5 ms·

How good software makes us stupid

21 points by _grrr 16y ago

cageface 16y ago
We're heading towards a mental man-machine symbiosis. Think of all your gadgetry as a co-processor.
- metamemetics 16y ago
  We're already there. Man has always existed in that symbiosis since he's been man. Man is defined by his exceptional tool use, so I will claim man has never not existed in symbiosis with machine and been just "man". A ship that can carry a settler across the ocean is a prosthetic foot that extends his powers of travel. Eye-glasses are prosthetic eyes that extend your power of vision. With the internet we are basically building improved books with better lookup features, they both are still prosthetic memory storage communicating information visually.
  - cageface 16y ago
    True, but I think we're crossing one of those historical barriers where a quantitative difference becomes so large that it becomes a qualitative difference. The kind of symbiosis you achieve with devices that connect you instantly to every other person on the planet and to which you can offload all kinds of calculation and information gathering is truly new. I'm not a triumphalist about it either. Technology gives but also takes.
    - metamemetics 16y ago
      Well "instantly" here probably means a response time of ~ 100-3000ms depending on the amount of processing being offloaded for an internet service. I agree it's new to be measuring this in milliseconds and discussing fiber optics rather than hours and the transatlantic-cable (or days and the pony express). If we're in the long view and talking about evolution, I disagree that the underlying process driving this has changed. I guess it's just a discussion of the merits between looking at the position of a car vs. one of its derivatives such as acceleration. You need to know all of them to predict its future position and there are possibly an infinite number of derivatives.
alexandros 16y ago
Socrates was grumbling that writing things down was impairing our ability to learn things by heart. As far as I am concerned, the more rote memorization that things machines can take off my brain's to-do list, the more time+space I can devote to higher-level thinking.
- integraleq 16y ago
  I would agree with you, but I think there is something to be said for the kind of mental dexterity it takes to do higher-level thinking while having a detailed view of what you are trying to accomplish. I would not want to give up all lower level cognition though. To each his own I guess.
  - okaramian 16y ago
    I think understanding the concept of the lower level stuff without having to have rote memorization is important. As an example, high school kids learn calculus via rote memorization (at least this is how we learned it). We learned what the derivative of x^2 was, etc. but not necessarily what the derivative is. The majority of testing doesn't really focus on the concept, and it should. As I got into college I understood the concepts behind mathematical thought and everything started making sense. So I guess I'm in the "less rote memorization" camp.
- Chris_Newton 16y ago
  > As far as I am concerned, the more rote memorization that things machines can take off my brain's to-do list, the more time+space I can devote to higher-level thinking. I agree up to a point, but someone who understands lots of grammar but has no vocabulary is just as poor a communicator as someone with lots of vocabulary but no grammar, or perhaps even worse. I am concerned that modern trends in education could create a generation with lots of ideas but no practical experience or background information to put anything in context. They can't look everything up every time, and they are going to need a certain level of knowledge to appreciate the significance of the ideas they are learning.
  - 16y ago
metamemetics 16y ago
>"Months later - the people who had the unhelpful software actually could remember how to do the puzzle, and the people with the helpful software couldn't." In the real world people with helpful software can take advantage of their time saved by tackling even harder classes of problems that people with unhelpful software never even had the time to get to.
daychilde 16y ago
But they've missed the true comparison. The question isn't: "Would a London cabby using satnav software without having learned the city do better than a London cabby who learned the city?" The question is: "Would a London cabby using satnav software do better than one without - both having learned the city?" In other words: Assuming good satnav software that knew current traffic conditions and historic average speeds of the roads, with an easy interface to offer multiple routing options that are easily changeable (for instance) - wouldn't that be helpful to a cabby vs. a cabby that didn't have that extra tool? I don't think it's fair to compare human+tech vs. human-only performance with no tech. Better to compare them with tech, since the whole point is that technology is available and used.
schwanksta 16y ago
All of these dire predictions of better technology dumbing us down are getting tiresome. People who are lazy, and wouldn't bother memorizing a route anyway, will be helped by something like SatNav or Google Maps -- and yes, probably use them as a crutch. But it's better than them not being able to get anywhere. Me? Having instant access to a birds-eye view of every road in my city (Los Angeles) has given me the tools I need to memorize many routes, and is one of the reasons I can drive around this city so effectively. Technology is a tool. Use it how you will.
jdietrich 16y ago
I am bloody sick of that troll Nicholas Carr. Exactly the same things were said of printing - conservatives said that we would lose the ability to remember things when all knowledge could be looked up in a book. Exactly the same things were said of slide rules and calculators - that we would lose the ability to reason as our ability to calculate atrophied. The obvious debunking of Carr's argument is the incredible level of skill so many computer users exhibit. Obviously we HNers are all aware of how bloody difficult programming is, but we forget just how complex a lot of very ordinary software is. Watch a skilled Photoshop operator or a really good Starcraft player in action and you'll see Carr's hypothesis go down in flames. Something as mundane as Excel is easily more complex than any system in the world just a few decades ago. Carr is at the bottom of a very long line of dreary, reactionary trolls, cursing that the young people today don't know how easy they've got it, that they're going soft with their newfangled tools.
- sabat 16y ago
  I am bloody sick of that troll Nicholas Carr. Couldn't have put it better myself. He really thinks he's good at being reductive. cursing that the young people today don't know how easy they've got it Every generation is sure that these young kids today, with their hair and their clothes, just don't appreciate how hard things used to be. Every generation is wrong about that, of course.
  - edanm 16y ago
    "Every generation is sure that these young kids today, with their hair and their clothes, just don't appreciate how hard things used to be. Every generation is wrong about that, of course." Funny anecdote: for years, my father kept telling me that "when he was a kid, we called our father sir". Made sense, until one day I read a book in which the character's father complained of the exact same thing, but the book was written in 1900.
  - Qz 16y ago
    Every generation is wrong about that, of course. Actually, they're right -- it's just that in the grand scheme of things, how much easier we have it today than the last generation, is insignificant compared to how hard life is in general. We do have it better, but it doesn't make us dumber because the world still needs smart people to keep it going.
adnam 16y ago
The Knowledge is a very hard test. It can take 3 years to pass, and you need to learn 320 set routes within 6 miles of Charing Cross. My aunt did The Knowledge anf now drives a black cab by day, and a rather expensive Mercedes sports car the rest of the time.
- cturner 16y ago
  Despite the trade protection their firm gets, the money is low, particularly considering outlay, hours and conditions. Yet the quality of the experience is consistently good in a city where service is often poor. I'm interested to know what causes this: whether it's due to the discipline (the thrill of navigating a puzzle, like a unix operator gets), or the institution (feeling like you're part of something important). I had a freaky conversation with a driver last winter about messaging systems. He knew all the right questions after I told him what I did, and made comments about the particular technologies. It came out that we were working on the opposite ends of a big integration between firms. He was unhappy with that life and very comfortable at the prospect of spending the rest of his days driving a cab around.
  - adnam 16y ago
    The money is actually pretty good. You can earn way above the national average, you're your own boss and can work the hours that suit you.
rflrob 16y ago
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. " Alfred North Whitehead, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
slantyyz 16y ago
Perhaps an alternative view: Good software makes the lazy lazier?
djhworld 16y ago
This article makes no real sense, does the author (of the book) have any scientific evidence for any of his claims?
scott_s 16y ago
Give me studies, not arguments. Using tools - and "good software" are just tools - that free us from having to use intelligence for a task allows us to direct that intelligence to other tasks. Yes, I'm not as good at arithmetic as a technical person from 50 or even 30 years ago. But I'm freed from having to do all of that myself so I can focus energy to what I actually care about.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

