My starting point on this occasion being wondering about the impact of google and the internet on the point of having lots of general knowledge. Or, put another way, what is the point of knowing lots of stuff when you can just ask google when you need to know? This being prompted by a question on some quiz program on afternoon television.
With general knowledge being defined as the sort of knowledge which half a century ago would have enabled the owner to participate in an intelligent conversation about the affairs of the day, perhaps as reported by the Manchester Guardian. Conversations which might have taken place in the hospital canteen, the staff room, the dining room or the local saloon bar; conversations which might be described as being of the middling sort: neither the high flown conversations of the seminar room or the board room nor those of the public bar. Possession of general knowledge was then regarded as important and some schools went to some trouble to impart it to their charges. Now it seems entirely likely that people with such knowledge might well do well at general knowledge quizzes – but then, so might people who have crammed for such quizzes without having much useful general knowledge at all. And google is very good at such quizzes, to the point where it is bad form to use your telephone when you are at one.
I think that in thinking about the impact of google on the value of having general knowledge, it would be helpful to be a bit clearer about what exactly general knowledge might amount to – and so, I look first at a sample of the questions which you might be asked in a general knowledge quiz.
What is the longest river in Africa?
With the name alone being of little value in itself. What might be more interesting would be collateral stuff like the actual length of the river, the length of Africa, the proportion of Africa occupied by the river valley in question, the length of other large rivers in Africa and the length of other large rivers in the world. The place of large rivers in the economy of the world. Knowledge of the name would be evidence of the possibility of knowledge of these other matters. It would also be an entry point to the wisdom contained in an encyclopaedia or that provided by google – although in this particular case you can just ask google the question (‘the longest river in africa’) and you very quickly get to the right answer – and to the collateral should you be interested.
Who was the prime minister (of the UK) who came immediately after Edward Heath?
When I was at school, some teachers used to get one to recite lists of kings, queens and prime ministers, and I can still do a reasonable job on the kings and queens of England, at least on those who came after the Conquest. Not so good on prime ministers, although with two of us on the case, we found that we could do the prime ministers from 1945. Knowledge of the name would be evidence of having gone to that sort of school and of having a serious interest in political history, to which one might expect knowledge of this sort to be incidental. But perhaps it is more than that, perhaps it is a way to organise one’s considerable knowledge: one can go through them in one’s mind, rehearsing the main points about each. Perhaps, thereby, prompting the unconscious to some interesting conclusion, interesting enough to use in some forthcoming lecture or paper. To my mind, this is the essence of thinking. You keep the conscious mind on the case in some routine, banal way, thereby giving the unconscious mind the space and opportunity to do something interesting. A something which, on a good day, pops into the conscious mind so that one can log it and subsequently put it to work.
Are the head of state and the head of government one and the same person in present-day Angola? Supplementary question: give the name, sex and approximate age of at least one of these persons.
A question which someone who is not Angolan and who is living in the UK is unlikely to be able to answer, except in the event of Angola being in the news for some reason or other. Not generally a matter of general knowledge. However, I ask google ‘angola head of state’, and I learn that the current head of state of Angola has just made his daughter the boss of the state oil corporation. From which we deduce that politics in Angola have not yet reached the heights of those in the western parts of Europe.
Name the courses in England which have hosted the UK open golf championships on any occasion since the start of that competition. Supplementary question: when was that and what was the occasion?
There are plenty of people about who have prodigious memories for special subjects of this sort. I can think of at least two such from my days of pub quizzes (they used to do rather good ones at the Tooting Mitre), one who was a wow on popular sport and another who was a wow on popular music. And if two such, specialising in the same subject, happen to get together, there may well be some competitive and entertaining banter about that subject, particularly if spirituous liquors have been served. The prodigious memories provide a peg on which to hang some general entertainment; they have served that purpose at the very least.
How many leap years have there been since the rumble in the jungle?
An interesting question in that it combines two strands. First you have to remember what, where and when the rumble in the jungle was. Second you have to remember how to distinguish leap years from other years and then to count them up on your fingers – fingers which would suffice in this case, assuming that is that your brain could cope with going around more than once.
How many steps are there on the main staircase leading up from the platform of Tooting Broadway underground station?
