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Comment by notyourwork | Hacker News Reader

Although I agree, convincing children to learn using that rationalization won’t work.

Yes it does. Plenty of children accept "you won't always have (tool)" as a reason for learning.

All adults were once children and there are plenty of adults who cannot read beyond a middle school reading level or balance a simple equation. This has been a problem before we ever gave them GPTs. It stands to reason it will only worsen in a future dominated by them.

“You won’t always have a calculator” became moderately false to laughably false as I went from middle to high school. Every task I will ever do for money will be done on a computer.

I’m still garbage at arithmetic, especially mental math, and it really hasn’t inhibited my career in any way.

It's pretty annoying in customer service when someone handing you back change has difficulty doing the math. There's been many times doing simple arithmetic in my head has been helpful, including times when my hands were occupied.

I don’t know where you live, but I haven’t used nor carried cash on me for at least 5 years now. Everything either takes card or just tap using your phone/watch. Everything. Parking meters, cashiers, online shopping, filling up your car. I live in a “third world” country too.

Good for you? I use cash half the time. For one thing, I'm not tracked for every single purchase.

I also love (and own) goats and use cash for most purchases.

But I bet you'd know if some calculated number was way too far-off.

I'm no Turing or Ramanujan, but my opinion is that knowing how the operations work, and as example understanding how the area under a curve is calculated, allows you to guesstimate whether numbers are close enough in terms of magnitude to what you are calculating, without needing to be exact in figures.

It is shocking how often I have looked at a spreadsheet, eyeballed the number of rows and the approximate average of numbers in there and figured out there's a problem with a =choose-your-forumula(...) getting the range wrong.

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