Arbesman: Relying on Google over memory ensures more up-to-date knowledge
Sam Arbesman · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · Nov 28, 2016 · at 4:32
Samuel Arbesman, complexity scientist and author of 'The Half-Life of Facts', explains to Shane Parrish why he views internet search technologies positively rather than as a detriment to memory.
0:00 / 0:22exact quote · 22.1s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“When people talk about how the internet and Google is ruining our brains or our memories I am actually much more positively inclined towards those technologies simply because it, if we don't necessarily have as good memories anymore, It means that we now actually have to look things up more often and make sure we actually have the information correct, which means we are more likely to have the most up-to-date bit of knowledge.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sam Arbesman
Arbesman: Algorithmically generated art elicits similar emotional responses to human art
“I imagine if you don't tell someone where it comes from, you probably can get a similar kind of response, especially if it's almost indistinguishable.”
Arbesman: People fail to update 'mesofacts' that change over decades
“So miso facts were sort of facts that bits of information that change neither too slowly nor too rapidly. They're sort of at the middle or miso scale. The idea is that there's bits of knowledge that change very, very rarely, like how many constants there are o…”
Arbesman: Science is a querying method where all knowledge is a draft
“Science is, it's a body of knowledge, but even more important than that, science is really a means of querying the world, and I think recognizing that everything we know is constantly in draft form is really, like, that's the way we should be thinking about th…”
Arbesman: Science and art are beautiful outputs constrained by reality and medium
“Science is almost like beautiful output constrained by reality, and art is also beautiful output constrained by reality of the media that you're using in some very different sort of ways.”
Arbesman: Physical books hedge against technological disruption better than ebooks
“Physical books are a great hedge against like technological change. And I know if like my physical book, if I like 20 years from now it will still be kind of backwards compatible with the human eye. But and like an ebook, not entirely clear”
Arbesman: Paywalls and jargon boundaries cause scientists to reinvent existing models
“In science sometimes you have things that are out of date, but also because knowledge might be either locked behind journal paywalls, or these articles are not necessarily as interconnected as they could be people sometimes end up reinventing certain ideas. So…”