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AdeleneDawner comments on Leveling IRL - Less Wrong Discussion
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I see, and basically agree with, your point, but that benchmark seems to still have some problems: Specifically, I'm having trouble coming up with a scenario where programming would be a relevant skill but level-1 ability (equivalent in difficulty to other level-1 benchmarks) at it would be sufficient.
I had a data entry job in the summer of 2002 when staying with family between years of college. After a day or two meeting people and finding out where the bathrooms were and getting started with the nominal data entry task I installed a macro recorder so I could factor out some of the human tedium by writing scripts to speed things up.
By the time I left the job 8 weeks later to go back to school I was teaching the "real employees" how to automate the boring parts of their own jobs and had them hire a friend who lived in the area to continue their macro lessons and to write the really "tricky" macros on the side (he'd upgraded the job to writing perl scripts within a few weeks).
Basically, if someone thinks they can be a "white collar worker" without any "algoracy" (cognate to literacy and numeracy), I suspect they are in the process of becoming economic road kill. The space of AI-hard jobs is steadily shrinking. Maybe some people can switch to "blue collar work" and learn to drive a tractor or pick strawberries instead? At least for a while? See, there's this thing called the singularity... but if you're here reading and commenting on this site you're probably already something like an expert in the "far mode" theory of the singularity :-P
The implications of the singularity to things like politics and job skill acquisition are the "near mode" applications that are still being worked out by basically everyone... but I suspect the importance of algoracy is one of the obvious practical implications.
I agree on programming.
(I'm progressing towards level 1 in programming currently, and programming so far has allowed me to write a script that eats a .txt combat log from an MMO and spits out information I care about, it allows me to use a Python console as my daily planner (from collections import deque -> create a stack+queue of tasks), and it allows me to solve Project Euler-type problems. So not a whole lot.)
However, I am treating levels of programming much like I treat levels of wizard - low level spells suck, high level spells are game-breaking-ly awesome.
Writing simple, convenient shell scripts. Solving low-level Project Euler problems.