[quote=“Mother Theresa”]
Do you ever get sick of all the BS – people googling myriad subjects and posting comments about them as if they actually knew jack shit about the subject prior to doing their search (with the exception of urodacus, obviously, who really does know everything)?
Is it a worthwhile activity for a group of people to engage in a discussion by comparing the result of their google searches?
Or am I mistaken, it’s just me who is ignorant, and everyone else really does know everything about everything?[/quote]
As the number of topics we are supposed to have a grasp of expands, as it inevitably does as we get older, you can do a couple things. The first is drive yourself insane trying to be an expert on everything. As Elegua pointed out, you’ll end up knowing everything about nothing or very little about a few topics.
A little less extreme is to try and take a few topics and get very comfortable with them. You may not be an “expert” but you can hold your own in a conversation on the topic and recommend good books on the subject to someone else who wants to get more informed on the topic. Better than that would be being able to tell them what books to avoid because they are just crap.
The more common thing nowadays, especially in the world of google and the internet, is having a brief and cursory knowledge on hundreds and hundreds of topics. You could probably talk about it for 2 to 3 minutes but couldn’t point out resources on the topic without googling for sources.
Sadly though, the above leads to the problem of where did your sources come from. Google isn’t bad other than it bringing up the twisted depths of the internet and leads us to view things that can never be unseen. The websites we view and the slant we read is what affects the discussion rather than the google search. I doubt it’s just a war of google searches on topics. It’s a discussion where one side had a contradictory viewpoint to the other and uses google to find websites, research papers and news reports that support them. The biases get extended through websites that look for supporting reports for their viewpoints.
If you would prefer to ban googling for sources, you’d get even less factual evidence and more personal feelings. The number of postings on forumosa would drop dramatically. Why discuss with anyone if you already are an expert? You would mostly see newbies asking questions that could be found with a simple search, someone complaining about “Taiwanese women doing XYZ” or “why can’t I get Taiwanese guy to do ABC”.
It would mean that, using you for an example, you could only talk about: being a lawyer, the state of law in Taiwan, being married to a Taiwanese woman, having a kid, riding bicycles and a few other topics. Do you really want a scenario where people don’t post unless they are 100% sure on a topic that has no gray area? It would lead to a very boring board.
There’s 
