Well, I don't think this is surprising, really. Those doctors are closer temporally to their training than the old docs. This is also why "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?" is actually harder than people think, because all those kids just learned last week what the capital of West Virginia is. Surgery seems to be a logical exception, since at the end of the day, I suppose it's more like being a car mechanic than a trivia competitor, and having a body of experience and "tricks of the trade" is more valuable than trying to compete with knowing more than WebMD and Wikipedia. I can't wait to pass the torch of diagnostics over to computers. People are generally lazy and they get comfortable too quickly for my taste, including doctors. I bet if you found some kind of situation in which doctors were kept on their toes, and constantly retraining their knowledge base, you'd find that the mortality rate doesn't go up.