“When the economic factor will go away, I suspect that even more people will go into fitness, body-building, surfing, chess, poker, and eSports, because these activities are often joyful in themselves and have lower entry barriers than serious science learning.”
This strikes me similar to the death of the darkroom. Yeah, computers do it better, cheaper, etc. However, almost no one who has ever worked in a darkroom seriously producing photography is happy that this basically doesn’t exist at all anymore. The experience itself teaches a lot of skills in a very kinaesthetic and intuitive way (with saturation curves that are pretty forgiving, to boot).
But more than this, the simple pleasure of math, computer programming, and engineering skills are very worthwhile in themselves. However, in John S Mills style utilitarianism, you have to do a lot of work to get to enjoy those pleasures. Will the tingle of the lightbulb coming on when learning PDEs just die out in the next 20 years like the darkroom has in the past 20 years? Meanwhile maybe darkrooms will make a big comeback?
I guess people will always want to experience pleasures. Isn’t learning complex topics a uniquely human pleasure?
“When the economic factor will go away, I suspect that even more people will go into fitness, body-building, surfing, chess, poker, and eSports, because these activities are often joyful in themselves and have lower entry barriers than serious science learning.”
This strikes me similar to the death of the darkroom. Yeah, computers do it better, cheaper, etc. However, almost no one who has ever worked in a darkroom seriously producing photography is happy that this basically doesn’t exist at all anymore. The experience itself teaches a lot of skills in a very kinaesthetic and intuitive way (with saturation curves that are pretty forgiving, to boot).
But more than this, the simple pleasure of math, computer programming, and engineering skills are very worthwhile in themselves. However, in John S Mills style utilitarianism, you have to do a lot of work to get to enjoy those pleasures. Will the tingle of the lightbulb coming on when learning PDEs just die out in the next 20 years like the darkroom has in the past 20 years? Meanwhile maybe darkrooms will make a big comeback?
I guess people will always want to experience pleasures. Isn’t learning complex topics a uniquely human pleasure?