Exactly. When I was in school, they had just started allowing electronic calculators into classrooms. I actually heard a parent complain that “kids aren’t learning how to do square roots by hand anymore” as though that’s something almost anyone ever needs to do, ever.
The fallacy that I think a lot of people fall into is that, just because most people no longer learn how transmissions work doesn’t mean nobody knows how those things work anymore. We don’t throw away knowledge that we need, we specialize. There are people devoting their entire lives to one amino acid or whatever so that I could get an mRNA vaccine. That was all magic to me, but I was happy just to not die from COVID (yet). This is what civilization does for us- specialization is the rising tide that lifts all boats.
People learn what they need when they need it. Some of us learn more than required because we like knowing how things work, but that should not be a moral condition of membership in society.
Ugh, so much this. I was gutted when Google replaced all their supported Boolean modifiers with “put quotes around important stuff!”. Which they, as you say, then ignore anyway.
For my DarkLantern project, I admit that I throw a sea of tags at the problem rather than a true knowledge system that would rank the importance of the reference more than a simple mention.
I couldn’t remember James Buchanan’s name, but I remembered his fauxbel prize, found that and linked from there. It’s a very useful tool for me, probably less so for other people because half the index is in my head. (Maybe I should create a meta-tag for “Those Libertarian Bastards”?)
The problem with classification hierarchies is they assume that closely related subjects will tend to fall into adjacent branches of the hierarchy. Public choice theory has put its dirty fingers in quite a number of wildly disparate pies.
I had the old CRC book of standard mathematical tables, but I thin that the only section that I ever used was the one on coordinate transformations. Because most undergraduate physics problems end up being coordinate transformation problems.
This! As my dad used to tell me when I was a kid, take notes as if they will be read by someone else. The same applies to file organization. It’s fine if you’re unorganized with your own files, but as soon as you start working with other people, organization is key.
I will always remember reading a thread on backup strategies here on BB where someone posted “I use files”.
That was the first time a light went off in my head that files are no longer the atomic unit of data for end users. Tags, databases, links, and especially the content itself are now the way we (and our new overlords) organize data.
Not needing to organize things in hierarchies is nice, but the main advantage is not needing to prune. Before email was easily searchable, I used to delete 90% of my emails so the important ones were easier to see in a visual scan. Now spam is pretty much the only thing that I expend effort deleting.
I once helped create a back-of-the-book index. Remember those? It was a fun dive into the science of taxonomy – categorizing subjects, naming categories correctly, creating meaningful hierarchies, & learning best typography practices. There are people who spend their whole lives categorizing categories. A good index is a thing of beauty to me now.
That, I’m afraid, is actually the programmer’s fault, and not the user’s fault. If the browser is silently sticking the files in some secret random place somewhere without giving a good indication to the user of where that may be (or how to get to it), then it’s a user-interface design failure.
Is anyone else disgusted/amused that everyone with a database, some Python and graphs is calling themselves a data scientist these days? (A cargo cult data scientist, maybe.)
And it’s not just young people, I know older people who have no idea where their files live, whether it is in the cloud or on a local drive, because Steve Jobs specifically wanted it that way, making it hard by default for people to understand where files are being stored, or why their storage is full:
“And eventually, the file system management is just gonna be an app for pros and consumers aren’t gonna need to use it.”
– Steve Jobs, 2005
It’s quite aggravating when trying to help people consolidate files when they have no idea where they have been storing them.
