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The Death of Knowledge?
By: Andrew Gerst, The Chronicle (Duke)
December 7, 2006 4:29 PM

(U-WIRE) DURHAM, N.C. - On the face of it, Wikipedia -- the free Internet encyclopedia -- serves a noble purpose: bringing an incredible depth of knowledge to greater audiences than ever before.

Unleashing the power of the Internet, poor schoolchildren in Ghana can learn about AIDS; professors can re-transmit research otherwise lost in dense academic journals; and perhaps most importantly, harried journalists at The Chronicle can get background information in a flash. For the most part these uses are productive, offering society a net of information that trawls both wider and deeper.

But for Duke students and the rest of the academic world, the site is a double-edged sword. With such a powerful information repository available, it seems students are beginning to ask: "Why bother remembering anything at all?"

Need to know how many quarts are in a gallon? Wikipedia. Where is the capital of China? Wikipedia. We are becoming lazier and lazier, and if all that matters at Duke is remembering some facts for a few hours before a mid-term, it makes sense why.

The late psychologist Raymond Cattell posited that humans have two kinds of smarts: crystal intelligence, which (roughly) measures our ability to memorize rote tasks and facts, and liquid intelligence, which measures our capacity to draw connections. The former is learned; the latter is innate. So Wikipedia, which can only augment our crystal knowledge, not the liquid kind, isn't any more of a crutch for intelligence than any other book might be, the story goes.

But Wikipedia, frankly, is convenient to a degree we've never seen before. Before the Internet, people looking for facts had two options: they could rely on humans, including themselves, or they could sift through a mountain of books. If the fact was trivial enough, it just wasn't worthwhile to look it up. Today, with Wikipedia competing against the brain, it doesn't save very much time to memorize. Add to that the possibility that someone may have misremembered a fact, and students aren't willing to even try anymore.

The problem here is that if one is to make use of liquid intelligence -- the force of genius that brings about innovation -- one must have crystal intelligence to inspire it. That is, before we can draw interesting conclusions, we have to understand our premises. Because Wikipedia is so convenient, it encourages us to remember basic, boring facts for as short a time as possible. As a result, we have fewer hours to mull things over; there is no great soup of facts to boil while we sleep, learn, talk and think. It is in those moments, undoubtedly, that real innovation occurs.

Because we forget things so quickly, in fact, Wikipedia does not actually build up our crystal intelligence at all. It merely teases us, giving us facts for a few days rather than encouraging us to learn how to remember for good.

Cynics at Duke love to insist that all knowledge is trivia, mere cocktail-party fodder for the upper class. But there is so much more to memorization. Imagine declaring a discovery in the lab without mixing any chemicals. Or think about trying to invent a new kind of circuit without being able to recall Maxwell's equations. How could we conclude anything about Shakespeare's era without knowing his plays?

We've got to face it: Duke undergraduates have a Wikipedia addiction. It's a dependence that reduces the real -- if fleeting -- joy of book learning into a mindless regurgitation of facts. It is difficult to overcome. The best thing professors can do is to continue challenging students to think in the "liquid" sense, writing exams that necessitate drawing original conclusions. This habit would encourage two virtues: first, by demanding originality, rather than the same endless compare/contrast papers, professors would force students to think critically. And second, to draw those conclusions, students would have to actually know their facts.

In the world of schoolwork, we're all tempted to take the escalator. But sometimes it's worth it to climb the mountain. Our society depends on it.

Comments

Is Wikipedia doing to general knowledge what the calculator did to math? Tools can help us but they also make us dependent. What happens if the world runs out of electricty. We can't use calculators or Wikipedia, then truly, only the strong would survive.
Posted by: Andrew | December 9, 2006 9:11 PM

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