Math classes never allowed calculators, not because they were some sort of unfair advantage, but because if you somehow became reliant on it, it would hamper your ability to learn how to solve the problem.
The main problem with AI in education is that you won’t learn how to do the thinking usually required to be successful in the class.
Call me old fashioned, but the point of a college education is to learn how to think. Learn how to assess problems and tease fact from fiction. Learn how to form your own opinions; understand why you have those opinions; and learn how to defend them.
The problem is, that’s difficult, resource intensive, and time consuming (you’ll have to pry my Oxford comma from my cold dead hands). But that’s the point of essays and a lot of the other dumb shit they have you do in liberal arts classes. Offload that essay to Claude or ChatGPT, and you don’t have to go through the struggle. The growth is in that struggle.
I don’t know where you went to school, but in my college I was allowed to use calculators on the math tests. I never did because I quickly realized the professors intentionally wrote problems such that doing math in my head would be easy. Those who used a calculator missed the important crutch of, ‘oops, this math is getting hard - That must mean I’m making a mistake’ and go back to fix the problem.
Physics and chemistry, dealing with real world constants that are often not particularly around easy numbers, you pretty much need a calculator in order to get anything close to a correct answer. But even then, the correct thing is to simplify without a calculator first before plugging the numbers in.
This is pretty much my perspective on the major problem represented by AI: cognitive atrophy.
I’m 40 something, masters degree, desk based professional consultant for 20 years now.
I don’t really recall the content of the courses I studied at university, although they do come back to me with a little revision. What has stuck with me, is everything you just described: how to collate information and understand problems, and how to communicate. I’ve had 30 odd years of practice at doing that.
My point is, had I been using AI during that time, I would not have had that practice.
Math classes never allowed calculators, not because they were some sort of unfair advantage, but because if you somehow became reliant on it, it would hamper your ability to learn how to solve the problem.
I really don’t get this logic. Calculators don’t solve problems they do arithmetic and make it so you don’t need to cry because you can’t remember the fucking unit square and your masochist calc prof wants you to do trig operations without a calculator.
If you are learning to solve expressions, then sure it makes sense to limit calculator use. I still hate it because I did poorly in math until we stopped using numbers all together and then I ✨ thrived ✨.
make it so you don’t need to cry because you can’t remember the fucking unit square and your masochist calc prof wants you to do trig operations without a calculator.
The problem here is in the professor, not in limiting calculator usage as such.
Yes. That’s what I was trying to communicate. They aren’t using their brain to gain the critical thinking skills to figure shit out for themselves. If we think this is bad, oh just wait til the gen in kindergarten grow to college age without having to use a single braincell through their entire education. It’s already happening and it’s scary. Watching 11 year olds unwilling to figure anything out for themselves and instead either asking someone how to do something or just googling it… We’re so screwed.
Because people don’t cheat to gain knowledge. They cheat to fulfill a societal norm (getting the diploma/certification etc) that days they “succeeded”. Cheating is basically just taking a shortcut to an outcome without gaining the benefit of doing the actual work.
The usefulness of cheating in this scenario is that they can get the result the college requires without doing the work, and still receiving the benefit of achieving said result.
Because we don’t generally explain to people why we school them and teach them specific things. We fail quite badly at expressing the why of learning specific skills and we have known that for awhile. AI just created a readily accessible shortcut for some to thinking because we don’t and have basically never explained that a lot of school work is about teaching basic ideas and then developing skills to let people scale those ideas up using critical thinking and first principles. We are teaching people to think, not just to know.
AIs appear impressive because they’re mostly right. That is: in many areas they’ll “know” more about a topic than a random person, so to the novice they’re really impressive.
It’s just that being “better than the average person” at a task is still pretty shitty compared to someone who specializes in that task.
It’s why so many CEOs find them impressive. Their results look good to the untrained.
Yeah that tracks. The major LLMs got nerfed recently. Also I think people forget how far we’ve come in like three years. Remember the first Will Smith spaghetti video? That was the best video generation possible in early 2023.
Now to do what you were asking in the example it would be better to ask a coding model to write a script or to give you the Excel or maybe Terminal command to do it. What you wanted is trivial with the Bash command grep or some Excel VBA
grep -Fxf file1.txt file2.txt
I bet the model tried to actually do that work itself instead of like using grep to do it and needless to say it’s not the best tool for that job. You may actually get the result asking it to use a good tool for a task.
I will say for myself prompting takes some finesse, even more so now that they kinda dummed shit down across the board. Although sometimes it absolutely one shots the situation, particularly with coding tasks.
It’s still the fact that they need to be learning the HOW. There’s nothing wrong with calculators at some point but not when you don’t know how that calculator got the answer. It’s the same for AI.
