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Head in the Cloud: Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are So Easy to Look Up
The real-world value of knowledge in the mobile-device age.
More people know who Khloe Kardashian is than who Rene Descartes was. Most can't find Delaware on a map, correctly spell the word occurrence, or name the largest ocean on the planet. But how important is it to fill our heads with facts? A few keystrokes can summon almost any information in seconds. Why should we bother learning facts at all?
Bestselling author William Poundstone confronts that timely question in Head in the Cloud. He shows that many areas of knowledge correlate with the quality of our lives -- wealth, health, and happiness -- and even with politics and behavior. Combining Big Data survey techniques with eye-opening anecdotes, Poundstone examines what Americans know (and don't know) on topics ranging from quantum physics to pop culture.
Head in the Cloud asks why we're okay with spelling errors on menus but not on resumes; why Fox News viewers don't know which party controls Congress; why people who know "trivia" make more money than those who don't; how individuals can navigate clickbait and media spin to stay informed about what really matters.
Hilarious, humbling, and wildly entertaining, Head in the Cloud is a must-read for anyone who doesn't know everything.
More people know who Khloe Kardashian is than who Rene Descartes was. Most can't find Delaware on a map, correctly spell the word occurrence, or name the largest ocean on the planet. But how important is it to fill our heads with facts? A few keystrokes can summon almost any information in seconds. Why should we bother learning facts at all?
Bestselling author William Poundstone confronts that timely question in Head in the Cloud. He shows that many areas of knowledge correlate with the quality of our lives -- wealth, health, and happiness -- and even with politics and behavior. Combining Big Data survey techniques with eye-opening anecdotes, Poundstone examines what Americans know (and don't know) on topics ranging from quantum physics to pop culture.
Head in the Cloud asks why we're okay with spelling errors on menus but not on resumes; why Fox News viewers don't know which party controls Congress; why people who know "trivia" make more money than those who don't; how individuals can navigate clickbait and media spin to stay informed about what really matters.
Hilarious, humbling, and wildly entertaining, Head in the Cloud is a must-read for anyone who doesn't know everything.
352 pages, Paperback
First published July 29, 2016
111 people are currently reading
1415 people want to read
About the author
William Poundstone
55 books367 followersWilliam Poundstone is the author of more than ten non-fiction books, including 'Fortune's Formula', which was the Amazon Editors' Pick for #1 non-fiction book of 2005. Poundstone has written for The New York Times, Psychology Today, Esquire, Harpers, The Economist, and Harvard Business Review. He has appeared on the Today Show, The David Letterman Show and hundreds of radio talk-shows throughout the world. Poundstone studied physics at MIT and many of his ideas concern the social and financial impact of scientific ideas. His books have sold over half a million copies worldwide.
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June 28, 2019
How the Dunning-Kruger effect's going to destroy the world as we know it.
Global loss of memory vs distributed memory. What's the price of literally keeping one's brain up in the Google search machine?
Internet as the new mnemonist (a la Ancient Rome).
I loved the tidbit about how people who believed Ukraine is under some ocean waters near the US wanted the US military over there. Nice. Looking for Atlantic commando-style.
Global loss of memory vs distributed memory. What's the price of literally keeping one's brain up in the Google search machine?
Internet as the new mnemonist (a la Ancient Rome).
I loved the tidbit about how people who believed Ukraine is under some ocean waters near the US wanted the US military over there. Nice. Looking for Atlantic commando-style.
September 29, 2017
I enjoy feeling superior to others.
Even as a kid, basking in my own precocity was a favored activity. When I got too old to be considered a prodigy, I coped by developing an encyclopedic knowledge of classic rock acts (discographies, influences, associated acts, etc.; bet you didn't know that Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck each had a short stint as the lead guitarist for The Yardbirds). I've got degrees like crazy, and of course I graduated Phi Beta Kappa. I've felt insecure about a lot of things, but never intellectual prowess.
William Poundstone starts Head in the Cloud: Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are So Easy to Look Up with a list of facts (mostly trivial) that millennials purportedly don't know. I knew most of these facts, probably because I spend much of my time reading books (or getting high and looking stuff up on Wikipedia). Superiority points maintained.
Here's the thing, though: Poundstone seems to just think of random facts, and quizzes people on how well they know them doing online surveys. He doesn't have any a priori reason to select any of these facts, nor does he submit his data to appropriate quantitative analysis to see whether his results are meaningful. In some sections, he seems profoundly confused himself. He maligns research in university settings for relying too much on a single, self-selected, demographic (college students), then talks about how great it is to rely on a single, self-selected, demographic of users of online survey websites.
Case in point: there's a bizarre anecdote in the beginning of the book about how Apple never announces the iPhone's technical specifications, and that the Random Access Memory on the iPhone ranks in the "tens of gigabytes" range. Of course, Apple does announce specs: my iPhone 6s Plus boasts 2GB of RAM (a far cry from tens of gigabytes). Poundstone asks his online survey crew to estimate how much memory the average iPhone has, but says "I didn't specify what type of memory (the results make it all too clear that this wouldn't have mattered much)." But it does matter: as a person interested in tech, I know that many people confuse storage space with memory, and I also know that most of my computers have had orders of magnitude more hard drive storage space than RAM. It's a huge difference, and without being specific his results are completely meaningless. Ironically, the whole section reads like it was written by someone who was so sure of his incorrect knowledge that he didn't bother to verify by actually looking it up.
Unfortunately, as the book continues, it becomes all too clear that Poundstone suffers from exactly the same thing he rails against: despite being less-than-knowledgeable about behavioral research methods, he’s overly-confident in his ability to utilize them. He doesn’t seem to even understand the problem with using ad-hoc multiple-comparisons and statistical chance to highlight data that he cherrypicks to support conclusions he had already drawn in the absence of data. His list of sources is also shockingly small, with few studies lending supporting evidence to his idle musings. This book certainly presents a powerful argument that knowledge is important: without an understanding of survey design and statistical analysis, I might not have recognized that this book is complete bullshit.
Even as a kid, basking in my own precocity was a favored activity. When I got too old to be considered a prodigy, I coped by developing an encyclopedic knowledge of classic rock acts (discographies, influences, associated acts, etc.; bet you didn't know that Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck each had a short stint as the lead guitarist for The Yardbirds). I've got degrees like crazy, and of course I graduated Phi Beta Kappa. I've felt insecure about a lot of things, but never intellectual prowess.
William Poundstone starts Head in the Cloud: Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are So Easy to Look Up with a list of facts (mostly trivial) that millennials purportedly don't know. I knew most of these facts, probably because I spend much of my time reading books (or getting high and looking stuff up on Wikipedia). Superiority points maintained.
Here's the thing, though: Poundstone seems to just think of random facts, and quizzes people on how well they know them doing online surveys. He doesn't have any a priori reason to select any of these facts, nor does he submit his data to appropriate quantitative analysis to see whether his results are meaningful. In some sections, he seems profoundly confused himself. He maligns research in university settings for relying too much on a single, self-selected, demographic (college students), then talks about how great it is to rely on a single, self-selected, demographic of users of online survey websites.
Case in point: there's a bizarre anecdote in the beginning of the book about how Apple never announces the iPhone's technical specifications, and that the Random Access Memory on the iPhone ranks in the "tens of gigabytes" range. Of course, Apple does announce specs: my iPhone 6s Plus boasts 2GB of RAM (a far cry from tens of gigabytes). Poundstone asks his online survey crew to estimate how much memory the average iPhone has, but says "I didn't specify what type of memory (the results make it all too clear that this wouldn't have mattered much)." But it does matter: as a person interested in tech, I know that many people confuse storage space with memory, and I also know that most of my computers have had orders of magnitude more hard drive storage space than RAM. It's a huge difference, and without being specific his results are completely meaningless. Ironically, the whole section reads like it was written by someone who was so sure of his incorrect knowledge that he didn't bother to verify by actually looking it up.
Unfortunately, as the book continues, it becomes all too clear that Poundstone suffers from exactly the same thing he rails against: despite being less-than-knowledgeable about behavioral research methods, he’s overly-confident in his ability to utilize them. He doesn’t seem to even understand the problem with using ad-hoc multiple-comparisons and statistical chance to highlight data that he cherrypicks to support conclusions he had already drawn in the absence of data. His list of sources is also shockingly small, with few studies lending supporting evidence to his idle musings. This book certainly presents a powerful argument that knowledge is important: without an understanding of survey design and statistical analysis, I might not have recognized that this book is complete bullshit.
Read
August 10, 2016I did not love this. I found Poundstone almost unbearably smug - even when I did know the facts he thought people should know, I objected to his tone.
