[mikeash]

I don't quite get that "security blanket" comment. If the phone is a useful tool for solving a problem, why not use it? Are we supposed to use old techniques just because the new ones aren't strictly necessary?

My experience in that regard has been pretty much the opposite. People are still stuck in a pre-smartphone mindset where you have to give people directions instead of an address, where you have to remember the locations of businesses you haven't visited in a long time instead of looking them up, where you have to guess about traffic conditions instead of just checking, etc.

It amuses me to no end when a crowd of techies get into a discussion about driving directions these days. No longer necessary!

[oinksoft]

Sure, there's no problem with you and I agreeing to disagree. I'm of the opinion that the mind operates like a sort of muscle, and that you can be in or out of shape for a particular thing, mentally. As the mapping example goes, any convenience I might gain from turn-by-turn directions, delivered on demand, does not outweigh the tremendous benefit I receive by thinking about where I am going, figuring out cardinal directions by the sun, and other things like that. The latter will seriously save you when you lose reception, phone is out of battery, you're in a place where online maps are out of date, etc. It's a real, applied skill.

So, what you see as a simple task I see as more of a practice, a way of living. This is just how I am about most things, being something of a perfectionist. And that's fine!

[hnriot]

And more programmer red flags!

Dead reckoning and using the sun will get you really far in navigation. Unless you're trecking across the tundra or sailing the high seas, you'll need something a little Mir modern.

This is getting stupid, you're insisting on using a horse and carriage in a time of motor vehicles. Fine, I will just pass you on th highway, tip my hat and be thankful for living in a country where we have the freedom to be as eccentric as we want.

[schackbrian]

How about walking or riding a bicycle in a time of motor vehicles?

[mikeash]

OK, I can buy that. However, I have to ask, why use a map? Wouldn't it be better practice to ditch that as well?

[probably_wrong]

Regarding this specific point: as someone who likes to backpack, I use a paper map for the following reasons

* Because I may not have an internet connection near my destination

* Even if I do, my maps app has a thing for taking me to the wrong place. Anecdote: some friends and I went biking through a popular bike road through the woods. When checking the route on their phones, all they could see was "you are here", and nothing else because apparently the road didn't exist.

* Paper is more reliable than electronics: a paper map will survive a fall, water and mud, and it will never run out of battery.

I don't deny the usefulness of electronic maps for daily use, but I honestly don't trust them for visiting unfamiliar places.

[oinksoft]

Yea, definitely! That's why, like I said in another comment, for local routes I don't really use a map unless it's some place I haven't been before. If I know how to get to the road the place is on, and can figure out where it is reasonably based on the address, there's no point in using a map.

But I'd find a traveler foolhardy to not at least consult a map ahead of time when visiting some very new, distant place. The good thing is that it's normal in the US for gas stations to all carry local maps. So I'm usually not more than a few minutes from being able to stop off and get my bearings if needed -- last I had to do that was in a tricky part of NC (damned business/non-business routes) in 2007.

[hnriot]

Or, rather than stop at a gas station to buy an out of date paper map, you could get with the program and pull out your smartphone and have the worlds most advanced cartographic system at your finger tips.

[mikeash]

Thanks, glad I asked.

I do similar stuff with mental arithmetic, to make sure I can, and exercise it.

I think the main reason I go straight to fancy electronics when driving is because I don't really like driving all that much,and want to make sure I get to my destination as quickly as possible. I'd rather save the pain and effort for other things.

[derleth]

Memory will seriously save you when you're out of reach of your reference material, so why rely on flammable, fragile, heavy paper? Don't you see how mechanical people who rely on books are, always sticking their notes in their mechanisms to read words off wood pulp instead of pulling them out of their memories? How much better it would be if we abandoned print and went back to the simpler, better time of rote memorization!

Or is that maybe not what the human mind is best used for? Maybe, humans are best at being creative, and our tools help us at that task by freeing us of tedium and ignorance of simple facts.

True, some people misuse GPS technology by driving their cars into lakes. Some people misuse book technology by taking Von Däniken seriously. I'm not seeing a big difference between the two, moral or otherwise.

[Simucal]

I know that your post was sarcastic and that you were illustrating a point (and I agree with you). It is interesting, however, that Plato actually argued the same thing that you outlined in your post!

"for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves." [1]

[1] - http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Gre....

[NotOscarWilde]

The interplay of memory and skill is something that interests me a lot, even though I claim no expertise in the field.

Historical evidence implies that it is true that the people who are able to leverage the tools at their disposal (be that actual tools like cell phones or just applying recent scientific breakthroughs) tend to do well in their life.

On the other hand, we have the idea that the mind is a muscle and it works best if we train it hard. In this mindset, we see objects as crutches that are best to be avoided in order to improve the mind as efficiently as possible.

I and people around me tend to focus on the first paradigm, leaving the second one unexplored.

One of the reasons may be that it is still largely philosophical: if you wanted to improve your memory, what would you do? There are books on people that use tricks to remember large digits and other chunks of data (the brother of Jonathan Safran, Joshua Foer, wrote one).

However, most of us believe that this is not the same type of memorization that can enable us to do pattern matching in our memories faster (which is what mathematicians need the most, being able to see parallels to math they've done before).

And even if we had a trick to pattern-match faster, in order to raise it from the level of "it was described in popular literature, but has no scientific basis" like mind maps and such, we would have to conduct very large studies to verify its validity, which is something that is not done at all in this area.

As a side remark, this is the same problem I have with nootropics. What works and what doesn't? For memorization and focus, it seems ADD medicine works somewhat. For Paul Erdös it was amphetamines which boosted his creativity -- is that better for us mathematicians? And what do these drugs do with us in the long term? Almost all evidence is anecdotal, and I'm not willing to risk my health to be a smarter scientist.

[Dewie]

> On the other hand, we have the idea that the mind is a muscle and it works best if we train it hard. In this mindset, we see objects as crutches that are best to be avoided in order to improve the mind as efficiently as possible.

Those crutches frees up time to let one work on other muscles; muscles that might not have any known crutches (like practicing reading maps instead of practicing navigating by the stars some centuries ago).

[oinksoft]

In my experience, it's vastly more likely that a mobile device loses reception, power, etc. than it is that my paper suddenly goes up in flames. I'd probably have bigger problems to deal with if that were to happen. Paper relies on any old light source and can be preserved for a terribly long time (Dead Sea Scrolls) in the right conditions. It can be torn and soaked and retain its message, being such a reliable medium.

[rdouble]

In LA personal directions are still useful because google and/or apple maps will give you a choice of some obvious routes that will all be clogged with traffic. It really is like "The Californians" on SNL.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLTkD8WI8VU

[paulhauggis]

yeah, no kidding.

I just started working for a new company a couple of months ago and my co-workers are all techies. We all decided to carpool together (I wasn't driving) and the driver was aimlessly looking around for the location.

I asked him about using google maps and he looked at me like I was an alien. Nobody else in the car ever used Google maps (or any form of GPS) regularly.

When I don't know how to get somewhere, I use GPS.