Shifting Intelligence
Are You Too Plugged into the Internet – is it hurting our intelligence
Has the internet shifted our ability to learn and understand our world? And I don’t mean in a good way. The ready access to information has changed our access to knowledge and opened the doors for many.
For many in my generation, they talk about the collection of the Encyclopedia Britannica (ironically the link to some good background information on this publication is from Wikipedia) that was essential to school work and learning. If you were lucky perhaps your family was able to afford some version of the collection and you had it available in your house accessing it for studying and homework. For others, you had to access a library and school resources, and understand the Dewey system that was shared with others. Under this model acquiring insights and knowledge was not an instant process. Even if you had ready access to the data you had to find it using an index printed in the back (maybe done by a professional indexer?), hopeful that it was well built and linked to the piece of information you sought. If it did not you had to re-think your search and update your own understanding
Side Note – when I arrived in this country, rented property the oven broke in our rental right around Thanksgiving (a holiday that was also foreign to our family) and despite wading through the fat tomes of the yellow pages we could not hit the right word to identify a local repair service. It took a call to a friend who provided the key – look up “Range” to find repair services.
Fast forward to computers, internet and the World Wide Web and the advent of discs with large amounts of data with many (do you remember Microsoft Encarta which was bundled with many new PCs) offering these for much lower cost and ultimately “for free”.
The history of knowledge access pervades our world history with limitations placed on people and resisted by those in control throughout predicting calamity as knowledge and information became increasingly available to everyone
The Techno Panic Timeline
And as history demonstrated each step left a trail of companies and individuals who got left behind failing to see the advances and accepting the change. Encyclopedia Britannica missed the wave and was replaced by the web and online Wikipedia of knowledge (although the content comes from a very small and unpaid segment of the population) but it remains a primary resource and data source and nearly instantaneously available (over 6 Billion people at last counts). But instant access does not mean instant understanding. I’ve even heard some who view the need for learning basic concepts as an old-fashioned view and unnecessary in the “internet age”. I even found myself thinking that in medicine – if I have ready access to the dose Information for any drug with one quick search on my phone, why would I need to learn that level of detail if I can just look it up.
There is some distinction between some elements of knowledge. For urgent situations like “Codes” (aka as “Crash Call” where a person has a severe medical emergency requiring immediate e saving intervention for example a heart attack), we continue to drill our clinical staff on the understanding and procedures required and requiring them to be able to do it from memory. Airline pilots are similar for emergency situations and both supplement this with checklists to improve outcomes.
But for the rest of the knowledge is there a need. Do I need to learn the dose and mechanisms of a drug if I can look it up? Do I need to understand the inner workings of an internal combustion engine, or an electric motor to drive a car?
There is probably some elements not necessary and in some cases with specialized knowledge. Not everyone can be a pilot and fly a plane, be a doctor and heal people, be a car mechanic and fix a car. But without a basic understanding of concepts, we lose our capacity to be involved in decision-making and in some respects return to information asymmetry or inequity.
Has the Knowledge (Internet) Pendulum Swung too Far
We talk about the Gen-Z and Millennials and digital natives who grew up in an era that was immersed in technology and applaud their adaptation making them better suited to the world we live in. And as any parent or grandparent will know, they do, they are the tech support for the older generation in many cases, albeit reluctantly! But what has this done to learning and understanding and is this trajectory sustainable and good or are we seeing irreparable harm and diminishing of knowledge and understanding that will be harder to recover from?
Don’t get me wrong – I am a geek and love the technology and all the instant access. I see the value of reminders that keep me from missing appointments and for the most part organized. But like all things it requires balance and the distraction and descent into one-line interactions have diminished our understanding and ability to see our own limitations. The abundant confidence that overcomes any lack of knowledge and understanding is fed by the knowledge that access to answers is just one click away. So I can be confident that I am right and know what I am doing?
In a recent discussion with a senior executive, we ended up on a discussion of gravity, mass, distance, acceleration, and force. If you drop two items of different weights at the same time do they hit the ground at the same time?
I’ll be honest, even understanding the science, I struggle to answer this with intuition. In part, it’s because our world experiences would present experimental data that suggest objects do not fall at the same rate. So many experiences suggest that size, and by implication mass, will impact the speed with which an object falls to earth. But the reality of the science is different, and as Galileo surmised, experimented (and apparently even proved with an experiment on the Leaning Tower of Piza), the two objects will strike the ground at the same time (there is a minor additional point that if the difference in mass of the two objects is sufficient for the gravitational pull of the object to influence speed then one might fall slightly faster than the other – but that’s splitting hairs)
In my conversation, there was no convincing this executive that this was true. I stopped short of pulling up the video of a classical experiment from Apollo 15 where Astronaut Commander David Scott actually carried out this experiment:
I replayed the conversation in my head multiple times in the weeks that followed and wondered why despite firm evidence and science, a counter position was held and not easily dissuaded and more importantly what that means for our society.
