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Quite interesting in that in the 20 years since that was written, the whole "socially unacceptable" to use a calculator to work out simple sums, is not (as far

Quite interesting in that in the 20 years since that was written, the whole "socially unacceptable" to use a calculator to work out simple sums, is not (as far as I see) the norm. I would say that it is very normal to quickly pull out a phone, or ask on your watch, or as Alexa etc.

pelasaco 5y ago
I still remember an IT director that I met @ Bank of Boston that said us: "To use google is for lazy people". 2003, I believe.
- bennyp101 5y ago
  And now it's more about your "Google-Fu" and do you know how to search properly to find the result you need! I wonder what things we consider "lazy" at the moment, will become the standard in 20 years
  - pelasaco 5y ago
    Now the Movie Wall-E[1] came to my mind, where humans couldn't even walk and all the job was done by robots. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E
willcipriano 5y ago
"You won't always have a calculator!" - Every teacher in school growing up
- andi999 5y ago
  Yes, but how do you do some calculations when you are driving and thinking about some physics problem?
  - SquibblesRedux 5y ago
    For most of the population, driving while thinking about a physics problem would be considered distracted driving, unless that problem involved avoiding hitting something in the road.
    - II2II 5y ago
      I would classify calculating how close you can drive to the vehicle ahead of you while being able to stop within 1.0 mm +/- 0.9 mm as reckless driving, not wreckless driving.
      - joconde 5y ago
        That calculation would probably be wrong anyway, unless you have a lot of practical experience with emergency braking. I constantly underestimate my reaction times.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Don't solve systems of differential equations and drive.
    - varjag 5y ago
      You can't take D out of PID.
  - an_ko 5y ago
    You'd leave calculator physics for later, and focus on the practical physics of steering your 2-tonne cyclist crushing machine, I would hope.
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      >steering your 2-tonne cyclist crushing machine wow
- taneq 5y ago
  “Yeah well you won’t always have an encyclopaedia… you won’t always be able to ask your friends…” I think the single biggest and most overlooked change in the past 20 years has been the creeping ubiquity of knowledge. It may not be as sexy as Trinity downloading a helicopter piloting program but the ability to pull a datasheet for almost any piece of equipment literally out of thin air is damn near as useful.
  - blackbear_ 5y ago
    > creeping ubiquity of knowledge. I'd rather call it "information". Knowledge is one level above that, knowledge is information integrated in a coherent whole. Nowadays it's very easy to find information about anything, but most people still know very little about most things. Confusing information with knowledge and knowing nothing at the same time is why misinformation spreads so easily.
    - taneq 5y ago
      I see it as information being the 1s and 0s, while knowledge is what you do with it.
  - scionthefly 5y ago
    I think it is relatable to the way that Archer has access to mission dossiers. "Yeah, but I never read them." People have access to limitless information but have little interest in actually looking for and using it.
- iso1631 5y ago
  "Noone will pay you for playing video games" - every parent growing up
  - Dumblydorr 5y ago
    Do they pay you for playing video games?
    - iso1631 5y ago
      No. They don't pay me for being a doctor either.
  - dTal 5y ago
    That's still true. And before you say "streamers", they aren't exactly being paid to play video games - they're paid to perform in public. You don't even need to be great at video games to carve out a living as a streamer, but you do need a charismatic screen presence. If you wanted to get on the "streamer" career path as a kid, you'd have been much better off spending your time taking public speaking courses and getting involved in amateur dramatics than playing video games.
    - blackbear_ 5y ago
      Note that esports are growing in popularity with paid gamers and real prize money for the top spots (e.g., 2.1 millions for the world champions in league of legends and 1.5 millions for counter strike).
      - JCharante 5y ago
        But being good doesn't equate to being in a team. There are plenty of players who are the best in SoloQ who can't play on a team professionally because they lack the teamwork skills or have toxic personalities. Having leadership skills and game knowledge would let you coach a team or analyze without having to be the best in playing the game.
- hwers 5y ago
  To be fair I never got to use a calculator in university tests and I'm glad I learned mental math in years prior to prepare me for that. (Though admittedly that's of course a very artificially constrained school-imposed situation.)
  - II2II 5y ago
