Re: The Web Is Making People Stupid (TWIMPS)

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TWIMPS.  Note 3

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Peircers,

I thought it would be taken for granted that most of us have been talking up
the benefits of augmentations, extensions, and computed-aided this and that
for as long as anyone can remember.  For my part, Marshall McLuhan's theme,
"The Extensions Of Man", had a major impact on my formative years, and my
first brushes with AI/IA in a real world, practical setting came from the
time I spent hanging out in John Eulenberg's Artificial Language Lab at
Michigan State, where the problems of augmentative communication that
I observed there inspired me to my first attempts at writing adaptive
programs for sequential learning, for example, finite state languages.

Still, the experience of developing augmentations, together with the trials
of using the array of media and tools that come down the pike over the years,
will bring us up against a rich variety of obstacles that bedevil our projects.
And so I thought it might be useful to split off a separate thread for discussing
the problems that many of us have no doubt run up against, especially since the
downside of the topic is likely to incite far more tangents of discussion than
the upside.

Not too surprisingly, at least, not too surprisingly for students of human nature,
a great many of the problems we encounter along the way are not really technical
or technological in character.  Indeed, part of the problem will often be that
technical fixes are being advanced as solutions to problems that are actually
conceptual, cultural, interpersonal, or sociological in their heart of hearts.
Anyway, that's just a random sample of things it might help to keep in mind.

Regards,

Jon

PS = Peter Skagestad

PS: This observation could belong in either thread, but let me
     just suggest that it is eminently possible to grow smarter
     and dumber at the same time, albeit in different respects.
     When printed books first arrived, there were complaints
     that they were undermining students' ability to memorize -
     no doubt true, but the student with books would have access
     to a vastly larger store of knowledge than the student who
     could access only the knowledge in his/her own memory.
     In my own case, my capacity for mental arithmetic quickly
     deteriorated after I got my first electronic calculator, but
     armed with my calculator I can do faster and more complex
     calculations than I ever could in my head or with pencil and
     paper. And so on. It is entirely possible - in fact, probably
     the rule - for the technologically augmented person to grow
     smarter at the expense of the intellectual abilities of his
     own unaugmented self.

PS: A different question is whether the web tends to dumb us down in ways
     that are not compensated for by extending our intellectual reach in
     one way or another. I have no particular insights to offer on this,
     but am posting simply to note that there are two distinct and very
     different questions here.

Reference Points —

• http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=27783
• http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=30388
• http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=30448
• http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/paradigm.htm
• http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/ia.htm
• http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2011-December/003745.html
• http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2011-December/003746.html

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