The New Rules for Thinking in a Digital World

Technology can make us smarter or stupider, and we need to develop a set of principles to guide our everyday behavior and make sure that tech is improving and not hindering our mental processes. One of the big questions being debated today is: What kind of information do we need to have stored in our heads, and what kind can we leave “in the cloud,” to be accessed as necessary?

An increasingly powerful group within education are championing(vt.支持，拥护) “digital literacy”(数字素养)，In their view, skills beat knowledge(技能胜过知识), developing “digital literacy”is more important than learning mere content, and all facts are now Google-able and therefore unworthy of committing to memory. But even the most sophisticated digital literacy skills won't help students and workers navigate the world if they don，t have a broad base of knowledge about how the world actually operates(但是，如果没有关于世界实际上如何运行的广泛知识基础，即使最高水平的数字素养技能也不能帮助学生和劳动者们闯荡世界). If you focus on the delivery mechanism and not the content, you’re doing kids a disservice(如果你只把重点放在信息的传递机制而不是信息内容本身，你是在害孩子们).

Indeed, evidence from cognitive science challenges the notion that skills can exist independent of factual knowledge. Data from the last thirty years leads to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not only because you need something to think about.（事实上，认知科学方面的证据对技能能够独立于事实性知识而存在的这种观点提出了质疑。从过去30年的数据可以得出一个经得起科学挑战的结论：思虑周全需要全面了解事实，的确是这样，不仅仅是因为你需要一些东西来思考） The very processes that teachers care about most — critical thinking processes —— are intimately intertwined （交织）with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory.

In other words, just because you can Google the date of Black Tuesday doesn’t mean you understand why the Great Depression happened or how it compares to our recent economic slump. There is no doubt that the students of today, and the workers of tomorrow, will need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you have to know what came before. To collaborate, you have to contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information against knowledge you’ve already mastered.(......毫无疑问，现在的学生，也是未来的劳动者，他们需要创新、合作、和评估。但是这些技能并不能与产生这些技能的知识相脱离。想要创新，你必须了解过去的情况。想要合作，你必须为共同的事业贡献自己的知识。想要评估，你必须将新的信息与你掌握的知识作比较。)

So here’s a principle for thinking in a digital world, in two parts. First，acquire a base of factual knowledge in any domain in which you want to perform well. This base supplies the essential foundation for building skills, and it can’t be outsourced （外包）to a search engine.

Second, take advantage of computers’ invariable memory, but also the brain’s elaborative memory. Computers are great when you want to store information that shouldn’t change. But brains are the superior choice when you want information to change, in interesting and useful ways: to connect up with other facts and ideas, to acquire successive layers of meaning, to steep for a while in your accumulated knowledge and experience and so produce a richer mental brew.(第二：要利用电脑不变的内存，但同时也要利用大脑的复杂内存。当你想要存储不会变化的信息，电脑是强大的。但是当你想让信息以有趣和有用的方式变化时，大脑是更好的选择：与其他的事实和观点相联系，理解深层意义，沉浸于你所积累的知识和经验中一段时间从而产生更丰富的思想)