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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

I can’t imagine how many shortcuts I would have taken as a kid/teen or stressed uni student if AI were an option.

I can see even a well-meaning student stuck in this aspirational cycle of “I’ll do it myself next time, but right now I just want to catch up.”

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The kid motivation is not the knowledge but the grade, in all subjects but the few that interest them.

Until that will chance the any and all shortcuts will be used, because the goal of the kid is to:

* get grades high enough to keep parents happy * do fun stuff

The motivation to get knowledge for something other than your own hobbies/curiosity only comes when you need to start paying the bills and get a job

Agreed. Anyone advocating for heavy AI use in primary and secondary school education obviously doesn't remember their own motivations at that age.

I never cheated, but it's far too high a bar to expect adolescents to be able to restrain themselves from a magic answer machine.

And the more they use it, the further they're going to fall behind in the basics (being able to do math, read, and write).

That’s one of the tragedies of AI to me. I fear that apart from everything else, it will make us collectively stupid and lazy.

I see this everywhere, with people seemingly losing the ability to use the tiniest amount of intellect or mental effort, if only AI can give something that vaguely looks like it might be the answer. Even if the output is great and AI is a great force for the better, and we will all share in its glorious outputs - we’ll degenerate into a lazy, stupid mass unable to reliably count our own fingers.

And that’s a future to be afraid of.

I laughed at the idea of Wall-E as a kid. At least the "humans give up all autonomy and wheel around in sci-fi carts served by an AI" (as a 10YO I was neutral to the environmentalist message).

Now, 20 years later, I see the underpinnings of this being formed in real time. I did not heed the warnings.

This definitely would have been me.

I burned 100s of hours into my 400 level classes, some of those hours were completely wasted on things that I could never figure out how to get them to work.

Hell im taking shortcuts now as a fully grown adult; just because it is so _so easy_, and I absolutely see my skills atrophy.

It’s terrible.

The wrong assumption is that you had any skills before that. But what you (and nearly all of us did) was using other sources to generate work. You looked up stuff online, asked a colleague who did this before and so on. Then simply fitted you heard into what you were doing. Now the source is one place and you are romanticizing former you.

There were certainly integral solving validators online when I took calculus in high school. At some point I gave up and just used that, because “the money is in web application development, I don’t need that calculus stuff”.

Big regret.

Edit: For reference, the regret came when I tried to do some RF related projects on the side. Those projects would likely have gone somewhere if I put some effort into even the basic calculus from high school.

I have never needed calculus since leaving university, nearly 40 year ago. If you're not in hard engineering, you probably won't (and if you are, you'll get to use all the computer assisting tools you want).

Math in general is something that you don't need to know until you need to know it, the problem with "just in time" learning is that if you don't already know it then you won't even be able to know when it's needed and which specific bits of math you need to learn for the specific situation you find yourself in.

If you don't know math, you often won't be able to even realize when math is needed.

There's a Steve Yegge quote about this:

> You'll gradually realize that your math deficiencies aren't just something that you might need to beef up on if you ever "need to"; you'll see that virtually every problem space has a mathematical modeling component that you were blissfully unaware of until Done, and Gets Things Smart gal points it out to you and says, "There's an infinitely smarter approach, which by the way I implemented over the weekend." You stare slack-jawed for a little while, and then she says: "Here's a ball. Why don't you go bounce it?"

Yeah, that's true, and I've been in that situation. Unfortunately the math I was missing was not calculus or anything I had exposure to in school, or any actual experience in practical application. You can't know everything.

If you overly rely on the computer assistance during the learning stage, there are fundamental principles you won't get a firm grasp on, and then you'll be at a disadvantage if you need it later. As someone who did use calculus after school, I'm glad I actually learned the subject.

You're right that most people don't need to know calculus in their lives, but to my knowledge calculus also isn't generally required to get through college/university for most people, so it's fair to assume that the people in the course are there because they need or want to learn it. When I was a TA for calculus, most of my students were pre-med, engineers, or in other sciences.

That's wishful thinking. I have been placed into professional situations where I needed calculus and, as I found out to my sorrow, all the CAS software packages in the world wouldn't have helped because I didn't have/remember enough math fundamentals. The CAS cannot provide any kind of answer if you don't know how to ask it the right questions.

Calculus can get pretty heavy, but I really value the comfort it gave me of the concepts of velocity and acceleration, (not to speak of higher orders) of which I am sure I wouldn’t understand nearly as well without the calculus background. I’m sure for most of HN velocity and acceleration, etc seem like super basic concepts, but I just don’t think I could apply the mental models as easily as before I took calculus.

> if you are, you'll get to use all the computer assisting tools you want

I've done work on fluid simulations. It sure would have been nice to understand the buttons being pushed so I can better validate what's going on.

And I think I did well in calculus. Just not "mastery of multi-variable calculus to transform fluid dynamics formulas into software" well.

In 2004 I had a program on my TI-89 "Calculus Made Easy". It would do basically everything AND show your work.

Someone gave it to me about 2/3's of the way through Calc 1. I truly regret having become dependent on it. I studied enough to know roughly what I was doing but not enough to not be dependent.

I suspect learning with AI is the same sort of thing. You're learning, but you're not deep learning .

I read a quote that I think is analogous to AI usage. Knowledge cannot be transferred it can only be learned.

As a counterpoint, I am self-studying physics while relearning the calculus and math I took in undergrad.

AI has been immensely valuable, but I suspect only so because I am intrinsically motivated to learn this material. When I make errors in solving problems due to a confusion in understanding, it can help me work through the problem the same way a TA would, without having to wait and where I can ask a million clarifying questions until the idea is concrete in my mind.

Could I abuse it to just answer questions for me? Absolutely. But since that’s at odds with my actual goal, I don’t.

I use simple algebra and occasionally a bit of geometry estimating and managing construction projects, but I’ve never found it necessary to find an exact solution for an area under a curve or the rate of change of a function at a specific point.

I don’t know how to solve an integral, but I understand that an electricity meter or flowmeter (gas and air) is performing continuous integration to keep track of total power usage or fluid flow. That’s good enough for me, and if I had to I could approximate a solution with a piece of paper, a pair of scissors, and a reasonably accurate scale; or trapezoids and graph paper.

Re: your edit, calculus would definitely come in handy if you had an interest in RF. The good thing is, you could still learn it :)

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