A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm the only person who actually Googles everything. When I sit down to have a conversation with most people, and questions about facts come up, I instinctively start Googling. Almost no one else does this. People will prefer to spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of e.g. Greece, rather than spend 5 seconds to just find it out.
And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.
And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.
I'm the sort of person who would happily spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of Greece and frown upon anybody who tried to Google it. I like the fun, social 'game' of trying to work out random stuff from a few first principles . Having someone Google for it and tell me is like someone telling me the ending of a movie. Sure it saves me the two hours having to sit though the movie, but it kind of misses the point. It's not like I actually care about what the population of Greece is.
That's interesting. I didn't know people would think like that. Your post explains a lot, now the world makes much more sense. Thanks for posting it :)
Now I wish people online would put a huge disclaimer saying "I'm only interested in arguing for the fun of it, not in finding an actual solution" before their posts. That would have saved countless hours of online typing wasted for nothing.
I mean, nothing wrong with finding it fun to discuss. But I wish I could accurately tell when that's the person's goal, versus whether it's a person who actually finds solving real problems more fun than talking, like I do.
Well, anyway, already learned something new today. My day is complete.
edit: wow this is bigger than I thought, now I've been reading through older HN posts where I was mind-blown about "why would he even post that? What's his motivation?". Now I feel like I can finally make sense out of it. I feel so stupid for never noticing something so simple. The world is different now.
"Now I wish people online would put a huge disclaimer saying "I'm only interested in arguing for the fun of it, not in finding an actual solution" before their posts. That would have saved countless hours of online typing wasted for nothing."
there's many things that get expressed "between the lines". arguing for the fun of it has benefits. for one, ideas get exchanged, validated and who knows: maybe something useful comes out of it.
> But I wish I could accurately tell when that's the person's goal, versus whether it's a person who actually finds solving real problems more fun than talking, like I do.
I think you're still missing it. Have you never enjoyed a movie with a surprise ending (as the GP pointed out)? Would it have been just as fun if someone had given you a 30-second summary of the plot? What about working out puzzles, brain-teasers, etc.? I like all of this stuff; I also solving real-world problems. I think the point is not that there are different kinds of people [1], but that there are different kinds of discussions. And, yes, it is good to know what kind one is involved in.
I think there may be a generation gap. Most older people I know don't even think to look it up. Many younger people instinctively look it up
I'm not denying it can be fun to debate and guess but there are plenty of times it just better to look it up and then move on to deeper more meaningful conversation
There's a difference between bandying around ideas and simple facts. 'Population of Greece' is a simple fact. 'Ramifications of overpopulation of Greece' is an idea. Making a conversation out of trying to guess at simple facts is like making small talk, in my opinion. Sure, it can grease the wheels if you don't know someone well, but among friends, it's a waste of time.
That's nice if the purpose of the conversation is only to figure out the population of Greece and to pass the time.
I hope that you don't take the same line of thought into conversations that have other purposes though, where Googling clearly has benefit to help the conversation achieve its goals faster.
I say this not to you, but to people on the board in general. Given that I've seen self-centred comments like "I considered the project a success because I got paid and I had fun doing it", rather than thinking about the bigger picture, I can totally see people thinking thoughts like "Don't tell me how long it would take them to make and deliver 15 pizzas, I want to figure out on my own when is the latest we should give them a call, who cares what time people will arrive for the party? The important thing is having fun figuring out how late I can call the pizza place."
It's also useful for exercising and perhaps improving ones ability to postulate based upon limited information. In a situation where you can subsequently check the result.
In the "real world", people end up doing a lot of such postulation. Or, they end up being pushed around by those who do or who have inside information.
P.S. Addressing the OP article itself, my version is/was "don't memorize what you can deduce in 30 seconds". For example, in physics, many of my classmates seemed to spend a lot of time memorizing all the formulae in the three chapters being tested. I would be familiar with them but also recall the few, um, "fundamental" formulae. Or, put another way, those formulae or expressions in which the relevant fields were usually summarized. During a test, it was trivial to start with these and manipulate to what I needed. But many of my classmate either had that variant memorized cold, or they got stuck.
The problem in the computer/tech world is that much of the detail we need to get things done, is partially or entirely arbitrary. What flag(s) did author/programmer X choose for their utility that I'm using? Maybe it was purely a personal choice. Or maybe they were influenced by environment/mentor/community Y. (In turn influenced by Z...)
Where you can track those influences, or simple memonics ("r" for "recurse" -- but wait, is it "r" or "R"...), there may be some rhyme and reason that builds up particularly over time and with increasing familiarity and breadth.
In other cases, though, X seemingly simply liked to use e.g. "s", and there may be no way to "deduce" or "infer" this.
If you're in a conversation where you will get pushed around by people who have inside information, and that matters, I hope that you're prepared with your own inside information and game theory predictions before you enter into the conversation.
I hope that you don't take the same line of thought into conversations that have other purposes though
If I'm in a situation where the demographics of Greece actually matter to an important decision, then chances are I knew I'd be in this situation beforehand and have spent plenty of time collecting, verifying and correlating every nugget of demographic fact and statistic I could lay my hand on.
But obviously sometimes haste if of the essence and then Google is great, but if I'm hanging out the pub with my mates, haste is almost never of the essence.
That's interesting, thanks for the link. Apparently I'm not like most people, as I guessed 20 million. Maybe the fact that you made me aware of potential cognitive bias affected the outcome, I don't know.
