[gcanyon]

It's incredibly difficult at this point to "skate where the puck is going" as Gretzky is said to have done. No one knows what knowledge work will look like in five years. People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point.

That said, assessments of poor critical thinking skills jump out at me more than the rest. That sort of thing seems likely to matter until machines can replace us completely.

[tialaramex]

> People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point

Do you have evidence that it ever was part of being a competent mathematician? AIUI the trope of mathematicians who can't even do arithmetic was common already before the pocket calculator was introduced last century.

[eks391]

My grandpa was upset that I never bothered to memorize trig tables. Tried to argue that I am not useful when there isn't a calculator around. I can think of several rebuttles to this, but didn't care to use any. He'd already been retired for some time so I didn't expect him to understand why even a pocket calculator is useless in modern engineering analysis, so memorizing trig was no more than a boring party trick performed by the out of touch nerd.

[curuinor]

https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/ca...

"It was said that when doing astronomical calculations that required logarithms, which are typically 10 digit numbers in log tables, [C. F. Gauss] would often just recall the logarithms instead of bothering to look them up."

[Jblx2]

Is this supposed to be one of those exceptions-prove-the-rule things?

[techblueberry]

> People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point.

Sometimes I don’t wonder if this wouldn’t still be a good way to educate people. Part of the problem is education has to sort of optimize to try to educate like passive people. If you’re a curious and pragmatic person, you can understand how to use what you learned in a liberal arts degree to be better at almost any job.

As I look forward to the second half of my career. Certainly I use AI in healthy doses.

But people talk about the division between practice and performance, and most of my practice is old school. Reading books. Writing my thoughts down. Memorizing quotes and passages.

I think more important than what you learn is the way you use it to train and evolve your brain, with the caveat that - I know this is more useful to me because I have a marketable skill. This is the balance universities have to stick, there are tons of people with liberal arts degrees in middling jobs.

But at least half if not more of education should be on building practical skills in the three r’s.(maybe the third r should be ‘rgumentation instead of ‘rithmatic, but I digress)

It’s interesting - people decry memorization in education, and I’m not entirely naive as to why - if you were to show up to the first day of work and say “I don’t know any of what you just said but I can recite log tables! It might be your last day - and yet one of the most underrated skills, especially late in your career is the ability to ingest and operate in large quantities of information.

[Jtarii]

>People used to memorize log and trig tables, and no one would say that's part of being a competent mathematician at this point.

That would be closer to engineering or accounting than mathematics. I don't think mathematicians do much arithmetic at all.

[xhkkffbf]

Go read the story that Richard Feynman tells of betting an abacus user. He used his knowledge of some strange numbers. It's in _Surely You Must Be Joking_.

I suspect his facility with numbers and his knowledge of tables like this really helped him do physics research.

See also his stories on approximation.

[latentsea]

> That sort of thing seems likely to matter until machines can replace us completely.

This seems like the crux of the issue. Like people are banking on that day coming even if they don't know exactly when.