I’m just going to steal the response I read years ago.
“I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.”
I’ve started l to realize that actual information worth reading is not available. Like I cant access in depth medical course or text book in engineering. Lots of beginner tutorials marketed as 7 minute abs.
Information is valuable and nobody gives it away for free. We have access to a worlds worth of crappy, unvetted trash information. But the vast majority of the good stuff is still locked away as it always was.
Wow not my experience at all. Fkn amazing access to nearly anything I want and I’ve been a programmer electronics tech, car hacker whatever and the resources available to me is AWESOME! And I’ve posted 5000 pages onycown website.
Does MIT not have open courses anymore? Besides that I wonder what you are looking for? I can find free scientific papers to improve my hobbies, watch along as professionals explain and do their jobs, graduate level math and computer science videos from the comfort of my home. As a student around 2000 (Google existed, barely) it was not so easy, even with access to university library you still had to find what you were looking for with worse tools and there was less of it. And who on earth was going to take the time to show you exactly how it worked their lab a thousand miles away? Once a week you could go to a seminar and a visiting scientist gives a slideshow. It’s better now.
Opencourseware is great. But what they’re a rarity instead of the norm. I think Stanford posted lectures for a bit too. Good sources of information exist. Just like there is research we all can access but there’s not as much as it appears without having to resort to piracy.
It became clearer to me when writing and researching topics. I still had to go to the university library and pour through books. Because that quality of information in their library is not there online. The internet didn’t replicate that knowledge. It gave us a surface level blog about topics. Don’t get me wrong. I know there’s lots of blogs and people giving in depth research for free on their speciality. But its still not a good source of knowledge like exists in academic libraries.
As an oncology researcher, to do my job I have to pay approximately $30-60 per article for about half the articles in my 1500 article library for my CAR cell therapy research.
The scientific field is slowly improving over the last 10 years, but it still sucks, and I can only read the abstract for free, which doesn’t provide enough details for my layperson research on topics like behavior or autophagy.
I’m one of the lucky few that has an institutional subscription, and most companies don’t pay for institutional subscriptions. Also, I can’t, as someone suggested, hack into the University wifi which is a half hour away and still do my job onsite.
It’s available if you set sail…
Argghh
Between Libgen and SciHub I’m interested in hearing an example of what you can’t find out there.
Those aren’t technically legal and because of that I’m excluding them.
Try google scholar.
He didn’t say “for free” though.
Most of the courses at MIT are free. Most information is free these days in fact. The world has never had access to more free knowledge.
Like I cant access in depth medical course or text book in engineering
Why not? The common ‘hack’ is to join the wifi at your local uni if you don’t have the necessary subscriptions for the platform but lots of stuff is open-access
That’s true but what I meant was that when I went to school it opened my eyes to how there is internet information and then there’s this other academic information. My own opinion is that I see a distinction between what I can learn online vs what I can learn with a text book. The internet is good at making me think I’m getting this massive access to knowledge when its really more superficial factoids rather than actually knowledge. And that’s because knowledge is sold like anything else
I mean sites like library exist and provide large amounts of academic texts for free.
Can you get academic text books from a public library?
Since you mentioned you went to a school already (and assuming you meant some kind of post-secondary school); I do think it’s outrageous that some schools limit full library access to only the time one is completing their studies. Lots of former students would benefit and since anyone with access through their employers is likely using the employer’s library access, I can’t imagine former students would significantly increase the cost of maintaining database access…
I got lucky and still have access through the alumni association at my uni, but I don’t believe that’s true at all schools.
depends a bit on the text book and library, but yes. that’s kind of the point of university libraries (which you normally can also visit, as far as I am aware)
In fact, I just checked: my local uni library will give you a membership card for only a handful of bucks a year
Not my cancer research niche textbooks.
It’s not hard to access information that is either relevant to popular culture or economically significant. Everything else is hit or miss.
You don’t use it to get into arguments with strangers.
…that’s not an argument; that’s just contradiction…
No it’s not!
I came here for a good argument.
Well played…
This does make me think. I remember the days where I would turn up at the library to read books. With my phone, I can read and learn but instead I doom scroll.
I combine the two. I doomscroll looking for things to read and learn about, which enhances the doom significantly!
but instead doom Scroll.
One of us, one of us!
I find I’m involved in a combination of doom scrolling and reading through my digital books. They’re not academic in nature but they bring me joy… I also leverage my device for googling the answer to any one of the thousand questions my offspring will ask daily.
We can’t use oil or gas anymore.
Also, there are 15 billions people on earth.
No, 8 billion. Not 15. Lrn2search!
Ah a mistake. The thing is that in the 50s it was believed that earth wouldn’t be able to feed more than 1 or 2 billions people. They didn’t imagine a city dozen million people either.
“It arguably made us all a lot dumber…”
I don’t know if the Internet has made folks dumber per se. What we may be experiencing is the visibility of semi anonymous unfiltered thought. I’ve had conversations with individuals online who have made claims that are egregiously incorrect and will defend those claims to the death but when discussed in person, they are amenable to discourse and can change their opinions.
