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Comment by blitzar | Hacker News Reader

How did we solve this when calculators came along and ruined peoples ability to do mental arithmetic and use slide rulers?

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We banned it.

Yes, that's what we did and are still doing. Most grade schools don't allow calculators on basic arithmetic classes. Colleges don't integrate WolframAlpha into Calculus 101 exams. etc.

Which is extremely stupid.

I want my math graduates to be skilled at using CAS systems. Yes, even in Calculus 1.

The lack of computer access for teaching math which objectively is supercharged by computation is a massive disservice to millions of individuals who could have used those CAS systems.

I don't want my engineers solving equations by hand. I especially don't want anyone who claims to be a "statistician" to not be skilled in Python (or historically, R)

The way this worked in my mathematical education is that you can't have a computer solve the equations at the level of the thing you are learning, but you can let the computer do all the stuff that's a level below what you're learning. This way, you first learn it at a fundamental level, and then with that foundation you are permitted to use computers to do that stuff as you learn something new.

The impact LLMs have on education is arguably orders of magnitude higher than calculators

Not really, its just calculators for all the other classes.

And tbh, lots of people historically would have loved a calculator that could write an essay about shakespeare or help code a simple game.

It's how you approach it.

You tell it to act as a tutor, it'll act as one. Tell it to solve your homework in the form of a poem, it'll do that.

That's not just a calculator, even though it's just calculating, just as much as a computer isn't just a voltage switcher, even thought it's just switching voltages.

Sure but even if a graphics calculator could recite poetry, its application to the maths class is to crunch numbers.

You can ask chat gpt to pretend to be Julius Caesar, it still probably shouldnt be in an english exam.

I was allowed to use calculators during my A-level Math/Physics/Chem exams, but knowing what to punch in was half the battle. Hell, they even give you most of the formulae on the very first page of the exam sheet, but again, application of that knowledge is the hard part.

Point being, the fundamentals matter. I can't do mental arithmetic very well these days because it's been years since I've practiced, but I know how it works in the first place and can do it if need be. How is a kid learning geometry or calculus supposed to get by and learn to spot the patterns that make sense and the ones that don't without first knowing the fundamentals underlaying the more complex concepts?

When I took multivariable calculus in tyool 2007, we were forbidden from using our calculators. "You can use a slide rule or an abacus" and I did indeed bring the former to one exam, but of course the problems were written in such a way that you didn't actually need it.

the difference is using my calculator in real life works ALL the time and is cheap. I can depend on it. And i still need to think about the broader problem even if i have a calculator. The calculator only removes the mindless rote memorization of the steps needed to do arithmetic, etc.

My calculator doesn’t depend on a fancy AI model in the cloud. It’s not randomly rate limited during peak times due to capacity constraints. It’s not expensive to use, whereas the good LLM models are.

Did i mention calculators are actually deterministic? In other, always reliable. It’s difficult to compare the two. One gives a false sense of accomplishment because it’s say 80% reliable, and the other is always 100% reliable.

Outsourcing a specific task to a deterministic tool you own is clearly not the same thing as outsourcing all of your cognition to a probabilistic tool owned by people with ongoing political and revenue motives that don’t align with your own.

We didn't, people who aren't good at doing math in their head are numerically illiterate and make bad decisions with money etc.

When it's general thinking we've trained people not to have to do anymore, it's going to be dire.

It sounds like you’re implying LLMs are to everything what calculators were to math, if so you are sorely mistaken

He's implying, rightfully so, that we've repeatedly adapted to various technologies that fundamentally threatened the then status quo of education. We'll do it again.

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