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RolfAndreassen comments on Rationality Quotes July 2014 - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure it plays out this way in real life all that often. For example, anyone who got a digital photography degree before the year 2002 spent three years learning how to accomplish what anyone with a knock-off copy of Photoshop can learn to do in half an hour. They're not super-badass, they're just obsolete.
To complete your argument, you need to demonstrate that what the man with a degree can do with Photoshop is not super awesome. Maybe the skills transfer; maybe not. But at any rate you haven't demonstrated, or even argued that, they don't.
I don't think I need to do that at all. Demonstrating equivalence seems entirely sufficient.
EDIT: Wait, I totally misread your comment the first time round, and yes, from the position you're approaching it, the argument isn't complete. In the context of the original spoon/spade argument, I think I'd need to demonstrate that the person with the pre-2002 photography degree can't accomplish equivalent feats to a person with a contemporary photography degree, adjusting for experience.
In this case, it seems that the contemporary photography graduate has the advantage of not having to learn a large quantity of material that is no longer necessary with the advent of better tools. This points to a possible difference between badass spoon-diggers and obsolete spoon-diggers: the badass spoon-digger develops general skills, whereas the obsolete spoon-digger develops obsolescent skills.
EDIT EDIT: Some explanation on this particular example -- this is a complaint I've heard a couple of times from people with such degrees, that they spent a lot of time learning how to achieve effects which are trivial under contemporary methods. From their perspective, this was time wasted.
At the very least, the man with the digital photography degree knows what makes a really good picture - how to fiddle with composition and lighting and stuff to make the sort of picture that makes the viewer go 'wow'. Given a little bit of time to learn how to use Photoshop, or the GIMP, or other similar tools, and the man with the degree will be able to do at least the same as he could do before, but substantially faster.
While anyone with a knock-off copy of Photoshop might be able to do the same technical tricks, he probably won't know which technical tricks to use to best improve a given photograph; and he might very well end up making it look a good deal worse.
"My digital photography degree from an era of obsolescent technology isn't rendered completely useless through the passage of time" is a far cry from "I can divert the course of rivers".
That is true. This implies that new tools can be divided into two categories; those that use the same skills as the old tools but have a multiplicative effect on the results for all users (spoons->spades), and those that bring even an untrained user up to a certain basic level of competancy but make little or no difference to an expert user.
...having said that, I now realise that there is a third category of tool as well; that which can be used to great effect by an expert but is next to useless to a completely untrained user. An example of this sort of tool would be a bicycle; someone who knows how to ride a bicycle can use it to travel at great speed, while someone who does not know how to use it is likely to simply fall off.