How good software makes us more stupider

[thewayne]

(poor grammar intentional)

Interesting story on the BBC site that the better software is, the less we think and the poorer our problem solving skills become. It had an interesting bit about London cabbies: the part of their brain that deals with spatial reasoning, i.e. city maps, is much better developed than most people. They have to pass a test showing that they know the city before they can get their license, and they have to do it from memory: no GPS satnav device. It would be interesting to know if they've ever been studied as a group for onset of dementia and Alzheimers as they age to see if their rate differs significantly from the general population.

I can partially agree with the conclusion:
Mr Carr says that this simple experiment could suggest that as computer software becomes easier to use, making complicated tasks easier, we risk losing the ability to properly learn something - in effect "short-circuiting" the brain.

"When you think about how we're coming to depend on software for all sorts of intellectual chores, for finding information, for socialising - you need to start worrying that it's not giving us, as individuals, enough room to act for ourselves."

I qualify it with 'partially' because the test that they performed can't be applied universally across all life, and they state that it was a simple experiment specifically about software. In my job, as a database administrator, I need to know how to do the most important parts of my job, and I need to know how to quickly find what I don't know how to do exactly off-hand. I don't need to immediately know how to set up replication as this is not something done on a regular basis, but I can find it quickly and get the job done pretty efficiently nonetheless.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11263559

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/09/13/1342209/How-Good-Software-Makes-Us-Stupid

Comments

[silveradept]

For tasks where the sum of the knowledge required to perform the task can be contained in a single brain, such as the map of London, or the multiplication tables, then they've got a point - technological assistance can hamper your learning by making it too easy.

For something like yours or my job, where some part of proper work requires doing common and uncommon tasks and accessing information stores that could not reasonably be expected to fit in one brain, then tech's not harming us, it's keeping us employed. Sure, I've got Dewey, but Dewey only works for one part of the collection. The OPAC is really how we keep things organized and find anything in the library.