The "Future": Perceived vs. Reality
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@coliver said:
Is there evidence for this? I know there has been a number of studies done on attention span in the internet age, which showed that our (collectively) attention span has gotten shorter as we are exposed to more and more internet stuff.
This is true. And it started before the Internet age. Reading books helps to offset this.
But there is another question, is a long attention span good in a world where we don't need it? Or are we properly adapting to the world as we know it? What's actually negative about handling shifting information streams more efficiently?
There are cons, of course, but what is the net effect? Are we adapting properly or improperly is the bigger question.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
Is there evidence for this? I know there has been a number of studies done on attention span in the internet age, which showed that our (collectively) attention span has gotten shorter as we are exposed to more and more internet stuff.
This is true. And it started before the Internet age. Reading books helps to offset this.
But there is another question, is a long attention span good in a world where we don't need it? Or are we properly adapting to the world as we know it? What's actually negative about handling shifting information streams more efficiently?
There are cons, of course, but what is the net effect? Are we adapting properly or improperly is the bigger question.
I didn't say it was a bad thing. Around the same time an evolutionary biologist made the case for short attention spans as an evolutionary advantage, allowing our ancestors to focus on many different things at once while still being able to forget things that aren't deemed important by the brain. It was just a blog post... but interesting none-the-less.
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I've read several books, some by psychologists and some by things like the Harvard Business School that have studied the effects of video games and the conclusion is pretty unanimous that interactive gaming is making kids thing faster, strategize better and learn better than ever before. Gamers are a desired workforce component as they are often in the top tier of knowledge workers.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@handsofqwerty said:
People who are my age and younger may be able to fly on any given electronic device, but basic communication skills are being replaced by the ability to text and chat via IM.
I don't believe that there is any foundation for this. In what way could previous eras communicate better?
I strongly believe it is an issue, but not as a function of increased technology; rather as a function of poor education standards.
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@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@handsofqwerty said:
People who are my age and younger may be able to fly on any given electronic device, but basic communication skills are being replaced by the ability to text and chat via IM.
I don't believe that there is any foundation for this. In what way could previous eras communicate better?
I strongly believe it is an issue, but not as a function of increased technology; rather as a function of poor education standards.
You believe that it is an issue that people communicate poorly? (Agreed) Or you believe that there is an issue that current educational practices are creating a generation that does so more poorly than in the past? (Not sure I agree.)
I agree that communication skills are poor. Not sure that I would agree that they used to be good.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@handsofqwerty said:
People who are my age and younger may be able to fly on any given electronic device, but basic communication skills are being replaced by the ability to text and chat via IM.
I don't believe that there is any foundation for this. In what way could previous eras communicate better?
I strongly believe it is an issue, but not as a function of increased technology; rather as a function of poor education standards.
You believe that it is an issue that people communicate poorly? (Agreed) Or you believe that there is an issue that current educational practices are creating a generation that does so more poorly than in the past? (Not sure I agree.)
I agree that communication skills are poor. Not sure that I would agree that they used to be good.
I think that your 25% figure may have been true at one point, but based on what I see daily, that figure has decreased dramatically. I'll bet less than 10% of the general public has a clue about proper grammar or how to construct a decent logical point about anything. Most people have no clue about logic, grammar, spelling, etc., and I find it very discouraging to think what the future may hold in that respect.
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@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@handsofqwerty said:
People who are my age and younger may be able to fly on any given electronic device, but basic communication skills are being replaced by the ability to text and chat via IM.
I don't believe that there is any foundation for this. In what way could previous eras communicate better?
I strongly believe it is an issue, but not as a function of increased technology; rather as a function of poor education standards.
You believe that it is an issue that people communicate poorly? (Agreed) Or you believe that there is an issue that current educational practices are creating a generation that does so more poorly than in the past? (Not sure I agree.)
I agree that communication skills are poor. Not sure that I would agree that they used to be good.
