Photoshop is Obsolete. Long Division should be next.

This is a post about why I hate long division. But to get there, we have to talk about Photoshop color modes.

When you open an image in Photoshop, you have the option of choosing one of three color modes (plus grayscale if you want it to be black and white). The default is RGB, which stands for red, green, blue. Any color that shows up on your screen can be reduced to a value between 0 and 255 for red, green, and blue. For instance, an RGB of 53, 94, 59 will give you a nice hunter green color.

The other popular color mode is CMYK; or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (the k actually stands for “key” but for all intents and purposes let’s call it black). Same thing: you give a value to each of the four colors and that unique combination will produce whatever color you are looking for. This is the color mode used for printing. Open up any commercial grade printer and you will see four toner cartridges labeled, you guess it, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

Photoshop also offers a color mode called Lab. The L is for lightness and the a and b are a range of colors, green to red and blue to yellow, respectively. When I was going to Photoshop conferences (a real thing) the Photoshop gurus (real people) were super excited about Lab.

Normally, if you wanted to adjust the lightness of an image (make it darker or brighter) you would use a Photoshop tool like Curves or Levels. Sometimes this had the unintended effect of also changing the value (ie shade) of the colors. So lightening an image might accidentally turn a red pixel into a pink one. Lab solved this by putting lightness on its own channel. Finally, a solution to a problem that only 1% of people actually notice!

Crowding In

All of this is to say that I have a deep knowledge of Photoshop. Most amateurs are interested in learning Photoshop because they want their images to be brighter, darker, sharper, or just to “pop". I had learned myriad ways to get inside images and make them pop.

Then Instagram filters came along and suddenly everyone could do what I could do. Even the default photo editing app on your phone does a good job. At first, I found ways to criticize these techniques; “this isn’t print quality” or “it looks fake,” but it is serving the intended purpose of the user; making it pop so they can share it online.

This trend has continued with Canva, turning any amateur into a halfway decent graphic designer. In fact, this trend started with digital photography in the ‘90s, which made it easy for anyone to be a decent enough photographer. Most non profit marketing teams don’t have a photographer, they just hand a camera to someone (usually the media relations guy) and say “figure this out.”

And he does. It’s not that hard to take “good enough” photos.

All of this has been bad for people who built their careers being highly-sought after professional photographers, graphic designers, and photo editors. But it’s made it really easy for people who cannot afford these services who can now do a “good enough” job and produce more content.

That is the crux of my point; the democratization of the tools didn’t kill my job. I do more digital than print content now, so I just spend less time tweaking photos in Photoshop and more time producing content, which is really what my job is.

Bad Math Dad

I have a ten-year-old who occasionally (when my wife is unavailable) asks me for help with his math homework. Sometimes I can help, but usually I get incredibly frustrated and launch into a tirade about how pointless it all is.

I usually stop there, but this time I decided to lean into my own self righteousness and develop a solid argument for why it is pointless, which you are now going to read.

The fact that I can’t remember complicated long division or how to multiply fractions is a pretty good indicator that learning it was useless for me. That’s not to say math is useless; it’s incredibly important. I use it every day. I just do it with a calculator.

You might counter that not all math can be done via calculator, and that’s exactly my point. Why do we waste time teaching kids things they will end up doing on a calculator? Why not just teach them how to use a calculator to solve simple problems.

Fast Tracking Innovation

Social media managers don’t need to understand color correction in Lab mode. They just take a photo on their phone, make adjustments, and post it to Instagram.

I read somewhere that society advances when we increase the number of things we can do without thinking about it. So how much quicker could we move students along to doing really exciting things in math if we aren’t wasting time with trivial things like memorizing times tables?

There is a story about an elementary school that dropped math from the curriculum, beyond some teaching some basic practice in measuring and counting. Those students rejoined the rest of the district in middle school, with students whose elementary schools had taught them math, and by the end of the year the non-math students' math scores had caught up with everyone else. 

