Comment by pocketarc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pocketarc | Hacker News Reader

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It's a shame as well because this stuff -is- important. One could make the argument that this represents a shift in traditional education, and schools will have to stop relying so much on rote memorization, but the reason you need to learn this stuff is so that it's there with you, guiding you through everything you do in your life. Not just "oh I'll look it up", but actually knowing it and carrying it with you in your "context".

The standard education system is incredible for raising the baseline level of knowledge of everyone in a society. I can talk about concepts like "atoms" or "bacteria" or "black holes" with anyone, and they'll know what they are - even if their knowledge of those subjects isn't in depth. Things that 100 years ago would've been cutting edge research, are base education today that virtually the entire population has studied.

That comes from schooling, and it's so important to commit to memory. Without that background knowledge, your understanding of everything around you will be limited in ways you won't even be aware of.

> I can talk about concepts like "atoms" or "bacteria" or "black holes" with anyone, and they'll know what they are - even if their knowledge of those subjects isn't in depth.

I'm not convinced this is an unalloyed good. Knowing that a disease is caused by "bacteria" instead of "demons" isn't really helpful if you don't have a deep understanding of exactly what bacteria is. See, for example, all of the people who want antibiotics whenever they're sick for any reason. We've just replaced one set of weird beliefs in the general populace with another and given it a veneer of science.

But more people know what bacteria are at a baseline level and what they do with diseases than before when all we had were demons/bad humors/etc.

There are functionally illiterate people too in modern day and the average reading level is still elementary school level, but that's vastly better than before when the average person couldn't read at all.

> Knowing that a disease is caused by "bacteria" instead of "demons" isn't really helpful if you don't have a deep understanding of exactly what bacteria is.

This is a poor example. Even an incomplete image of the germ theory of disease is a massive improvement over thinking illness is caused by demons. An extremely superficial understanding of bacteria as "microscopic organisms which can make you sick" gives good justification why people should do things like wash their hands, cover their mouth when coughing, and not lick the railing on a subway.

Knowing the difference between bacteria being living organisms and viruses being not-quite-alive does not qualify as a "deep understanding" though.

Further, the presence of people misunderstanding something that most of the population knows pretty well in no way makes teaching that subject to the population bad. Your assertion would require that believing demons cause sickness actually has benefits we've lost.

The memorization vs reasoning limit may soon be passed with some of these AIs. Really need to do the full controlled testing environment set up to have any chance of avoiding it. No calculators and no home work would be the next step. Maybe we will have a generation of mentats?

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