Squandering skills
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsWhat few maths skills I once possessed rusted away at the hands of a calculator. And similarily, I used to be a whiz at turntable setup, but now it all looks like a mystery. And it’s been 10 years since I sat at my design bench and plugged transistors and resistors into my protoboard. Today, high-level concepts and new applications are more my style than the nuts and bolts that once ruled my world.
The question I often ask myself is whether or not progress that relieves us of our hard-won skills is moving us forward or backward? Do we squander our skillsets when we replace them with technology? And if so, who cares?
If I want to know the wavelength in feet of a frequency, do I rack my brain for formulas I once memorized or click here? And if I want to understand Boltzmann’s Constant do I go to the public library or click on Wikipedia?
I suspect as long as we’re not soon reverting back to a world without technology, that we’re better off shedding years of training in exchange for quicker access to answers.
Squandering time might be a worse sin than letting go of hard-won skills.
Unless your labour(s) of love still absolutely revolve(s) around the nut & bolts of what you do…like, for example Danny Ritchie from ‘GR-Research’, then, yeah, who cares.
If your skillset(s) is/are no longer in high demand well, f#@k it…kick back & spend your ever diminishing time on this planet listening to more music & let the internet do the nuts & bolts; until someone offers you a sh!tload of money to hang your shingle out again…life’s good for us Boomers 🙂
No one asked to be born into this world, so what are you actually squandering…free time?
A skill lost is just that – a loss. To a certain extent we use our skills to define ourselves and maintain a sense of self-identity. As they fade away we are diminished. After 45 years of neglect I can no longer just sit down and sketch a circuit diagram for a power supply or an amplifier. Does it matter? I can certainly buy a better amp now for small money. Not so sure about the power supplies – they were very good. I still regret the passing of the ability. After 20 years of neglect I can no longer play guitar; the fingering precision has gone almost completely. I can quickly pull up far better guitar renditions of almost anything that I played, but I still feel that have lost something.
My wife maintains that knowledge is outmoded, because you can look up anything on the Internet in seconds. I have a good memory, and therefore disagree with her. It would be an open discussion were it not for the fact that we both love quizzes and puzzles. Looking it up on the Internet is not allowed in a quiz, so for a few hours a week my approach is king 🙂
I’m with you on this, it would be nice to have the time to keep all these skills current, and my memory for facts, methods, and stupid things I said 40 years ago, remains undiminished.
What we all lack is time…
Paul,
After 40+ years in aerospace, I am now in a similar position as you.
I started my career working on the drawing board apprenticing under experienced engineers, but soon transitioned two 3-D drawing on a computer. Strength analysis of parts soon transitioned from notebook calculations to FEA (Finite Element Analysis). Even the art of kinematic analysis of mechanisms can now be solved entirely on a computer.
Today, I rely on younger engineers to perform solid modeling of parts and detailed stress and kinematic analysis using canned computer programs. At one time I used to be skilled in these computer aids, but those skills have long since atrophied from disuse.
So what do I do for my company? About 10 years ago they made me a ‘Technical Fellow’. My responsibilities are to help guide the designs of new aircraft mechanical systems and train young engineers.
My most valuable technical skills are now what many now consider obsolete. Using a pad of paper, a hand calculator, and my set of 40-year-old design handbooks, I can develop a 80% solution to most designs in 20 hours. This compares to a team of three young engineers using computer aided design tools requiring 200 hours for the 95% solution. Add to this added time, more often than not we need multiple solutions to trade before making a final design decision. So in the end, the time saved using computer aids is often wasted providing unneeded detail information.
Before I retire my greatest responsibility will be educating the young engineers at our company in my soon to be lost skill sets. I already have many young engineers fighting over who gets my library of handbooks.
I lost my navigation survival skills long ago with GPS. Don’t think that I could read a Thomas guide map anymore.
This is a very interesting topic-and for a second I will digress- Lets consider cooking from memory and measuring and estimating the amount of stuff that goes into a recipe. When we do it from memory the end product never tastes the same since the volume of ingredients will vary due to “memory” or estimation. I recently read a book by a Psychologist who’s last name is Shaw and she resides in England. She detailed, in her book, the inaccuracy of a witnesses memory, which can be a very dangerous state since a persons position in society is being threatened. I would suggest the book, but I don’t recall the title (not trying to be funny-I did forget).
