Some of these don’t seem very well calibrated for ‘minimum necessary to maintain a reasonable quality of life’.
Programming: Most people don’t program at all, and do fine, so this might not be a useful category in the first place. ‘Computer interaction’ would be better, and level 1 might be something like the ability to use reasonably-user-friendly web-based email or the ability to write, save, and retrieve an essay in a word processing program. If we want to talk about actual programming, though, level 1 might be something like understanding what variables are, or that computers ‘think’ in a purely procedural way (that there is no ghost in the machine).
Math: I agree with atucker that basic arithmetic is appropriate for level 1, though I’d add ‘ability to parse simple word problems’ to it.
Endurance: I don’t run. At all. This has approximately never been an issue, and doesn’t affect my quality of life in any way that I can detect. Level 1 for endurance should probably be something more along the lines of being able to walk a few miles (2, maybe 3) on flat ground without becoming winded—this seems about in keeping with what someone would need to do in the course of shopping at a large store.
Empiricism: Again your suggestion seems too advanced for a ‘minimum necessary’ level. I’d suggest something more along the lines of being able to notice intrinsically flawed arguments or arguments where the arguer is obviously biased.
Perhaps we should refine “minimum necessary to maintain reasonable quality of life” to something like “minimum necessary to maintain reasonable quality of life, given that the area is relevant”.
By way of analogy, I don’t own a car. The minimum necessary skill in driving to maintain reasonable quality of life is absolutely nothing for me. But for many, driving a car is necessary; for them, the minimum necessary skill is being able to remain within the lines, use indicators, park and three point turn, etc. Pass the driving test, in other words. There’s no point standardising levels of driving skill to include my lifestyle! Given that driving is relevant to your quality of life, you need pass-driving-test levels as an absolute minimum. So that has to be Level 1.
Being able to get by without a skill isn’t the same as having the minimum amount of skill necessary. Being Level 0 in driving and still having a reasonable quality of life is a fact about me, and maybe about the public transport system where I live, and maybe also about the willingness of my friends to give me lifts—not a fact about how much skill is required in driving.
(When I crossclass into Professional, though, and Driving becomes a class skill, I’ll have to get to at least Level 1)
I see, and basically agree with, your point, but that benchmark seems to still have some problems: Specifically, I’m having trouble coming up with a scenario where programming would be a relevant skill but level-1 ability (equivalent in difficulty to other level-1 benchmarks) at it would be sufficient.
I had a data entry job in the summer of 2002 when staying with family between years of college. After a day or two meeting people and finding out where the bathrooms were and getting started with the nominal data entry task I installed a macro recorder so I could factor out some of the human tedium by writing scripts to speed things up.
By the time I left the job 8 weeks later to go back to school I was teaching the “real employees” how to automate the boring parts of their own jobs and had them hire a friend who lived in the area to continue their macro lessons and to write the really “tricky” macros on the side (he’d upgraded the job to writing perl scripts within a few weeks).
Basically, if someone thinks they can be a “white collar worker” without any “algoracy” (cognate to literacy and numeracy), I suspect they are in the process of becoming economic road kill. The space of AI-hard jobs is steadily shrinking. Maybe some people can switch to “blue collar work” and learn to drive a tractor or pick strawberries instead? At least for a while? See, there’s this thing called the singularity… but if you’re here reading and commenting on this site you’re probably already something like an expert in the “far mode” theory of the singularity :-P
The implications of the singularity to things like politics and job skill acquisition are the “near mode” applications that are still being worked out by basically everyone… but I suspect the importance of algoracy is one of the obvious practical implications.
(I’m progressing towards level 1 in programming currently, and programming so far has allowed me to write a script that eats a .txt combat log from an MMO and spits out information I care about, it allows me to use a Python console as my daily planner (from collections import deque → create a stack+queue of tasks), and it allows me to solve Project Euler-type problems. So not a whole lot.)
However, I am treating levels of programming much like I treat levels of wizard—low level spells suck, high level spells are game-breaking-ly awesome.