If we discuss an issue that depends on the size of the population of Greece but isn't about the Greece population, there's no point to waste time for a guess. We should get the right number from Google in a second, and move on to the core issue.
Most of my conversation are about ideas and strategies, not characteristics. Like 98% of them. Maybe a little less, let say 96.5%. Or 95%, what do you think?
This reminds me of a book we used in grad school in the mid-90s. Taught us methods of estimation without knowing all the facts. Something about a cow, etc. FWIW, Google didn't help me find the book. The book discussed techniques of estimation that sound like the typical Google/MS/Facebook interview. This was pre-Google, so we had to use our intuition and estimation skills. Very valuable
I can see your point but I noticed a problem with this (at least with my friends circle).
The problem is that I find my friends (and girlfriend) will often come up with the wrong answer and use it as fact from that point on. Unless I make an effort to show them they are wrong it will become the truth and I will forever have to tell them they are wrong.
It is incredibly annoying when I hear them repeating the wrong information later on.
I'm obviously not advocating willful ignorance or refusing to check your work. All I'm saying that I find value to trying to solve a problem "by hand" first, instead of instantly looking up the answer, no matter how easy it might be to look up the answer.
This reminds me of one of my favorite Tom Waits' quotes:
"Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now."
A lot of people I know argue against this line of thinking but they're usually missing the point. The "problem" isn't that information is readily available ("that's fine," he says) but that the exercise of wondering is often worthwhile and under-appreciated. There's value in not knowing and wondering why.
I think of this as analogous to the way computers have increased productivity at work. It's not necessarily that you get your work done faster, it's that you can have a better product in the same amount of time. So instead of wondering about the stuff that's easy to look up, wonder about deeper things. I love Tom Waits, but he's off the mark here: like so many other things, a "deficit of wonder" is a social problem, not a technological one.
There is an old tale of greek philosophers debating how many teeth a horse has.
- "They have a small mouth that cannot fit very many teeth - they must have less than 20."
- "They chew a lot so must have big strong teeth - big teeth take up more room so I agree they must not have very many."
- "I disagree, they only eat grass their teeth do not not need to be strong. But they need very many teeth to chew it effectively!"
and on and on.
Finally one of them opens a horse's mouth and counts...
Interestingly this happens with a certain group of friends as well. They are high-school educated people that have no intention of attending a post-secondary institution. As a corollary, another group of friends that have attended a post-secondary institution are usually the first to join in my quest for facts on Google or Wikipedia.
That's interesting, but completely counter to my experience. I finally discovered that my most intelligent friends (programmers, teachers, businesspeople) enjoyed the challenge of reasoning to an answer, and felt a sense of triumph and join accomplishment when they got the answer (however close or far they were when they grabbed an iPhone to check their work). They cherished the shared experience, and remember it fondly.
They couldn't give two shits that I had wikipedia.
For what it's worth me and all my friends have post-secondary education and we all consider looking stuff up on the phone at the pub bad form and only to be done if after we've either come up with a valid guess or are completely stumped after having given it our best shot.
That's part of the point. Almost everyone can drive google to get the answer to a question (doing so efficiently is a useful skill though). I think that some of the IGG (Instant Gratification Generation) believe that being able to provide an answer (or being the first to) somehow makes them special, despite them not actually doing anything really clever to get that answer. What bugs me (taking the XKCD spark plug example) are people pretending they know something without revealing the actual source, because they don't attribute their source.
It's also great fun to see how people react to technology questions in interviews when they don't have access to the Internet. It doesn't take long to find where the edge of someone's comfort zone is and start probing there. I consider bullshit or waffle as the worst possible answer, followed closely by confidently giving a wrong answer. At the other end of the spectrum are answers of the form "Not absolutely sure but I think it is..." and/or "If I had to look it up I'd look in <book>/<man page>/<documentation>/<website>/etc." Being able to quote possible sources is good as it is a useful indicator of breadth/depth of knowledge.
Back to the look-it-up or not debate; from my anecdata I'd guess at there being a better correlation with age rather than education level. IME, the younger people I work/socialise with are, the more likely they are to look things up. I seem to be on the cusp of the "look-it-up" camp which may be related to the fact that Google wasn't ubiquitous during my education (a Comp Sci degree finished in 1999), nor was the technology/access to look things up whenever I wanted (I had to go into a University building for Internet access - I only got fixed line dialup access in my final year and even then it was expensive and slow).
Some companies, mostly in the consulting sector, are even making these kind of question part of the job interview. The idea is about coming up with close-enough numbers based on a series of realistic assumptions.
Refusing to use one's phone to access information during a conversation is not necessarily Luddite (not that you said it was).
In modern architecture after the boisterous 1920's when design was seeking to incorporate the concept of the machine and industrial life into our domestic living, designers found themselves in the 30's longing for more organic expressions. Life had changed. The economy had crashed and values shifted.
Just because technology is available does not mean it is always what people want or even that people will use it to its utmost capacity. Sometimes we just want to hang out.
At work when sitting down with co-workers for lunch every single one of us programmers will grab our phones when it comes to fact looking up time. We won't spend time arguing about it, we won't spend time trying to reason through something, we simply look it up, and move on to the next topic of conversation.
A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm the only person who actually Googles everything. When I sit down to have a conversation with most people, and questions about facts come up, I instinctively start Googling. Almost no one else does this. People will prefer to spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of e.g. Greece, rather than spend 5 seconds to just find it out.
And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.