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gcanyon01/22/20252 repliesview on HN

1. Socrates criticized writing itself: in Plato's Phaedrus he said it would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories" (274e-275b)

2. Leonard Euler criticized the use of logarithm tables in calculating: in his 1748 "Introductio in analysin infinitorum" he insisted on deriving logarithms from first principles

3. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) initially dismissed mechanical calculators, stating in an 1878 lecture at Glasgow University that they would make students "neglect the cultivation of their reasoning powers"

4. Henry Ford in his autobiography "My Life and Work" (1922) quoted a farmer who told him in 1907 that gasoline tractors would "make boys lazy and good for nothing" and they'd "never learn to farm"

5. In 1877, the New York Times published concerns from teachers about students using pencils with attached erasers, claiming it would make them "careless" because they wouldn't have to think before writing. The editorial warned it would "destroy the discipline of learning"

6. In "Elements of Arithmetic," (1846) Augustus De Morgan criticized the use of pre-printed multiplication tables, saying students who relied on them would become "mere calculative mechanism" instead of understanding numbers

7. In his 1906 paper "The Menace of Mechanical Music," John Philip Sousa attacked the phonograph writing that it would make people stop learning instruments because "the infant will be taught by machinery" and musical education would become "unnecessary"

8. In his 1985 autobiography "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Richard Feynman expressed concern about pocket calculators and students losing the ability to estimate and understand mathematical relationships

I could go on (Claude wrote 15 of them!). Twenty years from now (assuming AI hasn't killed us all) we'll look back and think that working with an LLM isn't the crutch people think it is now.


Replies

eimrine01/22/2025

I do not consider any of 8 wrong, if I want to understand each of their ideas. The time was slower at their times and painting with eraser is kind of a different genre.

bibelo01/22/2025

what was your prompt?

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