Lynch: Google Knowledge

The problem today is that so many people have a Google knowledge of things without a deeper and more important kind of understanding, but there is a way that we can fix it. In 2016, the philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch defined Google knowledge as when you know a fact without knowing the underlying structures that frame it. For example, you might know that white blood cells fight illnesses, but do you know how blood moves around the body, what those cells actually do, and what other factors are relevant in fighting illnesses? You have an answer. You have a fact, but you don't know the environment in which it is framed. But the issue isn't only about Google. It's when you have knowledge that you need for a pub quiz, or to impress somebody, or to pass an exam. It's when a fact gets handed to you without the background environment needed to actually understand it. The problem isn't that this is just shallow understanding. It's actually making us bad at talking to each other. Imagine that there are two people, Dan and Hannah, and they are arguing about whether a supplement works. Dan says it does, and Hannah says it doesn't, and both have papers to back up their position, but neither Dan nor Hannah have the resources to measure the worth or the limitations of their studies. How many people were tested? What was it tested against? Was it repeated, and so on? When you only learned the headline of a thing, when you only Google know something, you do not know the underlying structures that allow you to evaluate and to fully understand it. The solution is harder and slower than most people will want. We need to pick a subject and not just a fact. We need to immerse ourselves in that subject long enough to know the why, and not just the what about something?