while I generally agree on his open weight stances, I lost all respect in that moment, everyone of these people are so out of touch
He said „The majority of the kids shouldn't learn”, not everybody. I listened to that pod and was under the impression that he wants to be portrayed as a "grounded" person and i didn't find his takes to be out of touch.
But IME, not having the knowledge is a major handicap. I did eventually learn essentially the full multiplication table with speedy recall and it _is_ useful in day-to-day life. I think its basic numeracy on a par with literacy if you ever have to do basics like compare prices for consumer goods, sanity check claimed facts/statistics, etc. I don’t think those skills go away when you have AI anymore than they do when you can “trust” Amazon to do the price math for you.
The memorization means that you can extrapolate the more complex concepts. If you don't have the very basics, what are you even going to extrapolate on?
It does not mean that. It means you can parrot a number if it came from the memorized set.
How has this enabled you to engage in higher-level thinking instead of syntax correctness?
(I saw this pattern first hand with 100s of students while teaching intro cs)
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my current favorite definition for The Singularity is the point at which humans give up critical thinking and have decided deferring to Ai is the better idea, social media being a stepping stone on that path that primed us for the outsourcing
much of the commentary under this submission has me thinking we are well on our way in this journey
I once had a roommate who I encouraged to divide our grocery bill by 2 in his head for splitting the bill, by the end of the year he was quick and accurate.
You can definitely get past algebra without knowing your times tables, but algebra isn't going to help you in the checkout line to make sure you received the correct amount of change and bought the correct number of goods.
practice makes perfect, exercise your brain like your body