ATTN Sigmatic

[Jasper]

Nobody's saying nothing has changed, period.  At least I hope not.

What I'm trying to point out is that, despite how much has changed, human nature hasn't.  And I don't mean things like cultural norms, I mean behavioral patterns that all humans share.  I can't think of one instance where technology has changed that.

[Captain Utopia]

Can you provide your understanding of the difference between cultural norms and behavioural patterns?

For example - when I started programming in assembler (z80/6502) 20 years ago, I'd spend a vast chunk of time upfront where I'd memorize everything I needed to get started, because looking it up in a reference book took too much time.  Now even languages I know very well and still use regularly (15 years of C), I've allowed myself to forget very basic things like the parameters to a common function like open() because if I can find a definitive answer in less than 5 seconds, then that's an acceptable trade off for me.  It's even just quicker to ctrl-t a new tab and use the googlebox than it is to alt-tab to find a terminal and then find the manual file stored on my local computer.

So in a very real sense, I've stopped storing certain types of information in my own brain, and I'm using the network as part of my own memory instead.

Is that a change of human nature?  I think so.  You could say that the internet is just a glorified notebook, and that we have been storing reference data on paper for centuries.  This is true, but the analogy falls down in that one day I might hit a wiki page to retrieve a memory.. and someone else has improved the accuracy of it.  Or made it worse.

And I might not even notice, or care.

[Jasper]

Now that I'm thinking about it, human nature is my short hand way of talking about humanity's traits on a biological and psychological level.  We have certain mental traits, such as hypothetical cognition, depth of thought recursion (metacognition), and so forth.  These faculties shape our psychology.  They do not differ largely from human to human.  However, the habits we form as a result of their presence can quite easily diverge in untold ways.  That divergence of mental habits is what I file under "culture". 

So I would agree that human mental habits have been altered extensively by inventions.   It has been since we started hitting things with sticks and rocks.  What hasn't changed is the basic way in which we acquire those habits.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Can you provide your understanding of the difference between cultural norms and behavioural patterns?

For example - when I started programming in assembler (z80/6502) 20 years ago, I'd spend a vast chunk of time upfront where I'd memorize everything I needed to get started, because looking it up in a reference book took too much time.  Now even languages I know very well and still use regularly (15 years of C), I've allowed myself to forget very basic things like the parameters to a common function like open() because if I can find a definitive answer in less than 5 seconds, then that's an acceptable trade off for me.  It's even just quicker to ctrl-t a new tab and use the googlebox than it is to alt-tab to find a terminal and then find the manual file stored on my local computer.

So in a very real sense, I've stopped storing certain types of information in my own brain, and I'm using the network as part of my own memory instead.

Is that a change of human nature?  I think so.  You could say that the internet is just a glorified notebook, and that we have been storing reference data on paper for centuries.  This is true, but the analogy falls down in that one day I might hit a wiki page to retrieve a memory.. and someone else has improved the accuracy of it.  Or made it worse.

And I might not even notice, or care.

F'kin totally! It still freaks me out from time to time when I realise I can't remember basic syntax but then I check it online in less time than it takes to remember and all is well again.

[Captain Utopia]

There is a divide I think - I work with some blokes who maintain a good memory of basic and advanced syntax and parameters, yet they seem less flexible at picking up and running with new languages and concepts.

Now that I'm thinking about it, human nature is my short hand way of talking about humanity's traits on a biological and psychological level.  We have certain mental traits, such as hypothetical cognition, depth of thought recursion (metacognition), and so forth.  These faculties shape our psychology.  They do not differ largely from human to human.  However, the habits we form as a result of their presence can quite easily diverge in untold ways.  That divergence of mental habits is what I file under "culture". 

So I would agree that human mental habits have been altered extensively by inventions.   It has been since we started hitting things with sticks and rocks.  What hasn't changed is the basic way in which we acquire those habits.

Well... we've changed the way we learn, and we've changed the way we remember things.  If our habits are emergent from these building blocks, then we've changed the way we acquire those too?

I have a feeling that I'm totally misunderstanding you!

Then there's this - "Pro Gamers: Brains the size of a planet and lungs the size of a pea", I'm sure that has a large impact on psychology, but I don't see any research into that yet.

[P3nT4gR4m]

There is a divide I think - I work with some blokes who maintain a good memory of basic and advanced syntax and parameters, yet they seem less flexible at picking up and running with new languages and concepts.

When I started playing with the very first computers I figured Basic was how you talked to them so I learned it, inside out. Then along came college and I learned pascal and cobol and they were simple enough but, toward the end of my course, along came C and it was teh future and it was going to replace cobol and pascal and it was how we were going to talk to computers for ever after. By this tiem I was already getting mixed up between basic/cobol/pascal function set and syntaxes and now I had to remember to put everything in a "main" with curly braces or some shit and "include" stuff that used to just be there on it's own. But you could make your own functions in C/C++ so, believe it or not, one of the first things I did was alias the whole of Amiga Basic in C just so I could do shit like clear the screen and "print" and "input" instead of this fucking putch and getch bullshit!

Next thing I know I'm using SQL and visual basic and thinking to myself "fuck it, no point learning any of this shit cos I'll be talking to computers using  something else soon enough and the autocomplete and help manual, along with the whole visual way of writing code using MS Access made it easy to do without learning anyroad. Fast forward 10 years and I find myself using PHP and MySQL and (bearing in mind that I've been coding SQL for over a decade now) I am utterly unable to write a single goddamn line of it - relying instead on Access Query builder then copy and pasting the code from that into notepad++

Next I'm finding myself trying to get my head around OOP and it seriously screwed with my mind for a while but, now that I'm there I'm writing stuff that I can forget how it works as soon as I'm finished it. So I do. I've hacked about 10,000 lines of code together for the system I'm currently running and I have no fucking idea what most of it does. And it doesn't matter. And that's fucking staggering!

[Triple Zero]

F'kin totally! It still freaks me out from time to time when I realise I can't remember basic syntax but then I check it online in less time than it takes to remember and all is well again.

tip: I always make sure to download a copy of the docs (preferably HTML, because it's fastest for me, though .CHM serves pretty well too, PDF is too cumbersome unless you print it) available locally.

It's slightly faster than getting it online (especially if your connection is busy doing other stuff), and you still have it when there's no connection.

... "No connection", is that something which might turn inconceivable in a decade or so?