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

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

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Comment author: gwern 03 April 2013 08:34:28PM *  24 points [-]

For kicks, and reminded by all my recent searching for digging up long-forgotten launch and shut down dates for Google properties, I've compiled a partial list of times I've posted searches & results on LW:

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 classes; knowing how to search seems like the sort of skill that would pay off constantly over a lifetime.

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.

Comment author: lukeprog 07 May 2013 03:36:32AM 1 point [-]

This is epic.

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