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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (254)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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.