Importance of Libraries

Google is great at answers, but you need to come up with the questions. That's the difference between a junior (know how to get an answer) and a senior (know which question to ask).

Moreover, as Niall Ferguson states, libraries have been developing cataloging systems for centuries, to help you expand your knowledge on a topic. This advantage starts right on the content curation — not all books make it into the library — and then there is a system of organization that helps you go from book to book, looking for particular concepts or ideas. Lastly, this advantage is topped with a human, the librarian, that has contextual knowledge and cultural awareness to know what to recommend. AI is still eons away from this.

Very important because libraries sort the material in a way that is honest, and Google sorts it in a way that's designed to sell ads to you. I think libraries — they are sacred places. Isn't it funny? Think back: The way that print evolved as a technology produced an enormous amount of content that was not selling ads, and libraries ended up as the organizing institutions of information with a system of cataloging that wasn't designed to do anything other than get you to associate the book you were reading with the other books that were related to it. I think library cataloging systems are a much-underrated contribution to our civilization.

So why are questions so relevant? Questions are the process that helps you think; answers are narrow insights that Google has optimized very well already. It is, in a way, a glorified phonebook — you know what you're looking for, you'll find it incredibly quickly. It's not a thinking machine. If you're exploring a topic you want to learn more, you'll stumble on a ton of pages of dubious quality, much of it repeated and word-optimized for SEO, not for your learning.

Via Niall Ferguson on Conversations With Tyler podcast: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/niall-ferguson/