> People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point.
Sometimes I don’t wonder if this wouldn’t still be a good way to educate people. Part of the problem is education has to sort of optimize to try to educate like passive people. If you’re a curious and pragmatic person, you can understand how to use what you learned in a liberal arts degree to be better at almost any job.
As I look forward to the second half of my career. Certainly I use AI in healthy doses.
But people talk about the division between practice and performance, and most of my practice is old school. Reading books. Writing my thoughts down. Memorizing quotes and passages.
I think more important than what you learn is the way you use it to train and evolve your brain, with the caveat that - I know this is more useful to me because I have a marketable skill. This is the balance universities have to stick, there are tons of people with liberal arts degrees in middling jobs.
But at least half if not more of education should be on building practical skills in the three r’s.(maybe the third r should be ‘rgumentation instead of ‘rithmatic, but I digress)
It’s interesting - people decry memorization in education, and I’m not entirely naive as to why - if you were to show up to the first day of work and say “I don’t know any of what you just said but I can recite log tables! It might be your last day - and yet one of the most underrated skills, especially late in your career is the ability to ingest and operate in large quantities of information.