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Comment by toenail | Hacker News Reader

And math skills are going to collapse from calculator reliance.

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...

> we've been in a critical thinking deficit for decades and decades.

Compared to when?

"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.

I have heard stories of cashiers being incapable of giving correct change. So yes it has happened.

I guarantee you that it's always been the case.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Math skills are at their lowest point ever in modern society, and many are still advocating for the reduction in reliance on calculators for this reason.

https://ivyleaguecenter.org/2024/03/12/over-reliance-on-calc...

Would you advocate for the removal of calculators to fix this problem?

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.

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.

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.

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.”

> 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

This would be quite the zinger if this wasn't actually true.

lol that actually happened

so many folks struggle to calculate a 20% tip in their head

llms have absolutely made education much more complicated for educators

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