Parts of it were actually really interesting, but I could have done with more focus on "why knowing things matters" and less on "here are studies I did and facts that people don't know but should".
And unfortunately, most of the time Poundstone's answer to the question of "why should I know this" came down to "because money". Not all the time, but often enough to be irritating.
Also, totally personal quibble, but there's a short section in the book where Poundstone correlates ignorance of certain facts with certain damaging or racist opinions. I don't necessarily object to that, though correlation is not the same as causation and it did feel like another opportunity for Poundstone to be smug. I do object to his saying that "thinking the sun revolves around the earth" correlates with "favoring 'trigger warnings' for college classes", as if this were a sin on the level of "opposing government recognition of same-sex marriage". It's such neurotypical nonsense - the idea behind using trigger warnings in college classes is not to stop teaching potentially harmful content; it's to allow students to look at the syllabus and plan self-care accordingly. Like if you know there's incest in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and that reading it will trigger you, you can schedule a therapy session and a yoga class for the day you're discussing The Bluest Eye.
Anyway. Ultimately I thought the concept was sound but the execution left much to be desired.
Parts of it were actually really interesting, but I could have done with more focus on "why knowing things matters" and less on "here are studies I did and facts that people don't know but should".
And unfortunately, most of the time Poundstone's answer to the question of "why should I know this" came down to "because money". Not all the time, but often enough to be irritating.
Also, totally personal quibble, but there's a short section in the book where Poundstone correlates ignorance of certain facts with certain damaging or racist opinions. I don't necessarily object to that, though correlation is not the same as causation and it did feel like another opportunity for Poundstone to be smug. I do object to his saying that "thinking the sun revolves around the earth" correlates with "favoring 'trigger warnings' for college classes", as if this were a sin on the level of "opposing government recognition of same-sex marriage". It's such neurotypical nonsense - the idea behind using trigger warnings in college classes is not to stop teaching potentially harmful content; it's to allow students to look at the syllabus and plan self-care accordingly. Like if you know there's incest in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and that reading it will trigger you, you can schedule a therapy session and a yoga class for the day you're discussing The Bluest Eye.
Anyway. Ultimately I thought the concept was sound but the execution left much to be desired.
November 28, 2016
Some of it was ok, but a lot of it seemed a bit presumptuous. For example, he calls out millennials for not knowing a two pages worth of facts, much of which deals with decades- old pop culture knowledge. Why would a millennial, or anyone else, need to know who wrote the song "Heartbreak Hotel", or who starred in "Casablanca"? And why does this make them devoid of facts? Would you ask a typical baby boomer what Rihanna's latest album was and then call them ignorant if they didn't know? Of course not.
Mostly, however, he spends a lot of time focusing on what he thinks people don't know, instead of what they should know, and why they need to know it. It's basically a book about a guy rambling about how smart he thinks he is. I'd skip it, or borrow it, but not buy it.
Mostly, however, he spends a lot of time focusing on what he thinks people don't know, instead of what they should know, and why they need to know it. It's basically a book about a guy rambling about how smart he thinks he is. I'd skip it, or borrow it, but not buy it.
August 1, 2016
Probably more like a 2.5 but 2 stars only seemed a bit stingy. This is another of those books that would have been far superior as a long magazine article. As it stands, the chapters are heavily bloated with a bunch of survey work that Poundstone did. The majority of the text consists of his writeups and explanations of his surveys rather than doing the hard work of thinking about the broader implications, or drawing from research on learning and education. This wasn't the worst book I've ever read, but it certainly wasn't the best either and probably isn't worth buying.
December 21, 2025
Read as Hoopla Audio Book.
Changing curriculum is like moving a cementary.
Dunning Kruger Effect = Dumb people are not smart enough to know how stupid they are.
Stanley Kubrick spent 12 hours a day as a chess hustler which he made 20 bucks a week.
Changing curriculum is like moving a cementary.
Dunning Kruger Effect = Dumb people are not smart enough to know how stupid they are.
Stanley Kubrick spent 12 hours a day as a chess hustler which he made 20 bucks a week.
July 3, 2018
First, the author. William Poundstone is a professional author with 15 books in his publication list. They’re mostly about science and the issues surrounding science and the philosophy of science. “Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair” or “Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody.” He also wrote “Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google,” which makes him an interestingly edge-case writer (especially since I work at Google).
Poundstone’s day-to-day thinking and writing is about what people know and how well they can use that knowledge to understand the world. That’s what this book is really all about.
It’s really a book-length treatment of a number of surveys he did about what people know about the world, and how that influences their income over time. Although he’s not precise about the number of surveys, or when they were run, or how he set up the studies, if you’re willing to believe that he ran the surveys correctly, then the results are damnably frightening. In short, there are two big findings: (1) people don’t know a great deal about the world (broadly speaking), and (2) a breadth of knowledge is correlated with happiness, health, and wealth. That is, as the title suggests, you still need to know facts about the world in order to navigate it with any kind of depth of understanding or efficiency. The more you know, the better off you are in many ways. This is called the “Knowledge Premium,” the benefit of knowing a lot about many things.
Now, I agree with that, but it’s a tough proposition to prove. So I have a bit of potential confirmation bias working here, but at least I know about the existance of confirmation bias, so I can watch out for it. If you don’t know about confirmation bias (or the availability bias, or the Dunning-Kruger effect, you’re working without much awareness of how your brain works… and that can lead to bad outcomes).
He starts the book with a detailed telling of the Dunning-Kruger effect (which is that if you have low ability, you over-estimate your ability—it’s difficult to estimate your own knowledge accurately—they call this “illusory superiority”). That is, most people rate themselves as above average in almost any area of expertise. And, the less competent you are, the more this is true.
The book is full of data about how people understand rather little. Example: Almost everyone “knows” Einstein, but only 48% can say what he did for a living; 30% know who devised the theory of relativity. Likewise, only 9% of people can name Frida Kahlo’s husband, while 5% identify her as the painter of “American Gothic.” The don’t know the size of the federal budget, or the difference between the federal deficit and the federal debt. It’s sobering.
The second section is about the Knowledge Premium—with many of his own surveys showing a correlation between broad knowledge, wealth, and overall benefits in life.
The last section is about “Strategies for a Culturally Illiterate World,” that is, ways to get by with your limited time and cognitive resources. The answer is to be mindful about what you learn, and notice that news sources with broad coverage (e.g., NPR, NYTimes, WSJ, etc.) tend to teach you more about the world at large, along with giving more depth about the arguments and specific detailed information.
The biggest surprise of the book is that so many people are SO convinced about their beliefs (religious, political, or economic), but they have little actual knowledge about them. In a bizzare upending of order, those that have the strongest beliefs on a topic tend to know less about that topic. The more then know, the more they admit there are multiple explanations and strategies. (For instance, people who believe strongly that the US should take military action in Syria are also the least likely to be able to find it on a map, or to say anything factual about the country. By contrast, people who can list the neighbors of Syria have a much more nuanced understanding of the issues about Syria.)
This is a book worth reading (although I wished he’d better more precise in describing the surveys he did).
A few bon mots…
p. 34. Describing Wegner and Ward’s work about looking up results on Google: can make you feel smarter about the topic than your tests actually show. (It boosts your self-assessment.) (See: Wegner and Ward, Scientific American, “How Google is Changing Your Brain” Dec, 2013. 58-61.
p. 196. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Quote from Phillip K. Dick
p 221. “We are what we do with our attention.” Quote from John Ciardi.
P 228. Philip Tetlock – Experts often are no better at predicting future events accurately (study from 2005 on “Expert political judgement”
P 222. His chart on the correlation of knowing a broad range of “easy facts” and income. Interesting side note: knowing more “hard” facts did NOT strongly correlate!
P 264. In general, readers of broad news aggregators (e.g. Google News) scored LOWER than people who read a few news sources that have broad coverage (e.g., NYTimes). An aggregator does not substitute for a good general purpose newspaper.
P 273. Kahan’s melting ice cap question. “Climate scientists believe that if the North Pole ice cap melted as a result of human-caused global warming, global levels would rise—true or false?”
(The answer is that nothing would happen. But you need to know that the north polar ice cap is floating ice, and that melting floating ice makes no change in water level, as you see in your tumbler of ice melting in the midday sun.)
P 275. People tend to echo the beliefs of those around them (rather than determining them on their own).
