More information help us make good long-term decisions or not

[OakLeaf]

People who want to be truly educated and use knowledge to help themselves found the knowledge they needed well before the internet came along.

To an extent. But we got our news from weekly newspapers and monthly magazines, and while it kind of forced us to get background, it meant we were constantly behind the news. Maybe if we had a good local bookstore, we could get newspapers from major cities in our own country the day after publication, and from other countries several days or a week late. Some of us got urban newspapers mailed to us, which would take one to three days, and wasn't cheap.

If we wanted to read scholarship or precedent, it meant traveling long distances to an academic library or law library even to search the catalog. Now, we can at least search abstracts without leaving home or office; some of us have access to full text via Sci-Hub or student/alumni access or firm subscription or other arrangements, or at the very least we know what journals to pull down if we make the trip to an academic library.