I;ve no idea why this is garnering such surprise. People are generally worse at doing arithmetic in their heads after accepting calculators. I don’t see why this would be any different.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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People are generally worse at doing arithmetic in their heads after accepting calculators.
Where did you get this idea from? Your teachers? Parents? It's absolutely false. Sure lazy people are generally bad at skills they don't both practicing themselves, like arithmetic and critical thinking. Those of us that actually use arithmetic and calculators regularly, from retail cashiers to engineers, know that it's easy to not recognize a wrong answer without ingrained basic arithmetic skills. So much so that one could argue that you should only be using a calculator if you can already roughly intuit the answer a d use the calculator to make precise answers more quickly.
It’s a fair point. I am mainly considering those in retail who once had to “make change in their head”. Most people I know in retail cannot do that any more. I think that’s my point - those of us that “have to” can do the math. Most of us don’t have to any more, and thus are less good.
That’s precisely why I think AI is potentially detrimental, too.
AI brainrot... literally...