Fighting the Googlit Plague
Fighting the Googlit Plague
A luddite lion's lance lunge
By
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Our current culture of knowledge suffers deeply from a plague known as "Google it", or Googlit for short. What are the symptoms of Googlit?
Fundamentally, answering your questions via the Googlit plague creates a habit of not figuring things out using either reason or research. Suppose you want to know what 12*18 is. Easy! Googlit! And so, the ability to even multiply two small numbers by yourself vanishes in a haze of habit.
Worse still are questions without clean, crisp answers Google agrees with. What candidate should you vote for? Googlit! The top hit will be what machine learning thinks best matches the politics of Google's search evaluators, who hold at least a few beliefs, surely, you find abhorrent. Indeed, allowing Google to directly insert opinions into your mind either by top search result or--worse--via an AI chatbot seems unwise. It seems unwise even if your beliefs almost exactly match the coastal liberals with perfect Google culture fit that the results are optimized for, unless you absolutely, positively trust them on everything. And sadly, those with the Googlit plague and the ensuing shallowing of knowledge are all too likely to substitute the top search result for their own judgement.
Of course, one of the greatest things lost to sufferers of Googlit, possibly including much of the past two generations, is how one figures out anything at all without Googlit. To better cure ourselves, let's go through some cases!
Easy Mode: The Case of the Missing Meaning
One day, you encounter the word "canard" in a story you are reading. What is that? Googlit! NO! NO! Let's cure ourselves, and solve this without asking someone or using electronic means.
In my case, I have a book on my shelf called a dictionary. The words are listed in alphabetical order, i.e. abcdefg order by first letter, then second letter, then third letter... We find the C section early in the book, landing on "common". We turn backwards, since "a" the second letter is before "o", and get to "burn", we flip a bit more forward, we're on the page Camus to candid! Going down the page, we find _canard_ m. a false or baseless, usually derogatory story, report, or rumor. Note: this essay is not a canard, because sufferers of Googlit truly are excessively influenced by top search results, search result order, and AI result boxes, as common sense would suggest and much research has verified.
Score 1 point if you knew this method, and 1 point if you used it in the last month. I'm betting most of you are on a score of 1. Scores of zero, leave a sunglasses emoji in the comments.
Normal Mode: The Case of the Five Emperors
In a conversation with one of your friends who, like most men, constantly thinks about the Roman Empire, you both have a brain fart and can't remember the names and order of the first five emperors. How do you figure it out? Googlit! NOOOOOO! Fight the plague! Okay, how do we do this without electronics? Clearly, asking each other failed.
Fortunately, you have a set of books called an Encyclopedia on your shelf. You pick the "R" volume and flip to Rome. Section 3, the Empire, has a subsection "The Julio-Claudian Line" and lists Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula), Claudius, and Nero. Bam!
Of course, one may object that this is a low level of verification, resting on a 20th century tertiary source. If we want to found our imperial knowledge on stronger sources, on my particular bookshelf I have Suetonius - The Twelve Caesars. Here we get a slightly different list: Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula), Claudius, and Nero at 6. Actually reading it, of course, we see that Julius never accepted kingship, nor established hereditary rule, but Augustus did establish succession and took the title of Princeps, making him arguably the first official emperor. We learn cool stuff as well as grounding our knowledge by going back to the ancient sources.
And if we don't trust Suetonius, there's always looking at a lot of old coins. If we do, we may find some coins with EID MAR (Ides of March) written on them and Brutus's head among the Caesars. So, if you count Julius as an emperor, perhaps you should count Brutus as well.
Anyway, only one method is necessary. If you knew about looking things up in paper encyclopedias, score a point! You can also score for knowing about reading ancient sources or looking at ancient artifacts! And if you've done any of this in the past month, yet more points!
I wonder what the median scores are like at this point.
Hard Mode: The Mysterious Curvy Area
Somehow, you need to know the area under the curve defined by y = x^2, from x = 0 to x = 1. Homework assignment? Trying to build a parabola in minecraft? Making a suspension bridge? Solving a physics problem? The possibilities abound. Let's solve it without electronics or asking our friends.
On my shelf I have a yellow book called "The Engineer-in-Training Reference Manual," a broad guide to pretty much all engineering knowledge. Other sources may include math textbooks or your trusty encyclopedia, but let's try the big yellow book for now. A calculus textbook might just have the answer in the inside cover, by the way, but perhaps that's too cheaty.
