It’s funny - almost as much stuff was knowable, but we couldn’t be bothered to get the info. I mentioned in a different thread recently that, today, if you’re with a group of friends and someone asks what a platypus eats, someone will whip out their phone and answer in 30 seconds. When I was a teen in that same situation, we for sure could have ridden our bikes to the library to find out, but a question like that just wasn’t important enough. If someone suggested going to the library to look it up, we’d laugh at them. There were gobs of things like this that, if no one in the group knew the answer, we’d just shrug and move on.
They eat worms, larvae, shrimp, and crayfish, by the way.
I’d say 9/10 times when someone looks something up that we wouldn’t have gone out of our way to find out, that info is instantly lost anyway. I’m way more likely to remember something if I have to go hunt down the info, either at a library or something really obscure that takes work to find online
You would consult the ancient technology of books. And there were these people who’s sole job was to direct you towards the books that contained the information you needed.
There were these huge buildings just filled to the brim with different types of books.
Just because the internet has a huge quantity of information doesn’t mean the quality has increased.
It boggles my mind how younger people think we lived in some kind of dark-age before google.
Not only did books exist, but they could give you an in-depth answer that could be trusted.
And yes, when the internet was made public, I loved being able to find answers more quickly, but I didn’t just walk around with empty space between my ears
If anything, I feel like people are more gullible and believe more falsehoods than they did when I was a teen
(That said… there is plenty of information that’s been updated, and plenty of stupid shit that went around- like the falsehood that we only have five senses, or that we only use 10% of our brains)
I had a teacher in high school tell us that glass is an incredibly slow moving liquid, and that’s why on really old buildings the glass is thicker at the bottom, because it has flowed and “pooled” like that.
I believed that for a good number of years and even repeated it a few times before finding out that no, it’s not, and the reason some old glass is like that is simply because of the manufacturing process at the time, and that it was simply installed thick side down for aesthetic reasons, and that you can actually find old glass that is thicker at the side or top because it was installed differently.
I remember that one! What about how people thought we could only taste certain flavors with specific parts of our tongues.
That one really confused me as a kid
I think the gullability of humans have been constant throughout our history. The difference now is that everyone has a way to broadcast their stupidity easier now than before.
I was there before Internet and I do think libraries are dark ages compared to Internet
And people always blindly trusted books and scientific articles. Including that one article that says that vaccines causes autism.
People were and are gullible. What changes is for efficiently being able to tailor lies to specific groups.
Yeah.
I definitely blindly trusted books and articles as a teen. I feel like standards for publications were higher, though. I suppose it depends on sources. I also had the advantage of being the youngest member of my family, with two older brothers who were both interested in science (in one way or another) and I went to private school as a younin’ with a gap of terrible public school, and then a decent snooty high (also public). What I mean with all that is that my experiences may not be the norm, and for some people the internet may have opened even more doors
Also, to be fair, I was a gullible teen and young adult as well. I’ve always questioned things, but I did carry plenty of false beliefs (hell, I probably still do!)
I tend to forget that, sometimes
Everything I learned from older people as a kid is the reason why I fact check everything anyone tells me now.
but there are also misconceptions that the internet also teaches us. For example, we are taught that planes fly by using Bernoulli’s law, that is, the shape of the wing causes lift to be generated. I can confidently say, after years of studying in aeronautical sciences at university, that the real reason planes fly is magic.
False! My mother bought us an encyclopedia set, and I read that shit cover to cover, A-Z! We also had these things called schools, and these big buildings called libraries.
Encyclopedias exited, and if you wanted to know the population of Greece they were perfect. But, they were terrible for answering random questions like “Why is the sky blue?” The answer was almost certainly in the encyclopedia, but you’d have to know to look up “Raleigh Scattering”, and how would you know that?
What makes modern web searching so good is that it’s amazing at surfacing answers to just about any question. Whether the answer it brings up is true is another matter…
The section about the sky would mention it, so then you go to the index in the R book, find the entry for that phenomenon, and read about Raleigh Scattering. The internet is definitely easier for finding random information though, although it’s harder now than it was like 10 years ago. ChatGPT is amazing for finding random information, but you have to verify what it tells you, since it will just randomly lie for no reason.
It doesn’t “lie” though, it just generates a plausible sequence of words. The sort-of fortunate thing is that facts are often plausible, and it’s going to be trained on a lot of facts. But, facts aren’t the only word-sequences that are plausible, and LLMs are trained to be creative, and that means sometimes choosing a next-word that isn’t the best fit, which might end up meaning the generated sentence isn’t factual.
Calling it a “lie” suggests that it knows the truth, or that it is being deceptive. But, that’s giving “spicy autocomplete” too much credit. It simply generates word salads that may or may not contain truths.
But, they were terrible for answering random questions like “Why is the sky blue?” The answer was almost certainly in the encyclopedia, but you’d have to know to look up “Raleigh Scattering”, and how would you know that?
Then you would ask the librarian!!! They would be able to help you find the answer or where to start! And will help you with your research a bit too, in my experience. If you have questions or something. Librarians are super cool and an awesome resource we shouldn’t let fade away.
But yeah I fucking love being able to look up any random question that pops in my head. The image post is like, my actual nightmare I can’t stand being misinformed, but ignorance is fine.
Yeah, the real difference is the lag factor. Librarians, teachers, parents, etc. were great at answering random questions. But, often you’d wonder something and there wouldn’t be someone around who you could ask. If it was important you could write it down or try to remember to ask later. But, these days you can satisfy any idle question in seconds without disturbing anybody.
I also think misinformation is awful, and in some ways the modern Internet plus AI is making the problem worse. What I hope they do is transition schools from places where kids memorize facts to places where kids learn critical thinking. Some of the key things I learned at some point in school were how to properly estimate something, and how various units work so you can cross check your answer. So, for example, a Joule is a kg m^2 / s^2 . If the units you’re using don’t match up, you must have screwed up somewhere. I also took a course in argument analysis once, that helped spot common fallacies.
I have the impression that as time goes on, being able to remember facts is going to be less and less important. And, learning technical skills (like how to search the web, use a spreadsheet, create a database, etc.) is going to be so easy that it’s not something worth teaching. But, what will be important is knowing how to spot bullshit.
I dunno every time I spoke to a librarian they were either super unhelpful or just plain dismissive.
‘hello, I’m trying to find information on the Inventor of the Volt, Alessandro Volta’ ‘look in the autobiography section’ ‘i couldn’t find anything there’ ‘ok fine I’ll look, here you clearly didn’t look properly go find this book - the life of Voltaire’ ‘that’s a different person though …’ ‘it’s just a different spelling’ ‘no they’re different people’ ‘well that’s all we’ve got so read it and see’ ‘but…’ ‘we’re closing soon sorry I don’t have time for more questions’
Not everyone had access to libraries in the first place and at least half the librarians were awfull at their job or awfull people, and they’d never help you with anything even slightly complex anyway even the good ones. I found more information about Volta while writing this comment to check the spelling of his name than my local and city library had buried in all their many volumes.
Yes libraries were fantastic and important before the internet, but the reason they’re merging into social places and community centres is because we still have use for those (previously forbidden) uses but for research they’re basically pointless now.
Yup. Now we (probably often myself included) rather “learn” from some low effort shitpost than getting distracted by that highly researched encyclopedia set.
Wikipedia can still give you some of that though.
We were much better at retaining information too. It wasn’t available at the tip of your fingers, so we put effort into remembering it. Nowadays I don’t remember anything except for old movie quotes, and stuff pertinent to work. I think the constant influx of information we experience now is interpreted by the mind as noise, and it goes in one eyeball and out the other.
