> No one to day learns that anymore. The vast, vast majority have no idea and I don’t think people are dumber because of it.
Arguably, the kind of person who was helped by learning to do that by hand still learns to do it by hand, but because of curiosity rather than because a teacher told them to.
I remember being thirteen and trying to brute force methods for computing the square root. I didn’t have the tools yet to figure out how to do it in any systematic way, and the internet wasn’t at a point yet where it would have even occurred to me to just search online. Wikipedia wouldn’t exist for another two years.
I probably finally looked it up at some point in high school. I’m not sure exactly when, but I remember spending a lot of time practicing doing a few iterations in my head as a parlor trick (not that I ever had the opportunity to show it off).
If I were thirteen and curious about that now, I’d probably just ask ChatGPT. Then I’d have a whole follow up conversation about how it was derived. It would spit a lot of intimidating LaTeX at me, but unlike with Wikipedia, I’d be able to ask it to explain what those things meant.
This is the thing I don’t get when people talk about LLMs’ impact on education. Everybody focuses on cheating, like learning is inherently a chore that all students hate and must be carefully herded into doing despite themselves.
But that’s a problem with school, not learning. If your actual, self-motivated goal is to learn something, LLM’s are an incredible tool, not a hindrance.