In my experience, Googling tends to give you shallow, surface knowledge while books are more likely to give you deep knowledge. (Needless to say, though, there are also plenty of books that only provide surface knowledge.)
In my experience, Googling tends to give far deeper knowledge, as everything has explorable context—you can focus onto anything and out for wider view until it integrates well with your mental model of the world. This kind of integrated contextual knowledge together with some practice can go very deep.
Books just try to mindlessly ram information things through, but it just doesn’t work for me. At all. I only ever use them for entertainment.
It’s possible that people work differently, but I don’t terribly like such hypotheses. It’s also possible many people are simply not terribly good at using Internet, or that many disciplines don’t yet have information available on the Internet—in the long term the normal case will far more information than you ever need available online, but this might not always be the case yet.
It’s also possible many people are simply not terribly good at using Internet, or that many disciplines don’t yet have information available on the Internet—in the long term the normal case will far more information than you ever need available online, but this might not always be the case yet.
It’s not the first possibility, it’s the second. I’m quite comfortable in saying that I am very capable at finding specific online content if it’s out there to be found. The problem is that most of the disciplines I’m interested in reading about don’t have the good, hard content available for free on the web. (Scientific journals can be accessed online, but these are just books.) It is not the “normal case” that far more information than one could want is available online for most domains, it is absolutely the abnormal case. To be frank, the idea that one could ever get a thorough grounding in any serious, empirical scientific discipline by scouring the Internet is, at least at this time, laughable.
To be frank, the idea that one could ever get a thorough grounding in any serious, empirical scientific discipline by scouring the Internet is, at least at this time, laughable.
Is this because of the lack of lab work as well as the lack of textbook-level information?
Incidentally, Google is clearly aware of this, and willing to step into some hot (and unprofitable in the short term) waters to get to the book-stored knowledge. They also revived decent open-source OCR probably for this purpose.
Are there any well-regarded textbooks you have tried before turning to the Internet? If, say, SICP or The Art of Computer Programming comes off as “mindlessly ram[ming] raw information things through”, you may want to promote “people work differently” back to prominence as a hypothesis.
I will say, though, that in my experience reading a textbook is very different from reading on the Internet—rather like switching abruptly to rifle shooting from cross-country skiing, metaphorically speaking.
In my experience, Googling tends to give you shallow, surface knowledge while books are more likely to give you deep knowledge. (Needless to say, though, there are also plenty of books that only provide surface knowledge.)
In my experience, Googling tends to give far deeper knowledge, as everything has explorable context—you can focus onto anything and out for wider view until it integrates well with your mental model of the world. This kind of integrated contextual knowledge together with some practice can go very deep.
Books just try to mindlessly ram information things through, but it just doesn’t work for me. At all. I only ever use them for entertainment.
It’s possible that people work differently, but I don’t terribly like such hypotheses. It’s also possible many people are simply not terribly good at using Internet, or that many disciplines don’t yet have information available on the Internet—in the long term the normal case will far more information than you ever need available online, but this might not always be the case yet.
It’s not the first possibility, it’s the second. I’m quite comfortable in saying that I am very capable at finding specific online content if it’s out there to be found. The problem is that most of the disciplines I’m interested in reading about don’t have the good, hard content available for free on the web. (Scientific journals can be accessed online, but these are just books.) It is not the “normal case” that far more information than one could want is available online for most domains, it is absolutely the abnormal case. To be frank, the idea that one could ever get a thorough grounding in any serious, empirical scientific discipline by scouring the Internet is, at least at this time, laughable.
Is this because of the lack of lab work as well as the lack of textbook-level information?
Incidentally, Google is clearly aware of this, and willing to step into some hot (and unprofitable in the short term) waters to get to the book-stored knowledge. They also revived decent open-source OCR probably for this purpose.
Are there any well-regarded textbooks you have tried before turning to the Internet? If, say, SICP or The Art of Computer Programming comes off as “mindlessly ram[ming] raw information things through”, you may want to promote “people work differently” back to prominence as a hypothesis.
I will say, though, that in my experience reading a textbook is very different from reading on the Internet—rather like switching abruptly to rifle shooting from cross-country skiing, metaphorically speaking.