For a senior-level professional? Yes, it does matter.
I wouldn't be comfortable with an accountant who couldn't do practical arithmetic in their head, or a surveyor who didn't have a fluent grasp of trigonometry and the ratios or function values for common angles.
Of course -- I don't care about the people working for them as a bookkeeper or assistent. They can be button monkeys as much as their boss lets them, but I also wouldn't expect those folk to reach very high in their career. Not everyone's going to, and a disinterest in and lack of technical fluency is a darn good predictor.
Your teacher was giving good advice about building skills and internalizing knowledge, because those are what contribute to mastery of a craft; maybe you were just being too pedantic or cynical to hear it?
I think this advice is backwards, as is the problem. I’d trust an accountant’s mind or a builder’s eye if I knew that they are acting from experience. But you don’t wanna trust someone who believes in-their-head is superior or reliable and makes you good.
The core idea is no, calculating in your head doesn’t turn you into a pro. Being a pro makes calculating in your head safe enough to rely on until you get to your desk and double-check.
That said, I was an integrator half my life and seen some accountants, big and small. Everyone used a calculator, it’s right next to their mouse and there’s another one elsewhere. And no one ever tried to talk about numbers afk, except for ballparks. Most of the times they suggest to go and query a db together. I find it very professional.
I just trust my accountant will use excel and what they are doing isn't rocket science.
I have no interest interacting with someone who is going to get into how great the slide ruler is and how kids these days need to learn the slide ruler. When I was younger I thought this type of person was highly admirable but now older and wiser I see how full of shit they are.
>> If you need Copilot to code in Python, have you really learned Python?
> Does it really matter though? It sounds awfully like when a school teacher said you're not going to have an calculator in your pocket.
Yes. A younger me had teachers say that to me, and that younger me thought they were wrong.
But it turns out they were right, and younger me was wrong. Calculator dependence created a ceiling built from "educational debt" that many years later severely limited my mathematical ability.
The problem is focusing too much on getting the "answer," and losing sight of building the abilities that allow you to get there with your own mind. Eventually the need to manipulate your automated crutch turns into a bottleneck.
It’s also kind of annoying to intuitively get to the correct answer and have everyone claim they can’t distinguish between that and you using a calculator.
I wonder if that would be an issue if nobody had any.
Isn't it obvious? If you can't do arithmetic without a calculator, it makes it hard to do algebraic manipulation. (Un)luckly a calculator that could do that arrived in my lap just in time. Then you get to calculus, and it was the same story. I eked by with a lot of furious typing, but the mental workload of that made it untenable towards the end and I wasn't really gaining much anyway because of that. It would have been far better if I'd just hadn't been allowed to use a calculator from the start.
It didn't affect my ability to reason and prove things, just as long those things don't strongly require the knowledge and skills I should have gotten from the calculator shaped gap in my education. I lack a lot of the background knowledge and/or familiarity and comfort with many skills that I should have.
I think we're using the term “mathematical ability” in different ways. For me, it's an ability to prove a theorem, not to solve a differential equation.
Yes, it does matter. While there are plenty of situations where it's foolish to forbid calculators, that's not universally true.
Forbidding calculators and requiring students to do mental math for absolutely everything is unnecessary. But requiring students to solve integrals by hand when they're learning about integrals? Entirely reasonable.
If your goal when teaching coding is to teach the mechanical process of writing code: sure, go ahead and use LLMs for that process. But if your goal is to develop a deeper understanding of how to code, then LLMs can very easily obscure that. The end goal is not always just the answer.
> But requiring students to solve integrals by hand when they're learning about integrals? Entirely reasonable.
I remember having to write code on a piece of paper in university.
Curiously, this lead to a lot of other students not really learning or caring about indentations and attempting to make code formatted in a generally readable way once they actually got access to IDEs and such.
They'd write it much like you would regular text on a piece of paper and would get absolutely stumped with unbalanced brackets whenever some nested structure would be needed.
Not only that, but somehow a lot of them didn't quite get around to using the various refactoring features of the tools, since they treated them like editors for writing text.
Did it help me memorize the basic constructs of the languages in question? Absolutely not, at least in the long term, since nowadays I have to jump between a lot of different languages and none of the syntax quite sticks, rather a more high level approach to problem solving.
LLMs just make that easier for me, letting me offload more work around language constructs and boilerplate, albeit requiring occasional intervention.
AI is not replacing the same function as a calculator does when solving a math problem.
Using AI to “help” learn to program is replacing the person’s effort thinking through the problems fully and is ultimately going to stunt their learning.
A calculator is fine so long as you understand what the operations actually represent. Remembering the multiplication table is not important, but understanding what multiplication actually does is.
The problem with AI-assisted coding is that, applied uncritically, it circumvents this understanding. And without it, you won't even be able to judge whether the code that CoPilot etc spit out is correct for the task.
yeah, at the moment anyway, because if you don't know what the syntax means, you can't tell when the code means something you don't want. that means you can't tell which copilot suggestions to accept and which ones to reject, and you can't debug your code; asking gpt-4 what's wrong with it only goes so far
imagine if the calculator in your pocket gave you subtly wrong answers most of the time
