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Comment by pranavj | Hacker News Reader

Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think.

We're heading toward AI-first systems whether we like it or not. The interesting question isn't "does AI reduce brain connectivity for essay writing" - it's how we redesign education, work, and products around the assumption that everyone has access to powerful AI. The people who figure out how to leverage AI for higher-order thinking will massively outperform those still doing everything manually.

Cognitive debt is real if you're using AI to avoid thinking. But it's cognitive leverage if you're using AI to think faster and about bigger problems.

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> Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think.

Over-reliance on calculators does make you worse at math. I (shamefully) skated through Calculus 3 by just typing everything into my TI-89. Now as an adult I have no recollection of anything I did in that class. I don't even remember how to use the TI-89, so it was basically a complete waste of my time. But I still remember the more basic calculus concepts from all the equations I solved by hand in Calc 1 and 2.

I'm not saying "calculators bad" but misusing them in the learning process is a risk.

>But I still remember the more basic calculu

All this is saying that more basic things are easier to remember than more complex things and without further evidence is very very limited in predictive power.

The amount of delusion about "bigger problem" You won't be able to solve bigger problems if you don't understand the details and nuances of how things are made.

And yet people complain that management is out of touch, MBA driven businesses are out of touch, PE firms are out of touch, designers are out of touch with product, look at the touch screen cars (made by people who have never driven one) with reality. I can't even.

The real question is whether one should live at all in a world devoid of meaning, where the only source of meaning available to is have a fake job with a better title than the next guy and a big number in the fake account.

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