Your phone & GPS device are making you doolally!

[Jdsk]

1) Never obey that sat nav order without a bit of a check via consideration of the reality you're actually in. One reads of some terrible fates as dafties blindly obey the gizmo-orders, ending up (or even down) in all sorts of trouble.

2) Try to apply the rule, "Everything you read on a gizmo screen is not necessarily any kind of troof". If you're not careful, you may find yourself not only watching a Tory PM candidate vid but believing the ludicrous claims made therein! And it may even make you vote Tory!! Your brain is then beyond redemption or recovery.

And 2 applies to 1.

We hear about mishaps related to the use of satnavs because they appeal to neophobia and schadenfreude and "Aren't those other people stupid?" and they're entertaining and... unusual. But rarely about the billions of times that the technology does its job and helps people and things get to where they need to go.

Jonathan

[Cugel]

1) Never obey that sat nav order without a bit of a check via consideration of the reality you're actually in. One reads of some terrible fates as dafties blindly obey the gizmo-orders, ending up (or even down) in all sorts of trouble.

2) Try to apply the rule, "Everything you read on a gizmo screen is not necessarily any kind of troof". If you're not careful, you may find yourself not only watching a Tory PM candidate vid but believing the ludicrous claims made therein! And it may even make you vote Tory!! Your brain is then beyond redemption or recovery.

And 2 applies to 1.

We hear about mishaps related to the use of satnavs because they appeal to neophobia and schadenfreude and "Aren't those other people stupid?" and they're entertaining and... unusual. But rarely about the billions of times that the technology does its job and helps people and things get to where they need to go.

Jonathan

Schadenfreude - guilty as charged, m'ludd.

Neophobia - innocent! I have e-bike, Di2 and a Cray-like PC, me.

So, having neophilia is not itself completely stupid (although we should remember the contents of Pandora's Box and the awful consequences when it's opened) but the employment of many technologies undeniably encapsulates human skills into that technology, thus making them redundant in the human brain.

Of course, use of various technologies does require some new knowledge and skills, which may or may not keep the human unstupid enough to be generally capable, especially in the context now modernised by the new technology. I am stupid concerning the operation of telephones and sat navs. But some technologies go beyond merely removing "grunt work" to supplant nearly the whole human understanding of something.

Another poster mentions electronic calculators and navigation devices as being better because they're quicker and often more accurate than more human-involved modes of calculating and navigating. The question to ask of this claim is: what if those devices cease to function or become unavailable? If the human brain needing such capabilities is no longer capable of providing them out of itself ......??

*******
In woodworking (and many other human domains of knowledge & skill) there are those who maintain older hand tool techniques because they're "purists" - distrustful of machines in a William Morris kind of way. Others still employ some machines for "grunt work" but nevertheless maintain and practice their human skills at achieving the same results with hand tools. Example: flattening, thicknessing and otherwise making a rectilinear plank from a rough chunk of timber; 10 minutes with a machine or half a day with handplanes.

The hand tool knowledge and skills teach you a great deal about the nature of wood, which you'll never understand if you only ever use a machine. Such intimate knowledge of wood is a great boon when designing and making things that require features of the wood such as strength, look, ability to shaped in more complex ways etc..

A similar consideration applies to all sorts of skills, including mathematical calculations and navigating in a landscape. And much else. It's no good saying that you can check your calculator with a mental process if you can't perform that mental process; no good saying that you can check the sat nav order by doing old fashioned orienteering if you don't have those skills.

So do the skills for operating calculators, sat navs or other gizmos provide our brains with sufficient stimulus to replace the stimulus of former methods of the "grunt work" kinds? It seems that the answer is, "not always". If so, does this cause a general atrophy of some brain functions and the physical parts that perform them? It seems that the answer is, "sometimes".

******
Easy to be a neophiliac, though. Progress in technology must mean Progress in humans, eh!? If only. It may even be that we humans don't just remain as we ever were (dangerously stupid in great part) but that the technology-use is causing various human retrogressions. Moreover, many of Pandora's Troubles of the technology kinds can amplify already extant human stupidities. Look around.

