31–40 of 58 posts
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The better part is calling it 'forcing'. As a young kid I used to enjoy long operation on paper (sum/mul/sqrt), no one forced me. The process helps understands the basic principles
Do we really believe it's a good idea to make a case for people being even less mathematically inclined than they already are? I don't.
Odd how a revolutionary content generating technology is transforming or replacing entire industries except that particular text generating industry we all dread. Notice how articles about replacing journalists have faded from the media?
> …forcing children to spend years learning longhand sums that can be easily done by computers. If we don't teach this, we'll forget how we got computers to do arithmetic in the first place. Not teaching basic arithmetic skills would be unconscionable.
If longhand sums take years to learn we are doing it wrong and/or doing it at the wrong stage. Laying foundations (counting, numerals) will take years sure, but they will be useful over various domains, but specific techniques shouldn’t be drilled. They are simple enough to pick up once matured a bit. Like someone said, why calculate sin(x) when you can use a lookup table. I mean, sure, do it a few times when you are…
Look at who wrote it:
https://www.ft.com/madhumita-murgia
https://www.ft.com/bethan-staton
Do you think either of these people have an innate understanding of the education system and its syllabus? They're journos. One of which is their dedicated AI hot take specialist.
It's a throwaway piece that's a vehicle for ads.
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The better part is calling it 'forcing'. As a young kid I used to enjoy long operation on paper (sum/mul/sqrt), no one forced me. The process helps understands the basic principles
Do we really believe it's a good idea to make a case for people being even less mathematically inclined than they already are? I don't.
The narrative when this comes up always seems to be about defending the current system as if everything is going so great as is.
In the piano analogy mentioned, it does feel like we spend time drilling scales and tuning the piano at the expense of the average appreciation for music. A good system for producing a small amount of future piano virtuoso while most end up not wanting anything to do with music at all.
> …forcing children to spend years learning longhand sums that can be easily done by computers. If we don't teach this, we'll forget how we got computers to do arithmetic in the first place. Not teaching basic arithmetic skills would be unconscionable.
Do you think that our society only remembers the skills that we teach children to be able to do with a pen and paper? More concretely, we already just teach kids that the trigonometric functions are essentially black boxes, you can just look up sin(x) in a table, someone has calculated it already. It doesn't mean we've "forgotten" how to calculate sin.
Personally I think mental arithmetic is worth learning as it gives practice in working with numbers and as a first algorithm. Maybe it should be expanded earlier to other concepts like modulus.
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We don't teach children how to make fire with sticks, and most of us probably couldn't do it either. We, as a culture, literally forgot the first step that enabled all our industry. Is that a problem?
Sure we do. In the Boy Scouts for example, though I just learned it from a book. I suspect a large percentage of people on HN would know how to start a fire from scratch.
It's almost impossible for me to believe that even 1% of HN readers can start a friction fire.
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Sure we do. In the Boy Scouts for example, though I just learned it from a book. I suspect a large percentage of people on HN would know how to start a fire from scratch.
> I suspect a large percentage of people on HN would know how to start a fire from scratch. It's almost impossible for me to believe that even 1% of HN readers can start a friction fire.
And then you'd have people who learned in some outdoor survival course, etc. Obviously this will vary from country to country, but surely it's higher than 1%?
"The software even received a B grade on a core Wharton School MBA course, prompting business school deans across the world to convene emergency faculty meetings on their future." A transcript of those meetings would be worth reading. How far are we from "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 with passive-aggressive set to low?"
There is no "ai" revolution and nothing is being transformed. Please enough of this already.
The appearance of LLMs has been the strangest phenomenon. If course not everyone agrees, but I feel like I'm watching the arrival of the automobile and am having people say to me "It's loud, it's slow and it breaks down often. There's nothing to see here. It's just a fad.".
Just about everyone in tech I know in person in their 40s and above, believe this will be the biggest thing since the internet. People who have been in tech long enough to actually see transformative technologies arrive - People who saw the rise of the web, and dotcom bubble, and open source, and mobile w/ app stores... They all are looking at this and saying this is gonna be huge.
And for the most part the people pushing how big it isn't going to be mostly seem to be in their 20s and 30s who haven't really lived through a tech revolution who are saying it's not much, and over hyped. People who have grown up during the hype bubble, where grifters have been hocking crypto or NFTs or rug pull du jour seem to be least excited. As one of the people in the older category, I'm starting to think another casualty of the hype bubble era is lots of technologists (especially younger) now have trouble recognizing revolutionary technology.
In the end, one of these two camps will be wrong. Each assumes it will be the other. It's just incredible to see the split in opinion.
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Note: The internet is large enough that there are obviously people who are outliers to the above categories on the internet, but the general trend seems to hold.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure we do. In the Boy Scouts for example, though I just learned it from a book. I suspect a large percentage of people on HN would know how to start a fire from scratch.
> I suspect a large percentage of people on HN would know how to start a fire from scratch. It's almost impossible for me to believe that even 1% of HN readers can start a friction fire.