    They probably meant electronic calculators. When I asked my prof about using a sliderule, they said that was fine. (Granted, that was in physics where the graders usually use the final answer as a check and rarely deduct many marks if all of the work leading up to an incorrect numerical answer is correct.)
  - dhosek 5y ago
    In my college classes either calculators were permitted (physics and chemistry tests) or were irrelevant (upper division mathematics). When I taught high school in the 00s, I had to impose rules about what sort of calculators were permitted to avoid cheating, especially as devices which could be used for communication like network-connected palm pilots were available.¹ I also wanted to have the kids avoid buying a $99 TI-89 when a much cheaper calculator was sufficient for the work they were doing. ⸻⸻⸻ 1. I remember one cheating technique that my friends in high school AP Chem used where a group of us were sharing a calculator. You would type in the question number you needed an answer for and someone else would type in the letter of the answer (we generally had multiple choice tests).
- advice_thrwawy9 5y ago
  It's worth pointing out that virtually every math teacher I had growing up, in retrospect, had no knowledge or experience with any actual math. I recall wondering out loud in hs geometry if one infinity could be bigger than another in typical early high school "big brain" thinking, and at the time my high school geometry teacher basically shrugged their shoulders. Years later when I discovered cardinalities of infinite sets, which comes up pretty quickly when studying math in college, I was fairly disappointed that such a great potential teaching moment was passed over. I'm pretty sure early high school me would have been dramatically more engaged with math if a teacher has said "funny you should mention that, do you know about the difference between integers and real numbers..." The tragedy of this is that most Americans, even the ones teaching math, believe mathematics is calculation, and even at the advanced levels will only rarely be exposed to real mathematical thinking.
  - d3ckard 5y ago
    It's interesting, because I was introduced to cardinal numbers and alef zero, plus Cantor proof, precisely during highschool mathematics class. In Poland though.
- LanceH 5y ago
  4.3 * 17 = 731 -- seemingly every kid who challenges that teacher and can't sanity check their calculator math.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    Heh. I was a TA for a grad school engineering course. The professor accidentally assigned a problem he thought would be easy, but he had a typo and it led to very messy integrals. It wasn't hard, just tedious (think multiple pages of derivations, where at each step the expression was multiple lines long - repeated integration by parts). He had a policy of no calculators/computer use, but he relaxed it for this assignment as he didn't want students to needlessly suffer. All the kids that used software (Mathematica and similar ones) got it wrong. All of them. Each and every one made a typo somewhere. Thing is, had any of these students done a very simple dimensional analysis, they would have known very quickly that their answer was incorrect. I'm sure they would have done that analysis had they attempted solving it by hand. However, people tend to forget sanity checks when working on a computer.
II2II 5y ago
I don't know about that. Kids are still proud when they can do arithmetic in their head while society has been grumbling about adults who cannot do arithmetic without a calculator for generations. Personally, I think that kids should learn simple mental arithmetic. It's not that I expect them to use it when they become engineers or cashiers, but it is useful for making quick approximations. It is useful to know when they have to pull out a calculator to check the price they are being charged at the store or to know when to check what they fed the computer (since they have the tools to figure out when an answer is wrong).
- Dumblydorr 5y ago
  Honestly, just my personal experience here, but amongst millennials, no one cares if you bust out the calculator app to add all your scores in a board game. It's actually superior to mental math because you can see the list of all the points you've added, if you add 20 numbers together it's nice to see them all after for verification purposes. There's no societal expectation placed on us whatsoever, it's all about getting the right answer.
  - II2II 5y ago
    Sorry, I meant children (rather than anyone younger than you are, which seems to be how some people use the word kids). While I agree with being able to check the results with many modern calculators, my argument is that it is useful to know when the results have to be checked. For example: if you know that all of the points are less than 5 and you are adding 20 of them together, a result greater than 100 means you have to go back and check what was entered.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    You don't group up the victory point chips in piles that each add up to 10 like I do? Heretic! (I agree with you, btw).
cblconfederate 5y ago
Siri, what is a calculator?

