Comment by kuschku
11 hours ago
> Remove GPS and people will have to figure out how to read maps again.
It's not GPS, but turn-by-turn navigation. Remove that and people's spatial understanding of their environment improves significantly, and this improvement persists even long after the experiment, and they'll even be able to use turn-by-turn navigation better.
Which aligns with Anthropic's reports that people are able to use Claude better if they understand their own codebase better, and that increased Claude usage leads to reduced understanding of the codebase.
When society replaced walking as the primary mode of transportation with driving, people started going to the gym to keep their body in shape.
We should probably be training spatial perception (replaced by GPS), understanding of algorithms and data structures (replaced by coding agents), too.
Counterpoint, lots of people learn to navigate the areas where they spend their time by following GPS directions repeatedly, and can drive regular routes without them (though they're still useful for routing around unknown traffic issues).
There is a giant difference in retention and learning between following even a printed turn by turn guide and using a modern gps.
This is anecdotally obviously as well as proven by studies. You don't learn the route or the neighborhood when you just "mindlessly" respond to "turn left" directions.
I understand that it feels that way, but this has been widely studied and it's just not the same.
When you repeatedly follow directions, you'll learn how to take that path.
But when you repeatedly read a map, or walk an area on foot, you'll also learn the roads and areas you're not taking nearby, and learning the spatial relationships between these places.
A lot of learning happens through the mistakes we make, because they teach us a lot more about our environment. Whether that's a physical landscape or a codebase.
When you search for a bug, you'll look at maybe one or two files that are related to that bug, but also 10-20 files that aren't. You won't consciously remember the content of those 20 files, but your mind is building a map of their spatial and logical relations, which helps you the next time.