21 points by _grrr 16y ago

cageface 16y ago

We're heading towards a mental man-machine symbiosis. Think of all your gadgetry as a co-processor.

metamemetics 16y ago
We're already there. Man has always existed in that symbiosis since he's been man. Man is defined by his exceptional tool use, so I will claim man has never not existed in symbiosis with machine and been just "man". A ship that can carry a settler across the ocean is a prosthetic foot that extends his powers of travel. Eye-glasses are prosthetic eyes that extend your power of vision. With the internet we are basically building improved books with better lookup features, they both are still prosthetic memory storage communicating information visually.
- cageface 16y ago
  True, but I think we're crossing one of those historical barriers where a quantitative difference becomes so large that it becomes a qualitative difference. The kind of symbiosis you achieve with devices that connect you instantly to every other person on the planet and to which you can offload all kinds of calculation and information gathering is truly new. I'm not a triumphalist about it either. Technology gives but also takes.
  - metamemetics 16y ago
    Well "instantly" here probably means a response time of ~ 100-3000ms depending on the amount of processing being offloaded for an internet service. I agree it's new to be measuring this in milliseconds and discussing fiber optics rather than hours and the transatlantic-cable (or days and the pony express). If we're in the long view and talking about evolution, I disagree that the underlying process driving this has changed. I guess it's just a discussion of the merits between looking at the position of a car vs. one of its derivatives such as acceleration. You need to know all of them to predict its future position and there are possibly an infinite number of derivatives.

alexandros 16y ago

Socrates was grumbling that writing things down was impairing our ability to learn things by heart. As far as I am concerned, the more rote memorization that things machines can take off my brain's to-do list, the more time+space I can devote to higher-level thinking.

integraleq 16y ago
I would agree with you, but I think there is something to be said for the kind of mental dexterity it takes to do higher-level thinking while having a detailed view of what you are trying to accomplish. I would not want to give up all lower level cognition though. To each his own I guess.
- okaramian 16y ago
  I think understanding the concept of the lower level stuff without having to have rote memorization is important. As an example, high school kids learn calculus via rote memorization (at least this is how we learned it). We learned what the derivative of x^2 was, etc. but not necessarily what the derivative is. The majority of testing doesn't really focus on the concept, and it should. As I got into college I understood the concepts behind mathematical thought and everything started making sense. So I guess I'm in the "less rote memorization" camp.
Chris_Newton 16y ago
> As far as I am concerned, the more rote memorization that things machines can take off my brain's to-do list, the more time+space I can devote to higher-level thinking. I agree up to a point, but someone who understands lots of grammar but has no vocabulary is just as poor a communicator as someone with lots of vocabulary but no grammar, or perhaps even worse. I am concerned that modern trends in education could create a generation with lots of ideas but no practical experience or background information to put anything in context. They can't look everything up every time, and they are going to need a certain level of knowledge to appreciate the significance of the ideas they are learning.
- 16y ago

metamemetics 16y ago

>"Months later - the people who had the unhelpful software actually could remember how to do the puzzle, and the people with the helpful software couldn't." In the real world people with helpful software can take advantage of their time saved by tackling even harder classes of problems that people with unhelpful software never even had the time to get to.

