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222 points dougb5 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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greenspam ◴[] No.45133130[source]
Imagine back in the days when calculators were just invented. An 8 year old kid might have the similar complain: “my classmate finished a 4 digits number multiplication problem in 5 seconds which generally took 1mins.” People might say, in the long term, the kid who cheated would be less proficient in arithmetic, which turned out to be true. But when you think about it, it seems not the end of the world when most high schooler in US cannot do complicated arithmetic quickly and accurately without a calculator.
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1. ipython ◴[] No.45133350[source]
Even today though you’re still taught arithmetic without a calculator. My kids have spelling words even though we have spell check.

Why? Because otherwise they’d have no idea if the answer provided to them is “correct”. As the saying goes, garbage in garbage out. You type the wrong numbers into the calculator ? How would you know the answer is also wrong unless you knew “about” what the answer should be?