I think that your 25% figure may have been true at one point, but based on what I see daily, that figure has decreased dramatically. I'll bet less than 10% of the general public has a clue about proper grammar or how to construct a decent logical point about anything. Most people have no clue about logic, grammar, spelling, etc., and I find it very discouraging to think what the future may hold in that respect.
I agree that few people have those skills. What I feel, though, is that even fewer had them in the past. In what generation could 10% even write, let alone write well? It's only recently that there is widespread literacy, post 1900. Since 1900, when was there ever a time period when the majority of people wrote well?
The only major difference is that we now see people who write poorly all of the time. They used to be filtered because the effort to publish was so high. Now that anyone who wants to be heard can write something somewhere, we see the people writing who previously could have only sent a letter by post or hoped that a publisher or editor somewhere would let their work get seen. And in those cases, often a team of people edited what went to print before it was seen by the public.
That we no longer use editors for most printed activity is a major change.
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When it comes to making technological predictions, Ray Kurzweil (and others) came up with a pretty good method of doing so. Of course, it's not a crystal ball, but it works best when trying to verify whether or not someone's prediction will likely be possible.
Some more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
I use this often when talking with people. In my experience, people either think things will happen way too soon or way too far away. Two examples:
- Flying cars
- I showed a demo video of a piece of software to my father in law some years ago, and he said "that's at least 100 years away," but I had already written it. He wasn't the only one either.
People are just really, really bad at predicting technology. If they think the idea is simple they will say it'll be tomorrow, if they don't understand it (like software) they say it'll be super far off.
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Also it right away one can guess likelihood of things based on physics alone. Are flying cars possible? Not unless they're helicopters or airplanes, because there's no (known) method of anti-gravity. So there likely will never be flying cars.
I think some decent examples of good predictions are Corning's promotional video series "A Day made of Glass," as many of the things shown either already do exist in some way, or are in development.
A big issue people get hung up on is style. For example Sun Microsystems made some promotional videos of offices with essentially social software, tablets, and electronic collaboration, however some people will say this isn't an accurate prediction because it isn't exactly like facetime, iPads, and TeamWork or Trello or whatever.
So while Corning's predictions will come true, that does not mean that Corning will actually be the one to pioneer these things, that they will look the same, or the UX will be the same. I still count it as an accurate prediction, however, even when pseudo-intellectual techno-weenies would sometimes not, and these are the same people who strike back against people like Ray Kurzweil and say "oh the prediction was vague," as if technology which doesn't exist yet can be pre-defined accurately in the first place. It's a great way to always crap on people you don't like, but it just makes you look like an idiot.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@handsofqwerty said:
People who are my age and younger may be able to fly on any given electronic device, but basic communication skills are being replaced by the ability to text and chat via IM.
I don't believe that there is any foundation for this. In what way could previous eras communicate better?
I strongly believe it is an issue, but not as a function of increased technology; rather as a function of poor education standards.
You believe that it is an issue that people communicate poorly? (Agreed) Or you believe that there is an issue that current educational practices are creating a generation that does so more poorly than in the past? (Not sure I agree.)
I agree that communication skills are poor. Not sure that I would agree that they used to be good.
I think that your 25% figure may have been true at one point, but based on what I see daily, that figure has decreased dramatically. I'll bet less than 10% of the general public has a clue about proper grammar or how to construct a decent logical point about anything. Most people have no clue about logic, grammar, spelling, etc., and I find it very discouraging to think what the future may hold in that respect.
I agree that few people have those skills. What I feel, though, is that even fewer had them in the past. In what generation could 10% even write, let alone write well? It's only recently that there is widespread literacy, post 1900. Since 1900, when was there ever a time period when the majority of people wrote well?
The only major difference is that we now see people who write poorly all of the time. They used to be filtered because the effort to publish was so high. Now that anyone who wants to be heard can write something somewhere, we see the people writing who previously could have only sent a letter by post or hoped that a publisher or editor somewhere would let their work get seen. And in those cases, often a team of people edited what went to print before it was seen by the public.
That we no longer use editors for most printed activity is a major change.
