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Martin Schoen

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Human beings need one generation to adopt to new developments i.e. to show "significant evolution"

From a German perspective - Juan gives a very comprehensive and exciting picture of the human future. I think, in one point he is making a wrong assumption. Citing his thesis "human beings in our days have to digest more data in one day, than our ancestors got to process in a lifespan."
I think this is a fundamental error.
If a farmer in 1920 was walking over his fields (weat, corn) I would think, he was collecting and retreiving more data than ourselfes by surfing 1 hour in the internet. He was using his eyes, his brain, his nose, not to forget his intuition, feeling and experience to retrieve and process the "data".
One might say "quite nostalgic"?1 I think this is not a nostalgic view to our ancestors. Today without any doubt, we have far better ways to get much more information. The only thesis I wanted to dispute is the statement - in our days we have to digest 100 times more data than our parents. The right wording - we could digest / process 100 times more data, if the evolution would have made us fit for this task. It´s an historical / anthropologic / sociologic phenomenon, that major technologic developments affecting our behaviour and our daily mode of operation, do take one generation (25 years) until they are really adopted and settled in our daily life e.g. telefon, TV, handy, computer, cars, aircraft or internet. Internet - invented in the ´60ties and made commercially available to the public in 1974 it took until 2000, that the internet got to be a useful and commonly spread communication medium.
The sucess story of mobile handphones has a similar time axis. Commercially availabe in the 80ties (1975), did I (as executive) get my first handphone from my from my company in the 1997. Handphones for everybody (housewives, Kids) did not come up before 2002/2005. Quod erat demonstrandum.


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  • Sep 23 2012: Human beings need to stop brainwashing children to repeat the negativity, the prejudices, etc. of their ancestors. Is it a coincidence that children grow up to hate the same people their parents hated? Sadly, as adults they believe their prejudices are arrived at through their own thinking and observations, totally unaware of the impact of their early childhood brainwashing.
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      Sep 23 2012: I totally agree with your thesis. I can imagine that there are countries or regions where parents influence their kids with the parents prejudices or limited view to the world. However (again from a German perspective) the major problem I see is "parents do not educate at all anymore". This statement is based on the experience two friend of are telling me (they are teachers in the primary school).
      Coming back to my subject - parents are not going out with their kids, in a forest, or in the nature, or reading the newspapers to them (like my grandpa did) or explaining them how to handle the internet and the information giver there...etc andsoon. My thesis was - that the amount of data / information is not the "problem" - but the lack of caring and diligent education and parents. And in this point we agree I think.

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