I’m not saying this is true for all cases but I think the is a lot more going on here in our digital age.
Edit: removed an embarrassing typo.
Apologies if annoying to point out, but it’s “per se”. It’s latin.
Whelp, color me embarrassed. Don’t mind me as I go to edit my comment.
Nah, I’m sure it hasn’t. It just seems like it has.
Part of it is the fact that it’s easier for people speak freely to an audience, and…maybe some of them shouldn’t…
There’s also the fact that it’s a lot easier to consider oneself an expert. For better or worse, respect for authority has plummeted, and there’s so much information that anybody can find citations for just about any claim.
If you don’t believe me, I can link you to some articles about it…
And porn! So much porn!
I mean, Avenue Q said it best.
“Yes, they are allowed to be on the same bus as us. No, we don’t call them that anymore”
“Bus? No we bulldozed hundreds of neighborhoods to build highways so now everyone has to have a car”
Depends where they appeared
And which person from the 1950s
And we had a pretty great black president.
I knew that would be the obvious joke but it’s not like that was unfathomable in the fifties. Desegregation was obviously where the world was headed and I’m sure everyone was expecting (or dreading) modern racial relations.
Things they considered morally fine (smoking, dropping litter, 40 year olds dating 16 year olds) is morally reprehensible, while things they thought were morally wrong or even outlawed are totally acceptable (homosexually, porn, divorce).
You just explained a large selection of boomers.
Yeah, a lot of them were born in the 1950s.
My comment now in retrospect was asinine. Yeah. True boomers are in that bracket.
Charlie Chaplin’s daughter died recently and I looked him up on wikipedia. Charlie married last wife, and the mother of the recently deceased, when he was 54 and she was 18.
It may not technically be pedophilia, but it damn sounds like it.
Depends where they live, too
Why the Nazis are back
This is the 50s, I think it’d be pretty easy to draw a line from casual racism to white supremacists. A key difference this time is that it’s not just Germans led by one insane man, it’s instead a bunch of redneck prices and conspiracy theorists.
Before the US got involved in WWII, there was a giant Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden…
There was a lot more than that. There were Nazi sympathizers, and saboteurs, and those who plotted to overthrow the US government. People like Father Charles Coughlin reading Goebbels’ propaganda on the radio to millions of listeners and forming an anti-government militia, and legislators like US Senator Ernest Lundeen working directly with Nazis and reading speeches literally written by them.
Highly recommend Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast if you want to say holy shit every few minutes.
they are the same picture
the og nazis were absolutely cooked full on conspiracy theorists, some of them were into occult shit and spend significant resources on that
Also, for the red neck prick angle of it, check out this fucking moron from rural Wisconsin (who I originally learned of through this article about when a bunch of vets kicked his ass in 1946 for trying to hold a Nazi rally in Minneapolis).
On October 22, he was punched in the face after delivering a radio talk in New Orleans. On the night before the election, he was arrested for disturbing the peace, reviling the police, and using obscene language after attacking Leche on statewide radio.
ha, you can’t trick me, he’s just time-traveling Richard Spencer
your second link is broken, but it has been archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20230319011140/http://historyapolis.com/blog/2015/12/09/we-dont-want-a-hitler-here/
That’s easy, people still wave the Confederate flag and that happened 90 years before the 1950’s.
Ironically, the confederate worship started in the 50’s and 60’s during the civil rights era. It was basically a rebellion against the civil rights movement, and an attempt to intimidate black people back into silence. Like “oh you want to use the same bathroom as us now? Well you can’t stop us from erecting this statue of a confederate general, to constantly remind you where you came from.” So depending on when exactly they came from in the 50’s, the confederate stuff may also be a surprise.
I doubt that someone that actually lived through WW2 would agree on that
Show them footage of January 6th.
They would view that as a good thing. Imagine if Germans did the same thing when Hitler took power.
I think that wouldn’t be too hard. He would just believe that they never left… which would be true
I presume you’re not talking about Russia? You’re going to have a hard time showing them those Nazis.
A person from 1950s will just be super confused when you say it because they’re going to ask you what country is Nazi. If you say the US they’ll just be confused further.
“Who are these nazis”
“Anyone that doesn’t have the same political beliefs as me!”
“…I see”
This denial is worse than any vulgar insult.
We’re talking about violent bigots. People responsible for mob violence against democracy, and state violence against women and minorities. Stop fucking pretending we ‘just don’t like it’ when you try to make us less than human.
…I see
Doubt.
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I mean by modern standards, almost everyday in the 1950s was a Nazi.
Depends a lot on the color of their skin.
“You’re telling me there was a black president and he wasn’t assassinated? Sure, buddy! Now let me get back to my sharecropping.”
Why the Nazis are back, and in America of all places
Seeing how much overlap they have with the KKK, I don’t think it’d be that surprising
They are back In germany too. Although I wouldn’t call it they are back, but they are open about it again
We walk around with a little rectangle in our pocket that gives us access to the sum total of human knowledge, but we mostly use it for looking at funny captioned pictures, the same pictures over and over just with different captions.
