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it's just simply that cooking is a very basic skill.

it only requires that you do it.

you don't need to study hard to learn to cook.

The average person can learn to cook from someone who already can do it (usually it's your parents...) in a week. It usually happens at the age of 15. From then on it's only a matter of practicing and experimenting. It doesn't require a tutor, contrary to what TV shows like master chef wants to sell to you.

I learned how to cook looking at my mom doing it and then tried some recipe from this book series from the '60s that were very popular in many homes when I was a kid.

It's easier than learning how to bike or walk.

https://www.ibs.it/in-cucina-con-fantasia-10-libri-vintage-w...




> it's just simply that cooking is a very basic skill

So? Millions of people lack basic skills, like 1/3 of the population struggles with digital skills.

Some skills are basic but obscure - maintenance of a bicycle is a basic, but if you never has a bicycle, you won't have it.

Or maybe prepping a live fish for cooking.


> So? Millions of people lack basic skills, like 1/3 of the population struggles with digital skills.

You mean people can't use their hands?

Digital skills are not real skills, they are imaginary skills that mostly boil down to "they don't know software products" but they also "don't care about them" and it's a very very very broad field, many people take for granted their knowledge about complex stuff, but basic "digital skills" are easily learned through simply doing it. Just like cooking, but less useful.

Coincidentally, I never used TikTok, I don't know how it works, it's one of the few Chinese stuff that I really don't care about (but it's ironically loved by Americans who also hate China for everything else). Based on this sentence many people would say that I lack basic digital skills, but I am also a professional software engineer since 1996. Many of the things that are basic digital skills for me, are advanced stuff for people who only use a smartphone. Many basic skills, like using a real keyboard, are alien to touchscreen natives. And so on. TikTok is not a skill, but if it was I would lack that skill.

Meanwhile cooking is something that anybody can do, even chimps ca do it

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/03/chimpanzees-...

> Some skills are basic but obscure - maintenance of a bicycle is a basic, but if you never has a bicycle, you won't have it.

as I've said, biking is harder than cooking.

> Or maybe prepping a live fish for cooking.

If you cook it in its entirety in the oven or on a grill, it will be edible, and will taste good.

Or fry it, fried lattarini are cooked exactly like that, you eat them whole.

https://www.tusciatimes.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/lattar...

Virtually every animal that is not an insect can be cooked the same way: open the belly, remove internal organs, cook it. Done. .

Fancy recipes are not "cooking", there's the same distance between playing soccer with your friends and being a professional soccer player.

Saying that TikTok helped someone to learn how to cook is misleading, the merit is of the person that started doing it and learned how to do it by doing it.

Replace TikTok with "grandma book of recipe" and the result is the same.

TikTok has no real value in this story, it just happened that someone used it for inspiration because that's what that person knew. Coincidence is not the same thing of correlation.


> You mean people can't use their hands?

Have you seen British newbuilt homes? They must be using their feet!

> Digital skills are not real skills, they are imaginary skills

So is filling doing paperwork and navigating beurocracy.

We have an entire proffesion dedicates to doing just that, and every year thousands of people get in trouble because they ticked a wrong box in a form.


> So is filling doing paperwork and navigating beurocracy.

yep, exactly, that's why I pay people to do it, unless I'm required by the law to do it personally.


> it's just simply that cooking is a very basic skill.

One that the vast majority of people suck at. Either it's not basic or something else is wrong ... like how hard it is to learn new skills.


They suck because they never took just a little time to try to learn, because they think it's so basic that they can just figure it out while doing it. Or they were wrongly taught by their mothers from past generations when women cooked because of their sex and not because they were any good at it.


You kind of mean cooking as in "cutting and heating food" it seems to me. It's like saying a person can learn "computing" in a week, where they learn how to write a Word document and print it. Sure, it covers a need, and it's a good start. Everybody should learn some cooking and YouTube is a great instructor, but like everything it takes time and effort to become skilled.


> It's like saying a person can learn "computing" in a week

Correct.

The difference is that computing needs a lot of prior knowledge, including what computing means and which branch of computing you want to learn.

But writing a Word document and printing it it's absolutely attainable in 1 day.

Cooking, as in cooking your meals at home, for yourself or your family, is only a bit more complicated than preparing the breakfast.

Which is something that anybody (IMHO) can do.


What prior knowledge would you need to do computing?

Cooking a simple meal anybody can learn, just as typing a Word document and printing it. More complicated cooking tends to stress people out immensely. Kind of the same as more complicated computer stuff does.


> What prior knowledge would you need to do computing?

Wikipedia to the rescue, as usual

Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software.

now go to the average person, ask them what an algorithm is and be prepared to be disappointed.

Ask them what a pressure cooker or filleting is and you won't be.

> just as typing a Word document and printing it

that's not computing, that's typewriting.

typewriting is easy, as the adage says: monkeys can do it and eventually write Shakespeare.

> More complicated cooking tends to stress people out immensely. Kind of the same as more complicated computer stuff does.

Not really.

More complicated cooking mostly takes more time, but it's not really more difficult. I would argue that many people can make cakes which is some of the more complicated food one can cook, but they amusingly say they can't cook.

Making sushi it's easy, but it needs a very long preparation.

More complicated computer stuff requires a lot of studying and you have to learn a lot of concepts that have no other use outside of computing world.




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