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This post is a refutation of Devin Coldewey’s TechCrunch article The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge.

Devin’s article is worth reading, though I’ll cover the gist here.

The general thesis of Devin’s article is that people are increasingly undervaluing the accumulation of information within ourselves (internal knowledge), preferring to rely on the Internet (external knowledge). This reliance is damaging to intellectual development, and is particularly true of generations raised in a post-useful-Internet world (Gen Y), according to Devin.

It’s a pretty compelling argument, but falls apart when you examine the nature and value of information as it influences intelligence, and the nature of human memory.

Each piece of information has many components
Let’s take Devin’s first example: Two friends talking about a Patrick Swayze movie at a bar but forgetting the leading actor’s name. Let’s assume they were talking about the movie Roadhouse. There will be a great many pieces of information the two friends will recall about the film and leading actor: details of the story, setting, characters, dialog, violence, etc. Forgetting one piece of this information, even something as important as a person’s name, doesn’t mean every other piece of information is forgotten.

The value of each component is not equal
Further, the value of each piece of information about a subject varies widely. In our example, maybe the two friends were talking about the prevalence of ice-cold-killer-but-secretly-sensitive hero’s in the ‘80s, and how that tied into the cultural effects of the cold war in America.  The names (not to be confused with identities) of the actors/directors/writers in the film may be among the least important bits of information in that discussion.

Devin makes much the same point later in the post when he writes “The counter to [my thesis] is that, freed from the necessity of remembering every little thing, we are better able to focus on what we think is important.” He’s right, though he doesn’t seem to fully believe it.

Misunderstanding normal memory operation as a new phenomena
While discussing the supposed reduction of internalized knowledge Devin suggests an experiment to illustrate a terrifying new phenomena. “Try this experiment: if you have a blog, a Posterous or Tumblr or what have you, try to remember as many items you’ve posted as you can, right now, without checking. Write them down or something. I have a “blowoff valve” blog myself, and I’ve posted hundreds of quotes, images, and such to it — but I have trouble picturing more than a few dozen. That terrifies me, and although it may not terrify you, you at least sense there’s something to it.”

That result illustrates how memory has always functioned, and is in no way a new phenomena. Our brains are not hardwired to remember lists, period. Our memories are primarily indexed with emotions and novelty. To be easily recallable in list form, the items on a list must have intrinsic emotion or novelty that ties together all the items on the list. AND the idea of that list itself must have emotion or novelty.

I remember that the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989. I don’t have an encyclopedic memory (though low-grade photographic), but I do remember two ideas about the event that anchor the date in my memory. 1) The fall of the Berlin Wall ended the ‘80s, thus pegging the year 1989, 2) Emotionally, the fall of the Berlin Wall was the opposite of 9/11, therefor the date was 11/9.

Information overload vs. retention
With his experiment Devin is suggesting a side thesis that our accelerated intake of information has eroded our ability to derive internal knowledge from information. That may or may not be true, but if Devin wanted to test how well he has retained knowledge from his blog his experiment was structured backward.

What he should have done is have someone quiz him on the important points of each post or image he blogged. For example: Q: “Why doesn’t Wikileaks publish every document they have?” A: Their quantity of submissions has been increasing exponentially, while their ability to publish has been increasing linearly. Q: “What kills cute kittens?” A: Masturbation.

I bet Devin would have gotten those answers correct. And similar questions about his other blog and image posts.


Why Gen Y is smarter, and The Encyclopedia vs. The Filter
So what does it all mean? If all information isn’t equal, and it’s all easily accessible, those who are best at filtering valuable from less-valuable information and those that are best at quickly finding information become the most intellectually useful. People raised in this new world are naturally more adept at both. Barring superseding negatives, that gives Gen Y a big advantage.

Toward the end of the article Devin also riffs on the concept of insight. I agree with his characterization of insight as “the result of recombination, hybridizing ideas, internal accidents, emergent properties of ideas we never even knew were related”. To be insightful, then, you must be able to draw on the information previously considered less-valuable, or valuable in unrelated area. This suggests encyclopedic minds are more likely insightful than the filterers. I agree, and consider this to be the defining characteristic of wisdom.

I think it will be a long time before a Gen Y person is wiser than, say, Tim O’Reilly. But that day will come, and not just due to age and experience. As those Gen Y minds are filling with highly-selective knowledge instead of less-selective knowledge, becoming more encyclopedic, I believe the number of valuable connections and inferences will increase.

At least linearly if not exponentially.