By Rafe Sagarin / On January 28th, 2014
Aníbal Pauchard and I argued in
Observation and Ecology that despite the great advances information technology has helped us make in complex fields like ecology, the increasing time both children and adults spend in front of screens instead of out in nature will erode our abilities to deal with complexity.
Our argument was experiential—our years of working in the field with many students showed us that those with the best abilities to discern patterns were those who spent abundant time as children just wandering around observing natu