If we extend the aforementioned to the current conversations we do come to the same resolve-our memory is not 100%! Studies have been carried out on memory and in general the conclusions show that immediate recall is rather accurate, but as time goes on our memory of a task or information dwindles to a poor recall and then recovers significantly but not to the level of recall immediately after learning a task. Thus, we are not as exact as a machine.
The availability of information, whether it be a formula, a theorem, or a diagram, is subject to imprecise memory. Thus having the ability to know how to retrieve information and then having the ability of applying the information is probably the best method. In my studies, from elementary school to high school, to college, and then to two graduate schools, memory was the key to success. In simple words , if you did not have a good memory you were incapable of moving on since progression was contingent upon the test grade you obtained. This process has nothing to do with one’s ability to utilize the memorized information. Thus, to have access to the information and to be skilled as to how to retrieve and apply the information is probably the most significant aspect for progression.
I recall having to memorize the math theorems in high school and when exam time came about, one would go directly to the section of the exam that required spewing forth the theorem . Also, I recall having to memorize the first 10 lines of the Canterbury Tales for an exam. There were a host of other demands placed on us for passing the exams and they all were senseless. Yes it is convenient to know things , but to what level is the accuracy of our memory . However, a person with an excellent memory and recall abilities may not have the ability to apply information.
In sum, then, our mode of education and the methods used to assess learning are totally antiquated. I think that the ability to know where information is located, being able to access the information, and being able to apply or use the information is critical.
I would like to terminate my preaching with a funny but sad school story: I was in graduate school and I thought it would be important
to become familiar with analysis of variance (ANOVA) . So, I asked my department chair for permission to venture into another department, the Dept. of Psychology , and take a course in ANOVA since the psych folks knew the application of these principles better than the science folks; so it did just that. As the course progressed, I realized that I was totally confused by the professor and had zero comprehension of the topic. Thus, rather than destroy my excellent academic scores, I decided to drop the course and just proceed as a student in the class earning credit to graduation but without a grade. It was my golden parachute. So I remained in the class till the end and was as confused as were my other classmates. Yes, the professor, was terrible. About 50 years later, I was jarred from my sleep and realized the math involved in ANOVA. I passed the course in my sleep! It was rather simple when I finally figured our how the system worked. All they had to do was to explain the process!
The cliche we were all fed was that we would be “well rounded” individuals with this mass of information and if we were able to quote something we would be considered genius. However, the product is not “well rounded” but a person with rough edges.
The education model must change. I guess, back then, when we did not have sophisticated memory adjuncts, like a computer with storage capacity, we needed to memorize, but that is past. Besides the computer memory bank does not suffer the same ills as does the human brain which has to transport information from a temporary to a permanent memory bank and loose information in the transition.
Nevertheless, when the computer fails we should have a grasp on how things work so we can re-program!
larry
Larry, there are some inherent conflicts in your post. You say that most of what you had to memorize was useless, and that we don’t have a need for a sophisticated memory anymore, then you say that we should have a grasp on how things work so we can reprograms. Given that our education can never be completely efficient, isn’t the memorization of things of some use if you actually engage in some applied thinking about some of the things that you end up memorizing? If you don’t attempt to retain actual concepts and simply rely on looking them up, don’t we become less developed as a society? And please don’t use the word loose when you mean lose (one of my pet peeves that seem to have originated in the aftermath of turning over our spelling abilities to our computers…).
And to think at some universities they get $40k/year for the privilege of learning this way. As an elder citizen I have now taken courses in evolution, plate tectonics and psychology, learning things that were unknown back when I was in college. Zen Buddhism hasn’t changed much, from what I can tell. History courses were the biggest surprise for me. I had little interest in it back then. We were too busy making it in the ’60’s. The older you get, the more there is to learn. All of this for the price of a modest pair of interconnects. Amazing.
So what happens when we as a society loose our Math and Physics knowledge and skills because of “who cares”? Who will write the code for the quick look-up formulas without the basic underlying knowledge. I know, I know….AI. I believe that If we loose this basic knowledge we should care but, we still need to move on with time becoming the most valuable commodity many of us seem to never have enough of. We each need to choose our life path wisely. Today’s Mathematicians, Logicians and Philosophers like Saul Kripke and George Boolos (RIP) might have and still may take issue with “who cares” but most of us could never ascend to their heights. They were pure in their thought processes. I knew George and I can say this with certainty. Today we need not be dependent on all of the underlying theory especially if we have friends or colleagues who possess this vanishing knowledge base but we need to have at least learned the basic skills that got us all here today. Paul’s question would have never be posed if not for DaVinci, Newton and Leibniz, Hemholtz, Faraday, Einstein et. al. I think that today’s topic is dependent on who we were back then and who we are now.
