How good software makes us stupid
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Exactly the same things were said of printing - conservatives said that we would lose the ability to remember things when all knowledge could be looked up in a book.
Exactly the same things were said of slide rules and calculators - that we would lose the ability to reason as our ability to calculate atrophied.
The obvious debunking of Carr's argument is the incredible level of skill so many computer users exhibit. Obviously we HNers are all aware of how bloody difficult programming is, but we forget just how complex a lot of very ordinary software is. Watch a skilled Photoshop operator or a really good Starcraft player in action and you'll see Carr's hypothesis go down in flames. Something as mundane as Excel is easily more complex than any system in the world just a few decades ago.
Carr is at the bottom of a very long line of dreary, reactionary trolls, cursing that the young people today don't know how easy they've got it, that they're going soft with their newfangled tools.
Couldn't have put it better myself. He really thinks he's good at being reductive.
cursing that the young people today don't know how easy they've got it
Every generation is sure that these young kids today, with their hair and their clothes, just don't appreciate how hard things used to be. Every generation is wrong about that, of course.
Funny anecdote: for years, my father kept telling me that "when he was a kid, we called our father sir". Made sense, until one day I read a book in which the character's father complained of the exact same thing, but the book was written in 1900.
Actually, they're right -- it's just that in the grand scheme of things, how much easier we have it today than the last generation, is insignificant compared to how hard life is in general. We do have it better, but it doesn't make us dumber because the world still needs smart people to keep it going.
Since you've proved it with your powers of induction. Not saying that you are wrong about the next generation, but you might be.
I've worked with a couple of people who are pretty handy with Vim, process control, Screen, etc. Watching them in their workflow, the hand movements, is mesmerising in the same way a dance can be. Purely anecdotal but they also have IQs that would be around the genius level.
People who have it probably have more mental energy to devote to other things - which would be a huge advantage - but that's not the sane as 'unprecedented insight'.
Alfred North Whitehead, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
In the real world people with helpful software can take advantage of their time saved by tackling even harder classes of problems that people with unhelpful software never even had the time to get to.
As far as I am concerned, the more rote memorization that things machines can take off my brain's to-do list, the more time+space I can devote to higher-level thinking.
As an example, high school kids learn calculus via rote memorization (at least this is how we learned it). We learned what the derivative of x^2 was, etc. but not necessarily what the derivative is. The majority of testing doesn't really focus on the concept, and it should.
As I got into college I understood the concepts behind mathematical thought and everything started making sense. So I guess I'm in the "less rote memorization" camp.
I agree up to a point, but someone who understands lots of grammar but has no vocabulary is just as poor a communicator as someone with lots of vocabulary but no grammar, or perhaps even worse. I am concerned that modern trends in education could create a generation with lots of ideas but no practical experience or background information to put anything in context. They can't look everything up every time, and they are going to need a certain level of knowledge to appreciate the significance of the ideas they are learning.
People who are lazy, and wouldn't bother memorizing a route anyway, will be helped by something like SatNav or Google Maps -- and yes, probably use them as a crutch. But it's better than them not being able to get anywhere. Me? Having instant access to a birds-eye view of every road in my city (Los Angeles) has given me the tools I need to memorize many routes, and is one of the reasons I can drive around this city so effectively.
Technology is a tool. Use it how you will.
The question isn't: "Would a London cabby using satnav software without having learned the city do better than a London cabby who learned the city?"
The question is: "Would a London cabby using satnav software do better than one without - both having learned the city?"
In other words: Assuming good satnav software that knew current traffic conditions and historic average speeds of the roads, with an easy interface to offer multiple routing options that are easily changeable (for instance) - wouldn't that be helpful to a cabby vs. a cabby that didn't have that extra tool?
I don't think it's fair to compare human+tech vs. human-only performance with no tech. Better to compare them with tech, since the whole point is that technology is available and used.
A ship that can carry a settler across the ocean is a prosthetic foot that extends his powers of travel. Eye-glasses are prosthetic eyes that extend your power of vision.
With the internet we are basically building improved books with better lookup features, they both are still prosthetic memory storage communicating information visually.
I'm not a triumphalist about it either. Technology gives but also takes.
I agree it's new to be measuring this in milliseconds and discussing fiber optics rather than hours and the transatlantic-cable (or days and the pony express).
If we're in the long view and talking about evolution, I disagree that the underlying process driving this has changed.
I guess it's just a discussion of the merits between looking at the position of a car vs. one of its derivatives such as acceleration. You need to know all of them to predict its future position and there are possibly an infinite number of derivatives.
I'm interested to know what causes this: whether it's due to the discipline (the thrill of navigating a puzzle, like a unix operator gets), or the institution (feeling like you're part of something important).
I had a freaky conversation with a driver last winter about messaging systems. He knew all the right questions after I told him what I did, and made comments about the particular technologies. It came out that we were working on the opposite ends of a big integration between firms. He was unhappy with that life and very comfortable at the prospect of spending the rest of his days driving a cab around.
Yes, I'm not as good at arithmetic as a technical person from 50 or even 30 years ago. But I'm freed from having to do all of that myself so I can focus energy to what I actually care about.