There's a thought experiment in Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth, that if you take a person from 1900 and bring him forward to 1930, he would be stunned, but if you took someone from 1970 and brought him to the 2000s, there isn't as large a difference.
Conversation
Replying to
He would not be as well adapted to consuming and synthesising multiple streams of information.
I also wonder if he would have the right sensemaking apparatuses in his head ... that are adapted for our world. Or if he could create them.
1
I suspect that things have changed quite a bit, if you think about the cognitive landscape from the 70s and you compared it with today.
On the face of it, not much has changed. But cognitively, I wonder if our man from the 70s would be able to keep up.
I suspect he wouldn't.
2
Tentative proof: everyone from my parents's generation can't seem to handle fake news.
And try as I might, I can't teach them the smell tests required to evaluate what they receive on WhatsApp.
I do not know why this is.
1
4
Ahh, it appears I've gotten the years wrong. It is 1870 to 1940. So an equivalent point of comparison would be 1950 to 2020.
I've been spitballing badly.
1
1
Another way in which the man from 1950 would be different: he would not have made my mistake.
He did not have Twitter.
2
3
On Hacker News, a perfect counter example: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233665