Here, Let Me Forget That

(As you were certainly hoping, I've done absolutely no research for this blog post, and all of this is just flotsam from my brain. It may all be wrong, is what I'm trying to say.)

This may sound clichéd, and I'm sure every generation thinks this, but we as a species are getting dumber. Granted, we're also getting a whole lot smarter. I mean we have smart-phones and smart thermostats now as evidence, right? And we have the internet, and cars with backup cameras, and cures for diseases, and probes flying around Pluto, which may or may not be a planet. But think about mental greats of the past: Newton, Galileo, Tesla, Socrates, etc... (I know I'm leaving a few out). I imagine that these people were the intellectual "real deal," and they knew a whole lot about a whole lot of things. There were less things to know back then, for sure, but they had it all in their heads. We don't have anything in our collective heads - nothing useful, at least.

Huh? Yeah, just dip that stick in the pile of ants
 and then you can eat them like a kebab.

Nowadays we've offloaded all the hard stuff to the internet, effectively. We no longer have to truly know anything; we can just Google it or Bing it or Webcrawler it (sorry).  Need to remind yourself of just enough calculus to figure out a problem before you forget it again? Wikipedia. How about finding out where the Maldives are? Google maps. I feel like those people I mentioned above would have known those things, not simply known where to find out. (A skeptic asks: But isn't that, in the end, just as good?) College should really just be condensed to a two day course about how to effectively use the internet. Why bother learning anything, digesting it, correlating it with other facts, or forming opinions when all of that is available online for you, at your fingertips? I'll admit I'm exaggerating here a little. You do, after all, have to know what to do with the information once you siphon it out of the aquarium of the Web. But I'm trying to make a point.

Instead of useful things, we load ourselves up with facts about celebrities or spend hours watching Youtube videos of puppies falling asleep.  We know all about the wackos on those Housewife shows, but we know nothing about how our government works, why it works (worked?), or who we are electing. In every spare moment we stare at tiny screens that stream trash directly into our heads, like we're bottom-feeding catfish hoovering up whatever's fallen to the lake-bed. It's amazing that we choose to focus on such dross given that the sum total of human knowledge is available to each of us with a few clicks.  Even if you make an effort, and you happen to turn on the Discovery channel or Nat Geo or the Science Channel, and happen to catch an actual documentary between episodes of The Next Most Coldest Fishermen Star in the Wilderness of the Yukon, you will only be filled with semi-correct factoids that don't even scratch the surface of the topic you're trying to "learn" about.

So here I am preaching down to the collective "you" from some high place, right? I don't claim to be better. I went to college, yes, but I've forgotten most of it. I have an engineering job, yes, but I feel my knowledge is narrow. And this is probably, unfortunately, necessary for the world we live in now. I think that for us to make advances, people must study in very narrow fields because those fields of study are so deep. We can no longer be generalists, we have to be specialists, because it takes that much more effort to "get up to speed" on a subject. This is what I find magnificently frustrating. In the end, some of us may know a lot about a little, but very few of us know anything useful about a lot. We are a bunch of ignorant geniuses that would at once amaze and horrify our ancestors.

What to do about it all? I don't know. Is it even really a problem? If it is, I didn't promise any solutions. I can only say that, personally, I wish I was more knowledgeable in a whole series of things. Here are a few of them:

• Statistics - Not knowing enough about this has haunted me in my engineering profession for years. It's a remarkably deep field with lots of strange quirks (seems like that to an outsider, at least).
• How to fix a car - Do people even do this anymore? Aren't cars too complicated now? Don't you have to hook them up to computers to even figure out whats wrong? Still, it would be nice to at least have a clue.
• American History - It's shameful how little I know really.  
• Writing and Literature - As a hopeful author, this goes without saying. I clearly need to keep improving and part of that is filling myself with more and more literature of every type.

So, that was my rant. I don't know if it actually accomplished anything, but it made me feel better, connecting yet another synapse in the bloated and pulsing brain of the internet. Let me know what you think.