Learning to Live with the Poxes

Google AI Overview is a literal pox on civilization.

But you have my permission to use it.

Of course, you don’t need my permission. The only power I have over you is the power that your tendency to overestimate the intelligence of people in glasses gives me. Give me a pair of contact lenses and you render me inert. Samson was much the same.

My goal for this post is to help the information snobs and the information slobs get along better—and ideally to get them to pick names for themselves that don’t rhyme. Let’s start with the snobs.

Concerning Information Snobbery

I have to say, if I lean in one direction or the other, it’s probably this one. I really like to be certain of the things I claim to know. But if you’re anything like me, you fall far short of the ideal.

Certainty is a tricky thing. I’ve heard it said that the only way to know anything is to know everything, or to know Someone who does and who reveals it to you. I’ll let you work out from the capitalization in the previous sentence who the speaker was referring to. He was saying this to sum up the idea that if you don’t know everything, what little information you have is subject to change. You might learn as a child that water conducts a lot of electricity, but then learn later that you were told something oversimplified (which you were, by the way, and I’m sorry you had to find out here—and from me no less). You could easily think you have an explanation for something, only to find out later that you were missing information and your conclusion was wrong. In order to really know anything, you have to know everything (or, again, know Someone who does).

This means you’ve never really done all your research—unless you want to assert that you know everything (at which point I have a link for you). There are degrees of certainty. If you’ve spent your entire life researching something, learning about it, writing papers about it, and the rest of it—if you’ve done all of that, you are entitled to a higher level of certainty than you are on something you spent twenty seconds googling.

But that’s just the thing. Life is too short to waste it finding out with (relative) absolute-ish certainty all the movies you’ve seen with Paul Rudd in them. It’s like Voetius once said, “You can’t write a dissertation on everything.”⁠ ¹ And frankly I’m not sure why you’d want to.

To you, my brother in snobbery, I want to commend the linguistic technologies known as “I think” and “I read somewhere.” If you add these little numbers to your vocabulary, you’ll quickly find that you have to do a lot less research on everything. The idea here is that you can pass something along with mere relative certainty or uncertainty. If you use one of these puppies, people will understand that they shouldn’t treat you like a literal encyclopedia.

This doesn’t just pertain to AI. There’s a kind of person who hears “I researched this,” and immediately has to respond “A TWO MINUTE GOOGLE SEARCH ISN’T RESEARCH!”⁠ ² This sort of response—the species of the thing I mean—makes sense in the context of a debate or contested matter. But it’s often thrown around as though research is a sacred word that you shouldn’t use unless you’ve reached the critic’s minimum semantic threshold. That’s where it gets silly.

Be a snob only about things it makes sense to be a snob about, and only at times when it makes sense to be snobby. That is to say, deploy your snobbery tactically. Reserve it for when getting to the truth of the matter really matters. Otherwise, and I wince as I say this, feel free to use Google’s AI Overview for silly things where being wrong won’t matter. You’ll save a lot of time, and it can honestly be refreshing to find out you’re wrong about something that doesn’t matter. So you’ll have that to look forward to occasionally.

Concerning Information Slobbery

We all know that guy who always wears a t-shirt and shorts. It could be his mother’s wedding or his father’s funeral; he always wears a grease-stained t-shirt and the kinds of shorts you just know he keeps snacks in.

Listen. Am I not a man of the people? I like to be comfortable. There’s a place for shorts.⁠ ³ There’s even a place for grease-stained t-shirts. I’m not even one of those fellows who insists every man own his own tailored tuxedo. This generation can’t buy their own houses; we shouldn’t be spending money on a suit we’ll maybe wear thrice in our lives. Use the money for something useful, like YouTube Red.⁠ ⁴

The intellectual snob likes to wear his tuxedo in the kiddy pool. But you do yourself no favors wearing your mostly-white Dave Matthews Band Tee to your own daughter’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing. You see, there really is a time to wear a tuxedo and there really is a time to do some real research. I’m not even saying you shouldn’t or can’t use AI to help you do that research. But sometimes you need to put on long pants, don a shirt with buttons, and stop screenshotting Google’s AI Overview as evidence. I dare say, I think this can sometimes become a ninth commandment issue .

My point again emphatically is not that there isn’t a place for shorts and a t-shirt. No one is trying to take those garments from you. Wear them to go to Walmart or paint your fence. We’d just like you to dress nice for your own wedding.

There is a time to do real research. There is a time to step up from Google AI summaries to actually clicking on articles. There’s a time to use Wikipedia. There’s a time to use all the Wikipedia source footnotes and ask your AI to do deep research and then examine the sources it gives you.

If you genuinely don’t know how to do research, ask ChatGPT to teach you how. I’m (pretty) sure it’ll be fine.

Anyway, I’ve gone ahead and prepared the following interactive figure to sketch some of the strata in the rock face of intellectual certainty, and the tools you might use to reach each layer. So here’s that:

Information apparatus

CertaintyCalibrator

Matter

The matter you want to learn about

Did the article actually say that?Source summary

Select an item

Method

The way you try to find out

Click the first plausible search resultSingle-hit web check

Select a method

Underdressed

Shorts at a funeral. Improve the method before speaking loudly.

Shuffle

The figure is completely unnecessary. My point isn’t terribly complex, so if you’ve had your eyes open, I imagine you’ve got it by now. I merely made it because I’m what the kids call extra.