Dig it, Wombat

Part of a mural on a wooden fence a few blocks from me.
Is that a wombat? I thought it looked like a Very Dangerous Animal with those claws, but I looked it up and wombats do have massive claws--for digging.

Speaking of digging and looking things up, here's a thing I wonder about, seriously:

Now that many of us carry the Internet in our pockets, why wouldn't people look (dig) online for an answer and/or fact-check their assertions?

Is there some cognitive bias going on?
Is there an evolutionary advantageous preference for not expending brain energy, but rather, for conserving energy with a shrug and a, "Who knows"?

Thoughts, anyone?


I. LMGTFY

Let's see... I'm going to google it! 

Hm.

Here's one option:
" you have to make an effort to create a reasonable question."

That used to be more true in the past than it is today.
You can type almost any junk in and google will make some sense of it.
However, it's true that when I typed in "why don't people look stuff up" I got a lot of returns about people physically "looking up", that is, raising their eyes to make eye contact.

So I changed it to "why don't people look up answers".

This is one of the best answers I found:

'Effective Searching' is a learned skill.

OK, yeah. That's true.
I learned when I was little that you can look things up, and I also learned it was fun, from my mother.
She was always saying, "Let's look it up!" and pulling out the dictionary.
In the early 1970s, she bought the Oxford English Dictionary from Blackwell's in Oxford and had it shipped home.
(Hm. Whatever happened to it? Gone now, anyway, not that I'd want it. It's online!)

Or she'd say, "Let's call the reference librarian at the library. They LIKE looking things up." 
[Kinda true.]

And then I grew up and worked in an art-college library for twelve years, and I researched geography books for another dozen-plus years.
So, OK.
What seems "easy and obvious" to me isn't--it's learned behavior.

Another answer, from a different angle:
it's not formulating the questions that is the problem, it's sorting out the answer(s):

"Google is a useful tool, but getting the most out of it requires the right mindset. You have to go into it with a willingness to learn, not just to apply a pattern filter to find your answer.
And a lot of people don't really think that way."

In spoken conversation, I do see the below answer in action--it's human connection we're after:

"People who ask easily-Googled questions are looking for interaction, not answers."

II. Don't be a Snark

Heh. This popped up too:

"Gratuitous meanness"---ergh. 
My question here is sincere, but I do sometimes feel snarky about people not-looking-things-up, yes.

I never say, "Google it," but I do say, "Hey, I have a magic box in my pocket we can ask," (and then I google the question). 

This is:

1. true
2. fun and openhearted (really!)

3. also a little like saying "Google it", or literally acting out LMGTFY [Let Me Google That For You]

From Stack Overflow:

The new Code of Conduct banned comments like "you could Google this in 5 seconds!" as excessively condescending. LMGTFY  has been banned for a while for being condescending and rude.

OK. I feel better, having looked that up--it helps me make better sense of something that's been bothering me. 

III. Or a Narcissist

 The thing is, I know someone who does this rather a lot--asserts things they have not fact-checked.
(When I check later, in private, half the time they are not exactly correct.)

Mostly it's stuff that doesn't matter––(Is a daffodil a narcissus?* )––but I have a big reaction against the way the info is conveyed.


OK, so that's a many-faceted question, "Why don't people look stuff up?"
And a factor more important than the facts and the questions themselves is the social value of information, and how it's used to jockey for social power.

It irks me that this person says things that are wrong, partly because I feel like I'm being one-upped.
If the facts were correct, I still wouldn't like it ("mansplaining"), but I could grant that they knew what they were talking about, and possibly (depending on the person) enjoy that I learned something.

I am also trying to practice stepping out of my annoyance, like stepping out of pajama bottoms that have lost their elastic...
It's my 2020 Resolution, to be less reactive.
Boy is it hard, in this case.
Basically my nonreligious family saw the pursuit of knowledge as godlike. Lack of interest was pitiable, but asserting wrong things--and not caring--was a sin.

So, that was my early training, which I need to factor into this whole question.

Still, it's a real problem when you can't trust what a person says because, for whatever reason, they didn't fact check it. 
(See also, President of the United States of America)

Well.
And did I enjoy digging around in that question?

In fact, I did.

* And, is a daffodil a narcissus?
It is.