Children do get ~6000 hours a year of stimulus. Spoken, unspoken, written, and body language. Even then they aren't able to form language proficiently until 5 or 6 years old. Does the internet contain 30,000 hours of stimulus?
Children do get ~6000 hours a year of stimulus. Spoken, unspoken, written, and body language. Even then they aren't able to form language proficiently until 5 or 6 years old. Does the internet contain 30,000 hours of stimulus?
30,000 hours is about the amount of new video uploaded to YouTube every hour.
That's astonishing. If you watched all of them, how much new information would you learn? I suspect a large portion of them are the same information presented differently; for example a news story duplicated by hundreds of different channels.
It's a huge amount of video-game footage included in those "hours of video uploaded per-hour".
So very, very little new info will be conveyed by the vast majority of the content.
Yeah, I imagine every moment of communication a child receives is new information not just baby talk about getting the spoon in their mouth and asking them if they have pooped.
> Even then they aren't able to form language proficiently until 5 or 6 years old.
Not even close; they're already proficient at two.
> Does the internet contain 30,000 hours of stimulus?
Is this a joke?
I'm sure someone else could calculate the informational density of all of the text on the internet vs. 30,000 hours of sight, smell, touch, sound, etc density. My intuition tells me it's not even close.
Does the information contained in smell and touch contribute to the acquisition of language? Keep in mind you'd be arguing that people born without a sense of smell take longer to develop language, or are otherwise deficient in it in some way. I'm doubtful. It's certainly tricky to measure full sight / sound vs. text, but luckily we don't have to, because we also have video online, which, surprise surprise, utterly dwarfs 30,000 hours of sight and sound in terms of total information.
One qualitative difference is that the child's 30,000 hours is realtime, interactive, and often bespoke to the individual and context. All the videos on youtube are static and impersonal.
I agree its not even close! A single day of YouTube uploads alone is 720,000 hours!
I think what he's saying is that "real world" interaction is so high bandwidth it dwarfs internet (screen based) stimulation. Not saying I agree just that he's not comparing hours being alive to hours of youtube