People who grew up with Wikipedia seem far better informed than their intellectual/personality peers from older gens at same age.
Jevons paradox. They know more *because* they can look up anything. No curiosity left unsatisfied.
I’d estimate a 10y advantage in factual knowledge
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Really? I've experienced a lot of the reverse. Because my peers CAN look up so much at a moment's notice, they feel less urgency to learn.
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I specified personality/intelligence peers across generations. Of course a nerdy introvert GenX teen would have known more in 1988 than an incurious jock millennial teen in 2008.
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Hoo boy do I radically disagree. It utterly depends on what kind of knowledge you’re talking about. Because there’s lots that’s not on the internet, but the cult of the internet makes people think it contains everything.
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Clearly I have smarter millennial friends than you 😀
Sure there’s some availability bias but that’s true of all media. Academic western libraries have their own biases.
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At the same time, that knowledge is likelier to be patchy - learning from books, while limited by the books you have to hand, is better at ensuring that the things you know, you know thoroughly.
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Similarly, I think we can expect a greater diversity of interests from younger generations when they grow up. Twitter and Reddit make it easy to go arbitrarily deep into any interest without IRL support groups.
Related thread:
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Reddit is a great tool for bootstrapping new intellectual interests.
• Google to find subreddits. Usually there are several.
• Raid subreddit sidebars and wikis for links, discussions, FAQ
• Take blogs you like and search by domain. Ex: reddit.com/domain/lesswro
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People think they know more because of internet but they don't cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.ya
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Da Vinci had to spend a lot of time getting information we can get instantaneously:
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A todo list:
- learn the measurement of Milan
- draw Milan
- ask A how to square a triangle
- ask B how the tower of Ferrera is walled
- ask C how people in Flanders walk on ice
- ask D how to repair a lock, canal and mill, Lombard-style
- ask E for measurement of the sun
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You had me at Jevon’s paradox. Also my anecdata agree - at any given level of nerdiness, this generation is much more thoughtful and better informed than mine was.








