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Comment by ecf | Hacker News Reader

A whole generation is going to start relying on AI and never do any actual writing or critical thinking for themselves. This is a problem when the average reading level for half of American adults is already below that of an 8th grader.

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School curriculums need to adjust how they are creating assignments.

I had a great assignment in college where the professor gave you all the materials required. You could only use the various articles/essays/news clippings he gave you, and you wrote an essay based on that.

Assignments that don't rely on the internet for research would do a much better job teaching the material and forcing students to read the material. Students wouldn't be able to SparkNote or ChatGPT an essay.

In my country most exams are in person with no phone/internet.

You can cheat all year if you want for homework &co, they're just here to help you get good for the monthly/yearly exams

I know this is a bit of a shortcut but have pocket calculators rendered mental math extinct? I see language models as calculators for text. True, the analogy isn't perfect, as you don't need to double-check your calculator's output.

Adding to this idea: perhaps learning how to "calculate" with text, or treating human semantic output as a programmable medium is the entire point of LLMs, as an evolution of our communication capabilities. For instance, I think the dramatic depreciation of low-quality text, various summarization techniques, etc. will act as a filter / evolutionary pressure on improving the quality and value of intellectual output.

> I know this is a bit of a shortcut but have pocket calculators rendered mental math extinct?

I've witness several cashiers getting their phone out to calculate basic change. Things like 1 euros - 20ct

So yes definitely

Well, I said extinct, but I wouldn't bet that on average mental arithmetic skills went down, perhaps they have, on the other hand it freed people up for learning about more complex operations and allowing them to perform those operations where otherwise they would be too costly.

Why not mitigate both, force people to learn the basics, allow them to use the tools later.

It isn't mutually esclusive

At least in math they didn't learn those operations though, because they don't have a strong foundation in the basics to understand how it works. Mental arithmetic is often indicative of at least a somewhat stronger number sense, and this shows at upper level math courses. Even at the high school level, where I had to struggle with kids who were way too reliant on a calculator and couldn't do basic math because of it, and thus struggled to do anything more advanced or abstract.

> I've witness several cashiers getting their phone out to calculate basic change.

Don't point-of-sale devices do that already? The cashier inputs the total you gave them, and the point-of-sale device shows the exact change on its screen (and releases the cash drawer lock). It might seem useless, but it reduces the risk of an incorrect mental calculation (like R$ 100 - R$ 77 => R$ 33 instead of R$ 23). Some even display which coins and notes, and how many of each, the cashier should get for the change.

While people should be able to calculate basic change in their head, especially if they're working with cash, when I worked in banking, we had explicit policies for cashiers to never ever do that in their head, no matter how simple, because the error rates are meaningfully different. A tired person in a hurry will occasionally get a brainfart and calculate something like 80-33 = 57 or pay out 200 as 20 times 20, so the policy was that you have to get the machine to calculate even the simplest stuff always.

When doing a math problem on an exam, I would always type in very simple intermediate calculations. Avoiding silly mistakes was part of the reason, but it was also so I could look through the calculator history when checking my work and see where each number came from. I would probably be inclined to do the same if I was a bank teller.

Being able to do basic math is definitely good, but I don't think that's nearly as bad as not knowing how to write without an AI. A cashier can reasonably expect to only need to work with a cash register in front of them, but if you can't write, you can't communicate your own ideas. And sometimes in life you are going to need to communicate and support your ideas, not just whatever the AI decides to spit out for that prompt.

I agree, but I'm also certain that using an AI writer will actually teach you to write better - like with art generators, you still need to look at the result and recognize it as good/better, and you form your taste by iterating.

I'm thinking about this from a McLuhanesque perspective, i.e. how the medium will shape the user, and in this case learning to write by going through large amounts of generated writing is just a more efficient way than the regular way (reading, getting own output graded, etc.).

Well, maybe not pocket calculators, but phone calculators for sure.

I figure learning the utility of AI might be more important than critical thinking about why some stories character might be female. Don’t we have more interesting questions for these children to ponder? Plus editing requires critical thinking in a way that is less mechanical than essay writing.

What is the long term historical trend of the average 8th grade reading level when taking in all currently measured groups and taking in considerations in measurement changes?

From looking at the reading assignments my kids were given throughout middle and high school, it seems like the goal of the education system is to eliminate any joy a kid finds in reading. When they were in elementary school, they learned that any book with a silver or gold medallion on the cover was the book equivalent of vegetables. You read it because some adults think it will be good for you.

When I was in high school (late 1980’s), there was a time each week for what they called USSR - undisturbed, sustained, silent reading (in retrospect, USSR is a strange acronym). They didn’t care what we read and there were no assignments associated with the reading material. The goal was to choose something you want to read and read it, 45 minutes at a time.

Edit: I just looked it up and it turns out it wasn’t a local thing. I had the acronym wrong though - it’s uninterrupted sustained silent reading.

http://ejournal.unp.ac.id/index.php/jelt/article/view/101466

We had "silent reading" in elementary school (I remember it for sure in 6th grade, and I think earlier as well) and I remember most kids finding something they liked (at the very least they weren't goofing around), then middle school and high school is when the required reading started killing interest for everyone.

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