this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Ask a 20yo from the 70s to use Excel. Nobody could do that back then. How stupid.
It's an equally wrong argument.
People's skills adapt to what they need frequently. If they need something, they will learn how to do it and they will know how to do it. If they don't need it, they will lose it. Why would you want to keep maintaining a skill you don't need? It doesn't make you a better person.
You went backwards, i went forwards, slight difference there.
People are losing basic cognitive skills.
People are losing/not learning skills they don't need. That's it. They learn other skills instead, that they do need.
Everyone has basic photography and photo editing skills. Something most people really didn't have in the 70s. Most people know how to use a smartphone or a PC, again not something that the average person could do in the 70s.
Then again, in the 1890s most people knew how to handle a horse and hardly anyone knew how to control a car back then.
Even back in the late 1990s a large portion of the adults were afraid to touch a computer, because they thought it was some arcane magic, and now that's not an issue any more.
In the 80s and 90s, calligraphy was a quite common skill. Nowadays it's not necessary any more because if I want text to look nice, I print it.
There's no such thing as a "basic cognitive skill" that everyone needs to have in every circumstance throughout world history. Because stuff changes and skills that were super important 30 years ago just aren't nowadays.
Case in point, to return to your original argument: It was a common thing for pupils in the early 2000s to ask their teachers why they need to be able to do long division if they can just use a calculator instead, and the common answer was "You won't have a calculator in your pocket all the time". Well, we do now.