To some extent, the argument against calculators is perfectly valid.

The cash register says you owe $16.23, you give the cashier $21.28, and all hell breaks loose.

Um, no? The cashier punches your $21.28 into the register, and it tells her that she needs to give you $5.05 in change.

At some places this is true.

At other places, they take the $20, look confused, and fart around with the change for awhile.

My experience is more that you give €20.28 and the cashier asks you whether you have €1.

I think Europe is a few years behind the US in many respects, including the dumbing down of the population.

I wish we wouldn't be just behind, but would choose another path, but the fear is that we are really just behind.

On the one hand, yeah, immigration and trade issues push the buttons of the hard right.

On the other hand, our hard right has a trifecta of business, gun culture, and religion.

You're lacking the religion and gun culture, and trying to take away your health care would be the third rail, so in some respects, it would be difficult for you to follow us.

Also, without that trifecta, it seems that it would be somewhat more difficult to push the sort of anti-education agenda that gets pushed here, both at the university level and at lower levels (e.g. giving equal time to science and creationism).

You have to remember that the US was, in large part, founded by dogmatic malcontents who couldn't get along with their neighbors.

The difference is a calculator always returns 2+2=4. And even then if you ended up with 6 instead of 4, the fact you know how to do addition already leads you to believe you fat fingered the last entry and that 2+2 does not equal 6.

Can’t say the same for LLM. Our teachers were right with the internet of course as well. If you remember those early internet wild west school days, no one was using the internet to actually look up a good source. No one even knew what that meant. Teachers had to say “cite from these works or references we discussed in class” or they’d get junk back.

Right so apply the exact same logic to LLMs as you did to the internet.

At first the internet was unreliable. Nobody could trust the information it gave you. So teachers insisted that students only use their trusted sources. But eventually the internet matured and now it would be seen as ridiculous for a teacher to tell a student not to do research on the internet.

Now replace "the internet" with "LLMs".

Most teachers would never let you grab any random internet source. We always had to get decent sources. Actual journal articles from our library’s JSTOR subscription would often be a hard requirement for a certain number of sources. Citing the text we used in class or other reference material we had access to as well. It was never free rein anything goes, unless that has changed.

I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Only to point out that in the early days of the internet, even into the 00s, teachers had a Hard No rule on any internet source.

I graduated high school in '04 and even then I was only allowed to use this system called "Galileo" which was basically a curated listed of encyclopedic articles specifically meant for education and research.

You could argue that a lot of the people who few up with calculators have lost any kind of mathematical intuition. I am always horrified how bad a lot of people are with simple math, interest rates and other things. This definitely opened up a lot of opportunities for companies to exploit this ignorance.

This implies that people had better mathematical intuition, on average, pre calculator which seems difficult to believe.