The Internet Is Not A Substitute For Your Brain

作者：Peter Greene
原文：福布斯
原文链接：
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2018/11/23/the-iternet-is-not-a-substitute-for-your-brain/#c3cc6dd64cd7
我的来源：智能观（ID：zhinengguanym）编译，翻译链接

One of the foolishly persistent ideas in modern education crops up in a variety of settings. It may be the offhand remark by a professional development presenter that you no longer need to teach particular content because it's available on line. It may be the school administrator who casually observes that we can focus less on content knowledge because "students can just google that stuff." Or it can be more weighty pronouncements from leaders like Expert in Residence at Harvard's Innovation Lab Tony Wagner:

Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially... Today knowledge is free. It's like air, it's like water. It's become a commodity... There's no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn't care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.

Forbes carried that quote in a 2012 article, but it still travels the interwebs, cheerfully memed and shared by those who believe it.
All of this is wrong. The internet is not a substitute for your brain.

For one thing, your brain is not a computer. As research psychologist Robert Epstein laid out in his essay "The Empty Brain," your brain "does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories." Because your brain is not a computer, the metaphor of using the internet as a sort of external hard drive for your brain simply makes no more sense than having an external hard drive hooked up to a can of spam.

For another thing, the internet is full of baloney. Recently we've seen discussion of the ways in which YouTube algorithms promote extreme fringe ideas to its viewers, including pushing the flat earth theory. "Just google it" is a recipe for misinformation on the grand scale, unless, of course, the googler possesses enough knowledge to be able to evaluate the content of the information she discovers on line.