The Wikipedia Curse, or A Book So Thick It Was Incomprehensible
I graduated from the high school before Wikipedia became The Encyclopedia, but I started to rely on it more and more during my university years. For non-experts seeking academic-likr knowledge, Wikipedia is likely to yield more useful results than other top Google results combined.
I think it makes us stupider. Not just Wikipedia, but cheap search access in general. But especially Wikipedia. We can look up a thing and we get the impression that we understand something about this thing, while in fact we're in an unfortunate spot of confidence/knowledge chart explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect.
As it happens with Dunning-Kruger, I didn't notice it for years. My mum, who's a middle school science teacher, noticed it immediately, observed and documented it. In just a decade, she says, children stopped being interested in science. They can look anything up, read it out loud, and they honestly believe they understand the thing. Most of them don't.
Nina Kalinina /
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2024-06-19 21:35:14
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2024-06-19 21:35:14Event JSON
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