Sure, but we have all of that built into Word, and look at what we get. My own experience may have skewed my perception, but it seems that the average adult that I knew as a child had a better command of the English language than the adults I know today. I also remember the trees in my grandparents' yard being much bigger, so take it for what it's worth.
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@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@handsofqwerty said:
People who are my age and younger may be able to fly on any given electronic device, but basic communication skills are being replaced by the ability to text and chat via IM.
I don't believe that there is any foundation for this. In what way could previous eras communicate better?
I strongly believe it is an issue, but not as a function of increased technology; rather as a function of poor education standards.
You believe that it is an issue that people communicate poorly? (Agreed) Or you believe that there is an issue that current educational practices are creating a generation that does so more poorly than in the past? (Not sure I agree.)
I agree that communication skills are poor. Not sure that I would agree that they used to be good.
I think that your 25% figure may have been true at one point, but based on what I see daily, that figure has decreased dramatically. I'll bet less than 10% of the general public has a clue about proper grammar or how to construct a decent logical point about anything. Most people have no clue about logic, grammar, spelling, etc., and I find it very discouraging to think what the future may hold in that respect.
I agree that few people have those skills. What I feel, though, is that even fewer had them in the past. In what generation could 10% even write, let alone write well? It's only recently that there is widespread literacy, post 1900. Since 1900, when was there ever a time period when the majority of people wrote well?
The only major difference is that we now see people who write poorly all of the time. They used to be filtered because the effort to publish was so high. Now that anyone who wants to be heard can write something somewhere, we see the people writing who previously could have only sent a letter by post or hoped that a publisher or editor somewhere would let their work get seen. And in those cases, often a team of people edited what went to print before it was seen by the public.
That we no longer use editors for most printed activity is a major change.
Sure, but we have all of that built into Word, and look at what we get. My own experience may have skewed my perception, but it seems that the average adult that I knew as a child had a better command of the English language than the adults I know today. I also remember the trees in my grandparents' yard being much bigger, so take it for what it's worth.
Regular people always had bad hand writing, grammar, and spelling, even in languages where spelling is much easier and more logical than English -- I found old letters from my great grandmother where she had pretty nice handwriting, but did mispell common Hungarian and German words. Of course some people wrote more so logically their writing would be cleaner and clearer (on average), but that doesn't mean that was the case for regular people. The fact is, in general, regular people have rarely ever written anything aside from addresses and phone numbers.
The fact is when it comes to the 19th or early 20th centuries as well, if you find something written down, it almost certainly was written by someone more educated and more experienced in writing, not by someone in the majority. So when people say "oh handwriting/cursive was so nice back then," the sample size is tiny.
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@art_of_shred said:
Sure, but we have all of that built into Word, and look at what we get. My own experience may have skewed my perception, but it seems that the average adult that I knew as a child had a better command of the English language than the adults I know today. I also remember the trees in my grandparents' yard being much bigger, so take it for what it's worth.
I remember the summers being hotter and more "brownish yellow."
I feel like adults were filtered a lot more then. Meaning that the adults that my parents exposed me too were mostly engineers and other carefully selected family friends. I only knew a handful of adults that I would speak to on a regular basis. Now I talk to more people per day than I used to talk to in a year. I think that the "parent filter" might have a lot to do with it.
Example: We recently had house guests for three weeks. One is a psych research student. The other a physics graduate. Those are the adults my kids have seen. But me, I've seen them plus a lot of people at the bar. The adults my kids see are filtered.
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@tonyshowoff said:
The fact is when it comes to the 19th or early 20th centuries as well, if you find something written down, it almost certainly was written by someone more educated and more experienced in writing, not by someone in the majority. So when people say "oh handwriting/cursive was so nice back then," the sample size is tiny.
The farther in time you go back, the fewer writing examples we have. The things that have survived as more and more the products of a very elite few. Look at Greek literature, how many writers do we have to work from? Just a few. Probably the best of the best and not just from one year but from hundreds of years we select just two or three main writers.
