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And in this story he claims that abacus use is mechanical and rids you of having to "know" numbers or approximate methods or understanding anything about the computation and why answers come out as they do. You're just executing steps and the more complex the computation, the more steps you do with no understanding whatsoever. So the opposite thesis from TFA.

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It's not really an opposing thesis.

The moral of the story is that his opponent became married to the use of the abacus and convinced of its superiority and that led to an overreliance on it and inflexible thinking.

The thesis of the TFA is that the abacus can be a great tool for teaching arithmetic and number sense. It doesn't argue that it's the only thing you'll ever need and you should use other tools.

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