Google Pundit
Ross Douthat points me to this Reason piece which eviscerates a “Google Pundit.” I’m not too interested in the details of the article itself, rather, I like the term, and would add “Wikipedia Pundit” as another flavor of the same species. It’s a problem everyone suffers from now and then, the urge to win the most pressing argument, but over the long term this sort of behavior doesn’t add any value to one’s own understanding of the issues at hand (and what else really matters?). This is of course not to denigrate the worth of Google or Wikipedia, but a monkey with a powerful computer is still a monkey. Especially in relation to social science questions it is almost trivially easy to find some “authority” who supports any given position.
I’ve gained understanding from Google/Wiki punditting. Like that I was completely wrong about something.
I’d say I have too, but it’s hard to know?!
As against that, when I get Google blog alerts about Ireland – an area I know quite a bit about – I find that blog posting are about 60-70% misinformed, outdated, or just plain wrong?!
Like that I was completely wrong about something.
*nod* google is great for falsifying an isolated, precise & distinct fact. especially quantitative data. even if you see discrepancies in something like GDP per capita, it is within a rather small range. in math and the mathematical sciences it is also rather good because of the *relative* lack of noise around many of the questions and controversies. but when you are talking about big issues which involve many moving parts and structural relations between those parts there are serious problems with people simply seeking what they already “know” to be true. IOW, you can find the answer you’re looking for from any authority, and if you ask the question in a particular way you’ll get the exact genre of authorities you want on the first page. but, that doesn’t mean that those authorities represent the median within a given field, nor does even a median capture accurately the extent of variance of opinion within a field.
i think google and wikipedia are *great* as the start of an exploration of a particular topic if you want to learn more. e.g., i use wikipedia to look for references when google scholar fails me. but unfortunately it also enables the high school essay writing technique of starting with a thesis and piling up an X number of sources which validate your thesis. if 1% of 100,000 sources agree with position 1 as opposed to 2, it’s not problem to construct an argument with lots of authoritative sources if you just sample out of the 1,000. and that’s the sort of high-schoolish behavior which wastes everyone’s time (at least for people who are interesting in *knowing* things as they are, as opposed to being perceived to be *right* in any given argument)
also, to be clear, these problems aren’t new with google or blogs. the technology has simply increased the metabolic rate of this sort of idiocy.
One former colleague about another: “He publishes so much because (i) he has low critical standards about his own work, and (ii) he is careful not to read the literature.”
“He publishes so much because (i) he has low critical standards about his own work, and (ii) he is careful not to read the literature.”
There must be some brain mechanism relating mating strategy and career strategy (leaving the seed of your idea in the womb of a problem). The above translates as: i) he has low standards for the girls he’s willing to sleep with, and ii) he isn’t aware that many other guys have already slept with those girls.
What are the tell-tale signs of the Google/Wikipedia pundit, then? One I’d identify is an inability to filter out irrelevant noise, which reveals a lack of any underlying theory being applied to news. They’re just blurting out everything they recall reading, usually putting undue emphasis on the importance of recent developments (which they have read about in a recent newspaper article).
As something of a news and blog junkie, one filter technique I am really finding valuable is consciously to get around to reading news articles, preserved in my RSS reader, a few days late, liberally closing any that no longer seem important. This is a great way to cut down on quantity without sacrificing quality: after all, if it doesn’t now seem relevant just three days later, it wasn’t worth reading at any time.
Sorry, was referred to these comments by a more recent Google pundit post and posted the above in the wrong place.
According to a study I found on Google, 27% of everything on Wikipedia is wrong.