Even in the 1700s, only the best of the best trickle down to us today. It is only current writers that we tend to see any of the course, bulk of writers that are not the elites of written society.
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@art_of_shred said:
Sure, but we have all of that built into Word, and look at what we get. My own experience may have skewed my perception, but it seems that the average adult that I knew as a child had a better command of the English language than the adults I know today. I also remember the trees in my grandparents' yard being much bigger, so take it for what it's worth.
I had similar experience, when I was a child I remember family members being able to speak German much better than myself, but years later I realised they actually weren't very good at it at all, I just didn't speak it at the time. This is also true with languages like Hungarian where the grammar is extremely complex compared to English, children make many more mistakes than would be noticed in English.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I remember the summers being hotter and more "brownish yellow."
I remember them being brighter, and back home I also remember them being more green, I guess maybe I spent more time outside back then. Last summer I went with my sister to our old house from the very early 90s, and it was so much smaller, even though I was a teenager back then, it did seem bigger. I always knew it was crappy, but oh man is it a really tiny, crappy shanty.
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My memories of working with my mother out in the garden always seem like it was SO hot. How could the world have possibly been so hot back then?
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@scottalanmiller you also see the world through your Aspie colored glasses as well. You see the world very differently than many. I see technology as awesome. But I also see the detriment to children. They just aren't as active as our generation was. Heck I know a few that just don't have outside stuff (bikes, soccer balls etc) and just don't go outside at all. Overall this makes for a VERY unhealthy generation.
The other side of this is I am seeing too many parents take this too the extreme and not have technology in their homes.... umm yeah that is not the world we live in. Teach your child to use technology and often as a learning medium it is amazing! But also make them disconnect because Facebook gives people a VERY unrealistic view of the world
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@scottalanmiller said:
My memories of working with my mother out in the garden always seem like it was SO hot. How could the world have possibly been so hot back then?
I didn't have an air conditioner until I was 17 or so, and it was just one of those windows ones. Air conditioners are necessary in America too, because it's hotter than absolute hell, and the sun beats down on you, and for some reason Americans call these "beautiful days."
It was very humid when I was a kid, but it still was usually about 25C/77F even in July, though sometimes there were days it got much hotter. Some years back there was a record temperature of something like 44C/112F, which is normal for a lot of parts of America, or at least might as well be.
If I ever made a list of things I hate about America, the top 5 would all be "it's too hot."
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@tonyshowoff said:
If I ever made a list of things I hate about America, the top 5 would all be "it's too hot."
No kidding. I live in the hottest region of Spain, on the edge of a desert and everyone here complains about how hot it is. Are you kidding? No one here has or needs air conditioning. It's just not that hot. Even NY is crazy hot compared to this.
I was in Morocco over the weekend. Almost nowhere in Morocco (where there are cities, at least) is as hot as almost anywhere in the US.
The US is just amazingly hot.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@tonyshowoff said:
If I ever made a list of things I hate about America, the top 5 would all be "it's too hot."
No kidding. I live in the hottest region of Spain, on the edge of a desert and everyone here complains about how hot it is. Are you kidding? No one here has or needs air conditioning. It's just not that hot. Even NY is crazy hot compared to this.
I was in Morocco over the weekend. Almost nowhere in Morocco (where there are cities, at least) is as hot as almost anywhere in the US.
The US is just amazingly hot.
I used to say "how did European American settlers deal with this heat?" and people say "they didn't know any better." I'm pretty sure they knew what winter was and that Europe wasn't as unbearably hot. Also if people never knew any better, why'd people ever put air conditioners in their homes? I can't imagine someone in the US in the 60s or 70s when told about central heating and air said "I had no idea I was sweating bullets constantly in my own home/office" or "I never knew being colder was possible, as you see America is on the equator and I've never opened my fridge or been around in winter time or sat under a tree in the shade."
So I don't say that any more, since the answer seems to be "they were crazy or stupid," which would explain why their descendants think nobody else noticed how hot it was and/or that it was sometimes colder.
