*promote
Reminds me of the telescopic effect this guy from Waking Life is talking about
http://www.videosift.com/video/Telescopic-Evolution-Waking-Life-excerpt

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Monday, July 13th, 2009 6:52pm PDT - promote requested by JiggaJonson.

*cooking!

Adding video to channels (Cooking) - requested by EndAll.

Ah i heard this dude on the radio, and tried to remember to read his book.

Completely forget, and now, I dont need to - THANKS OP!


Also, we absorb more protien from cooked meet.

Such a crazy rambling thought process he has, but I like it. Also, lol at Robin Williams.

This would be so much better if it were just an interview with the author of the book rather then Penn's rambling recollections of a book.

Still, I like dudes like Penn, who aren't college types or scientists, but still have a genuine curiosity about humanity and science. It's amazing that that's fairly rare.

I disagree that thinking outside the human body is an advantage. Wikipedia is a prime example of how someone with poor education will attempt to win an argument by merely regurgitating what they quickly access online. Soon, maybe even now, people are realizing that regurgitation of factoids is no replacement for logic, experience and education. Phones and the internet are tools, which offer an advantage, but not without real thought.

I do however enjoy Penn and Teller.

obscenesimian, I was genuinely surprised to hear Penn come to such a forward thinking conclusion. I've watched the majority of the Bullshit series, and he doesn't always come across as such.

Memory is something that is prime for offloading as far as our thinking goes. We have always been taking steps to do this. Storytelling is at the heart of humanity because it gives us a way to pass lessons on to younger generations. We developed written language to get stories out of our memories and onto something more permanent. In the modern day, we rely on written records scores of times every day.

To tie this into Penn's phone reference, how many phone numbers do you remember? The only two phone numbers I know that I've learned in the past 10 years are my current cell number and my office number. Beyond that, I remember my home number growing up, my aunt's number, and my best friend from high school's number. This is hugely beneficial. The effort I would need to exert remembering phone numbers is now available for other, more important tasks.

In college, we had only open book tests in my computer science program. The reason? At any time, if I need to know what the fastest sorting algorithm is, I can look it up and have the answer in 5 minutes. But if I need to figure out whether or not using a sorting algorithm is appropriate, more analytical and diagnostic skills are needed. Which is more important? I don't think it's debatable that knowing when it's appropriate to use something is more important than knowing exactly what that thing is. This is because it's easy to write down what the thing is, but in what situations it will be useful is a harder if not impossible job to write de facto laws on.

Someone with a poor education will attempt to win arguments by accessing facts online, but education doesn't teach you facts, which I think you're aware of from that statement. Education teaches you how to think. And you can't just pull out a fact and all of a sudden be right. Regurgitation of facts will never be a replacement for logic, experience, and education. I need to look facts up all the time. Yesterday I looked up statistics on shootings in Philadelphia. Do you think I could ever memorize how many there were in 2007, how many of those were of African Americans, and how many of those were of African American males? I could, but would there be any point to it? Probably not. However, the internet made those statistics available to me, and they were very useful for making a point in the discussion I was a part of at the time.

Thinking outside the human body is a wonderful gift. As interaction with this information becomes more seemless, we'll be able to offload more of the legwork to allow our brains to do what simple memory banks can't. Embrace it. It's one of the main devices that allows our silly little species to advance at the rate that we do.

He is a fat fuck.

Thoughtful reply, oh door waiting drunk interceptor, but I stand by my brief, logical statement.