Head in the Cloud Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are So Easy to Look Up
Book Review: Head in the Cloud: Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are So Easy to Look Up
Carolyn Kost
Carolyn Kost
Providing vital resources for informed decision-making to individuals, families, and organizations.
This book was just not as convincing or as stimulating as it could have been. It was a cross between an airplane read and an Atlantic monthly article, which would have been a better venue for Poundstone's ideas. Ecclesiastes was right: there is nothing new under the sun. Socrates indicted the written word as a corrupting force; folks predicted that radio and then TV interfered with family life and made humans stupid; we criticize the Internet. Same thing, different technology and different age. At least Poundstone refrains from engaging in the pseudo-neuroscience regarding the ways that the Internet is changing our brains, but he makes similar arguments.
The major takeaways and the themes of the book are three (p. 39). The most delightful is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which describes what happens when people mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is; like students believing they scored much higher on a test than they in fact did. That's relevant to the digital world because "The Internet isn't making us stupid but it can make us less aware of what we don't know. Incomplete knowledge creates distorted mental maps of the world...[that] affect choices, behaviors, and opinions in both the personal and public realms."
Second, the Knowledge Premium is the correlation between "the ability to answer so-called trivia questions" "and higher income and other indexes of a successful life." Poundstone makes a startling case against the wisdom of crowds, and by extension, of democracy. The discussion of the non-scientific popularity of gluten-free products (pp. 194-197) would be a hoot if it didn't reflect the majority's reliance on social networks rather than empirical facts for information. While careful to emphasize correlation over causation, Poundstone examines the incomes of people who know about sports (people who know more earn more) and compares the audiences of Fox and NPR, which he states may in part relate to the venue, i.e. social media vs. TV vs. radio and print.
That relates to the last section, "Strategies for a Culturally Illiterate World," which proposes that we consume information in smart ways. In short: obtain your information from a variety of sources, not too customized; avoid ideological echo chambers; and make sure your sources are intelligent and well-educated. Those latter two should be clarified. What does that mean exactly? Fox's (former) Bill O'Reilly has a MPA from Harvard and NPR's Terry Gross graduated from U Buffalo. An Ivy League credential does not inoculate one against idiocy or fake news and often these days is an indicator of an elitist and staunch leftist partisan, rather than a signal of a dispassionate critical thinker.
I was hoping for more, but older generations are always concerned about the changes they see on the horizon. The fact is that the coming generations will deal with them just fine. Better to heed Max Ehrmann in Desiderata: "doubtless the universe is unfolding as it should."
Explore topics
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/book-review-head-cloud-why-knowing-things-still-matters-carolyn-kost
0 Response to "Head in the Cloud Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are So Easy to Look Up"
Post a Comment