Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Vaniver 01 April 2013 03:00PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 04 April 2013 02:08:52AM 3 points [-]

Can't help but get the impression that even people here aren't very good at Googling. Maybe they should be taking Google's little search class; knowing how to search seems like the sort of skill that would payoff constantly over a lifetime.

It appears to me that in half of these examples people hadn't tried to google at all. It doesn't seem particularly likely to me that the class would develop such a habit. Not that I have a better idea.

Comment author: gwern 04 April 2013 03:43:27AM 14 points [-]

My belief is that the more familiar and skilled you are with a tool, the more willing you are to reach for it. Someone who has been programming for decades will be far more willing to write a short one-off program to solve a problem than someone who is unfamiliar and unsure about programs (even if they suspect that they could get a canned script copied from StackExchange running in a few minutes). So the unwillingness to try googling at all is at least partially a lack of googling skill and familiarity.