> that's a whole different level of ignorance, that's much more dangerous.
Why? Is it more dangerous to not know how to fry an egg in a teflon pan, or on a stone over a wood fire? Is it acceptable to know the former but not the latter? Do I need to understand materials science so I can understand how to make something nonstick so I’m not dependant on teflon vendors?
It's relative, not absolute. It's definitely more dangerous to not know how to make your own food than to know something about it - you _need_ food, so lacking that skill is more dangerous than having it.
That was my point, really - that you probably don't need to know "materials science" to declare yourself competent enough in cooking so that you can make your own food. Even if you only cooked eggs in teflon pans, you will likely be able to improvise if need arises. But once you become so ignorant that you don't even know what food is unless you see it on a plate in a restaurant, already prepared - then you're in a lot poorer position to survive, should your access to restaurants be suddenly restricted. But perhaps more importantly - you lose the ability to evaluate food by anything other than aspect & taste, and have to completely rely on others to understand what food might be good or bad for you(*).
(*) even now, you can't really "do your own research", that's not how the world works. We stand on shoulders of giants - the reason we have so much is because we trust/take for granted a lot of knowledge that ancestors built up for us. But it's one thing to know /prove everything in detail up until the basic axioms/atoms/etc; nobody does that. And it's a completely different different thing to have your "thoughts" and "conclusions" already delivered to you in final form by something (be it Fox News, ChatGPT, New York Times or anything really) and just take them for granted, without having a framework that allows to do some minimal "understanding" and "critical thinking" of your own.
When it comes to food prep, I'd agree with you that the more time of your life passes, the more irresponsible is the risk of not knowing how to fry an egg, for example.
At the same time, you only need to learn how to fry an egg once, and you won't forget it. You can go your entire life without ever having to fry an egg yourself - but if you ever had to, you could.
When it comes to coding, the analogy breaks down, I think. Aside from the obviously different stakes (survival versus control of your device), coding also requires keeping up with a lot of changing domain knowledge. It'd be as if an egg is one week savoury, another week sweet, and another a poisonous mushroom. It's also less of a single skill like writing a for loop, and more of a combination of skills and experiments, like organizing a banquet.
Coding today suffers from having too many types of eggs, many of which exist because some communities prefer them. I also don't like the solution "let the LLM do it", but it's much easier. Still, if we manage to stabilize patterns for the majority of use cases, frying the proverbial egg will no longer be as much of domain knowledge, choice or elitism as it is today.
You do need to be able to understand nonstick coating is unhealthy and not magic. You do need to understand your options for pan frying for not sticking are a film of water or an ice cube if you don't want to add an oil into the mix. Then it really depends what you are cooking on how sticky it will be and what the end product will look like. That's why there are people that can't fry an egg, people that cook, chefs, and Michelin chefs. Because nuance matters, it's just that the domain where each person wants to apply it is different. I dont care about nuance in hockey picks but probably some people do. But some domains should concern everyone.
> You do need to be able to understand nonstick coating is unhealthy and not magic.
Prove it. Please, show me a method by which polytetrafluoroethylene is going to kill me. Because if you're like everyone else moaning about "plastic bad" online, you'll be wrong, and if you have some secret insight that no one else has, I'd love to hear it. But a basic understanding of chemistry reveals that PTFE is functionally inert. It doesn't react with damn near anything, it needs heats well in excess of anything you should be exposed to cooking to melt or burn, and even if you were eating the stuff straight, the whole "inert" thing applies to just about any digestive process your body could apply to it, too.
Why? Is it more dangerous to not know how to fry an egg in a teflon pan, or on a stone over a wood fire? Is it acceptable to know the former but not the latter? Do I need to understand materials science so I can understand how to make something nonstick so I’m not dependant on teflon vendors?