| ▲ | toenail 8 hours ago |
| And math skills are going to collapse from calculator reliance. |
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| ▲ | larsfaye 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Actually, they have for a large majority of the population. And fun fact: that debate is still going on, and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) enacted a rule prohibiting calculator use in AMC. https://ivyleaguecenter.org/2024/03/12/over-reliance-on-calc... Math fosters critical thinking, and we've been in a critical thinking deficit for decades and decades. I don't think we can afford to sink even deeper... |
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| ▲ | hypfer 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Math fosters critical thinking I kinda agree, but I also kinda disagree. My question would be if "math" is the right tool for that. It can achieve that as a side-effect, but how we express it and talk about it is full of legacy cruft, cargo-culting and general bullshit that makes it not exactly snap into place for all kinds of brain wirings. Math I believe is not an end in itself. Maybe with that perspective, solutions that satisfy our needs there can be found | |
| ▲ | lanstin 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because the 1890s and 1930s were famous for their population wide critical thinking, of course. Good heavens, what do they teach in the schools these days. | | |
| ▲ | gustavus 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mean you may be trying to make a point but the counterpoint is Einstein, Bohrs, Planck, Shannon, Turing, Von Nuemann, Feynman, Bohr and most of the other big names all came out during that time. In contrast since then we've had almost not noteable physicists or Computer Scientists that I'm aware, we've got a couple, Hawking and Knuth. But apart from that I don't know if there is a single scientist I could point out today that has revolutionized our understanding or even done any real breakthrough work in the field of Physics since Einsteins era. | | |
| ▲ | lanstin 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | We have gotten better at working as a group. The standard model is a tour de force. It was a collaborative effort over decades but is a lot more complex than anything Einstein did. To some extent we haven’t gotten new physics since then because of reality - we have built higher energy experiments but haven’t got new results. But my reply was I guess implicitly assuming the post I was replying to was talking about the median level of critical thinking. Your reply is talking about the peaks of creative accomplishment which is not what I was addressing. | |
| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | antonvs 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not a good argument. Those were big names because they were (co)founders of major fields. Physics and CS aren’t like fashion where you can come out with a new color or design every six months. You also seem to be restricting yourself to pop science knowledge of who’s made breakthroughs. That’s because our collective understanding of physics has become much more detailed, to the point where it starts to lose the ability to be meaningfully comprehensible to the average layperson. Consider AdS/CFT, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence There’ve been many major developments just in that area since the early 1970s, to through the late 90s all the way to 2019 (the island formula), with many major contributors like Bekenstein, ‘t Hooft, Susskind, Maldacena, and many less well-known names. If you resurrected some of the scientists you mentioned, they’d have a lot of work to do to catch up, and making field-changing major breakthroughs would be just as difficult for them as for anyone else alive today. Something similar is true in CS. There’s been plenty of progress in all fields of CS, but similar to the situation with physics, its nature is not as simple as what the founders of the field were dealing with, so there’s less awareness of it outside the field. Just to pick one small example, Conor McBride’s insight that the derivative of a regular type is the type of its one-hole context ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358663 ) is beautiful and kind of amazing, but not a result that you’re going to hear much about outside of PhD programs and the like. CS is chock-full of such work. The entire field of programming language theory has come a long, long way since Turing and Von Neumann’s time, to pick a broader example. |
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| ▲ | antonvs 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > we've been in a critical thinking deficit for decades and decades. Compared to when? |
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| ▲ | Ekaros 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have heard stories of cashiers being incapable of giving correct change. So yes it has happened. |
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| ▲ | musebox35 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A more apt analogy is the diminishing understanding of assembly language and machine instruction sets. I love programming and something got lost in both transitions, first to high level languages and now to coding agents. I am quite sure some contexts will require programming by hand for a long while as there are still people who are writing amd64/avx512/sass by hand. I hope in time we will find new ways to enjoy solving problems with this new programming modality. By now, I am pretty sure it is here to stay and evolve from its current crude form. |
