Knowing what to ask is more important than just knowing

Byryan

Fans of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells them the secret to life, the universe and everything. The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute the answer, which famously comes out as 42. The computer helpfully points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was.

Source: Douglas Adams was right – knowledge without understanding is meaningless | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian

Anyone with an internet connection has access to almost the total sum of human knowledge, but without understanding, no one can know what to do with that information.

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