pelasaco 5y ago

I still remember an IT director that I met @ Bank of Boston that said us: "To use google is for lazy people". 2003, I believe.

bennyp101 5y ago
And now it's more about your "Google-Fu" and do you know how to search properly to find the result you need! I wonder what things we consider "lazy" at the moment, will become the standard in 20 years
- pelasaco 5y ago
  Now the Movie Wall-E[1] came to my mind, where humans couldn't even walk and all the job was done by robots. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E

willcipriano 5y ago

"You won't always have a calculator!" - Every teacher in school growing up

andi999 5y ago
Yes, but how do you do some calculations when you are driving and thinking about some physics problem?
- SquibblesRedux 5y ago
  For most of the population, driving while thinking about a physics problem would be considered distracted driving, unless that problem involved avoiding hitting something in the road.
  - II2II 5y ago
    I would classify calculating how close you can drive to the vehicle ahead of you while being able to stop within 1.0 mm +/- 0.9 mm as reckless driving, not wreckless driving.
    - joconde 5y ago
      That calculation would probably be wrong anyway, unless you have a lot of practical experience with emergency braking. I constantly underestimate my reaction times.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Don't solve systems of differential equations and drive.
  - varjag 5y ago
    You can't take D out of PID.
- an_ko 5y ago
  You'd leave calculator physics for later, and focus on the practical physics of steering your 2-tonne cyclist crushing machine, I would hope.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    >steering your 2-tonne cyclist crushing machine wow
taneq 5y ago
“Yeah well you won’t always have an encyclopaedia… you won’t always be able to ask your friends…” I think the single biggest and most overlooked change in the past 20 years has been the creeping ubiquity of knowledge. It may not be as sexy as Trinity downloading a helicopter piloting program but the ability to pull a datasheet for almost any piece of equipment literally out of thin air is damn near as useful.
- blackbear_ 5y ago
  > creeping ubiquity of knowledge. I'd rather call it "information". Knowledge is one level above that, knowledge is information integrated in a coherent whole. Nowadays it's very easy to find information about anything, but most people still know very little about most things. Confusing information with knowledge and knowing nothing at the same time is why misinformation spreads so easily.
  - taneq 5y ago
    I see it as information being the 1s and 0s, while knowledge is what you do with it.
- scionthefly 5y ago
  I think it is relatable to the way that Archer has access to mission dossiers. "Yeah, but I never read them." People have access to limitless information but have little interest in actually looking for and using it.
iso1631 5y ago
"Noone will pay you for playing video games" - every parent growing up
- Dumblydorr 5y ago
  Do they pay you for playing video games?
  - iso1631 5y ago
    No. They don't pay me for being a doctor either.
- dTal 5y ago
  That's still true. And before you say "streamers", they aren't exactly being paid to play video games - they're paid to perform in public. You don't even need to be great at video games to carve out a living as a streamer, but you do need a charismatic screen presence. If you wanted to get on the "streamer" career path as a kid, you'd have been much better off spending your time taking public speaking courses and getting involved in amateur dramatics than playing video games.
  - blackbear_ 5y ago
    Note that esports are growing in popularity with paid gamers and real prize money for the top spots (e.g., 2.1 millions for the world champions in league of legends and 1.5 millions for counter strike).
    - JCharante 5y ago
      But being good doesn't equate to being in a team. There are plenty of players who are the best in SoloQ who can't play on a team professionally because they lack the teamwork skills or have toxic personalities. Having leadership skills and game knowledge would let you coach a team or analyze without having to be the best in playing the game.
hwers 5y ago
To be fair I never got to use a calculator in university tests and I'm glad I learned mental math in years prior to prepare me for that. (Though admittedly that's of course a very artificially constrained school-imposed situation.)
- II2II 5y ago
  They probably meant electronic calculators. When I asked my prof about using a sliderule, they said that was fine. (Granted, that was in physics where the graders usually use the final answer as a check and rarely deduct many marks if all of the work leading up to an incorrect numerical answer is correct.)
- dhosek 5y ago
  In my college classes either calculators were permitted (physics and chemistry tests) or were irrelevant (upper division mathematics). When I taught high school in the 00s, I had to impose rules about what sort of calculators were permitted to avoid cheating, especially as devices which could be used for communication like network-connected palm pilots were available.¹ I also wanted to have the kids avoid buying a $99 TI-89 when a much cheaper calculator was sufficient for the work they were doing. ⸻⸻⸻ 1. I remember one cheating technique that my friends in high school AP Chem used where a group of us were sharing a calculator. You would type in the question number you needed an answer for and someone else would type in the letter of the answer (we generally had multiple choice tests).
advice_thrwawy9 5y ago
It's worth pointing out that virtually every math teacher I had growing up, in retrospect, had no knowledge or experience with any actual math. I recall wondering out loud in hs geometry if one infinity could be bigger than another in typical early high school "big brain" thinking, and at the time my high school geometry teacher basically shrugged their shoulders. Years later when I discovered cardinalities of infinite sets, which comes up pretty quickly when studying math in college, I was fairly disappointed that such a great potential teaching moment was passed over. I'm pretty sure early high school me would have been dramatically more engaged with math if a teacher has said "funny you should mention that, do you know about the difference between integers and real numbers..." The tragedy of this is that most Americans, even the ones teaching math, believe mathematics is calculation, and even at the advanced levels will only rarely be exposed to real mathematical thinking.
- d3ckard 5y ago
  It's interesting, because I was introduced to cardinal numbers and alef zero, plus Cantor proof, precisely during highschool mathematics class. In Poland though.
LanceH 5y ago
4.3 * 17 = 731 -- seemingly every kid who challenges that teacher and can't sanity check their calculator math.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  Heh. I was a TA for a grad school engineering course. The professor accidentally assigned a problem he thought would be easy, but he had a typo and it led to very messy integrals. It wasn't hard, just tedious (think multiple pages of derivations, where at each step the expression was multiple lines long - repeated integration by parts). He had a policy of no calculators/computer use, but he relaxed it for this assignment as he didn't want students to needlessly suffer. All the kids that used software (Mathematica and similar ones) got it wrong. All of them. Each and every one made a typo somewhere. Thing is, had any of these students done a very simple dimensional analysis, they would have known very quickly that their answer was incorrect. I'm sure they would have done that analysis had they attempted solving it by hand. However, people tend to forget sanity checks when working on a computer.

