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   Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 01:30:36 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

   In general I think we should be very cautious about sweeping claims about human intelligence and impairment of cognition. From "cellphones make you stupid" to "LLMs make you stupid", from "coding makes you a genius" to "knowing math makes you a genius." Pushing for absolutisms about human intelligence and human cognition is a toxic pattern that is also so baked into our history and cultural patterns and it plays right into dehumanization for either extreme

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     silverwizard (silverwizard@convenient.email)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 01:40:33 JST silverwizard

     in reply to
     @grimalkina That paper is one on a large list of why I'll never trust Arxiv. It's a study on learning and cognition without any longitudinal claims or measures
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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 01:40:34 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     I think there's a lot to be said and studied about what helps or hinders our problem-solving but we need to free ourselves from this essentialist approach that's always looking to define who is "smart and dumb." It's a weapon against human well-being every time.

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 01:40:34 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     Cognitive aids do not "make people dumb" and cognitive impairment does not change anything about someone's inherent worth as a member of our community. I am certainly troubled by the political alignment and uses of AI in the world but I will never sign on to a dehumanizing narrative about cognition just because I think it might work against the uses of AI I disagree with. We need better arguments than that.

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 01:40:34 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     Also just as an aside the bar is HIGH for showing "cognitive change," honestly. Really high. You can't just say one person zoned out in a task oh wow their brain will never work again

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     Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 02:14:20 JST Howard Chu @ Symas

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Wendy Nather

     @mattblaze @grimalkina @wendynather if you can't do the easy stuff right, in your head, how can you have confidence that you've done the hard stuff right?

     Machines sometimes get things wrong, like the infamous Pentium FDIV bug...

     feld likes this.
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     Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 02:14:22 JST Howard Chu @ Symas

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Wendy Nather

     @mattblaze @grimalkina @wendynather arithmetic then. It is as much "math" as anything else pocket calculators were used for.

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     Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 02:14:22 JST Matt Blaze

     in reply to

     • Howard Chu @ Symas
     • Wendy Nather

     @hyc @grimalkina @wendynather As someone who does (and teaches) math stuff for a living, I'm grateful for the ability to easily do the calculations that lead you to the interesting stuff.

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     Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 02:14:23 JST Howard Chu @ Symas

     in reply to

     • Matt Blaze
     • Wendy Nather

     @mattblaze @grimalkina @wendynather seems like math skills *did* atrophy.

     I see people pulling out calculator apps all the time just to add two small numbers.

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     Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 02:14:23 JST Matt Blaze

     in reply to

     • Howard Chu @ Symas
     • Wendy Nather

     @hyc @grimalkina @wendynather That's not actually what math is.

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     Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 02:14:25 JST Matt Blaze

     in reply to

     • Wendy Nather

     @grimalkina @wendynather I'm reminded of the similarly reductive debate/moral panic, after pocket calculators came out, of whether their use in schools would cause children's math skills to atrophy.