Online, everyone is an expert on everything

[Dr_McCoy]

But I didn’t need Google to tell me that.

[headhonchoII]

[quote=“Dragonbones”]Speaking of people just googling for sources, I consider online researching to be a valuable skill, involving searching for, gleaning through, digesting and regurgitating information, and each step can be done badly or in an intelligent fashion. Not everyone is good at finding the info, not everyone can absorb it rapidly, and not everyone can present it well. It’s nice when people acknowledge their lack of expertise, and don’t put others down for not knowing, of course.

BTW, some of the people on this website ARE the sources we google for: Cranky Laowai, for instance, on phonetic transcriptions for Chinese; and all those who have contributed their own real expertise to Wiki pages, for instance (I can think of several, and I’m sure there many). There’s some amazing expertise here – Enigma (and others) on cooking, the photography wizards, too many to name, the animal experts like Stray Dog and others, those who really know their scriptures and biblical scholarship like Fortigurn, the highly experienced teachers who give excellent advice, the mechanical wizzes over in Cars, and so on. It’s wonderful having them all in the same online community. [/quote]

Biblical scholarship

[Fortigurn]

@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…

Yes.

Is it a worthwhile activity for a group of people to engage in a discussion by comparing the result of their google searches?

No.

@lbksig

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”.

I doubt you would get less factual evidence (though you would get more personal feelings). People tend to use Google to look for information which appears to support their personal feelings anyway (confirmation bias, see also Morton’s demon). But you would still get the same people posting who actually have real knowledge of the subject on which they’re writing (DB, Cranky Laowai, Mick, and others), and who have the skills to perform genuine research and present well articulated arguments which are properly substantiated from reliable sources (I’m thinking especially of DB and Cranky Laowai’s rigorously academic posts on Chinese).

[Buttercup]

It’s easy to just ignore the googlers. It’s pretty clear who knows about stuff and who is googling.

Academic stuff, maybe, but no-one posts anything much in my field and I have a kabillion half-read journals on my desk anyway.

Huang Guang Chen is the only person I go to for info, tbh, but then I don’t drive, have pets, care about food, indulge in religious debate or give a crap about global warming. The Learning Chinesers got some good stuff but it’s all way over my head/level.

[Charlie_Jack]

If it weren’t for Google, I might still be in the dark about important technological innovations such as the following:

[quote]Recently machines have been developed which rotate badger hair brushes over the candy, “dusting” off the grayish substance, known as chocolate oxide, thus restoring the candy to its original fresh appearance.[/quote]–“Chocolate Candy Is Brushed to Improve Appearance,” Popular Mechanics, June 1934, p. 865
books.google.com/books?id=vN4DAA … kQS32ZymBA