Calcuators have made the youth of today stupid.

Have you considered the possibility that the kid behind the register might have been stupid even if he'd never seen a calculator?

 

when i worked in retail about half my coworkers were completely thrown off by things like that. i got stuck explaining it to them.

i'm not that old either (23). once i got into calculus, i relied entirely on a calculator and never looked back. a lot of what i do in lab is too complex to do by hand, but i can balance my checkbook without a calculator. unless it's a particularly bad day... :lol:

 

actually you hit on a way to make some extra money. a few days ago, i went to a fast food joint. bill came to $4.80. i gave the girl a $5 and five pennies. without even looking at what i gave her, she gave me two dimes.

i said. "hey, i gave you 5.05..."

she looked at me, looked at the money i had just given her and took back the two dimes. she then turned to talk with someone who was standing next to her. they had a brief exchange and all i heard was "25 cents". so then she gave me two dimes and a quarter and sent me on my way.

 

Raed the Isaac Asimov story "A Feeling of Power" or "A Sense of Power" (I can't recall its exact title). At the time it was written the closest thing anyone had to a calculator was a ten million dollar IBM mainframe occupying an air conditioned room mounted on special flooring and attended to by a staff of technicians, something only the military or General Motors could afford. When I read it for the first time thirty five years ago I thought the premise a bit overblown, but now I'm not so sure.

Not long ago a little girl about 8 years old approached me in a hallway and held out her hand, full of coins. She wanted a Coke out of a vending machine and didn't know which coins to use. She knew the price of the Coke (she could read the machine), but she had no clue how to correlate the price with the metal medallions she had in her hand. I was touched by her trust that a strange grownup would do the honest thing for her, but good grief in bucketloads, that's TOO vulnerable!

A couple weeks ago we had a one day class in running Monte Carlo simulations and plotting out tornado charts (if you don't know what these are it doesn't matter it's business goulash and you're better off not knowing trust me) and one of the exercises was plotting out the parameters of a tornado diagram by hand. We were supplied calculators so we wouldn't have to do the dreg arithmetic by hand, but forbidden to build a spreadsheet on our laptops. Well, my calculator didn't work, so I did the dreg arithmetic by hand - and did the problem faster than had the calculator worked. That's because having to do the dreg work by hand forced me to find shortcuts - which I found, thankgod, and so finished the problem more quickly. Had the calculator worked I'd've punched merrily away on the keys and not spotted the patterns that allowed me to shortcut the work.

I wouldn't say that poor education today MAKES people stupid, but it sure as hell doesn't seem to be making them competent to reckon with a complicated world. That's scary. These people vote, run businesses, and (godhelpusall) work for the government.

Mark Baird
Alameda CA

 

When I took the ACT exam (years and years ago) I left my calculator in my car. They wouldn't let me go back to get it. I surprised myself at how fast I got done once I remembered all the shortcuts.

I scored higher on the math portion than the guy I was dating at the time... who did remember his calculator. :lol:

 

I know how these "stupid" people feel. Somtimes when I'm put on the spot, even simple addition can make me go blank. I hate math. It's that simple. It wasn't the fault of the calculator, it was my lack of caring as a kid. If there is anything you can't stand doing, do you do it very well? Sure I should have more compassion for numbers since money is everything. Now if I were to work retail at a register I would make sure I was on the ball. I have been "smart" enough never to do that line of work. I do make sure I program a short cut to the calculator on my keyboard. So, the bottom line is if calculators haven't been invented yet, it wouldn't make me want to calculate faster in my head so people around me don't think I'm "stupid". I would just take longer and maybe for fun look at them cross-eyed.

Maybe some of those "stupid" people have smoked too much weed and used to be better at math. I was "smart" enough to stay away from all illegal drugs (as hard as that is to believe).

I do agree that calculators can make people lazy just like storing your phone numbers and pass words for easy access make you forget them after a while.

At least I was "smart" enough to pay cash for my car at msrp and not get suckered into finance charges, special insurance, extended warranty, and junk fees. If some "smart" cats at fast food places steal my money and I don't catch them it evens out with the "stupid" clerks that give me too much back. And one more excuse to make myself feel "smart"... I don't gamble.

 

when i took the ACT exam years and years and years ago... i also didnt use a calculator since in those days, none were allowed

 

:lol:

Truthfully, I always find that to be an annoying habit.

People trying to be "change efficient"...

Does it REALLY matter THAT much? h34r:

r u obsessed with COUPONS too?



Which leads me to another related point:

IM "language"... Kids write like crap in this day and age...

 

When I was preparing for the MCAT, one of the test preparation segments taught by my chem teacher was what he called "fast math." It was mental (not on paper, just mental) ways of doing math quickly by approximation, including exponents, roots and such. It was really interesting, and I still use those mental shortcuts today. But I like math. =) Some people surely do not.

 

That's OK. Television made my generation stupid.

(I think they blamed my parent's generation on either radio, movies, or pulp magazines. Grandpa's generation was probably due to "penny dreadfuls"):

 

I just don't like my pockets full of change.
If I can reduce the amount of change in my pocket by asking some "customer associate" to do his job, I gotz no problem with that.

 

duh...me no do math good

 

It's what's been termed the 'dumbing down of America' and it's been going on for some time. I see jounalists getting dumber by the day. If I read one more journalist from a respected publication write '...a myriad of...' I'm going to scream. They can't write any longer, either. Video games are making kids fat too. America is in trouble isn't it?

 

If America is getting dummer, it's our own fault for starving the education system of funds so we can finance wars and tax cuts for the rich.

 

That's one thing, for sure. I think what Danny's alluding to is the general trend towards automation and the unintended consequences that have resulted. The problem is that even though times are always changing, what they're changing in to doesn't appear to be resulting in anything better per se. If our society loses the ability to do math and write and spell properly, what do we gain instead? Are we to become fat blobs who can't think much less do simple addition?

 

Okay, so maybe I'm one of these kids made stupid via calculator, but if you gave the guy $5.03 and didn't purchase anything, shouldn't you get $5.03 in change and not just $5.00?