daychilde 16y ago

But they've missed the true comparison. The question isn't: "Would a London cabby using satnav software without having learned the city do better than a London cabby who learned the city?" The question is: "Would a London cabby using satnav software do better than one without - both having learned the city?" In other words: Assuming good satnav software that knew current traffic conditions and historic average speeds of the roads, with an easy interface to offer multiple routing options that are easily changeable (for instance) - wouldn't that be helpful to a cabby vs. a cabby that didn't have that extra tool? I don't think it's fair to compare human+tech vs. human-only performance with no tech. Better to compare them with tech, since the whole point is that technology is available and used.

schwanksta 16y ago

All of these dire predictions of better technology dumbing us down are getting tiresome. People who are lazy, and wouldn't bother memorizing a route anyway, will be helped by something like SatNav or Google Maps -- and yes, probably use them as a crutch. But it's better than them not being able to get anywhere. Me? Having instant access to a birds-eye view of every road in my city (Los Angeles) has given me the tools I need to memorize many routes, and is one of the reasons I can drive around this city so effectively. Technology is a tool. Use it how you will.

jdietrich 16y ago

I am bloody sick of that troll Nicholas Carr. Exactly the same things were said of printing - conservatives said that we would lose the ability to remember things when all knowledge could be looked up in a book. Exactly the same things were said of slide rules and calculators - that we would lose the ability to reason as our ability to calculate atrophied. The obvious debunking of Carr's argument is the incredible level of skill so many computer users exhibit. Obviously we HNers are all aware of how bloody difficult programming is, but we forget just how complex a lot of very ordinary software is. Watch a skilled Photoshop operator or a really good Starcraft player in action and you'll see Carr's hypothesis go down in flames. Something as mundane as Excel is easily more complex than any system in the world just a few decades ago. Carr is at the bottom of a very long line of dreary, reactionary trolls, cursing that the young people today don't know how easy they've got it, that they're going soft with their newfangled tools.

sabat 16y ago
I am bloody sick of that troll Nicholas Carr. Couldn't have put it better myself. He really thinks he's good at being reductive. cursing that the young people today don't know how easy they've got it Every generation is sure that these young kids today, with their hair and their clothes, just don't appreciate how hard things used to be. Every generation is wrong about that, of course.
- edanm 16y ago
  "Every generation is sure that these young kids today, with their hair and their clothes, just don't appreciate how hard things used to be. Every generation is wrong about that, of course." Funny anecdote: for years, my father kept telling me that "when he was a kid, we called our father sir". Made sense, until one day I read a book in which the character's father complained of the exact same thing, but the book was written in 1900.
- Qz 16y ago
  Every generation is wrong about that, of course. Actually, they're right -- it's just that in the grand scheme of things, how much easier we have it today than the last generation, is insignificant compared to how hard life is in general. We do have it better, but it doesn't make us dumber because the world still needs smart people to keep it going.

adnam 16y ago

The Knowledge is a very hard test. It can take 3 years to pass, and you need to learn 320 set routes within 6 miles of Charing Cross. My aunt did The Knowledge anf now drives a black cab by day, and a rather expensive Mercedes sports car the rest of the time.

cturner 16y ago
Despite the trade protection their firm gets, the money is low, particularly considering outlay, hours and conditions. Yet the quality of the experience is consistently good in a city where service is often poor. I'm interested to know what causes this: whether it's due to the discipline (the thrill of navigating a puzzle, like a unix operator gets), or the institution (feeling like you're part of something important). I had a freaky conversation with a driver last winter about messaging systems. He knew all the right questions after I told him what I did, and made comments about the particular technologies. It came out that we were working on the opposite ends of a big integration between firms. He was unhappy with that life and very comfortable at the prospect of spending the rest of his days driving a cab around.
- adnam 16y ago
  The money is actually pretty good. You can earn way above the national average, you're your own boss and can work the hours that suit you.

rflrob 16y ago

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. " Alfred North Whitehead, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead

slantyyz 16y ago

Perhaps an alternative view: Good software makes the lazy lazier?

djhworld 16y ago

This article makes no real sense, does the author (of the book) have any scientific evidence for any of his claims?

scott_s 16y ago

Give me studies, not arguments. Using tools - and "good software" are just tools - that free us from having to use intelligence for a task allows us to direct that intelligence to other tasks. Yes, I'm not as good at arithmetic as a technical person from 50 or even 30 years ago. But I'm freed from having to do all of that myself so I can focus energy to what I actually care about.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]