Replies (1)

• @hansolo@lemmy.today 2026-11-01 06:45

  Ah, OK - I think you’re conflating a few terms here, which is causing the confusion. First, a skill that must be practiced and kept up is called a perishable skill. CPR is a perishable skill, you have to get re-certified to prove you’ve practiced. Speaking a language is also one. I used to speak Spanish pretty well and French OK, and over the last 15 years of not using either of those and learning other languages instead, my Spanish sucks and my French is limited to like 50 words. “Skill Decay” is the term for when someone used to know how to do a perishable skill well, and then stopped practicing and would need to practice more before doing it again. Use it or lose it. If you don’t bake for 20 years and then get back into baking, you’ll find you have to relearn some stuff. Right - that’s a perishable skill. If you experience skill decay and forget how to bake well, it doesn’t meant that the whole world has also lost the ability to bake bread. Second, “Lost Skill” can mean a few things - I’m talking about it in terms of a societal lost skill. I don’t think you are, so it’s sort of a nebulous conversation pinned to a single term. I’m talking about lost skills like hunting mammoths with an atlatl, or telephone switchboard operator. Skills attached to tasks where the task ceased to be part of our world. Mine horse trainer. High priest to the Temple of Zeus. Things like that. What’s actually not a lost skill to our species? A lot of things where someone (or many someones) have kept the alive and recorded so we can still learn how to do it if we want. Papyrus scroll maker? You can learn that. How to make garum, the fish sauce that Ancient Rome used instead of salt on their food? You can learn that, too. How to hunt deer with an atlatl? We still have deer, and people still play around with atlatls, so it’s just hunting deer with a different weapon. Amazingly, there are people that hunt with spears for the hell of it. Weird, but they’re keeping a paleolithic skill alive in our species while others that are more modern have come and gone. Back to bread. Why bake bread if you don’t need to know how? Personally, I learned how to brew beer, bake fancy bread, make pasta, make kimchi, make pickles, cure meat, and a few other things because I like those things and lived in places where the versions of those things I like weren’t available. The knowledge on how to do those skills was easily available, and so I learned in order to improve my quality of life. Many people do it for fun. Some people are lucky enough to do it for pay as skilled artisans that can charge $8 for a loaf of sourdough (getting up at 4:00am, notwithstanding the lucky part). As for CS majors and people that write code, there are people out there that still know how to write COBOL and Fortran and early computer languages that used to be taught commonly. This is, so far, not a lost skill to our species, but it will be in 50 years as those people pass away, and no new programs are written in those languages. That’s like hunting with a spear. It might fade out and be lost, but it’s something people in the future can learn if they want. Modern coding is used everywhere all the time, so that skill in general is not at risk of being lost, even with LLMs. When I was in high school, I wrote HTML by hand because my friends and I were dorks and thought using Word to get basic WYSIWYG formatting was “cheating.” We made fun of each other as sissies and bitches for using Word to format our Geocities pages - can you believe it? Then after maybe 6 months, we all stopped being idiots and realized that while knowing the basics were important to make little changes, letting the machine help you on the bulk of the work was just a huge savings of time and frustration. Once all our geocities pages were up and running, no one inspected the code anyway, so it ultimately didn’t matter other than our teenage egos. Personally, I think a lot of the friction here is similar to the fading of the US auto industry. Americans hold a lot of self-identity with their jobs. And, these are very good-paying, highly-skilled jobs that are narrow enough they don’t allow for much transfer of the skillset to things like HVAC repair or plumber. So to go from $180K a year to being made redundant and learning that you’re now unskilled for most other work available is a double shock, and demand learning skills for another unrelated job entirely from scratch. It sucks, but it happens a lot on this planet.

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