P 277. “The issue is not just rational ignorance (remaining ignorant because the cost of acquiring knowledge outweighs the benefits) but something deeper. To form opinions on the scientific and technical issues driving public policy today—climate change, net neutrality, stem cell research, genetically modified organisms—it is not enough to [just] learn some facts. One must deliberate over those facts and actively seek out evidence that challenges what one wants to believe or initially suspects to be true. This is not something that many average citizens have the time or inclination to do. We fake our opinion, going along with the crowd. Kahan warns that: ‘…this style of reasoning is collectively disastrous: the more proficiently it is exercised by the citizens of a culturally diverse democratic society, the less likely that they are to converge on scientific evidence essential to protecting them from harm.’ “
P 281. Deliberative polling is a method to teach a group of people about a complex topic. First, you take a poll on the topic. THEN, you teach a class on that topic (with all perspectives represented, as unbiased as you can). This adds knowledge to the group and gives them time to deliberate on this. THEN you re-poll and look for changes. Expensive. See Fishkin and Luskin, “Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal: Deliberative Polling and Public Opinion” Acta Politica 40 (2005) 284-298.
P. 291. “those with context knowledge are better able to think for themselves.”
P. 295. “The one thing you can’t Google is what you ought to be looking up.”
Poundstone’s day-to-day thinking and writing is about what people know and how well they can use that knowledge to understand the world. That’s what this book is really all about.
It’s really a book-length treatment of a number of surveys he did about what people know about the world, and how that influences their income over time. Although he’s not precise about the number of surveys, or when they were run, or how he set up the studies, if you’re willing to believe that he ran the surveys correctly, then the results are damnably frightening. In short, there are two big findings: (1) people don’t know a great deal about the world (broadly speaking), and (2) a breadth of knowledge is correlated with happiness, health, and wealth. That is, as the title suggests, you still need to know facts about the world in order to navigate it with any kind of depth of understanding or efficiency. The more you know, the better off you are in many ways. This is called the “Knowledge Premium,” the benefit of knowing a lot about many things.
Now, I agree with that, but it’s a tough proposition to prove. So I have a bit of potential confirmation bias working here, but at least I know about the existance of confirmation bias, so I can watch out for it. If you don’t know about confirmation bias (or the availability bias, or the Dunning-Kruger effect, you’re working without much awareness of how your brain works… and that can lead to bad outcomes).
He starts the book with a detailed telling of the Dunning-Kruger effect (which is that if you have low ability, you over-estimate your ability—it’s difficult to estimate your own knowledge accurately—they call this “illusory superiority”). That is, most people rate themselves as above average in almost any area of expertise. And, the less competent you are, the more this is true.
The book is full of data about how people understand rather little. Example: Almost everyone “knows” Einstein, but only 48% can say what he did for a living; 30% know who devised the theory of relativity. Likewise, only 9% of people can name Frida Kahlo’s husband, while 5% identify her as the painter of “American Gothic.” The don’t know the size of the federal budget, or the difference between the federal deficit and the federal debt. It’s sobering.
The second section is about the Knowledge Premium—with many of his own surveys showing a correlation between broad knowledge, wealth, and overall benefits in life.
The last section is about “Strategies for a Culturally Illiterate World,” that is, ways to get by with your limited time and cognitive resources. The answer is to be mindful about what you learn, and notice that news sources with broad coverage (e.g., NPR, NYTimes, WSJ, etc.) tend to teach you more about the world at large, along with giving more depth about the arguments and specific detailed information.
The biggest surprise of the book is that so many people are SO convinced about their beliefs (religious, political, or economic), but they have little actual knowledge about them. In a bizzare upending of order, those that have the strongest beliefs on a topic tend to know less about that topic. The more then know, the more they admit there are multiple explanations and strategies. (For instance, people who believe strongly that the US should take military action in Syria are also the least likely to be able to find it on a map, or to say anything factual about the country. By contrast, people who can list the neighbors of Syria have a much more nuanced understanding of the issues about Syria.)
This is a book worth reading (although I wished he’d better more precise in describing the surveys he did).
A few bon mots…
p. 34. Describing Wegner and Ward’s work about looking up results on Google: can make you feel smarter about the topic than your tests actually show. (It boosts your self-assessment.) (See: Wegner and Ward, Scientific American, “How Google is Changing Your Brain” Dec, 2013. 58-61.
p. 196. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Quote from Phillip K. Dick
p 221. “We are what we do with our attention.” Quote from John Ciardi.
P 228. Philip Tetlock – Experts often are no better at predicting future events accurately (study from 2005 on “Expert political judgement”
P 222. His chart on the correlation of knowing a broad range of “easy facts” and income. Interesting side note: knowing more “hard” facts did NOT strongly correlate!
P 264. In general, readers of broad news aggregators (e.g. Google News) scored LOWER than people who read a few news sources that have broad coverage (e.g., NYTimes). An aggregator does not substitute for a good general purpose newspaper.
P 273. Kahan’s melting ice cap question. “Climate scientists believe that if the North Pole ice cap melted as a result of human-caused global warming, global levels would rise—true or false?”
(The answer is that nothing would happen. But you need to know that the north polar ice cap is floating ice, and that melting floating ice makes no change in water level, as you see in your tumbler of ice melting in the midday sun.)
P 275. People tend to echo the beliefs of those around them (rather than determining them on their own).
P 277. “The issue is not just rational ignorance (remaining ignorant because the cost of acquiring knowledge outweighs the benefits) but something deeper. To form opinions on the scientific and technical issues driving public policy today—climate change, net neutrality, stem cell research, genetically modified organisms—it is not enough to [just] learn some facts. One must deliberate over those facts and actively seek out evidence that challenges what one wants to believe or initially suspects to be true. This is not something that many average citizens have the time or inclination to do. We fake our opinion, going along with the crowd. Kahan warns that: ‘…this style of reasoning is collectively disastrous: the more proficiently it is exercised by the citizens of a culturally diverse democratic society, the less likely that they are to converge on scientific evidence essential to protecting them from harm.’ “
P 281. Deliberative polling is a method to teach a group of people about a complex topic. First, you take a poll on the topic. THEN, you teach a class on that topic (with all perspectives represented, as unbiased as you can). This adds knowledge to the group and gives them time to deliberate on this. THEN you re-poll and look for changes. Expensive. See Fishkin and Luskin, “Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal: Deliberative Polling and Public Opinion” Acta Politica 40 (2005) 284-298.
P. 291. “those with context knowledge are better able to think for themselves.”
P. 295. “The one thing you can’t Google is what you ought to be looking up.”
January 11, 2022
This book was certainly worth the effort.
Poundstone argues from original research that a broad, contextual understanding of the world strongly and consistently correlates to more wealth and higher self-reported happiness. Further, a host of important cultural issues and policy decisions are impacted simply by the breadth of one’s native knowledge on facts that have nothing to do with one’s partisan affiliation and nothing to do with the policy itself. One of the most striking examples is on page 47. Researchers studied the correlation between people’s ignorance of world geography and their opinions on the countries they knew little about, finding that, “the farther a person’s guess was from the actual location of Ukraine, the more likely it was that that person supported a US military intervention in Ukraine.”
The book makes a convincing case that “the one thing you can’t Google is what you ought to be looking up” (295)” Knowing the facts on a broad range of topics is a significant predictor of how well one uses and engages with the digital world, regardless of political or religious affiliation.
For context, the book seems to be making a the same argument that E.D. Hirsch makes in *Cultural Literacy* but Poundstones' arguments come in the age of internet and massive changes to the way we interact with information.
Four stars because it contains a lot of data that is already out of date, even though the arguments are still very relevant.
Poundstone argues from original research that a broad, contextual understanding of the world strongly and consistently correlates to more wealth and higher self-reported happiness. Further, a host of important cultural issues and policy decisions are impacted simply by the breadth of one’s native knowledge on facts that have nothing to do with one’s partisan affiliation and nothing to do with the policy itself. One of the most striking examples is on page 47. Researchers studied the correlation between people’s ignorance of world geography and their opinions on the countries they knew little about, finding that, “the farther a person’s guess was from the actual location of Ukraine, the more likely it was that that person supported a US military intervention in Ukraine.”
The book makes a convincing case that “the one thing you can’t Google is what you ought to be looking up” (295)” Knowing the facts on a broad range of topics is a significant predictor of how well one uses and engages with the digital world, regardless of political or religious affiliation.
For context, the book seems to be making a the same argument that E.D. Hirsch makes in *Cultural Literacy* but Poundstones' arguments come in the age of internet and massive changes to the way we interact with information.
Four stars because it contains a lot of data that is already out of date, even though the arguments are still very relevant.
