LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK
Moving on to New Problems
Use it or lose it?
Overcoming an infantile attention span is a challenge.
Nonetheless, in an attempt to understand how newfangled stuff works, I read a long and entertaining article about ChatGPT.
Not intelligent. Nope. (I’m talking about ChatGPT here, wiseass.)
An example cited was solving the roots of a polynomial. Don’t slap your forehead and move on because mathematics has been mentioned. You will not be required to understand the mathematical machinations.
My Ph.D. friends are snickering. (Yes, some of my best friends are people who have earned the moniker. Please don’t judge.) “You call that math?” they are saying. Dear Doctors, please don’t be “educationalists” and discriminate against those of a different educational level than your own. How about mutual respect? Who cuts and splits your firewood?
In addition to having made a living as an engineer, I tutored math for over 20 years. But life changed, and that ended ten years ago. Even so, I remembered that one could use a trick to get a solution (the quadratic equation is really just a tool, but seems tricky), but also that there was another way. What was it?
Factoring. That’s it! (You will not be bored with explanations of either solution method.) After staring baffled for a few minutes, there were a few moments of relearning the technique. A bit of trial and error resulted in renewed understanding.
Note the distinction between remembering and relearning.
That I had forgotten is distressing. Have all those lessons from all those years gone down the tubes?
That I was able to puzzle out how to do this once again is uplifting. Evidence that the capability to learn (perhaps better stated as “relearn”) still exists is pleasing, and even more pleasing than mere remembering.
But why the mental cobwebs in the first place? Is it a sign of encroaching shutdown? Was the need to dredge up mathematics taught hundreds of times a harbinger?
Or is the loss of mental resolution in one area the result of focus in another? Can it be that limited resources have been redeployed?
Engineers and authors think differently. While one discipline may seek to eliminate variability, the other hopes to expand thinking. It’s the difference between a journey to a specific destination versus going on an open-ended adventure.
The limits of one’s capabilities demand that in transitioning from one discipline to another, some techniques are left behind as others are assimilated. That finely honed tools are no longer sharp is not overly lamentable if useful new ones are added.
Particularly if the old tools can be picked up and used again if needed. After resharpening, of course.
More rigor in the explanation of ChatGPT: https://medium.com/towards-data-science/how-chatgpt-works-the-models-behind-the-bot-1ce5fca96286