Comment by falcor84
5 hours ago
> Augmentation always leads to atrophy.
That's a very bold claim. As a small example let's look at calculators - I remember a lot of claims that having access to calculators would make people's brains atrophy and they'll never be able to do actual math, but what I'm seeing in myself and most people around me is that we're using calculators (and more mathematical software) to tackle significantly more complex problems than people would be able to do if they rejected calculators.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that kids should be using a calculator from the first day of pre-school, but I do absolutely think that using them as later on as augmentation is clearly beneficial.
Writing atrophied our memory, calculators atrohpied our mental arithmetic, GPS nagivation atrophied our navigation ability, LLMs are atrophying our ability to program.
When you externalise part of your brain in a new tool, like a calculator, that part of your brain is no longer needed and atrophies.
If the complexity of your mathematical problems was down to arithmetic then your problems were not at all complex.
A small example is doing NPV (Net Present Value) calculations to compare the benefits from alternative projects/investments. It's just basic arithmetic, but is annoying to do by hand. I'm sure that if we had to do them with just pen and paper, we would do significantly fewer of them, and with a lot less detailed scenarios than we can with tools.
a lot of people indeed cannot do even simple calculations by themselves. Your example just adds to the point.
"A lot of people" never could do simple calculations, regardless of calculators. But if you're interested in actual figures over time, this data from nationsreportcard.gov would probably be the best longitudinal data source we have about the US, showing a strong general increase in mathematical scores, both for 9 and 13 year-olds, from when calculators started being introduced in the 70s and until the 2010s. Note that there's a recent decline over the last decade, partially explained by the pandemic, but even with it, current scores are higher than what they were in the 70s.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per...
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/mathematics/scores-per...