April 7, 2017
The content was rather interesting, but the tone was so smug and condescending, it was distracting. And listening to it in audiobook didn't give this smug tone problem any favors, as the reader wasn't inserting anything that wasn't in the text, but man, I don't think a tone could say any more clearly "if you don't know all of these random facts, you are definitely an ignoramous!" My husband heard part of the audio while I was listening and just passing through the room he was also struck by the tone and wondered if the reader was the author. It wasn't. This was a professional narrator, and I don't think he got the tone wrong, as it was clearly the author's intent to sneer at his audience. Ouch.
The other main gripe about this book was how "padded out" it seemed. What could have been an article was somehow a book, and as a result seemed rather repetitive. This was terrible, but I did fast forward through a couple chapters when the first couple of paragraphs made it clear that the author was taking some annoying political stance and calling anyone who doesn't agree an idiot. Charming.
But, now I feel very well versed in the Dunning Krueger Effect (sorry if I spelled that wrong - it was an audiobook). I'm sure the author would judge me harshly. Just as he pretentiously judged people who mispronounce words. Wow, that is the height of snobbery, as many people who mispronounce words are either speaking English as a second language, or they learned the word through reading. Oh, clutch the pearls, some uncouth fool learned a word by reading and didn't have a nanny or private school tutor around to read it to them. It was also very annoying that his only measure of "success" for adults is income. Barf.
Ok, I'd say more, but here's the parting shot, here is the last line from the official book blurb on Goodreads:
"Hilarious, humbling, and wildly entertaining, HEAD IN THE CLOUD is a must-read for anyone who doesn't know everything." Ok, who writes this stuff. But, my thoughts on reading this after finishing, the author is the only person who can't read this book, as he is the only person who already knows everything.
For the record, my husband and I are often a pretty formidable trivia team. I knew most of the very important facts he vested with so much importance. But then I'm old and still rely on maps and written directions instead of GPS, so I'm not the generation he's talking about.
The other main gripe about this book was how "padded out" it seemed. What could have been an article was somehow a book, and as a result seemed rather repetitive. This was terrible, but I did fast forward through a couple chapters when the first couple of paragraphs made it clear that the author was taking some annoying political stance and calling anyone who doesn't agree an idiot. Charming.
But, now I feel very well versed in the Dunning Krueger Effect (sorry if I spelled that wrong - it was an audiobook). I'm sure the author would judge me harshly. Just as he pretentiously judged people who mispronounce words. Wow, that is the height of snobbery, as many people who mispronounce words are either speaking English as a second language, or they learned the word through reading. Oh, clutch the pearls, some uncouth fool learned a word by reading and didn't have a nanny or private school tutor around to read it to them. It was also very annoying that his only measure of "success" for adults is income. Barf.
Ok, I'd say more, but here's the parting shot, here is the last line from the official book blurb on Goodreads:
"Hilarious, humbling, and wildly entertaining, HEAD IN THE CLOUD is a must-read for anyone who doesn't know everything." Ok, who writes this stuff. But, my thoughts on reading this after finishing, the author is the only person who can't read this book, as he is the only person who already knows everything.
For the record, my husband and I are often a pretty formidable trivia team. I knew most of the very important facts he vested with so much importance. But then I'm old and still rely on maps and written directions instead of GPS, so I'm not the generation he's talking about.
August 27, 2017
Why do we need to know things if we can look them up on the internet? This book cites many studies to reveal why it is good to know things, basically concluding that good basic knowledge is better than knowledge of a more specific nature and that this knowledge often correlates to higher income. It is also true that often people who know very little, believe that they are quite knowledgeable. I was relieved to know that personally, judging by my knowledge of the sample questions, I really am indeed as smart as I thought I was. Now that I've got the bragging out of the way, I will say that I enjoyed the book and will continue to learn new facts. After all, you need to know what to Google and how to word your query to find what you are looking for. So, keep on learning.
October 24, 2023
Started off strong but went off on tangents that do not necessarily support his argument of why knowing things still matters in the age of The Cloud (TM), and also very US-centric in its outlook. For example, not everything this book says is worth knowing as 'general knowledge' is really general knowledge; mostly they are Westernized knowledge that has been treated to be the Universal Be-All Knowledge that everyone must know. (I, for one, don't care how many members there are in the US congress or care about how many players there are in football.)
May 23, 2019
Not only does this book fail to provide a good insight on knowledge, knowledge acquisition, and value of implication, but also it oversimplifies investigating facts. Basically, the author relies on questionnaires that he conducted to draw conclusions in the majority of the book. It undermines the real reasoning, in my opinion, why one still need to know what facts are. Also, the book is not necessarily a page-turner. Hence, reading becomes like a chore after a while.
September 24, 2020
Dry as a bone, this reads like an academic paper. While it may be enlightening to scholars of the subject, as general reading knowledge it is a bore. I should have guessed how long-winded he would be when he couldn’t even make up a title that was less than seventeen words long.
February 22, 2021
I had higher hopes for this book. It was easy to US-centric for my Canadian-raised mind. There were some tidbits that were interesting, bit not engaging enough to recommend
March 4, 2017
Why is it important to know stuff? From a purely practical perspective, one has to recognize the limits of one's own knowledge to be able to effectively look new information up. Otherwise, the ignoramus blissfully believes that he or she is an expert, with inevitable disastrous results. TL;DR Knowing facts may not make you rich (though it is associated with higher incomes), but may make your brain work better.
Also, knowing a few facts (along with some critical thinking skills) helps you evaluate if that information you're googling is legit or belongs in the realm of "alternative facts."
Also, knowing a few facts (along with some critical thinking skills) helps you evaluate if that information you're googling is legit or belongs in the realm of "alternative facts."
August 6, 2016
I listened to the audio version of Head in the Cloud. The narration was fine although it was even slower than normal I think, because I set the speed to 2x rather than my usual 1.5x. I suspect there may have been some charts and visuals in the printed and ebooks, but not having access to them didn't make me feel as if I was missing anything.
As for the content -- in general I have to agree with Poundstone's assertion that it's good to know a lot of facts and how to find out things and how to reason. He argues that it isn't good enough to know that you can access facts anytime through the web, you have to know how to do this effectively, how to sort out the junk from the facts, and you have to know what you don't know. In other words, it's possible to be so ignorant that you don't even know that you are ignorant.
Poundstone sets out to show just how stupid people are by devising and administering a number of quizzes in which he asks questions such as how long does it take to boil an egg and which way does a light bulb screw in. He expresses amazement that people can be so ignorant. Well, I'm amazed that he's amazed. I don't know how long it takes to boil an egg but I can do it. I don't know which way a light bulb screws in but if I screw it the wrong way at first, I know what to do next. And it won't be going online to see what Wikipedia says about screwing in lightbulbs.
Poundstone peeves away at people who mispronounce words and names (Gide, Goethe, Keynes). He thinks we should all know how many candles are on a menorah and recognize the art of Damien Hirst. These are all fine things to know, but there's a hint of snobbism in claiming that people who don't know these things are somehow incapable of reasoning or are somehow inferior. And there's always the bottom line -- how much more money do people who know these things earn on average? Because I guess that's what really matters.
Even if you follow Poundstone this far and agree that everyone should achieve a certain level of cultural education, he takes it a step further by implying that people who lack facts will make stupid political choices. And that people who have the facts and a minimum level of reasoning ability will make smart political choices. If only this were true. Unfortunately (or not) political choices are made on more than facts and reasoning. There is also emotion and one's personal circumstances and the fact that there's rarely a perfect candidate or perfect bond initiative, etc. We are not robots, so reason and facts are only a part of our decision making arsenal.
Interesting, if sometimes infuriating.
As for the content -- in general I have to agree with Poundstone's assertion that it's good to know a lot of facts and how to find out things and how to reason. He argues that it isn't good enough to know that you can access facts anytime through the web, you have to know how to do this effectively, how to sort out the junk from the facts, and you have to know what you don't know. In other words, it's possible to be so ignorant that you don't even know that you are ignorant.
Poundstone sets out to show just how stupid people are by devising and administering a number of quizzes in which he asks questions such as how long does it take to boil an egg and which way does a light bulb screw in. He expresses amazement that people can be so ignorant. Well, I'm amazed that he's amazed. I don't know how long it takes to boil an egg but I can do it. I don't know which way a light bulb screws in but if I screw it the wrong way at first, I know what to do next. And it won't be going online to see what Wikipedia says about screwing in lightbulbs.
Poundstone peeves away at people who mispronounce words and names (Gide, Goethe, Keynes). He thinks we should all know how many candles are on a menorah and recognize the art of Damien Hirst. These are all fine things to know, but there's a hint of snobbism in claiming that people who don't know these things are somehow incapable of reasoning or are somehow inferior. And there's always the bottom line -- how much more money do people who know these things earn on average? Because I guess that's what really matters.
