[TuringTest]

I'm concerned that this "every knows" is increasingly becoming a true social problem, unsolved by current technology - in fact, worsened by it.

Knowledge about a field transfers best by hands-on association with people who practice it. Before widespread IT, communities of practice were local and relatively homogeneous; so it was easy to share the essentials of a field quickly, and get newcomers up and running with best practices.

Nowadays however, communities of practice are widespread, coming around all the world with very different backgrounds, communicating through low-bandwidth channels, and we're flooded with information so it's difficult to ascertain what is essential and what's accessory.

It is much more difficult for an outsider to grasp the essential qualities of a field they want to enter, as there are usually no guides comprehensive enough to detail everything you need to know.

[jmnicolas]

Why is it a problem? People should put at least a minimum of effort to research what might interests them. Not everything has to be spoon fed to people.

I never found any subject that needed let's say more than 10 minutes of internet searches to know if it's worth pursuing.

It was much harder before the web. I remember as a kid seeing books about C++ in the local shop but even with looking inside not understanding what C++ was. Nowadays I would get my answer almost instantly.

[JohnHaugeland]

> I'm concerned that this "every knows" is increasingly becoming a true social problem, unsolved by current technology - in fact, worsened by it.

You couldn't possibly believe this if you were old enough to remember what preceded the internet.

Good lord, no, today is not worse than microfiche and card catalogs.

[TuringTest]

I was a young adult when the web become widespread, and the problem I'm talking about was milder: precisely because there was a shortage of documentation, what was available limited the number of topics that you could learn about, and being flooded by different sources was less of a problem.

It was still possible to define a Library Science were books were classified by hand, and not some secret algorithm counting links as votes or learning and regurgitating a corpus of loosely related documents without understanding any of it. I.e., it was possible to make sense of information sources, and whatever you learned of a field came with a single consistent narrative. Nowadays, information gathering has become an exercise in picking and choosing unconnected fragments from which you must infer your own understanding.

In some ways you can still try to emulate the old way, by limiting yourself to a small set of publishers who try to compile and organize a small part of a field of knowledge - yet it is much easier than the teachings of that source will be deeply contradicted by some other seemingly authoritative source, without a clear way to know which one should you rely upon, and with the whole exercise feeling like it provides an incomplete perspective.