II2II 5y ago

I don't know about that. Kids are still proud when they can do arithmetic in their head while society has been grumbling about adults who cannot do arithmetic without a calculator for generations. Personally, I think that kids should learn simple mental arithmetic. It's not that I expect them to use it when they become engineers or cashiers, but it is useful for making quick approximations. It is useful to know when they have to pull out a calculator to check the price they are being charged at the store or to know when to check what they fed the computer (since they have the tools to figure out when an answer is wrong).

Dumblydorr 5y ago
Honestly, just my personal experience here, but amongst millennials, no one cares if you bust out the calculator app to add all your scores in a board game. It's actually superior to mental math because you can see the list of all the points you've added, if you add 20 numbers together it's nice to see them all after for verification purposes. There's no societal expectation placed on us whatsoever, it's all about getting the right answer.
- II2II 5y ago
  Sorry, I meant children (rather than anyone younger than you are, which seems to be how some people use the word kids). While I agree with being able to check the results with many modern calculators, my argument is that it is useful to know when the results have to be checked. For example: if you know that all of the points are less than 5 and you are adding 20 of them together, a result greater than 100 means you have to go back and check what was entered.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  You don't group up the victory point chips in piles that each add up to 10 like I do? Heretic! (I agree with you, btw).

cblconfederate 5y ago

Siri, what is a calculator?