Even if you follow Poundstone this far and agree that everyone should achieve a certain level of cultural education, he takes it a step further by implying that people who lack facts will make stupid political choices. And that people who have the facts and a minimum level of reasoning ability will make smart political choices. If only this were true. Unfortunately (or not) political choices are made on more than facts and reasoning. There is also emotion and one's personal circumstances and the fact that there's rarely a perfect candidate or perfect bond initiative, etc. We are not robots, so reason and facts are only a part of our decision making arsenal.
Interesting, if sometimes infuriating.
May 17, 2017
If you're smart enough to be reading this book, then it's almost certainly not a surprise to you that "general knowledge" might not be as "general" as the name implies. You can feel smug when you know the answers to the "general knowledge" questions the author poses -- "Haha, what kind of dumb-dumb can't locate Nebraska on a map?" -- and then feel humbled again when you don't know one ("Wait, who did invent the phonograph?") and immediately look up the answer on your phone ("Oh damn, it was Edison? I mean, that makes sense, but mostly I associate him with light bulbs"). In this manner, I picked up a few factoids along the way, which made the read more interesting.
As a librarian, I'm totally on board with Poundstone's main idea: that is, "Known facts are the shared points of reference that connect individuals, cultures, and ideologies. They are the basis of small talk, opinions, and dreams; they make us wiser as citizens and supply the underrated gift of humility -- for only the knowledgeable can appreciate how much they don't know." This idea is at the very heart of why libraries exist, and I enjoyed the book for attempting to make the case for that. I'm only giving it two stars because I think it would've worked better as perhaps a long article, and it does come off a little preachy and/or self-satisfied at times. Nonetheless, an interesting little book on a topic well worth considering.
As a librarian, I'm totally on board with Poundstone's main idea: that is, "Known facts are the shared points of reference that connect individuals, cultures, and ideologies. They are the basis of small talk, opinions, and dreams; they make us wiser as citizens and supply the underrated gift of humility -- for only the knowledgeable can appreciate how much they don't know." This idea is at the very heart of why libraries exist, and I enjoyed the book for attempting to make the case for that. I'm only giving it two stars because I think it would've worked better as perhaps a long article, and it does come off a little preachy and/or self-satisfied at times. Nonetheless, an interesting little book on a topic well worth considering.
July 31, 2016
a common sense look at and review of the need to teach knowledge as well as the need to know how to search for answers.
Poundstone answers some of the most difficult questions that a teacher or educator may be asked by other educators or involved parents. I have long worried about the move from learning to research methods. There needs to be a balance.
Poundstone answers some of the most difficult questions that a teacher or educator may be asked by other educators or involved parents. I have long worried about the move from learning to research methods. There needs to be a balance.
December 5, 2016
Definitely makes you question your level of general knowledge. However I will say it is very USA focused - so a lot of the historical / cultural references may not be know by those growing up there.
I like the last thought of the book - The one thing you can't Google is what you ought to be looking up. Context, not necessarily facts are power.
I like the last thought of the book - The one thing you can't Google is what you ought to be looking up. Context, not necessarily facts are power.
December 18, 2016
I'd give this interesting book 3 1/2 stars. Although I didn't always agree with the specifics, the advantages of having a good general knowledge seems indisputable. It is also sad and frightening to realize the implications of a population of uninformed or misinformed individuals.
March 13, 2018
In this day and age, information is easy to get thus making us lazy to dig deep and understand in-depth knowledge. Sadly, few of us know that this is an issue. If you want to be the know-how read this book.
August 7, 2019
The book is an interesting romp through the topic of what people know and how much their knowledge matters - or seems to matter. I was happy to see the always-fascinating marshmallow test make an appearance. Imagine a simple 15 minute test given to four-year-olds that reliably (in the social science sense) predicts quite a bit of how the rest of their lives are going to go - whether they might get fat, get hooked on drugs, go broke, score high or low on the SAT, etc.
I was dismayed to find zero mentions of IQ. It's the elephant in the room that Poundstone painstakingly ignores even as he dances around it. As anyone who has read the simplest introduction (such as Intelligence: All That Matters) would know, if you're exploring correlations between what a person knows and how much money the person earns, and you don't control for IQ, you haven't isolated the role of knowledge itself. (IQ correlates both with how much a person ends up knowing and earning, and is a strong candidate for being causal for both. To at least begin to separate the effect of knowing things from raw cognitive power, you would have to compare people with the same or similar IQ scores who differ in their amounts of knowledge.) Given all the social science Poundstone cites, I'm not sure how he missed what has been a rather important part of psychology for over a century, also having predictive power for individual outcomes.
If the book gets another edition, the political sections will need an update to account for the Trump era. The factual errors and gaffes of earlier politicians mentioned by Poundstone seem quaint in comparison to the proudly-doubling-down ignorance of Trumpism. Trump makes Dubya, in hindsight, look like a Rhodes Scholar, and Bill Clinton actually was one. Trump, our Dunning-Kruger effect incarnate, is steadily erasing his predecessors' intellectual shortcomings like the Wisconsin glaciation grinding the upper midwest flat during the last glacial maximum.
And although the book isn't terribly forward-looking, it should at least mention the potential impact of the exploding field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In particular, Poundstone rightly points out the perils of our unknown unknowns (a Rumsfeldian term sadly absent from the book which refers to things we don't know that we don't know), and how today's dumb computers are largely useless as advisors unless we have some idea of what we need to look up. But AI offers at least a glimmer of hope that one day our computing devices may be "intelligent" in a real sense (not just in a marketing hype sense). That is, maybe someday our computers can warn us - persuasively - against making the kinds of life errors, financial errors, health errors, and so on, that ignorant people routinely make (and we are all ignorant this way at least some of the time). Maybe someday our computers will actually know things, detect what we need to know, and choose to be nice to us. That might level the playing field somewhat between today's know-somethings and the know-nothings. Of course a lot of things would have to break the right way to result in such a benevolent outcome. But Poundstone could have at least tried to future-proof the book a little, instead of writing as if the computers of the 2010s will never change.
This shouldn't be the only pop-psychology book a person reads, but I doubt it would be for many readers of this book. It should appeal to trivia buffs seeking to justify their trivia buffery, or to anyone who is curious about human nature and individual differences. But do yourself a favor and read a little something about intelligence, lest you get too carried away with Poundstone's preliminary correlations.
I was dismayed to find zero mentions of IQ. It's the elephant in the room that Poundstone painstakingly ignores even as he dances around it. As anyone who has read the simplest introduction (such as Intelligence: All That Matters) would know, if you're exploring correlations between what a person knows and how much money the person earns, and you don't control for IQ, you haven't isolated the role of knowledge itself. (IQ correlates both with how much a person ends up knowing and earning, and is a strong candidate for being causal for both. To at least begin to separate the effect of knowing things from raw cognitive power, you would have to compare people with the same or similar IQ scores who differ in their amounts of knowledge.) Given all the social science Poundstone cites, I'm not sure how he missed what has been a rather important part of psychology for over a century, also having predictive power for individual outcomes.
If the book gets another edition, the political sections will need an update to account for the Trump era. The factual errors and gaffes of earlier politicians mentioned by Poundstone seem quaint in comparison to the proudly-doubling-down ignorance of Trumpism. Trump makes Dubya, in hindsight, look like a Rhodes Scholar, and Bill Clinton actually was one. Trump, our Dunning-Kruger effect incarnate, is steadily erasing his predecessors' intellectual shortcomings like the Wisconsin glaciation grinding the upper midwest flat during the last glacial maximum.
And although the book isn't terribly forward-looking, it should at least mention the potential impact of the exploding field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In particular, Poundstone rightly points out the perils of our unknown unknowns (a Rumsfeldian term sadly absent from the book which refers to things we don't know that we don't know), and how today's dumb computers are largely useless as advisors unless we have some idea of what we need to look up. But AI offers at least a glimmer of hope that one day our computing devices may be "intelligent" in a real sense (not just in a marketing hype sense). That is, maybe someday our computers can warn us - persuasively - against making the kinds of life errors, financial errors, health errors, and so on, that ignorant people routinely make (and we are all ignorant this way at least some of the time). Maybe someday our computers will actually know things, detect what we need to know, and choose to be nice to us. That might level the playing field somewhat between today's know-somethings and the know-nothings. Of course a lot of things would have to break the right way to result in such a benevolent outcome. But Poundstone could have at least tried to future-proof the book a little, instead of writing as if the computers of the 2010s will never change.