Don Henley once related to what his friend and sometimes collaborator John David Souther once told him……….”Time passes, things change”.
This question is one that I ask on a more subtle, global scale, as we turn more and more of our mental calculation over to A.I. I don’t want to start an actual political discussion here, but I see a real erosion in the general public of the ability to reason accompanying our gradual transition to complete dependence on computers. They may make things much more convenient and quick, but they also shed our actual participation in the world. It is more than a bit distressing to walk the streets of Manhattan and spend a quarter of my time avoiding bumping into a significant proportion of the population that is buried in their cellphones while walking, some of who can’t seem to navigate the rectangular street grids there without having their gps up. Even with the use of spell check, it’s also quite clear that much of the world is unable to spell or use the English language nowadays, and that is among the native English speakers that I see online.
So true
I would say as long as you’re acquiring and refining one skill set even at the expense of others you’re still moving forward. When it is decided not to keep the mind and 2 a degree the body active, is when the ‘checkout’ is not too far away.
As far as technology goes we’ve all embraced it, or we wouldn’t be here posting. What the future generations do with Technology is beyond our control. I remember my grandparents and great grandparents predicting the ‘doom of mankind’ when looking a generation or 2 ahead. We’re still here…..
As far as reading a map, or finding the North Star or many other things , someone taught me and I retained the knowledge. Obviously that part is not being passed on?…..
Use it or lose it. In the spring of my sophomore year I knew every method of solving a differential equation backwards, forwards, inside out, upside down, any which way there was. When I came back from summer vacation to start my junior year I couldn’t remember even one of them. I had to relearn it from scratch. I look back at my textbooks and wonder how I ever passed any of those courses. How did I remember so much math? Looking things up on the internet isn’t always entirely helpful. A lot of it uses shorthand symbols that I wasn’t taught. An example is on one web site where the title says do you understand this equation? It has an upside down triangle followed by B = 0. Yes I recognize it as Gauss’s law but when I learned it, it was an integral equation. Everything was spelled out completely.
I’m amazed at how some people can think in mathematical equations. I think in visualizing things. When I studied equations I had to parse out each part, every variable, every symbol to understand what they meant and how they fit into the whole. I do have one consolation though. Watching physicists and cosmologists the more they learn the less they know. Within the context of the way they study things they have arrived at an increasing number of contradictions they can’t explain or reconcile. They are now starting to question whether or not there is something wrong with their basic understanding, something I have believed for a long time. So don’t be to disconsolate. Even the people who know something don’t know something. BTW, they disguise a lot of it in jargon they banter back and forth with each other glibly. You want to take a trip into the twilight zone? Start reading about Q bits.
Soundmind,
If I hadn’t wanted to stir the pot on this topic then, “Use it or lose it” would’ve been my only comment.
Well said sir 😉
I still have a scale rule and proportion dial in my desk drawer. Haven’t used them in many years, but I don’t want to forget where I came from. Happy New Year to my PS Audio family.
Will we see PS Audio at the 2nd Florida Audio Show in Tampa this February?
I saw a picture of a slide rule and thought, “I used to know how to use that thing.”
One of the skills that will disappear is the ability to write with a pen cursively ? This became apparent prior to Christmas when writing Christmas cards . There were only four, the first I managed to execute without too much of a mess, the second , well it wasn’t a spelling mistake the hand coordination was down to 50% so the word that got messed up was scratched out , l thought well I’m not going to throw the card out , they’re not cheap and it’s quite a nice card so I cut a letter out of a magazine and stuck it on the offending word . It then occurred to me the next card should be done using letters and words cut from magazines , it did look like a ransom note but colourful and novel . It was to my brother and I knew he wouldn’t be alarmed , the downside was it took an hour to create . Of course the other issue was I knew he wouldn’t respond and it took two phone calls before he confirmed that he’d received it . Christmas cards are disappearing as well .
Gary, I still have my slide rule that I purchased close to 50 years ago. It was the latest model with Teflon grooves to speed up how fast user could do calculations. It’s still a thing of beauty but it’s only a conversation piece now.