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| ▲ | petcat 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > the diminishing understanding of assembly language and machine instruction sets This is true and nobody complains that GCC or LLVM is making programmers dumber. They are code-generation tools from higher-level source code. Much like LLMs are code-generation tools for higher-level language/prompting. |
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| ▲ | 3qs12g5 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Math skills had never anything to do with arithmetic. Maybe Ramanujan discovered a couple of theorems by dealing with numbers themselves. That is it. Online discourse though is collapsing under dumb AI talking points. |
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| ▲ | lanstin 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Man, Usenet had the best online discourse - hardly any angry personal flaming because people dared to disagree. And Twitter, wow that was just pure rationality. slashdot - practically a masters program. Now, they all did have gems of interaction that would could find by sifting thru the dumb stuff, but I find that property of discourse to be pretty steady. I've even found some interesting comments on YouTube videos and newpaper websites. |
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| ▲ | tikhonj 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Arithmetic skills. And they probably have? |
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| ▲ | Terr_ 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not really the same, since your average calculator doesn't take over executive function. The user thought and decided what needs to happen, down to one extremely well-specified task, which is so unambiguous that it can be completed by rote and without context. This is more like paying someone else to read your math homework, generate answers, and maybe even submit them on your behalf. If that had been the (average) student experience, math skills really would have collapsed. |
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| ▲ | lanstin 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think we'll find that the people doing that, like the people spending all their time and energy reading slasher pulp fiction in the 1950s, won't be doing as well as the people learning to enhance the power of their education and their expertise via LLMs and strategic alternating between GenAI and thinking about problems. And eventually, if society ever steadies up a bit, people will learn the useful ways of using technology in school and youth; and we'll be glad to be alive to see such marvels. Assuming we can re-establish the will for democracy and taking care of the whole group. | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think it's quite as bad, but I'm imagining someone in the 1950s going: "People just have to use methamphetamines responsibly in their work, and then we'll see the massive benefits as widespread adoption unlocks the potential of the human mind." In other words, a positive outcome with thing X is possible but there are also big behavioral and cybernetic pitfalls, ones which are suspiciously persistent. | | |
| ▲ | lanstin 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mean I use coffee quite a lot to prop up my software career. I don’t really find purity to be useful for anything except to answer questions like “should I steal this money now that I am alone” or “should I backstab this friend who pissed me off today.” | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > questions like “should I steal this money now that I am alone” or “should I backstab this friend who pissed me off today.” Ah, yes, a very BOFH approach [0] to workplace quandaries. > I mean I use coffee quite a lot Perhaps, but I don't think either of us would agree with the claim: "The way we integrated caffeine for productivity offers a useful and practical model for integrating meth for productivity." There's an extremely detectable difference in the feedback loops that form between the tool and the people using it. There's something which remains unsolved ~90 years on. If we assume for the sake of argument that coffee is "good" and "productive", then that leads us to the question: Are these LLM systems going to be more like coffee, or more like meth? [0] https://www.theregister.com/bofh |
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| ▲ | svachalek 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Those are some big ifs and assumptions unfortunately, and the use of AI unfortunately has an isolating effect that is only likely to move the needle in the wrong direction. | |
| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | dosisking 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > And math skills are going to collapse from calculator reliance. People can no longer drive a stick-shift car, whereas it used to be that a valet would always be able to drive one to park it. |
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| ▲ | lanstin 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I also can't make butter by churning or soap from lye and animal fat or what ever. However, I can use mathematica to demonstrate the criteria for various forms topological stability of solutions to many types of differential equations. I'd rather live now. |
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| ▲ | platevoltage an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This would be quite the zinger if this wasn't actually true. |
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| ▲ | gdulli 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's a very good point. People don't pull out their calculator in the grocery store to do analysis of unit costs or whatever, it's too much of a hassle for that small kind of analysis. But calculators have robbed us of the need to be good at doing that math in our heads. So the math doesn't get done. |