This shouldn't be the only pop-psychology book a person reads, but I doubt it would be for many readers of this book. It should appeal to trivia buffs seeking to justify their trivia buffery, or to anyone who is curious about human nature and individual differences. But do yourself a favor and read a little something about intelligence, lest you get too carried away with Poundstone's preliminary correlations.
September 24, 2025
The author produced and analyzed internet surveys to reveal connections between knowledge (education) and, to my mind, ethics and morality. This aligns wit my personal philosophy that promoting education and increasing access to, especially higher, education betters society. Much is made here of income, a natural scale of success and life and the observation that learning causes higher brain function which leads to higher income. The Dunning–Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities, is oft referred to. Other biases in popular knowledge explored include Churchillian Drift, coined by British writer Nigel Rees, which describes the widespread misattribution of quotes by obscure figures to more famous figures, such as Winston Churchill. Also covered is the "Google effect," or digital amnesia, the psychological phenomenon where people tend to forget information they know they can easily find again online through a search engine.
For me, the most profound insight here is how obtaining, maintaining, and developing an education secures commendable morality through such correlations as:
For me, the most profound insight here is how obtaining, maintaining, and developing an education secures commendable morality through such correlations as:
Ignorance…: Not being able to find Nebraska on a map
Correlates with…: Refusal to vaccinate children for measles, mumps, and rubella
Ignorance…: Thinking the United States has more people than India
Correlates with…: Refusal to eat genetically modified foods
Ignorance…: Thinking shrimp is kosher
Correlates with…: Objecting to reusable bags in supermarkets
Ignorance…: Not knowing which way to turn a screw to loosen it
Correlates with…: Refusing to buy a $100 lightbulb that would save $300
Ignorance…: Not knowing what kind of creature says “Nevermore” in a famous Edgar Allan Poe poem
Correlates with…: Being willing to throw your pet off a cliff for $1 million
Another question asked,
Would you push a button that made you a billionaire but killed a random stranger? No one else would know you were responsible for the death, and you could not be charged with a crime.
Nearly one in five Americans said they’d push that button. Those who scored low on a general-knowledge quiz were more likely to push the button, and yes answers were almost twice as common (36 percent) among those who couldn’t name the year of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.
...We are given digital tools that enable headfirst dives into deep pools of interest while excluding everything else. The promise is that “everything else” will always be in the cloud, available on demand. Lost in this seductive pitch is that being well informed is about context as much as it is about factoids. It is the overview that permits the assessment of the particular, that offers all-important insight into what we don’t know.
A broad and lifelong education is not just a means to achieving wealth and health (though it has a lot to do with that). The act of learning shapes our intuitions and imaginations. Known facts are the shared points of reference that connect individuals, cultures, and ideologies. They are the basis of small talk, opinions, and dreams; they make us wiser as citizens and supply the underrated gift of humility—for only the knowledgeable can appreciate how much they don’t know.
The one thing you can’t Google is what you ought to be looking up.
July 7, 2018
If you convert the subtitle of William Poundstone’s book into a question and ask: “Does knowing things still matter when facts are so easy to look up?” then the author convincingly answers, “Yes, it does!” Poundstone has produced a scholarly work that is thought-provoking and hugely interesting. Not only that, but the book is written well enough to be a speedy read, and despite the light-hearted title, the question posed by the subtitle is deadly serious.
In part one of the book, the reader will learn all about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which states that those most lacking in knowledge and skills are least able to appreciate that lack. “The Dunning-Kruger Effect,” says Poundstone, “requires a minimal degree of knowledge and experience in the area about which you are ignorant (and ignorant of your ignorance).” Poundstone proves this in survey after survey by groups of people one would expect to know better.
Psychology students surveyed on grammar, logic, and jokes are also asked to estimate both how well they scored and how well they did relative to others. Lowest-scoring students estimated their skills were superior to two-thirds of the other students. Similarly, when gun lobbyists at a shooting competition voluntarily took a National Rifle Association-published gun safety quiz, gun owners who knew the least about safety wildly overestimated their knowledge.
In quizzes, the only way to score well is to know, and Poundstone says there are real consequences to the growing lack of simply knowing things. Take the Millennials, for example, reported to be the nation’s most educated generation. A comparison of verbal, mathematical, and digital media skills and knowledge of US Millennials were among the lowest of twenty-two other nations in all categories.
The second section of the book, “The Knowledge Premium,” explores how lack of knowledge correlates to other factors, such and happiness and income levels. Although happiness is hard to measure, survey participants scoring higher on knowledge quizzes generally correlated positively with higher incomes and greater happiness. Poundstone argues that no amount of sophisticated transportation will ever make walking obsolete, and that “exercise is needed for the human body to function.” Similarly, being able to look up facts does not obviate the need for brains to undertake the act of learning to function at peak performance.
In the final section, “Strategies for a Culturally Illiterate World,” Poundstone argues why it is important to be knowledgeable and well-informed. “The act of learning,” he says, “shapes our intuitions and imaginations. Known facts…make us wiser as citizens and supply the underrated gift of humility—for only the knowledgeable can appreciate how much they don’t know.”
Head in the Cloud: Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are So Easy To Look Up is replete with charts of every kind showing people’s lack of knowledge on the most basic subjects. Reading it will likely change your reliance on looking up facts compared to simply knowing them. While the book is enormously entertaining in addressing an important topic, by the end of the book, readers should also prepare to be humbled by the number questions they are unable to answer!
In part one of the book, the reader will learn all about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which states that those most lacking in knowledge and skills are least able to appreciate that lack. “The Dunning-Kruger Effect,” says Poundstone, “requires a minimal degree of knowledge and experience in the area about which you are ignorant (and ignorant of your ignorance).” Poundstone proves this in survey after survey by groups of people one would expect to know better.
Psychology students surveyed on grammar, logic, and jokes are also asked to estimate both how well they scored and how well they did relative to others. Lowest-scoring students estimated their skills were superior to two-thirds of the other students. Similarly, when gun lobbyists at a shooting competition voluntarily took a National Rifle Association-published gun safety quiz, gun owners who knew the least about safety wildly overestimated their knowledge.
In quizzes, the only way to score well is to know, and Poundstone says there are real consequences to the growing lack of simply knowing things. Take the Millennials, for example, reported to be the nation’s most educated generation. A comparison of verbal, mathematical, and digital media skills and knowledge of US Millennials were among the lowest of twenty-two other nations in all categories.
The second section of the book, “The Knowledge Premium,” explores how lack of knowledge correlates to other factors, such and happiness and income levels. Although happiness is hard to measure, survey participants scoring higher on knowledge quizzes generally correlated positively with higher incomes and greater happiness. Poundstone argues that no amount of sophisticated transportation will ever make walking obsolete, and that “exercise is needed for the human body to function.” Similarly, being able to look up facts does not obviate the need for brains to undertake the act of learning to function at peak performance.
In the final section, “Strategies for a Culturally Illiterate World,” Poundstone argues why it is important to be knowledgeable and well-informed. “The act of learning,” he says, “shapes our intuitions and imaginations. Known facts…make us wiser as citizens and supply the underrated gift of humility—for only the knowledgeable can appreciate how much they don’t know.”
Head in the Cloud: Why Knowing Things Still Matters When Facts Are So Easy To Look Up is replete with charts of every kind showing people’s lack of knowledge on the most basic subjects. Reading it will likely change your reliance on looking up facts compared to simply knowing them. While the book is enormously entertaining in addressing an important topic, by the end of the book, readers should also prepare to be humbled by the number questions they are unable to answer!
December 30, 2018
This book was just not as convincing or as stimulating as it could have been. It was a cross between an airplane read and an Atlantic monthly article, which would have been a better venue for Poundstone's ideas. Ecclesiastes was right: there is nothing new under the sun. Socrates indicted the written word as a corrupting force; folks predicted that radio and then TV interfered with family life and made humans stupid; we criticize the Internet. Same thing, different technology and different age. At least Poundstone refrains from engaging in the pseudo-neuroscience regarding the ways that the Internet is changing our brains, but he makes similar arguments.
The major takeaways and the themes of the book are three (p. 39). The most delightful is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which describes what happens when people mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is; like students believing they scored much higher on a test than they in fact did. That's relevant to the digital world because "The Internet isn't making us stupid but it can make us less aware of what we don't know. Incomplete knowledge creates distorted mental maps of the world...[that] affect choices, behaviors, and opinions in both the personal and public realms."
