Does looking up facts make you stupid?

Ross Douthat passes on a summary of a Walter Mossberg talk.

A lot of his talk had to do with the issues constant connectivity raises for deep knowledge ("people hate iPhone users," he remarked, "because you can never have an argument about facts without them whipping out the phone and looking up the answer" - a description that I’m afraid I resemble, even though I have a Blackberry and not an iPhone) and deep reflection (in the future, Mossberg noted, we may never be free of "that subtle feeling that maybe you need to check Slate, or Facebook"), and he echoed some of the points that Nicholas Carr makes in his Atlantic essay on how the internet may be changing the way we think, and not necessarily for the better.

I definitely know iPhone users that whip them out constantly to check facts. While this may have deleterious effects on memory I don’t see how more facts are supposed to degrade the quality of our arguments. Citations and hyperlinks might make for less interesting reading at times, but they’re key for figuring out what really happens.

Moreover, our kinds of deep knowledge our shifting. We’re becoming more like librarians, we’ll know some things, but on many other topics we’ll simply know where to look to get the information quickly. I have a few favorite studies I quickly can refer to for common arguments, I know their general findings but I need to look it up to get the numbers.