On page 9-1 of the yellow book, titled "Integral Calculus", we see integral x^m dx = x^m+1 / m + 1 + C. On page 9-7, we find the area under the curve from 0 to 1 is this formula evaluated at 1, minus the formula at 0. In other words, f(x) = x^3 / 3 + C. f(1) - f(0) = 1/3 - 0/3 = 1/3. The Cs cancel out, of course.
GETTING HARDER. We now want to find the integral of e^-x^2 from 0 to 1. Lost our stats book lookup table, maybe? Who cares, let's try without electronics!
On 8-14 of the yellow book, directly opposite the page where we found integral x^2 = x^3/3 + C, we see the Taylor series for e^x: e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! + .... + x^n/n! We substitute in -a^2 for x, get 1 - a^2 + a^4/2! - a^6/3!..., integrate via the formula above (integral x^m dx = x^m+1 / m + 1 + C again), and bam! We can write out exponents of 1 (always 1) and divide them by the appropriate terms, and calculate out this baby by hand. Just keep going until the terms are small. 1 – 1/3 + 1/(2*5) – 1/(6*7) + 1/(24*9) - ... = 1 - 0.333 + 0.1 - 0.0235 + 0.004 - (too small to care) = somewhere between 0.74 and 0.75
If we wanted to dive deeper, we could investigate numerical methods like sampling the curve at various points. Digging through our reference book, we've discovered a wealth of techniques and ideas that solve these problems in more ways than one, in just a couple pages! Cool!
Scoring: one point for ever having looked up a problem-solving technique in a textbook or reference manual that WASN'T for a class, one point if you did it in the last month. Yet another point if you figured out a number to at least two decimal places without electronic help in the last month, and an extra steampunk-chic point if you used an abacus, slide rule, or other non-electrical calculating device. Claim your bragging rights in the comments if you're slaying the last-month-doing-it at this point.
NIGHTMARE! Mode: The Case of the Lost Restaurant
Back before the age of smartphones, a coworker of my father's had his internet go out. He had no way to get to the restaurant his work friends were meeting at, without accessing Google Maps. What, then, had he done in the days before Google Maps existed, my father asked the next day.
"I just didn't go anywhere."
Ha! That's one solution, on par with resolving all your programming bugs wontfix. But for the uninitiated, here's how it was done back in the day, allowing one to get somewhere without asking directions or following someone who knows the location:
Use the white pages (a part of the Yellow Pages book kept next to one's landline phone), find the business by name alphabetically, and look up the street address. This will be something like 1240 George St., Awesometown, CA.
On your street map or road atlas that includes Awesometown, find George St. in the street index. It will give you the location of the road on the map, and for an atlas, the page number. The graticule location will be something like B-4, defining a rectangle on the grid on the that page. George Street will be within this rectangle.
Find George Street on the map, then plot a path along roads to George Street. Generally if the destination is more than a couple highway exits away, plan to drive directly to the highway, exit out the exit closest to the destination, then drive the shortest street route to the destination street.
Drive down George Street on the route. Once there, drive up or down George Street reading the street numbers of various buildings until you get to the destination. If you're at 1000, go in order of increasing numbers to get to 1240; at 1500, go in the direction of decreasing number. Bam, you're there.
The truly enlightened also had a faster method than (4) using a technique called "knowing the closest cross street", a piece of knowledge often asked and gained when calling the number you found in the white pages to determine whether the restaurant was open.
Scoring! One point if you knew this method, one point if you've done it since the dawn of the smart phone age, one point if you own a map or atlas with a street index, and one point if you've looked up a street in it in the last month. Flex your 4 on this section if you've got it.
Final Thoughts
By using traditional, non-electrical methods of finding knowledge, we break our dependency on the internet and electrical devices, avoid polluting our brain with the preferred results of a given biased search megacorp, and discover tons of interesting adjacent knowledge, from meanings of more than one word, to deeper historical knowledge, to cool mathematical problem solving techniques, to greater knowledge of our local area. But even the most intentional luddites among us may be forgoing much gain due to the sheer convenience of not doing these excellent traditional research methods. If you got a perfect score, and yet are reading this article over the internet, my hat is off to you.
P.S. Despite the dangers of Googlit, there is one use case where I admit using internet search engines is legitimate and proper: finding specific, hard-to-find web pages on the internet. As an arbiter of all knowledge? Never.