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Comment by RandallBrown | Hacker News Reader

This isn't even about having poor dexterity, it's about having poor sewing skills. I would guess that most people's fine motor skills are actually better now than in the "old" days just because of how much people type on phones and computers.

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I would guess that our "motor" skills are as good or better, but that our "tactile feedback sensing and response" is far worse. Not only are we not training it at all, we are abusing it with weird signals all the time in the form of vibration motors.

I would separately guess that "tactile feedback and response" is harder to find and more important for a surgeon than "fine motor control", though obviously they do need both.

By that logic, we're all far better piano players too.

Skills and neural pathways have training and use specificity. Even (or especially) slightly different practices can have surprisingly little transfer, or even interference.

That's not the logic I was using. Using your piano example, I was saying that people would be better at learning to play the piano today, because our fingers are already used to pressing keys.

Typing on real keyboards with all ten fingers is quite a different engagement of dexterity than dabbing at a screen with two thumbs, or just an index finger.

To me, typing on a phone is a lot easier to learn in terms of dexterity than threading a needle.

I'm not convinced. My mother can thread a needle just fine, but the keyboard on an iPhone is very tiny, and she often produces incorrect keystrokes.

Next time I am intoxicated, I should (unscientifically) test this by comparing the difficulty of threading a needle with that of sending an accurate and correct text message

I have found the position of my finger in relation to a touchscreen has a substantially weaker correlation with successfully pressing the button I want than the position of the thread in relation to a needle's eye has with successfully threading the needle.

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