Assuming that these skills don’t generalize to areas where we can’t depend on Google, I suspect that people desire to internalize these skill merely because they can (possibly for the show off potential or in order to validate their intelligence). Sort of like wanting to be unnecessarily* good at mental arithmetic when a simple calculator can do the job much faster.
I suspect that people desire to internalize these skill merely because they can
Yes, sort of like how people desire to breathe merely because they can. To say that a skill is useful only prompts the question: useful for what? Your goal system has to ground out somewhere; at some point you need some conception of a life worth living and a work worth doing, that don’t need to be justified in terms of anything else, or else why should why should we care about being useful? Cf. Eliezer’s “High Challenge” and Nick Bostrom’s “The Future of Evolution.”
The wetware is also highly convenient. Sans Palm Pilot, I don’t have a calculator with me everywhere I go. It would be useful to me once or twice a day if I could do arithmetic in my head without messing up nine times out of ten.
Assuming that these skills don’t generalize to areas where we can’t depend on Google, I suspect that people desire to internalize these skill merely because they can (possibly for the show off potential or in order to validate their intelligence). Sort of like wanting to be unnecessarily* good at mental arithmetic when a simple calculator can do the job much faster.
Yes, sort of like how people desire to breathe merely because they can. To say that a skill is useful only prompts the question: useful for what? Your goal system has to ground out somewhere; at some point you need some conception of a life worth living and a work worth doing, that don’t need to be justified in terms of anything else, or else why should why should we care about being useful? Cf. Eliezer’s “High Challenge” and Nick Bostrom’s “The Future of Evolution.”
The wetware is also highly convenient. Sans Palm Pilot, I don’t have a calculator with me everywhere I go. It would be useful to me once or twice a day if I could do arithmetic in my head without messing up nine times out of ten.
There’s a procedure you can learn for that, at least for the simple stuff.
I learned chisanbop in the third grade, presented a report on it to my math class, and promptly forgot about it.