Troubleshooting without help from others

[Rob Sutherland]

Madison Kelly wrote:
>
> The fact that this is a legitimate question is funny/sad. Back in the 
> day I would have considered myself a pretty good trouble shooter. 
> These days though if you took the Internet away from me I'd be so lost.
>
> Is this a reflection of:
>
> a) The complexity of modern tech being such that no one can be 
> expected to know enough on their own to be able to work on it 
> independently.
>
> -or-
>
> b) The Internet has atrophied our minds because it allows us to get 
> away without thinking/problem solving on our own anymore?
>
Those are both true to an extent, although I wonder what areas of our 
minds are being developed as some are atrophied. But I think
the reason that people can get away with googling up answers for quite a 
while is because it works for  a certain percentage of
problems. And the reason it works is because large numbers of people use 
the same software packages and 'document' their
problem solving experiences enough so that pasting an error message  
into google will sometimes give you a useful answer
for things like 'Why did package abc crash when I installed it on distro 
xyz'. More complex problems can't be solved this
way, so we can't throw away our brains yet :-)

Rob

"I for one, welcome our new problem solving googlish overlords'


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