Cugel

[thirdcrank]

In common with quite a few others on here, I'm from the mental arithmetic generation who learnt "times tables" by heart as well as rods/poles/perches, chains and furlongs. The calculator and decimalisation saved our successors from that drudgery. Perhaps the issue is whether we use that freedom to push further. On the specific issue of GPS, I don't think humans have much innate navigating capability - unlike migratory species - so if we travel further than the end of the street we are depending on the geography of others. While map reading with a compass may be a fine mental exercise, it's obsolete for most people.

I do believe that the normally instant communication available through mobile phones has reduced the need to plan. IF → THEN has been replaced by ringing up for a discussion.

Yes! Why use a redundant brain when Gizmo will steer you about and decide all those difficult matters for you? Thinkin' is for pilgrims.

Cugel, still with a head full of the 12X table.

As is increasingly often the case, I failed to make myself clear, but I doubt if it was ever going to be possible.

You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to go cycling.

[Cugel]

You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to go cycling.

..... Unless you're a bicycle wheel manufacturer and seller, that is. Wheels for bicycles seem to be reinvented about every two months now. Of course, much of the invention is in service of sales rather than going along the road in an improved way.

Well, unless you count "sporting the latest gizmo" as an improvement (of one's image in the eyes of others who cycle in a promenading, er, fashion).

Cugel riding some of the latest in bike tech whilst wearing a Flandria jersey with matching cotton cap.

[pete75]

Are Cugel and Jacob Rees-Mogg one and the same? I think we should be told.

Naughty, that comment! I should feel insulted .... but can't be bothered.

Well you both seem to want to go back to a pre-modern world and write about it in a somewhat affected manner.

[pwa]

1) Never obey that sat nav order without a bit of a check via consideration of the reality you're actually in. One reads of some terrible fates as dafties blindly obey the gizmo-orders, ending up (or even down) in all sorts of trouble.

2) Try to apply the rule, "Everything you read on a gizmo screen is not necessarily any kind of troof". If you're not careful, you may find yourself not only watching a Tory PM candidate vid but believing the ludicrous claims made therein! And it may even make you vote Tory!! Your brain is then beyond redemption or recovery.

And 2 applies to 1.

We hear about mishaps related to the use of satnavs because they appeal to neophobia and schadenfreude and "Aren't those other people stupid?" and they're entertaining and... unusual. But rarely about the billions of times that the technology does its job and helps people and things get to where they need to go.

Jonathan

I use satnavs for work that will get me to the exact location of an address on a country lane sometimes. Yes, of course you need to be cautious and not take every instruction as Gospel, but at least if you can see on the screen where the destination is, you can choose a slightly different route to the one suggested. I have had the situation where a satnav suggests an inappropriate lane, but I have just taken a moment to look carefully at the screen (pulled over and stationary) to select an alternative way round. Satnav working alongside human brain is a very good hybrid system.

Even when following a route I have installed on a GPS device on by handlebars, I have changed my mind and taken a different route for a while when the route I had thought I wanted turned out to be gratuitously hilly, with a much less hilly main road running down the other side of the valley in plain sight. And with little traffic on it. GPS/Satnav is just a tool, that you can over-rule when you think you know better.

I also have the subscription OS app on my phone, which means I have OS mapping for every part of the UK. I can zoom in and get Explorer mapping with my current position. I don't walk around with it permanently on, but I do get it out to check occasionally when I'm not sure about something. I use that for walking, not cycling. Naturally, if I were going anywhere extreme I'd take a paper map too. They don't need batteries or signal.

[Cugel]

How to ensure that your gizmo-offered data or info is not a pitcher of wrongfulness? Some suggest that the gizmo-offered directions or advice can be checked via another and perhaps more old fashioned mode of finding out about or understanding something. If the sat nav directions sound a bit iffy, do old fashioned map reading. But what if you can't?

This article references a survey that suggests many old fashioned ways of understanding the route finding process - those relying on some human brain operations other than gawping at a screen - are beyond significant portions of the population:

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2022 ... rvey-study

"Of the 2,000 adults surveyed, more than half (56%) admitted they’d got lost because they couldn’t use a map or follow a phone app correctly, with 39% resorting to calling friends and family, 26% flagging down help, and 10% calling mountain rescue to get home.