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| ▲ | johsole 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Many grocery stores will already give you a per oz or per unit price so you can compare pricing for different brands that have different sizes. It's a very handy feature. | | |
| ▲ | oasisaimlessly 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And it's so often wrong that you better be doing sanity checks if you use it for anything. | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Is it often flat-out wrong where you live? My most-common frustration with it is when products I want to compare don't have the same quantity-denominator. (Either a different unit, or sometimes a different dimension like weight versus volume.) | | |
| ▲ | gdulli 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've many times seen it wrong but more often the same item will have some tags expressed on cost per ounce, others per lb, etc. To discourage comparison. But I dont think people are paying much attention to those numbers anyway. Math has become a scary topic for them altogether. |
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| ▲ | shimman 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's mandated by law, not because the grocery story wants to. |
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| ▲ | tired_and_awake 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is exactly the right analogy. Granted LLMs are a more sophisticated calculator and engineering is still adapting to this wonky/evolving technology. But to pretend it's a coming catastrophe is to ignore every past parallel development - where this has not happened. |
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| ▲ | miltonlost 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Mental math skills" literally did collapse tho??? "Math skills" to write proofs (which a calculator cannot do) is a fundamentally different skill set than that "math skills" of mechanically doing arithmetic (which a calculator does do). Seems like critical reading skills have already collapsed. |
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| ▲ | VCFundedGenYer 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No. With a calculator you still need to understand the fundamentals of mathematics. You also need to understand how to operate a calculator and know its functions. Even when removing numbers and manual calculation, being a function or formula oriented mathematician still requires you to know the theory and functionality. With an LLM, you don't even need to know anything other than asking the robot to perform. You don't understand the output, nor can an unskilled person explain it. |
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| ▲ | Forgeties79 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Your calculator isn’t designed to keep you addicted to it and doesn’t have baked in orders like “be humorous and irreverent when appropriate.” Also, yes I am dependent on a calculator. |
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| ▲ | what 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They probably have though. |
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| ▲ | jckahn 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Seems like we're doing fine though, yeah? | | |
| ▲ | larsfaye 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Could be a doing a whole lot better. Do you think there's an abundance of critical thinking in society? Because math skills aid in that. | | |
| ▲ | r_lee 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I honestly can't tell what reward there is for this "critical thinking" since the entire world is bathing in "AI will replace you" what point is there to be a human calculator if nobody rewards you for it? and I'm not talking about wealthy Bay Area tech workers doing it so that they can write their substack blogs but rather the average person | | |
| ▲ | esafak 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Getting to live in a civilized society with a responsible government. Witness the counterexample. | | |
| ▲ | r_lee an hour ago | parent [-] | | that's not something you can accomplish just by practicing critical thinking yourself, you'd need to convince a majority of the population to do the same. we can vent here but it's not gonna change things, a wider cultural shift is needed. and even then I don't see it guaranteeing a "responsible govermment", e.g. see PRC China for example |
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| ▲ | __MatrixMan__ 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When I look at the state of software engineering, "fine" is not the word that comes to mind https://xkcd.com/2030/. If we're going to be the last generation that understands code at this level, we need leave it in a much better state before we die. | |
| ▲ | bigstrat2003 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not really, no. It's embarrassing how many people lack the ability to do basic arithmetic. | | |
| ▲ | jckahn 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do they necessarily need to? We have ubiquitous tools for this. |
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| ▲ | EGreg 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is the same kind of analogy people make when they "poo-pooh" any sort of technological advance, especially with AI. "Oh, that old simple device didn't displace anything, so this one which is now quickly taking over every job will be just like that simple one". So I guess people today know how to sew and knit and bake bread? "Oh, humans were always needed, so it'll be the same this time." Is that true of horses and oxen after cars and tractors were invented? |
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| ▲ | catchnear4321 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 1) have they not?
2) not a level comparison |
