This is sort of a shower thought because this morning I was using some shaving cream and I thought, if it turns out in 5 years this was giving me cancer, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Comes out a goo, ejected from a can with force, immediately becomes a foam?
Do you have anything you use that you think might be too good to be true?
Our phones are probably doing something to us
We know that depending on your use it can ruin your attention span. But I agree, it’s probably worse than we know.
I read somewhere that the existence of the internet massively stifles our ability to reason. For every question I have, spending a few minutes to ponder what the most plausible answer is provides a small workout for my brain. If everything I’m curious about is answered within seconds, I don’t get those mental workouts.
I think that comes down to your desire to learn. One person might just repeat a google answer but another person might spend some time thinking about why it’s the right answer.
Google is how people get degrees after all, it’s the modern day version of hunting down books in libraries
I think there’s a sufficient amount of questions where it’s very easy to convince yourself the solution is obvious after you’ve seen it, but less obvious if you’re taking the time to try to figure it out on your own.
I teach college math courses (usually around calculus-level), and for every exam I give I will write a practice exam to post online a week before and devote the lecture prior to the exam to reviewing those problems. I try to make every problem that appears on the exam very similar to one that was on the practice. The students who attempt the problems before the review session, even if they get incorrect solutions in the process, will always bulldoze their exams and will say it’s essentially identical to the practice, while the students who just watch me give the solutions and copy down what I’m writing will tell me the practice was easy but this was barely similar at all.
When you see an obvious solution immediately, you completely bypass seeing potential stumbling blocks which might have tripped you up.