all this collective knowledge is too big for my small cranium

That's why its distributed. :)

bless bookmarks :)

There was a time when educated people spoke dead languages, and could remember lots of crazy ass shit by creating an association like a memory palace in their mind. simply amazing. People don't remember as much today...not much need with all this computer memory available.

Hate to see what would happen if the lights go out.


I don't think that people are any smarter today then at any other time in our recorded history. I'm sure there is someone here who wants me to back that statement up with facts. All I have to say to that is...google it yourself!

we dont remember as much because we are expected to keep so much more active memory in use. Aristotle didn't have to remember his PIN or his SS# or his home phone......he had all that grey matter available for philosophy.

IE! my son once recited every penny he got from the tooth fairy, tooth by tooth. is he a genius? or is his mind uncluttered by buulllllshit like mine isn't?

He didn't have to worry where the money was coming from, just count it.

Absolutely. Just look at the engineering they did. Our IQ scores are going up because they measure the kinds of intelligence we presently value and teach to. When/if civilization fails a lot of folks won't have much to offer.

Collectively we are smarter and our facts are more accurate. We are throwing aside the cruft. Our capacity to learn is the same; our ability to find information to learn, solved in a flash.

Sharing information is what has pushed the human race ahead fastest. The dark ages end with the arrival of the printing press. Modern civilization showed up with the newspaper, radio and then TV. The internet brings us faster and bigger changes and we will see innovation sprout ahead again.

I still say Flint is crazy.

I don't think flint's right. I think that the availability of knowledge has NOTHING to do with how much people care.
for example... my sister asks questions all the time, when the rest of the family is watching the news or the West Wing or whatever. questions than anybody who cares about what goes on in the world would be able to answer, stupid questions like, 'thats a country?' or 'wait what does congress do?', things like that.
but by the time one of us has finished explaining it to her, all she has to say about it is 'um, i stopped listening. i dont really care'.


ignorance is not caused by lack of information. ignorance is caused by apathy.

I can't help but be reminded of an incident about 15 years ago when I was visiting my parents. My mom and I had stopped at the grocery store to get some stuff.. the cash register system crashed. I was actually very impressed at the efficiency of the cashiers in adding things up with legal pads and pencils.

Anyway. It almost goes without saying, but the concept of what it means to be "educated" is constantly changing. Also the number of people who are "educated" is a moving target. It used to be that only a small proportion of the US population went to high school, much less college. Now it seems you need a college degree for anything better than "do you want fries with that?"


I'm currently reading "What is intelligence?" by James Flynn. He talks about the so-called Flynn Effect--rising IQ scores over time. In a nutshell IQ tests have been "renormalized" over the years so that the average is steady at 100. But the performance needed to achieve that 100 has changed. What would have earned a 100 in the 1920s might get a 65 or 70 now. So if you accept the scores at face value, either we are now become a race of supergeniuses, or our great-grandparents were mentally retarded.

I would have to say his mind is cluttered by a completely different sort of bullshit than yours!

Maybe.... maybe.... maybe... maybe...

You're kidding right? Whether it's the latest celebrity party girl who forgot to stop at Victoria's Secret for some panties, or Television Without Pity, or entire discussion boards devoted to the ephemera of past decades' children, we currently have access to more cruft than ever before. Mounds and mounds of cruft, glorious cruft the likes of which previous generations could only imagine.

Yeah, but....

Whenever I hear talk like this, I'm reminded of my last job, which partially involved some astronomers. They would apply for time on, say, the Hubble Space Telescope. It would gather information as requested. It would get sent back to us via the Internet. Our astronomers and their students would process and analyze the data using specialized software running on UNIX workstations. (My job was to keep the computers running.)

Contrast this with 16th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. He made some of the first accurate astronomical measurements, producing data which Kepler would later use to calculate planetary orbits. And how did Tycho do this? Did he have a Sun workstation to crunch his number and process image files? No, actually he held a ruler up to the sky and measured.

And so I wonder what we would do without all our infrastructure. The answer, I suppose, is die off down to a level of population that would support subsistence farming and start all over. (Could you grow your own food? I sure as hell couldn't, and the amount of land where I live is woefully inadequate to support the number of people who live here if they expect anything other than a house and a yard.)

If you had told me 20 years ago that , I will have a computer on my desk, and that I can not live with out it, I would have laughed in your face. Now it is my primary source of news, and information.

what to do with all this magic ,

Easy

PORN SURF !!!!!

That's the attitude!

I was thinking about the slide rule getting us to the moon recently and how we sometimes just smash things into Mars due to conversion errors.

Google will control your minds and eventually the world. Buy stock now.