Recently I thought about what it actually means to be smart, in the literal sense of what knowledge you know and, perhaps more importantly, what knowledge you truly need to know.
In a world full of game shows and other events based around petty trivia (Jeopardy!) and sometimes meaningful trivia (Rock ‘n’ Roll Jeopardy!), I wondered how much of this really mattered in the real world. In all honesty, 99.9% of life’s questions (if not a straight 100%) can be answered by simply typing your question into a search box on a website such as Google.
With that being the case, I thought up something along the lines that the truly knowledgeable people are those who knows things which you cannot find by asking Jeeves. I think the real test as to what we truly know or don’t know can be determined by how we react in a situation where we need help but simply do not have an iPhone at our fingertips to figure out the answer.
This lead me to two good ideas for television game shows- though I honestly think that they should be merged into one to make it even better.
For the first half of the show, the contestants would be asked a series of trivial questions. The answers would basically be based around the fact of who could type the fastest (and most accurately) to pull up the results on a webpage. But the thing is, this round would have to be like math class—you’d have to show your work. So, for example, the winning answer could be by Bob who typed in “How do you change a tire eHow” to Google and came up with the correct result. If you simply know the answer, you can’t just blurt it out. It has to be a form of search mission in that way, as well.
The second half of the show is where it gets good. Do you know how long a person can go without drinking water? Sure you don’t, nor do you care because if it really pertains to you, you can always Google it. But what if you weren’t able to use Google? What if you were in an undisclosed location and forced to answer questions based on your own wits alone? Do you have the survival instincts to do it? What if the challenge was that you must decide- with no help from anyone or anything else- how long you could live without water and whatever your answer was would determine whether you lived or died. If you said that the human body can stay alive for a week without dehydrating, guess what? You just died. Worse than that, you died by your own ignorance.
The point of all of this, really, is that there have always been two types of smarts—book smarts and street smarts. You’d throw people who were only book smart out onto the street and watch them grasp at straws for answers while they get carjacked, mugged, raped and left for dead. Yes, I fully agree that people need book smarts to a certain extent. No one should have to using their calculator on their phone (or Google) to find out how much two tacos will cost if they’re $0.69 each. (Though I bet some people can’t do that in their head, so maybe I should’ve went with a 2 + 2 equation instead) But at the same time, we rely on the internet as a resource far too much in this day and age. While it doesn’t really matter whether or not you can pull the name of the 14th President off the top of your head or you have to Google search it, I think there needs to be a certain amount of basic survival instincts still kicked into people. One day, if we have some kind of apocalyptic type catastrophe and we’re all left without the internet we’ll see who lives and who dies.
No comments:
Post a Comment