CREATIVE NONFICTION 37millennia, in conversation with some of the greatest thinkers
who have ever lived. For that student’s possibly
nervous parents: The philosophy major helps students
gain critical thinking skills. You’re majoring in thinking.
For the career-minded: You will acquire analytical
skills crucial for success in many different areas. And (as
was oft-repeated in my own college philosophy
department) Did you know philosophy majors consis-
tently have the highest LSAT scores?
But when I clicked deeper through the results
back then, I also turned up a bunch of online
discussion boards full of other disillusioned
philosophy students. We all echoed our depart-
ments’ boilerplate: I studied philosophy to find answers.
But then, everyone agreed, all I found were more questions.
The scary thing about studying philosophy, others
had commented, was not that you don’t get your
questions answered, but that you start to doubt the
value of questions and answers at all. You start to
see that knowledge, as you had conceived of it, is
relative and mutable. Can it even be studied? We’d
all begun our degrees searching for Truth, capital
T, only to realize such a search is foolish and will
get you laughed out of the room. Someone should
tell you to get over it, eat your damn french fries.
when i first began writing about search, one
of my roommates, Dave, was a computer scientist at
Carnegie Mellon University. CMU is home to one
of the top computer science programs in the world.
Some of Google’s most important employees—pio-
neers of search and artificial intelligence—studied
and taught there. Dave would tell you that one of
his degrees is in computer science, but he wasn’t
technically part of the School of Computer Science;
he was in the Department of Engineering and Pub-
lic Policy, which is in spitting distance of computer
science. Two of my other roommates, biomedical
and civil engineers, loved to goad Dave and say that
computer scientists aren’t really engineers.
Dave told me then, “I would define search as
selective information delivery. Well, retrieval
and delivery.”
When Dave and I first discussed search, he said
a lot of things I couldn’t make sense of or put
into context until I understood and internalized
how Google works. He said one of the keys to
searching is being able to quantifiably determine,
à la Louie C.K., if something is or is not there. He
said Google has gotten better at encoding people’s
feelings and thoughts than it used to be. It’s moved
beyond just being the most effective at matching
up ones and zeros, and toward the idea of searching
for concepts.
I told Dave that Sergey Brin said he wanted
Google to be as smart as its user. “But I don’t think
there’s any argument to be made against the idea
that it’s smarter than me.”
“I think there’s a difference between being book
smart and being wise.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, imagine you go to the biggest library
in the world, and rather than use a card catalog,
there’s a librarian with super speed. She can
retrieve anything you want from the library almost
instantly. Is she smarter than you? Or is she just
really good at performing that one task, at doing
what she was designed to do?”
Dave reminded me of one of the dimensions of
my love for Google. That is: its ability to retrieve
practical information in the exact instant that I
need it. Things such as directions somewhere,
where food is, which brand I should buy, what
time an event starts. Sometimes my search history
is not pretty. Sometimes it might make you wonder
how I’ve survived thus far as an adult in civilized
society (though I suspect I’m not alone in this).
Sometimes it looks like this (age 25):- Blue whale
- Cat immunizations lasts how long
- Leftovers how long in fridge
- Wendy’s value menu
- Rice Krispie treats
- Arcadia Austin Shakespeare
- Valentines Day
- Luby’s restaurant hours
- Old Dominion University
Or this, from over spring break and at the South
by Southwest Interactive Festival (age 24):- Barbarella dance club Austin
- Boobs
- Define: vertigo
- Hangover dizzy how is this possible
- Vodka drinks
- Jeremy Irons