I don't know, though. When written knowledge was first becoming more common among the wealthier Greeks, people like Plato, if I recall rightly, complained that it would lead to no one working to reason things out as hard because they would just get the finished answer from a book without having to go through the process themselves.
On the flip side, access to so much knowledge eventually means that instead of wasting time on the basic processes, people could take tons of conclusions accumulated through the saved wisdom of ages, and then use that to make even more advanced conclusions which otherwise they could not have done because they would have been busy rediscovering the basics.
I think that this has some relevance to the internet debate. It has a lot of bad, but I think it can be good as well. It could accelerate the rate of discovery if education is adapted to fit the new paradigm.
On the flip side, access to so much knowledge eventually means that instead of wasting time on the basic processes, people could take tons of conclusions accumulated through the saved wisdom of ages, and then use that to make even more advanced conclusions which otherwise they could not have done because they would have been busy rediscovering the basics.
I think that this has some relevance to the internet debate. It has a lot of bad, but I think it can be good as well. It could accelerate the rate of discovery if education is adapted to fit the new paradigm.