As I cast my mind back to when this data point was demonstrated to me it was in school, in a Physics class and our teacher was asking the same question. We watched as he demonstrated a plastic ball and feather fall in a tube. The feather dropped slowly and those who had not done the pre-read celebrated their correct answers. But then he pulled out another almost identical glass tube with the same items and turned it over and the two items fell at identical rates both striking the bottom of the tube at the same time (I don’t have video of that experiment but naturally found a version of this online that you can watch from MIT). The tube was a microcosm of the experiment on the moon and took place in a vacuum. The difference was the loss of wind resistance with no air present to inhibit the fall of the feather.
The experiment and experience stuck with me. But it was not just the data point or the specific insight on falling objects. It was the experimental process, science at its finest demonstrating two different conclusions in almost identical experiments and without a deeper understanding of the underlying data, in this case, the absence of air in one tube, you could present two identical experiments and come up with two completely different conclusions.
There’s no “YouTubing” this and understand this in one line or one 20-second video (or more like a 60-second video as you endure the adverts before you are allowed to watch the video).
Accessing and ingesting data on the internet has to be done in context and if not we end up down a path that is incorrect and clouds our understanding of the world we inhabit. Worse than that your activity of “searching” feeds whatever conclusions you have – something akin to confirmation bias. The search engines are working to keep you engaged and coming back for more – that is their model. That’s true of every feed and application you access for free (and for many that you pay for). Facebook wants you to keep scrolling on your feeds. So does Twitter, Tik-Tok, and every other channel. They have fine-tuned their algorithms from the very start to keep you there and they know to do that they need to provide things that will excite your brain and provide pleasure. Since disagreement is not typically pleasurable they are not motivated to show competing data, videos, or views. They know they exist since they are being presented to other people who hold different positions.
I hope there is no one reading this that believes the Earth is Flat but that segment of the population not only exists but is expanding. The data is out there but you don’t see it or get presented with it because it does not match your profile. But there are plenty of sites and videos that “prove” the earth is flat and the moon landings were fake! You can watch the two-hour jaw-dropping Netflix documentary (Beyond the Curve) or go look for yourself. Warning – you might not want to do that as searching and watching that kind of content will start to fill your feed with content that is similar and equally wrong!
We saw the increasing impact of this in our attempt to combat the pandemic. Despite solid and resounding levels of data that confirm the safety and effectiveness we find ourselves surrounded by people that don’t just disagree they actively fight any suggestion of the veracity of data and science and will believe data that confirms positions they hold. I think you can find a web page to support pretty much any position or viewpoint you hold. Some of these pages even come from people who have advanced degrees in science and medicine – something I struggle to comprehend and explain but they exist.
I’ve lost long-standing friends over Pandemic misinformation and beliefs – it got so bad I created this post (Snake Oil Infodemic) that I used anytime I entered into an exchange that was never going to end. My experiences are light in comparison to some amazing scientists and clinicians who have braved an onslaught of vitriol and threats that are hard to reconcile or accept.
Incremental Steps to Recovering
We are at an important juncture in our world. Many fundamentals seem under doubt or attack. I had always believed that science was incontrovertible – accepting that sometimes it does get things wrong but the scientific process and our ability to learn, adapt and move forward remained. But now core concepts are under assault fed by a never-ending stream of content that distracts and diminishes us as humans.
Here are some incremental steps you could take to redress the balance and perhaps return control of knowledge to you and not some algorithm that has no sense of right or wrong, fact or fiction but rather sees you and everyone else in our attention-grabbing terms:
- Accepting that one-line insights and perspectives can’t always fully explain the nuances of a topic
- Approach each data point with an open mind. Even your own position
- Ask yourself – if I was wrong how could I be wrong and how would I know
- Try disproving your own position and take the time to listen and understand counterviews and positions
- Perhaps start by switching off all the distractions and alerts for your attention and return control of knowledge finding to yourself not an algorithm
Do you have any techniques or suggestions? What helps you stay sane and above the rising tide of distrust and misinformation that sweep our national and world. If you do, please share them below or with me and others.
