Jane Goodall was a hack

I spent $200k on an education I could have gotten with $10 worth of late charges at the library $20 worth of data charges on my phone
I just spent 30 minutes explaining what encyclopedias are to my 7 year old. The majority of the time I was talking it felt less like an explanation, and more like a justification for their existence. I should have known which tone the conversation was going to take based on the question that sparked it, “Daddy, when you were too young to have a phone, what did you use to google stuff for school?”
“When I was a kid no one had cell phones and most of us didn’t have buttons on the house phones.”
“What’s a house phone?”
“The kind that your grandmother has. Never mind that, when we wanted to learn about something we looked it up in an encyclopedia.”
“Is that what they called google then?”
“No, it was a series of books with topics sorted in alphabetical order. There were 25-30 books to a set and they were so expensive people use to save up for a set and one year after they bought them they would be out of date.”
“Then why did you buy them? Why didn’t you just borrow them from the library.”
“Probably because people thought it made them look better if they owned a set.
“Oh, like when you drive around in your Porsche?”
“No, cars make you look cool. Encyclopedias made you look smart. If you have them now you’re a hoarder.”
“What kind of stuff was in them?”
“Almost everything. If you were writing a report on gorillas you could find a whole page on gorillas in the G book.”
“How did you write a whole report on gorillas by just reading one page?”
“We wrote big, and we double spaced.”
“It doesn’t sound like you could learn much from those books. I’ve read a whole book on gorillas and I saw a bunch more at the library that had different stuff in them.”
“You couldn’t learn everything from them, you just got a summary.”
“Like the search results from google? If you want to learn everything you just have to click them and read the next page. What did you do?”
“You could go get other books on the subject, I usually just made the rest up.”
“Why didn’t you just start with the other books and then you wouldn’t have had to buy that expensive set of encyclopedias?”
This led to 25 more minutes of conversation that I see now I could have prevented if I’d simply answered, “Because back then we were stupid.”




