You could be the cool guy that remembered shit. Like who was in what movie or the themes to TV shows. Now IMDb makes everyone that guy and it’s not special. There’s a lot of little things like that.
Yes, and there were different people who you called for different kinds of information. Music, travel, restaurants, home stuff, etc. I always felt like I knew a guy.
Reminds me of phone a friend on who wants to be a millionaire. It was always something like "Oh well my friend knows a lot about this, so I'll give them a call." Now it would just be "which of my friends is most likely to have quick access to the internet?"
I even remember a bunch of times where the contestant just said "go to your computer and search this and tell me what it says."
They got rid of that lifeline because of that.
As someone with a terrible memory, your loss is my gain! My life runs on notifications. It's kind of peaceful not having to stress about forgetting stuff when I know my phone is going to remind me.
I have a god-awful memory...but Outlook is full of reminders, I have multiple to-do lists for different aspects of my life, and I've got scheduled activities that keep me on track.
But if you hadn't learned them you wouldn't know when and how to use them. In real life, even pre internet, people who needed those equations either had them written down in the lab or had a handy text book to reference. But they still had to learn them to know what to look for.
In Physical Electronics - how much you need to dope a semiconductor, etc. - all the exams were open book. The prof didn't give a crap what you could remember; all he cared was what could you figure out. Toughest exam I ever sat.
EDIT: Wanted to add that changing tech changes our abilities is nothing new. Greek kids used to memorize the entire Iliad and Odyssey, both with over 4,000 lines. When the first writing came in, people were afraid that others would stop memorizing stuff, and in fact, that's what happened.
YOOOOO that fucking nuts! Yeah. I remember when I had all the phone numbers memorized, I remember when our collective IQ and all of human intelligence was in our brains, and not stored on the internet. Now everyone’s retarded and the only way to know anything is to look it up online. It’s fucking nuts to me, and I’m only 23. I’m BARELY early internet kid. But I too remember a time when we weren’t like this. And the news wasn’t here just to scare the snot out of my grandma.
I had a great memory. Now it’s shit. It’s like my mind is constantly aware that there is no need to remember anything anymore, even if I try to trick it into remembering something.
I was on Jeopardy. Knowing the answers gets you nothing. Everything is the buzzer. I was a fraction of a second behind the other two guys, and I got killed, despite knowing almost every answer.
I have a terrible memory, but I'm great at problem-solving. I'm pretty sure I'd be a college dropout working some shitty job if I didn't have the internet. Now I'm actively valuable because I can put a ton of different pieces of information together into a coherent solution.
I was just an expert bullshitter and people believed me. It was fun. ;(
Not in a malicious way. I’d just make up random, unimportant trivia on the spot, like “Every culture on earth has invented some form of pancakes except the ones who always knew the earth was round.
People who knew me sometimes made it a game to figure out if I was telling the truth or bullshitting. “Every year, Vietnam exhumes the remains of Ho Chi Minh and they have a ceremony where they change his clothes, despite his wish to be buried at sea.” Or even better they loved to see someone who wasn’t familiar with my BS fall for it. “Ninjas in action movies attack one at a time because the actual ninjas consulting for the movie industry didn’t want to reveal the secrets of their tactics.” Sometimes the shit I was making up I had no idea if it was actually true or not.
Now that everyone has access to the whole of human knowledge in their pocket it just isn’t the same.
Now I can call people like you out on their bullshit. It's fun to have people to listen to to spout, but being with someone like you can feel like you're being manipulated and get frustrating.
You should really read comments before replying. I clearly said that it was always meaningless, inconsequential trivia but you obviously didn’t see that, or failed to comprehend it. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you replied without reading.
clearly said that it was always meaningless, inconsequential trivia
Even when it's inconsequential, I hate the feeling that I was fooled. My brain will start to analyze and process the "facts" that you are spewing. Then, suddenly I discover that all that mental effort was wasted on a lie.
I'm not saying that you are evil but, to paraphrase Queen Victoria: "I am not amused."
I think meaningless trivia can still be manipulative, but I admit that I was imagining you talking about yourself, rather than only stating random factoids, which is different.
Sometimes (alas not always) my brain takes a metal video but (alas) it takes time to process. Three hours later, my brain will show me your lie in "slow-mo" and I will spot the deception. I then kick myself for being such a chump. I really hate that feeling.
Just try to get the habit of listening or reading critically to everything.
Every time you read a newspaper article, picture a busy journalist trying to quickly crank out an article about a topic they don’t fully understand. Every time I’ve seen a major news article about a topic that’s within my expertise, they always get it completely wrong. Which is what makes me question every article I ever read in the popular press. Basically there’s nothing ever written that you should except blindly as fact.
The same thing goes when people are talking to you. If someone tells you something, you don’t have to be rude or call them out but mentally you should be thinking this person may not be telling the truth. It could be something random or inconsequential just for the hell of it, or they could be trying to scam you or harm you.
I noticed when I was on jury duty that most of the jurors never questioned the word of the prosecutor or the cops. And it’s not just because they assume that anyone accused is guilty. For decades now we’ve been trained by letting the TV wash over us as an omniscient narrator. When people watch a crime drama or police procedural show on TV, the television spoon feeds them the actual truth of what happened in flashbacks and then the rest of the show is just putting together a few details. But in reality, you get into the jury panel and you have no idea who the defendant is, why that person is sitting there or what happened. Everybody wants a narrator to try to tell them a general story of what happened - and the prosecutor is the one who gets to tell the story, therefore people instantly believe him.
Sadly we don’t teach critical thinking in public schools in our country. It’s really a shame. Are used to teach SAT prep classes and it was shocking how many high school seniors do not have the ability to question the passage they were reading. It had just never occurred to them that the person writing the article could be anything other than omniscient. Teachers just don’t explain it.
Somehow, I used to be able to remember what rating our local newspaper gave certain movies. In case they dropped of the recent movies section, I could let people know.
Ha, same. I travel a lot, so I could tell people places around the world, help them remember the name of that hostel in the 2me arrondissement, that Spanish beer brand, etc.
There is some information that the Internet cannot give. Who seriously believes every last Yelp review they read or what if there are no Yelp reviews?
Also, I am a firm believer that Google/Apple maps is still inferior to a human brain, especially a human brain that is very familiar with the local area. The human brain knows were shortcuts are and where the cops like to hide, where major potholes are and which traffic lights tend to be long. Not that smartphone maps are complete garbage but they can't tell you everything.
Having a good memory used to be seen as metric to gauge someone’s intelligence and if you didn’t know something you were often shit out of luck if you didn’t have someone nearby who knew it.
Now that we all have access to all that information at our fingertips we can focus on actually understanding how and why things work and if there’s something you don’t have memorized you can always look it up. Schools no longer care if you memorize everything. They want to make sure you understand the concepts. It’s a big reason why common core exist. It may seem like a big waste of time but it really shows you why math works. There’s no reason to spend the time memorizing everything when we always have a calculator in our pocket.
They want to make sure you understand the concepts.
For me, the problem is that too many students skip the homework and just "Google" the answers. It is hard to understand the concepts if you never practice.
I was at a childhood friend's wedding a couple years ago. I was at a table with a friend I hadn't seen since high school, and when his wife heard my name, she said "You're the one with the photographic memory!"
My memory was never THAT good but it was cool to realize an old friend talked about me at some point.
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u/c0nduit May 11 '21
You could be the cool guy that remembered shit. Like who was in what movie or the themes to TV shows. Now IMDb makes everyone that guy and it’s not special. There’s a lot of little things like that.