The school dropped math for budgetary reasons, but what if money isn’t an issue for your school? How would you use those extra learning hours to advance knowledge?

My fear is that the reason we still teach these building blocks is the reason some photoshop mavens hate Instagram; it makes their deep knowledge and experience irrelevant.

But I think we have to put the kids first and get past all that. How many kids are we losing each year by forcing them to learn boring, rote memorization of pointless skills they will never use manually? How much sooner could the next generation of math whizzes reach breakthroughs and innovations if they didn’t waste so much time learning building blocks and instead stood on the shoulders of the amazing calculators our society has invented for our convenience?

Or maybe I just really suck at math and this is all cope.

Short Takes: Updating my Priors 2.2023

I once wrote a post pontificating that perhaps the reason US history was told with no contradictions, with America as the hero, was to create a myth to unite a diverse group of citizens. But I think a more likely answer is that a simple narrative is just easier to remember. 

As me move toward a messier, more complicated retelling of our story, my guess is that more students are going to lose track of the overall picture.

---

New paper! Here's the one-minute version. There's a puzzle I've been thinking about for a long time. Wealthy countries tend to be happier... pic.twitter.com/LL2neJbiT4

— Thomas Talhelm (@ThomasTalhelm) January 24, 2023

Interesting thread on happiness that mirrors my post on trust. Some similarities, poverty and inequality lead to low trust and happiness. It also complicates two of my views: I'm okay with inequality as long as we take care of the people at the bottom. But I also highly value trust, which seems incompatible with high inequality.

---

Speaking of trust and social capital, I’ve speculated a lot on the decline of social capital; why there is less face-to-face interaction with people outside our homes in younger generations. But maybe the better question is to ask why there was so much face-to-face interaction with the silent generation. 

And maybe the simple, boring answer is that civic participation and social interaction is driven by boredom. And entertainment and technology is so amazing right now that people are never bored enough to leave their homes and find other people to cure their boredom.

I also think this is a better explanation than the one offered by the Let Grow movement, i.e. that kids are stuck inside because their parents are too scared to let them out. My theory is that they don’t want to go out. The idea of meeting up with some neighborhood friends and building their own treehouse is less exciting than doing the same thing virtually on Minecraft.

---

In my End of Culture post, I pointed out that the proliferation of new movies that are sequels (Top Gun: Maverick, etc.) and TV shows that are spinoffs (Velma, Wednesday, etc.) are a sign of a lack of creativity driven by the Gossip Trap. 

But I think there is a better explanation. 

Research shows that, given low information, a voter will choose the candidate with the familiar name. Likewise, given an abundance of streaming options, and the paradox of choice, a viewer will choose a familiar-sounding show. So spin-offs and sequels are a way for content makers to cut through the noise by giving the viewer a familiar-sounding name.

---

In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef uses the example of a climate activist using investment language as an analogy to change the stance of a climate skeptic who worked in finance. I was thinking of this when reading NYT’s "The Morning" when it quoted Biden’s line about going after “junk fees.”

Not knowing much about junk fees, I would have defaulted to feeling like this was some government overreach effort that is probably a net harm, especially if I read it in a column by a leftwing activist with language like "corporate greed" and "the evils of capitalism". But watch how David Leonhardt frames it.

“True, one company could call out another for using [junk fees]. But doing so often requires a complex marketing message that tries to persuade people to overcome their psychological instincts (like the appeal of a low list price). For that reason, Hilton can probably make more money by charging its own sneaky resort fees than by criticizing Marriott’s.”

In other words, our current, unregulated system penalizes companies that don’t engage in junk fees. If they want to stay competitive they have to do it too, even if they don’t want to. The government, in this case, is just resetting the nash equilibrium so there is no longer an incentive to opt out of the prisoner’s dilemma.

I mean, that worked for me. And it reminded me why viewpoint diversity is important for persuasion; you have to know how other people think and talk if you want to change the way they look at things.