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jt's avatar

TY. Love Sowell...

I'm almost done reading a book called "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains." The author, one Nicholas Carr, makes a decent case that a lotta problems are caused by outsourcing our memory to the 'Net. By being able to Google everything and pick up three or four-minute snippets of information, we lose the capability to think in depth.

And by seeing this as the *apotheosis* of processing information. Yeah, can *process* it all right. But I'm not sure how having "the attention span of a gnat" could possibly be *worth* it.

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Chris Fox's avatar

Another point. Back when I had to go to a library to find information I had to riffle through books and encyclopedias and by the time I found the facts I was looking for I had run into a lot of other new ones along the way.

Many times in my life, in libraries and bookstores or even in an unread book in my own collection, I would randomly read a paragraph that started me thinking for days. Lee Smolin got me reading real physics; Karl Popper got me thinking about much deeper ramifications of the Uncertainty Principle. And that's science alone. The opening to Tale of Two Cities fer chrissake.

None of this happens with Google.

When did John Horton Conway die? 2020. Done.

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jt's avatar

TYTY. Yeah, sometimes I get like that. That's half the fun of reading, to me anyway.

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Peaceful Dave's avatar

Quite a number of my books were not something that I was looking for, but they caught my attention in a bookstore.

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