Second, the Knowledge Premium is the correlation between "the ability to answer so-called trivia questions" "and higher income and other indexes of a successful life." Poundstone makes a startling case against the wisdom of crowds, and by extension, of democracy. The discussion of the non-scientific popularity of gluten-free products (pp. 194-197) would be a hoot if it didn't reflect the majority's reliance on social networks rather than empirical facts for information. While careful to emphasize correlation over causation, Poundstone examines the incomes of people who know about sports (people who know more earn more) and compares the audiences of Fox and NPR, which he states may in part relate to the venue, i.e. social media vs. TV vs. radio and print.
That relates to the last section, "Strategies for a Culturally Illiterate World," which proposes that we consume information in smart ways. In short: obtain your information from a variety of sources, not too customized; avoid ideological echo chambers; and make sure your sources are intelligent and well-educated. Those latter two should be clarified. What does that mean exactly? Fox's (former) Bill O'Reilly has a MPA from Harvard and NPR's Terry Gross graduated from U Buffalo. An Ivy League credential does not inoculate one against idiocy or fake news and often these days is an indicator of an elitist and staunch leftist partisan, rather than a signal of a dispassionate critical thinker.
I was hoping for more, but older generations are always concerned about the changes they see on the horizon. The fact is that the coming generations will deal with them just fine. Better to heed Max Ehrmann in Desiderata: "doubtless the universe is unfolding as it should."
The major takeaways and the themes of the book are three (p. 39). The most delightful is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which describes what happens when people mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is; like students believing they scored much higher on a test than they in fact did. That's relevant to the digital world because "The Internet isn't making us stupid but it can make us less aware of what we don't know. Incomplete knowledge creates distorted mental maps of the world...[that] affect choices, behaviors, and opinions in both the personal and public realms."
Second, the Knowledge Premium is the correlation between "the ability to answer so-called trivia questions" "and higher income and other indexes of a successful life." Poundstone makes a startling case against the wisdom of crowds, and by extension, of democracy. The discussion of the non-scientific popularity of gluten-free products (pp. 194-197) would be a hoot if it didn't reflect the majority's reliance on social networks rather than empirical facts for information. While careful to emphasize correlation over causation, Poundstone examines the incomes of people who know about sports (people who know more earn more) and compares the audiences of Fox and NPR, which he states may in part relate to the venue, i.e. social media vs. TV vs. radio and print.
That relates to the last section, "Strategies for a Culturally Illiterate World," which proposes that we consume information in smart ways. In short: obtain your information from a variety of sources, not too customized; avoid ideological echo chambers; and make sure your sources are intelligent and well-educated. Those latter two should be clarified. What does that mean exactly? Fox's (former) Bill O'Reilly has a MPA from Harvard and NPR's Terry Gross graduated from U Buffalo. An Ivy League credential does not inoculate one against idiocy or fake news and often these days is an indicator of an elitist and staunch leftist partisan, rather than a signal of a dispassionate critical thinker.
I was hoping for more, but older generations are always concerned about the changes they see on the horizon. The fact is that the coming generations will deal with them just fine. Better to heed Max Ehrmann in Desiderata: "doubtless the universe is unfolding as it should."
July 16, 2021
One star because I was really hyped up for this book (I thought the premise was interesting) and I'm angry that it fell far short of my expectations. If I wasn't coming from a place of anger and underwhelm, I'd probably give this 2 or 3 stars. That would be generous, and this is proof positive that you can have an interesting concept and totally f*** the execution with insufferable, and quite frankly undeserved, superiority.
Let me summarize the book in one sentance: Poundstone is up in his feelings that the educational system and national culture no long only serves to replicate white, male, upper class culture.
In showing that physicists have no business moonlighting in statistics, Poundstone spends roughly 1/4 of the book speaking about correlations as if they are causations. Additionally, I'd like to see the data set, surveys, and some tests of significance on some of the correlations that he throws out there because quite frankly I'm skeptical of his findings and the representedness of his sample.
Another 1/4 of the content is complaining about the shift in emphasis from knowledge (factoid memorization) to skill in the US educational system. Here Poundstone's utter lack of understanding concerning education becomes painful. Rote memorization is considered the lowest level of understanding/engagement throught the discipline of education. Despite the fact that every contemporary theory regarding educational psychology places memorization as the lowest common denominator for depth of knowledge, Poundstone argues that we need to revert to memorization in education because it hurts his sensibilities that the younger generation is less likely to identify the authors of "good" literature. Heaven forbid anyone engage with popular literature, yet another 1/4 argues for the supremacy of high brow culture.
The final 1/4 of the book is an utter tone deaf lack of understanding as to the role of socioeconomic class with correlations between familiarity with white, high class culture signifiers (such as knowing that Piacsso painted Guernica, or that Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice) and income. A lack of appreciation for art (read: inability to do slide ID's ad nauseam) is correlated with lower income? No s*** Sherlock, poor people usually can't afford to go to the art museum, opera, or symphony with any degree of frequency if at all. They also don't have extra money to piss away on an education in art history (I write this as someone who minored in art history, which I totally loved, but the only reason I was able to have such a fluffy minor that wasn't terribly practical was my middle class status and the fact that I had a parent helping me with tuition).
Let me summarize the book in one sentance: Poundstone is up in his feelings that the educational system and national culture no long only serves to replicate white, male, upper class culture.
In showing that physicists have no business moonlighting in statistics, Poundstone spends roughly 1/4 of the book speaking about correlations as if they are causations. Additionally, I'd like to see the data set, surveys, and some tests of significance on some of the correlations that he throws out there because quite frankly I'm skeptical of his findings and the representedness of his sample.
Another 1/4 of the content is complaining about the shift in emphasis from knowledge (factoid memorization) to skill in the US educational system. Here Poundstone's utter lack of understanding concerning education becomes painful. Rote memorization is considered the lowest level of understanding/engagement throught the discipline of education. Despite the fact that every contemporary theory regarding educational psychology places memorization as the lowest common denominator for depth of knowledge, Poundstone argues that we need to revert to memorization in education because it hurts his sensibilities that the younger generation is less likely to identify the authors of "good" literature. Heaven forbid anyone engage with popular literature, yet another 1/4 argues for the supremacy of high brow culture.
The final 1/4 of the book is an utter tone deaf lack of understanding as to the role of socioeconomic class with correlations between familiarity with white, high class culture signifiers (such as knowing that Piacsso painted Guernica, or that Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice) and income. A lack of appreciation for art (read: inability to do slide ID's ad nauseam) is correlated with lower income? No s*** Sherlock, poor people usually can't afford to go to the art museum, opera, or symphony with any degree of frequency if at all. They also don't have extra money to piss away on an education in art history (I write this as someone who minored in art history, which I totally loved, but the only reason I was able to have such a fluffy minor that wasn't terribly practical was my middle class status and the fact that I had a parent helping me with tuition).
January 27, 2020
When it comes to the knowledge they always referring to the education systems around the world, hypothetically knowing that we’re so advanced to have such a great education system BUT unfortunately it’s becoming worse than ever! Human brain doesn’t need to memorize every single fact it just need to learn them skill (and give them enthusiasm) to look for knowledge; that would be so useful rather than giving them solid facts.
People started to rely on the cloud or physical memories to store their knowledge in it, they don’t have to recall it inside their brains but they just need to collect them one they are needed. Hence, human tend to be more dumb in the knowledge side in which can’t recognize historical figures and can’t estimate thing pretty good and that leads to the biggest question why they can’t use their brains as what it intend to be?
It is a perfect thing that he brought the conspiracy theories over to discuss in his book, and how that would affect people behavior towards everything in their lives. Honestly, it is a skepticism thing that can have control over humans’ knowledge and direct them to specific information that they would believe even if that was totally wrong and incorrect, no matter what percentage of accuracy and efficiency could hold they would believe it just because it is something that has been over the years repeated among people.
Everyone has that undoubtedly trust of being informed while they barely know the roof of any information they got in their minds; being misinformed sometimes does not seem to anyone like having lots and lots of dots but they are actually not connected which means that is so missed up and not in the favor of the person whom hold these ideas. The amount of knowledge that you got inside your memory won’t be useful and yet feeling arrogant about how much you got until you face a real question or going through a debate with someone and duh you are now a clown for not knowing how much you needed to look into information to be sure about them. The expansion of the internet now is on our favor but knowing how to take advantage of it that depend of you, even the internet have misleadingly articles and any piece of information that before you can insert it to your memory you need to look more about how right they are.
September 4, 2017
Why should I learn anything when I can just look it up on Google? That's the question this book attempts to answer.
