[ryanwaggoner]

It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations

Can you clarify the relationship of technology and readily accessible information to the downfall of societal values? I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, but I'm curious as to how you came up with that as a hypothesis for the cause.

[shantanubala]

I don't speak for him, but here's my opinion.

Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information. Since we are constantly overloaded with information (and we're always connected to those sources of information -- email, IM, SMS, the news, etc.), we have to be extremely selective about the stuff we actually absorb. In the process, we lose absorption of the information that doesn't look good on the surface. For example, I was not very interested in physics until I started reading about Special and General Relativity. I wouldn't be able to understand those topics without learning boring and dry (in my opinion) Newtonian Mechanics first.

In other words, we now usually only truly absorb stuff that looks good in the headline, rather than actually reading about it first. If we actually tried reading about all the stuff that's available, we'd be dead before we even got through a percent of it.

[metamemetics]

>Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information.

it's a moot point. In the 1700's we wouldn't have had access to the information anyway. Or even the money, time, and opportunities like aristocracy such as Jefferson had to buy books from London and study the smaller amount of knowledge available then.

So rather than not having an incentive to absorb information X, we wouldn't have even known it existed! A large part of knowledge is knowing what you DON'T know. The truly dangerous individuals are idiots that think they know everything.

Hopefully the web is making people realize that there are a lot of things out there they DON'T know. Decreasing anti-intelluctialism, provincialism, and narrow-mindedness.

I would be ecstatic if more people got their news from the web than from television!

[eitally]

You're correct, of course, but the fact that information is only a web search away has driven down the perceived value of formal study and demotivates children from learning. That was my point, not that Jefferson wasn't exceptionally fortunate himself. Jefferson's own regimented work ethic, however, was an outlier even amongst his privileged peers.