Discovery

Originally published on Tumblr.

How important is discovery? How important is it to facilitate discovery?

That’s a trick question.

It’s easy to agree that discovery, the prerequisite of progress, is important. It’s much more difficult to agree that making discovery easy is a good thing.

Google facilitates discovery, which makes us lazy. Using Google we remember fewer facts, because we don’t need to wade through surrounding context to find them.

Imagine I’m curious about the American commanding officer at the Battle of the Bulge. I wonder what his name is. Easy, I’ll ask Google: https://www.google.com/#q=american+commander+at+the+battle+of+the+bulge. Within less than a second I know it’s General Anthony Clement “Nuts” McAuliffe. Tomorrow I probably won’t remember that.

What if I could only look his name up in a book? I’d first have to find a book about the battle. Then I’d have to do a lot of reading to find the information I want. In the process, I’d absorb a lot of context. That context isn’t “useful” if I just want General McAuliffe’s name, but the context is a trellis over which I can hang all sorts of related facts. Almost certainly it will help me remember his name tomorrow. The effort required to find the answer creates a lot more grooves in my neurons than the Google search.

Why does that matter? Because context allows us to make connections, and making connections is what allows humans to be creative, to discover new patterns, to invent new things.

Now imagine that, a few weeks later, I read something about D-Day. If I’ve forgotten McAuliffe’s involvement in the Ardennes, I won’t have the chance to be surprised that he was involved in both battles. It seems incredible that he was, when you consider the importance of both in the context of the war, but not so incredible when you string the facts across the trellis. The Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944, pushed across France, liberating Paris in August, and ended up in Wallonia, Belgium, where the Germans mounted their “final” attack against the Western Front, the Battle of the Bulge. McAuliffe made the whole journey.

Context makes all the difference between knowing a few facts and understanding a story. The story matters. The facts, without context, really don’t.

I’ve been thinking about virtual travel a lot these days. We’ll soon be able to visit other parts of the planet thanks to VR technology. We’ll be able to walk on the ocean floor at depths that currently require a submarine. We’ll be able to walk into a volcano without risking our lives. We’ll be able to fly over Chernobyl and Fukushima without fear of radiation poisoning.

That’s exciting. We’ll have the opportunity to discover more in a day that we currently can in a lifetime. But how much of that will we remember? If we aren’t making a big investment in time and money to get to Machu Picchu, will it impress us the way it does today? Will we remember as much about it? Almost certainly not.

But given the choice, I am very much in favor of anything that facilitates discovery. Despite the downsides, I far prefer a world with Google and VR-enabled travel than a world without them. Sometimes, though, I’m happy to run into barriers that slowed me down just long enough to really pay attention.