This question is interesting in different ways. First, there is no right answer, as the main staircase is an escalator, with the steps fading down to nothing both top and bottom. So what steps does one count? The question does not help on this point. Second, the only people who are going to be able to answer such a question, even approximately, are people like myself who use Tooting Broadway underground station reasonably regularly, who make a point of climbing the stairs and who are old and slow enough to count as they go. So even less like general knowledge than the river question, although even here one can think of interesting collateral. What is the distribution of the length of stairs and escalators in the underground train system of London? What do we know about the people who walk or even run, rather than ride? What about the show-offs who run up an escalator which is moving down? What about other countries? In this case google is only going to be helpful in the event of someone having made a study of such matters, perhaps in pursuit of some higher degree, a someone vain enough to publish the results of that study on the internet. (As it happens, google has pointed me at several such studies in the last week or so. Not of stairs, but of matters nearly as obscure).
So what can I deduce from all this?
I leave aside the question of the accuracy of the information supplied by google, beyond observing that I believe that in matters of this sort it is very accurate, particularly if you avoid the more chatty fora, hosting all-comers.
I leave aside the consideration that displaying general knowledge is more a way of showing off, of marking status than of helping the conversation along.
Instead, returning to my deduction, I think the question about prime ministers gives us a clue. Good general knowledge is not about memorising lists, it is about knowing how the world works, at least those parts of the world in which lots of sentient adults take an interest, in this case the post-war politics of the UK. And google, while a very useful supplement to such knowledge, is not a replacement – at least not yet. DeepMind is not that deep, despite its recent success at the game of Go. See reference 1.
So what do I need to be able to answer to a practical question like ‘is having the Crow as leader of the Labour Party helpful to the left-wing cause?’
Typing the question direct into google results in some confusion about which crow is meant, which is not unreasonable, my take on the leader’s name not having caught on (see reference 2). But it also turns up quite a lot of stuff, mostly from newspapers and magazines, some respectable, which is relevant and it seems likely that reading it would go to the practical question. One catch with this would be that it would be quite slow. Another would be the need to sort the wheat from the chaff. And yet another would be the passivity. In reading all this stuff there would be a tendency just to soak it all up and to end up agreeing with whatever one had read last, before falling asleep.
Maybe what general knowledge of the old sort is offering is some basis, some framework from which to judge others. The more you bring to the stuff turned up by google, the more you will take away from it. Much the same point as used to be made about going to see Shakespeare. It is also a sensible & helpful framework within which to generate your own thoughts and questions, perhaps in the way pointed to above. Maybe, even, an original thought. And if the framework is a reasonably shared framework, it can be the basis for collective thought and conversation, with such collective thought often being both an excellent spur to and a check on private thought. On a good day, the one complements the other – and again, not yet something that DeepMind can manage. I believe that it does do something of the sort in playing Go, being able to play itself, but that it not the same as being able to discuss the merits of the Crow.
But what if all that I want is the answer? I am not interested in the whys and wherefores; I have not got time to work it out for myself and I just want the answer to plug into something that I am doing, something that I am really interested in. In which case, I might look to google to provide the answer and, if I am being careful, something about the provenance of the answer. What about the credentials of the person supplying the answer? I might be satisfied by learning that the person had a number of university degrees and was very successful in his or her chosen career. I might be content to trust the opinion of such a person, a person with an entry in wikipedia, without further ado. A more direct approach would be to quiz the person in person about former prime ministers, to which end it would be easy enough to ask google about prime ministers and to come up with a few questions which would test those credentials; I would not need to know very much about politics at all to generate some impressive sounding questions. And general purpose interviewing technique & experience would enable me to judge the worth of the person from the way that he handled those questions, a judgement which should not be greatly disturbed by the fact that the person might have swatted up on this very sort of thing beforehand.
So where I think I have got to for the moment is that general knowledge and google knowledge are complementary; the two sorts of knowledge work together to deliver something greater than either of the parts. For the time being at least, humans and computers have complementary strengths and weaknesses. While being good at pub quizzes is evidence of good memory - but is not good evidence of general knowledge of a useful sort. It doesn’t make one an idiot savant but it does have tendencies in that direction.
A minor plus point of google is its reminder that knowing the names of all the rivers in the world, while a possibly impressive feat, does not serve any wider purpose, in the absence of knowledge about rivers. The name is a point of entry to that knowledge, but it is not the knowledge itself.
Reference 1: https://deepmind.com/.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/theres-hope-yet.html.
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