It’s called a phone but no one ever uses it as one.
Also, the “video telephone” that everyone always so desperately awaited from the future? Yeah, we have that; no, nobody uses it, because we can’t be bothered to dress up for a phone call.
I also thought no one used facetime until I worked retail recently… The amount of people I saw come in on a facetime calls where they both just had their cameras pointed at the ceiling was bizarre and boggling.
Tell that to the tonnes of people that facetious in public but neither them nor the person they are calling are actually in frame
That pretty much sums it up.
The phone never leaves my side, but I dread getting an actual phone call.
#3 Why we still haven’t got colonies on the moon
#2 Climate change
#1 That fascism is back
they knew about climate change in the 50’s- actually, greenhouse gases were first proposed in the 1820s.
You’d think most of them are more fascist than the people you consider fascist now. Remember what England did to Alan Turing. They’d be amazed we let women and minorities work with us and we don’t persecute gays. They’d think the commies won.
I’m going to go on a different angle on this one and say that we are much tougher on sexual harassment. I feel like a lot of people from the 1950s who have grown up on pulp sci-fi like Flash Gordon could accept a lot of modern technology and the internet as basically just magic. To be fair is how a lot of modern people also accept it. But I don’t think they would be able to process the move towards egalitarianism that we have taken.
That is not to say that modern society is egalitarian only that we have made good strides in achieving that aim.
Edit: Turns out Gordon is from the '70s, but other pulp sci-fi exist so my statement stands.
Edit: Turns out Gordon is from the '70s, but other pulp sci-fi exist so my statement stands.
Live action Flash Gordon was from the 50s
Most difficult imho would be to explain why we haven’t advanced any further. If the person is 50 in 1950 he started with horse carriages and saw development to intercontinental bombers, rockets etc. The landing on moon would astonish him, advances in medical sciences and computing too but he probably would ask: “And what are you using that neat little gadgets for?”
I’m using this little gadget for all my banking needs, a significant amount of my shopping, to stay instantly connected with friends/family and strangers with common interests all around the world, to almost instantly find information on almost any topic, to watch any of a hundred thousand movies or TV shows instantly on demand, and it’s also a telephone.
I think you’re severely underestimating how our daily lives have advanced. We’ve advanced so far that we don’t even regularly use the thing that would blow the mind of someone from the 50s, like calling someone on the phone. Calling someone with your phone would already blow their mind, because the first handheld phone didn’t happen until the 70s. But we don’t really call people anymore. We send instant messages or if we want “a call” we do video calls, which is guaranteed to blow their mind because a) most people in the 50s had a black and white television, so being able to see colored picture in real time is just next level shit, b) you can see someone else in real time on the other side of the planet and c) it’s going to feel like you’re there because the image quality from the 50s is like a cave painting compared to what we have today. And that’s just calling someone. Imagine what else would blow their mind, modern cars probably.
Maybe I’m underestimating individual benefits of digitalisation. But I tried to remember talks with my grandfather. He was born in 1912 and lived to the age of 87. He could remember the coronation of the last austrian-hungarian emperor Karl. People then were not as individualistic as we are today. Technological, social or cultural advancements were seen more on a collective scale. The mere possibility of calling or texting someone didn’t impress or astonish him much. Especially in the 50’s and 60’s promises of a bright and shiny future were made. Just think of the exploration of space or the deep sea with proposed bases on moon, mars or the seabed. It wasn’t called the atomic age for nothing. What I experienced was that those now long dead relatives appreciated the individual improvements of their lives but they felt a certain slow down in regard to an overall progress of society.
Also, remember that the previous generations versions of a “phone call” was the mail, or sailing across on ocean, or being carried by a horse, or even walking for years or decades to get to the person you want to make contact with.
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This I disagree with. Porn has always been widely available throughout human history, it just wasn’t as widely openly available and distributed as today. Case in point, my grandfather died in Vietnam back in '63, all of his barracks stuff went into a box that was sent home. My grandmother never opened it, to the extent it was still sealed with navy tape from the 60’s. When she died, my father didn’t even know it was in the attic.
When he passed back in '15, I was cleaning out this attic and found the box. Ontop some actually really cool shit- you guessed it, I found a literal shitload of vintage porn. Grampy was dropping loads left and right with these bitches. A LOT of hair back in the day I might add.
Why doesn’t anyone think of the memes?
How easily we can know anything, yet how diligently we fail to learn anything.
Nothing as sobering as showing a techno-optimist what the future really looks like
We still work 8 hours/day!
But we also won the cold war
School shooter drills
They’d wonder why nobody got their shotgun from their locker and fired back.
That shitty actor from Bedtime for Bonzo becomes president.
“Ronald Reagan, the actor?!”
And he made life worse for nearly everyone.
“Then who’s vice-president, Jerry Lewis?”
Nope, but this VP helped assasinate a president 10 years in your future.
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