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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> And screen provide tiny amount and much much less complex information than the real world no matter how complicated software you run.

That may be true in general, but I think what matters is that a screen provides much larger, richer and more complex information and experience than just about any other individual object in the physical world. Nothing in nature (with the possible exception of faces) comes within an order of magnitude to the "experience density" of a smartphone running even relatively trivial software like a picture gallery or a scrollable list of songs. I wouldn't discount the impact of this on a brain of a 1-3 y.o. It's a superstimulus.

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> That may be true in general, but I think what matters is that a screen provides much larger, richer and more complex information and experience than just about any other individual object in the physical world

Children pay attention to very small details. When they are looking at a plant with a spiderweb, they are looking at individual leaves, how the web connects to the plant, the spider, its movement, anything in the web, the colors, how it reacts to the wind, not to mention the 3d-ness of it all. Then they touch things and see how they react, training their fingers, hands, arms and rest of the body to make the exact movement they want, coordinating it with what the eyes see and what the skin feels.

A photo gallery in a smartphone is extremely dull in comparison, and that's why they can learn to use it immediately.

> A photo gallery in a smartphone is extremely dull in comparison, and that's why they can learn to use it immediately.

I think the reason they can learn to use it immediately is that it's super-simple to learn - tap and swipe, and not very many of those gestures at that. Phone interfaces now are designed to be used by /anyone/ - and that means keeping them simple enough that it can be learned quickly by a child.

> Children pay attention to very small details. (...)

They do. All your examples are correct, for the first few encounters. Then they bucket these things as "leaves", "spiderwebs", etc. and stop caring. Complex does not mean interesting (see also my parallel reply here: [0]).

> A photo gallery in a smartphone is extremely dull in comparison

No, it isn't. Not only the photos in the gallery are likely to be complex, with each showing a slice of the real world, they're also likely to be varied - each one may show a completely different situation, scene, context. And they're unpredictable, surprising.

The one constant of the natural world is that what you see now is roughly the same as what you saw a second ago, or a minute ago. There's only so much of the world around you, it's persistent, and except in emergency situations, stable. Kids learn to tune it out very quickly[1]. Meanwhile, smartphones are those magic rectangles filled with varied, unpredictable, immediate reactions to input.

> and that's why they can learn to use it immediately.

Kids are smart and much more persistent than adults at figuring things out, meanwhile UX designers are assuming users are drooling idiots and designing interfaces that are more trivial than those on Fischer Price toys. It's a perfect storm, so no surprise little kids figure smartphones out very quickly.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29113029

[1] - Not being able to would be debilitating.

Not my experience at all with kids.

> There's only so much of the world around you, it's persistent, and except in emergency situations, stable. Kids learn to tune it out very quickly

Kids know very little about the world, so everything is new, amazing and umpredictable. Some rock or stairs to jump from, throwing a paper plane a thousand times, playing the sand building something for hours.

With pictures, at least when they are young, they usually want to see the same ones over and over again, and mostly of people they know, but I guess there are kids that like a bit more variety.

Nothing in nature (with the possible exception of faces) comes within an order of magnitude to the "experience density"

I got one of the first digital cameras of anyone that I knew. It was early enough that people were kind of shocked to see it.

One of the things that I noticed very early on is that JPG files that were generated from pictures outside were significantly larger than JPG files that were generated from pictures inside. At the time I took this to mean that the outdoor pictures were much less compressible because the level of detail in the natural world is much larger than anything indoors. It's a world of subtle details that we literally evolved to sense.

I just don't think looking at pictures on a screen can compare to the experience of physically going to places.

You are correct. Indoors have areas of solid color and near constant intensity, which compress very well in a wavelet basis.

Physical world may be a fractal of complexity, and nature doubly so, but one of the thing a human brain is good at - and arguably one of its most important function - is filtering all that out.

This is the reason I chose to write "experience density" and not "complexity" in my previous comment. A tree may be infinitely complex, and the first tree you see is profoundly interesting. But the tenth tree you see is just a tree. Soon after, you don't even notice them anymore, except in situations when you have a reason to care, or you see a tree that is very different from all the trees you usually see.

You're correct on the JPG size difference between indoor and outdoor shots. But just because something is too complex to compress well, doesn't mean it's interesting.

I understand what you are seeing and can see your point.

I think it brings up another point though. Does interesting have intrinsic value?

I believe the 20th century was a time period where the western world had to learn to live in a world with infinite sugar, fat and salt. Our nature is to gorge on these naturally rare resources when we find them.

I believe the 21st century will force humans to live in a world of infinite information. Again, our nature is to gorge ourselves on things we find interesting. Is watching YouTube videos you’re interested in any better than eating sugar? Time will tell but my initial reaction is that it is just as unhealthy.

For example, I love history. YouTube will happily feed me an infinite array of little factoids about history. I’ve seen so many that I will then see the same one come up on my feed again and think, “ooh that sounds interesting” and then I remember watching it previously and can’t remember a single thing about it. Was it really that interesting then? Or was I just wasting time mindlessly binge watching videos?

Nah, I don't think "interesting" has intrinsic value. The kind of "interesting" / "surprising" quality that I claim smartphones deliver better than anything in natural world, is a kind of cognitive equivalent to sugar. For the most of the history of our species, sugar was a good proxy for "nutritious", and in the same way, sensory input being interesting/surprising was a good proxy for "important for survival". Today, both sugar and interesting experiences are superstimuli - they tend to be found in most abundance in things of little value.

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