Many areas of knowledge correlate with the quality of our lives, including areas like health, wealth and happiness. The author is not suggesting that everyone should be smart enough to appear on a TV show like "Jeopardy." It's totally fine if a person's knowledge is "a mile wide and an inch deep." The author found strong correlations between income and scores on general knowledge quizzes (even if they are multiple choice). It's possible that learning improves cognitive abilities that are useful almost anywhere, including in a career.
How bad is the ignorance of the average American? Less that 10 percent of Americans don't know what country New Mexico is in. About the same percentage of younger Americans can find Afghanistan on a map, according to a 2006 National Geographic poll. More than half could not find Delaware on a map.
People who don't know which city has an airport called LaGuardia correlates with thinking that there are at least twice as many Asians in America than there actually are. Not knowing that the Sun is bigger than Earth correlates with supporting bakers who refuse to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples. Thinking that America has more people has more people than India correlates with refusing to eat genetically modified food. Not knowing how many US Senators there are, or thinking that early humans hunted dinosaurs, correlates with refusing to vaccinate children for measles, mumps and rubella.
According to a 2015 report from the Educational Testing Service (the people behind the SAT's), more than half of Millennials don't know the poison that killed Socrates; they can't name the Virginia home of Thomas Jefferson; they don't know who recorded "All Shook Up" and "Heartbreak Hotel"; they don't know who (in popular myth) designed and sewed the first American flag; they can't name the secret project that built the first atomic bomb; they can't name the largest ocean on Earth, the longest river in South America or the city whose airport is Heathrow.
Wow (and not in a good way). These people are going to be running America in the near future? This is a very disheartening book, and is extremely highly recommended.
Many areas of knowledge correlate with the quality of our lives, including areas like health, wealth and happiness. The author is not suggesting that everyone should be smart enough to appear on a TV show like "Jeopardy." It's totally fine if a person's knowledge is "a mile wide and an inch deep." The author found strong correlations between income and scores on general knowledge quizzes (even if they are multiple choice). It's possible that learning improves cognitive abilities that are useful almost anywhere, including in a career.
How bad is the ignorance of the average American? Less that 10 percent of Americans don't know what country New Mexico is in. About the same percentage of younger Americans can find Afghanistan on a map, according to a 2006 National Geographic poll. More than half could not find Delaware on a map.
People who don't know which city has an airport called LaGuardia correlates with thinking that there are at least twice as many Asians in America than there actually are. Not knowing that the Sun is bigger than Earth correlates with supporting bakers who refuse to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples. Thinking that America has more people has more people than India correlates with refusing to eat genetically modified food. Not knowing how many US Senators there are, or thinking that early humans hunted dinosaurs, correlates with refusing to vaccinate children for measles, mumps and rubella.
According to a 2015 report from the Educational Testing Service (the people behind the SAT's), more than half of Millennials don't know the poison that killed Socrates; they can't name the Virginia home of Thomas Jefferson; they don't know who recorded "All Shook Up" and "Heartbreak Hotel"; they don't know who (in popular myth) designed and sewed the first American flag; they can't name the secret project that built the first atomic bomb; they can't name the largest ocean on Earth, the longest river in South America or the city whose airport is Heathrow.
Wow (and not in a good way). These people are going to be running America in the near future? This is a very disheartening book, and is extremely highly recommended.
December 13, 2024
I was searching for this book yet I had no idea it actually existed. Even though this book was written around a decade ago, it still seems poignant and has the same alarming effect when it shares how ignorant we as a population were. As relevant as it was back then, we are still ignorant. It's to the point where the term "meta-ignorant" in the book becomes a more apt way to describe what's going on with our knowledge bank.
In "Head in the Cloud," the author, Poundstone, shares facts and studies surrounding knowledge and recall of facts. When it came to wanting to study memory recall, it turns out people perform worse when they use a phone to snap a picture of something memorable in their environment (like at a museum), or when they expect to be able to search up a fact (the fact is available online, 24/7, so why should my brain have to hold on to such information?) However, the startling issue was the realization most people do not take the time to critically research facts or information they do not know. Yet, we hold beliefs so strongly, most without knowing exactly what they are about. Crazy right? It was refreshing to see this printed and the reader is more inclined to want to critically analyze new information and prove they are not part of that meta-ignorant crowd. Hopefully more people go this route. Because the crowd is not always the wise way to go. On some general knowledge questions proposed by the author, the majority was wrong, and far off in some questions asking for a numerical estimation.
We need more people to read this book and gleam insight to foster better critical thinking skills and cultivate more curiosity. We should be curious about why we believe what we believe and learn more about the world. Sure, facts are easy to look up but it's more rewarding and engaging to have a conversation among people who are already knowledgeable, it's more humane. Even if one of the people does not know a fact the others do, we can teach and learn from each other and break down those beliefs and pursue research after the fact and go from there. Read it! Your brain will certainly thank you. Overall, a good read.
In "Head in the Cloud," the author, Poundstone, shares facts and studies surrounding knowledge and recall of facts. When it came to wanting to study memory recall, it turns out people perform worse when they use a phone to snap a picture of something memorable in their environment (like at a museum), or when they expect to be able to search up a fact (the fact is available online, 24/7, so why should my brain have to hold on to such information?) However, the startling issue was the realization most people do not take the time to critically research facts or information they do not know. Yet, we hold beliefs so strongly, most without knowing exactly what they are about. Crazy right? It was refreshing to see this printed and the reader is more inclined to want to critically analyze new information and prove they are not part of that meta-ignorant crowd. Hopefully more people go this route. Because the crowd is not always the wise way to go. On some general knowledge questions proposed by the author, the majority was wrong, and far off in some questions asking for a numerical estimation.
We need more people to read this book and gleam insight to foster better critical thinking skills and cultivate more curiosity. We should be curious about why we believe what we believe and learn more about the world. Sure, facts are easy to look up but it's more rewarding and engaging to have a conversation among people who are already knowledgeable, it's more humane. Even if one of the people does not know a fact the others do, we can teach and learn from each other and break down those beliefs and pursue research after the fact and go from there. Read it! Your brain will certainly thank you. Overall, a good read.
July 16, 2019
Quite a few years ago, at the onset of what was called "the information revolution", a continuing theme was that access to this somewhat amorphous category of "information" was an obvious boon and benefit for all concerned. In Australia, this line was continuously peddled by a particular senior politician.
To me, what this person neglected to add that you needed to know something about what you wanted to know, what William Poundstone might call "context" – the construct of personal interest was left aside as well: the last sentence in this book is "the one thing you can't Google is what you ought to be looking up"
In this entertaining and insightful book, replete with surveys, survey methods and relevant commentary, Poundstone puts forward the idea of a general knowledge being important. Much of the material is correlated with income, but also education and political beliefs. Some of the results from his research are surprising, the vast majority insightful. General ignorance is a theme, applied to all levels of society. I found it interesting that those without religious belief tend to know more facts about that area than believers, but that's an area of personal interest. Poundstone's examination of opinions on climate change and level of scientific knowledge doesn't have the expected o and so there may be variations for other nations. I couldn't answer any of the sporting questions he puts for instance.
There's a point here also about the distinction about opinion and reality or even the activity of having an opinion without knowledge.
This book also made me think about modes of teachi8ng and education where the claim is that skills are taught, rather than facts and that makes for better education. Facts without context is obviously problematic, but then so is teaching a skill without any context, something the author alludes to in passing, and other things to think of besides.
Naturally, this book focuses on Americans
To me, what this person neglected to add that you needed to know something about what you wanted to know, what William Poundstone might call "context" – the construct of personal interest was left aside as well: the last sentence in this book is "the one thing you can't Google is what you ought to be looking up"
In this entertaining and insightful book, replete with surveys, survey methods and relevant commentary, Poundstone puts forward the idea of a general knowledge being important. Much of the material is correlated with income, but also education and political beliefs. Some of the results from his research are surprising, the vast majority insightful. General ignorance is a theme, applied to all levels of society. I found it interesting that those without religious belief tend to know more facts about that area than believers, but that's an area of personal interest. Poundstone's examination of opinions on climate change and level of scientific knowledge doesn't have the expected o and so there may be variations for other nations. I couldn't answer any of the sporting questions he puts for instance.
There's a point here also about the distinction about opinion and reality or even the activity of having an opinion without knowledge.
This book also made me think about modes of teachi8ng and education where the claim is that skills are taught, rather than facts and that makes for better education. Facts without context is obviously problematic, but then so is teaching a skill without any context, something the author alludes to in passing, and other things to think of besides.
Naturally, this book focuses on Americans
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