Even when they’re not actually getting lost, 31% said they were worried they might. Many adults (46%) said they were happier walking with someone else".

As with navigating, perhaps also with a hundred other things involving finding out about things? You can treat your gizmo data or info as the final authority or you can check it by comparison with other modes of finding out (those involving the use of your thinking organ) - unless your thinking organ has no procedures, methods or other means to perform such finding out alternatives to the gizmo mode. You're left with nothing but what the gizmo tells you.

Since the gizmo use is "convenient" and "easy" it seems the most attractive option for gaining knowledge. After all, it takes some mental effort to learn how to read maps and do orienteering; or to examine political claims against a raft of theories, philosophies, rhetorical devices, histories, psychologies, anthropologies. ideologies and other modes of understanding, analysing and/or criticising the propositions and conclusions offered by other humans.

And sometimes a gizmo-related data set is indeed very useful. At other times, the gizmo relates utter claptrap, with exactly the same apparent "technological authority and infallibility". Many folk have no means to differentiate between the two. Consider the vast numbers of humans convinced by gizmo of all sorts of mad conspiracies. Gizmo "information" is often from sources lacking even the now decrepit checking standards of modern journalism.

Mind, newspaps and other mass media "authorities" have also long been a highly suspect source of any kind of resilient truth or objectivity ...... Many are convinced by The Daily Hate Mail in a very similar fashion to the convincing done of dafties sucking up Fizzogpuke gizmo-stuff of the most ridiculous claptrappy kind.

***********
Still, we must all be "modern" eh? Nobody knew anything worth knowing in the past as they lacked our planet-wide gizmo-got knowledge. Oh brave new world, that has such gizmos in it!

Cugel

[LancsGirl]

What is all this talk about "maps"? Are these the pretty pictures impressed upon the new-fangled "paper". Stuff and nonsense I say, only needed by the imbecilic half wits who roam the thoroughfares of fashionable London town.

I can find my way entirely with a combination of my trusty sextant, the sun, moon and stars. I may supplement that information with the tracks of boar, deer and other beasts who roam the land of fair Albion. When did people lose such elementary skills?

"Maps", bah, be gone I say!!

[Biospace]

It seems it might also be degrading their thinker itself, to a condition in which it becomes dysfunctional. Soon they will be babbling on a perch in some expensive gimmery, as Brutus the male "nurse" readies his chemical cosh!

You sure we haven't already reached that point, Cugel?

[Cugel]

It seems it might also be degrading their thinker itself, to a condition in which it becomes dysfunctional. Soon they will be babbling on a perch in some expensive gimmery, as Brutus the male "nurse" readies his chemical cosh!

You sure we haven't already reached that point, Cugel?

There does seem to be many a sign and indication that the inmates have taken over the asylum. Many now regurgitate the mad opinions fed to them by various newspaps, idiotbox channels and interweb toxicity-wallows.

I often visualise the Hate Mail opinion repeaters I meet as a form of parrot, perched in a cage they've still not realised is there, imitating the sayings of the mad folk passing through the media-room in which their cage is located. There they are, on their perch, cawing away their various favourite pieces-of-hate shrieks as the mix of cheap seed and 5$*^3 accumulates beneath them.

Cugel, emitting my own caws and shrieks of alarm.

[Biospace]

So do the skills for operating calculators, sat navs or other gizmos provide our brains with sufficient stimulus to replace the stimulus of former methods of the "grunt work" kinds? It seems that the answer is, "not always". If so, does this cause a general atrophy of some brain functions and the physical parts that perform them? It seems that the answer is, "sometimes".

Cugel

I chanced on a small group of bikers well into their 80s yesterday who had scrolled paper directions on their handlebars. If their general demeanour was in any way related to a lack of handing over brain function to electronic devices then we should all take note.

The idea of sending around half of young people to university-style education in itself appears to be having an effect on the ability of many to think for themselves, add computers to take over so many aspects of brain function and perhaps there's the prospect of a population which could be very easily controlled.