Some of these don’t seem very well calibrated for ‘minimum necessary to maintain a reasonable quality of life’.
Programming: Most people don’t program at all, and do fine, so this might not be a useful category in the first place. ‘Computer interaction’ would be better, and level 1 might be something like the ability to use reasonably-user-friendly web-based email or the ability to write, save, and retrieve an essay in a word processing program. If we want to talk about actual programming, though, level 1 might be something like understanding what variables are, or that computers ‘think’ in a purely procedural way (that there is no ghost in the machine).
Math: I agree with atucker that basic arithmetic is appropriate for level 1, though I’d add ‘ability to parse simple word problems’ to it.
Endurance: I don’t run. At all. This has approximately never been an issue, and doesn’t affect my quality of life in any way that I can detect. Level 1 for endurance should probably be something more along the lines of being able to walk a few miles (2, maybe 3) on flat ground without becoming winded—this seems about in keeping with what someone would need to do in the course of shopping at a large store.
Empiricism: Again your suggestion seems too advanced for a ‘minimum necessary’ level. I’d suggest something more along the lines of being able to notice intrinsically flawed arguments or arguments where the arguer is obviously biased.
Perhaps we should refine “minimum necessary to maintain reasonable quality of life” to something like “minimum necessary to maintain reasonable quality of life, given that the area is relevant”.
By way of analogy, I don’t own a car. The minimum necessary skill in driving to maintain reasonable quality of life is absolutely nothing for me. But for many, driving a car is necessary; for them, the minimum necessary skill is being able to remain within the lines, use indicators, park and three point turn, etc. Pass the driving test, in other words. There’s no point standardising levels of driving skill to include my lifestyle! Given that driving is relevant to your quality of life, you need pass-driving-test levels as an absolute minimum. So that has to be Level 1.
Being able to get by without a skill isn’t the same as having the minimum amount of skill necessary. Being Level 0 in driving and still having a reasonable quality of life is a fact about me, and maybe about the public transport system where I live, and maybe also about the willingness of my friends to give me lifts—not a fact about how much skill is required in driving.
(When I crossclass into Professional, though, and Driving becomes a class skill, I’ll have to get to at least Level 1)
I see, and basically agree with, your point, but that benchmark seems to still have some problems: Specifically, I’m having trouble coming up with a scenario where programming would be a relevant skill but level-1 ability (equivalent in difficulty to other level-1 benchmarks) at it would be sufficient.
I had a data entry job in the summer of 2002 when staying with family between years of college. After a day or two meeting people and finding out where the bathrooms were and getting started with the nominal data entry task I installed a macro recorder so I could factor out some of the human tedium by writing scripts to speed things up.
By the time I left the job 8 weeks later to go back to school I was teaching the “real employees” how to automate the boring parts of their own jobs and had them hire a friend who lived in the area to continue their macro lessons and to write the really “tricky” macros on the side (he’d upgraded the job to writing perl scripts within a few weeks).
Basically, if someone thinks they can be a “white collar worker” without any “algoracy” (cognate to literacy and numeracy), I suspect they are in the process of becoming economic road kill. The space of AI-hard jobs is steadily shrinking. Maybe some people can switch to “blue collar work” and learn to drive a tractor or pick strawberries instead? At least for a while? See, there’s this thing called the singularity… but if you’re here reading and commenting on this site you’re probably already something like an expert in the “far mode” theory of the singularity :-P
The implications of the singularity to things like politics and job skill acquisition are the “near mode” applications that are still being worked out by basically everyone… but I suspect the importance of algoracy is one of the obvious practical implications.
I agree on programming.
(I’m progressing towards level 1 in programming currently, and programming so far has allowed me to write a script that eats a .txt combat log from an MMO and spits out information I care about, it allows me to use a Python console as my daily planner (from collections import deque → create a stack+queue of tasks), and it allows me to solve Project Euler-type problems. So not a whole lot.)
However, I am treating levels of programming much like I treat levels of wizard—low level spells suck, high level spells are game-breaking-ly awesome.
Writing simple, convenient shell scripts. Solving low-level Project Euler problems.