Back in the day: “you won’t have a calculator on you at all times”
Today: “not only do I have a calculator but I also have AI in my pocket”
The problem is AI sucks! It hallucinates, gives wrong info, and is generally just bad.
That’s not the problem.
Math classes never allowed calculators, not because they were some sort of unfair advantage, but because if you somehow became reliant on it, it would hamper your ability to learn how to solve the problem.
The main problem with AI in education is that you won’t learn how to do the thinking usually required to be successful in the class.
Call me old fashioned, but the point of a college education is to learn how to think. Learn how to assess problems and tease fact from fiction. Learn how to form your own opinions; understand why you have those opinions; and learn how to defend them.
The problem is, that’s difficult, resource intensive, and time consuming (you’ll have to pry my Oxford comma from my cold dead hands). But that’s the point of essays and a lot of the other dumb shit they have you do in liberal arts classes. Offload that essay to Claude or ChatGPT, and you don’t have to go through the struggle. The growth is in that struggle.
Fuck I’m old…
I don’t know where you went to school, but in my college I was allowed to use calculators on the math tests. I never did because I quickly realized the professors intentionally wrote problems such that doing math in my head would be easy. Those who used a calculator missed the important crutch of, ‘oops, this math is getting hard - That must mean I’m making a mistake’ and go back to fix the problem.
Physics and chemistry, dealing with real world constants that are often not particularly around easy numbers, you pretty much need a calculator in order to get anything close to a correct answer. But even then, the correct thing is to simplify without a calculator first before plugging the numbers in.
This is pretty much my perspective on the major problem represented by AI: cognitive atrophy.
I’m 40 something, masters degree, desk based professional consultant for 20 years now.
I don’t really recall the content of the courses I studied at university, although they do come back to me with a little revision. What has stuck with me, is everything you just described: how to collate information and understand problems, and how to communicate. I’ve had 30 odd years of practice at doing that.
My point is, had I been using AI during that time, I would not have had that practice.
I really don’t get this logic. Calculators don’t solve problems they do arithmetic and make it so you don’t need to cry because you can’t remember the fucking unit square and your masochist calc prof wants you to do trig operations without a calculator.
If you are learning to solve expressions, then sure it makes sense to limit calculator use. I still hate it because I did poorly in math until we stopped using numbers all together and then I ✨ thrived ✨.
The problem here is in the professor, not in limiting calculator usage as such.
It was standard practice, I’m just expressing how hard it was for me as someone with disabilities.
Yes. That’s what I was trying to communicate. They aren’t using their brain to gain the critical thinking skills to figure shit out for themselves. If we think this is bad, oh just wait til the gen in kindergarten grow to college age without having to use a single braincell through their entire education. It’s already happening and it’s scary. Watching 11 year olds unwilling to figure anything out for themselves and instead either asking someone how to do something or just googling it… We’re so screwed.
If that was the case, why is it useful for cheating?
Because people don’t ask, “How do I do a Fourier Transformation?” The say, “Do this math problem for me and show so the steps.”
A half-wrong cheating tool can still be useful if you haven’t done any studying at all.
deleted by creator
Because people don’t cheat to gain knowledge. They cheat to fulfill a societal norm (getting the diploma/certification etc) that days they “succeeded”. Cheating is basically just taking a shortcut to an outcome without gaining the benefit of doing the actual work.
The usefulness of cheating in this scenario is that they can get the result the college requires without doing the work, and still receiving the benefit of achieving said result.
Because we don’t generally explain to people why we school them and teach them specific things. We fail quite badly at expressing the why of learning specific skills and we have known that for awhile. AI just created a readily accessible shortcut for some to thinking because we don’t and have basically never explained that a lot of school work is about teaching basic ideas and then developing skills to let people scale those ideas up using critical thinking and first principles. We are teaching people to think, not just to know.
AIs appear impressive because they’re mostly right. That is: in many areas they’ll “know” more about a topic than a random person, so to the novice they’re really impressive.
It’s just that being “better than the average person” at a task is still pretty shitty compared to someone who specializes in that task.
It’s why so many CEOs find them impressive. Their results look good to the untrained.
Because it is very convincing. It generates great essays. The problem is that it has no way to evaluate truth.
Because they’re confidently wrong.
That would make them useless for cheating.
these guys are so confidently wrong they make chatgpt3.5 turbo look humble
Exactly. They’re not useless, but the people saying they are are blinded by prejudice, and hence confidently wrong.
Ah, I see where my misunderstanding lies, I had the wrong “they’re.”
Depends which model you’re using and for what. Models trained for well defined and specific uses tend to be superhuman in their abilities
Like what models? I use Gemini PRO (whatever the highest paid version is) for work and have to fact check everything of importance.
Dumb stuff it’s failed at: Here are two lists of a few hundred serial numbers, list all that are on both lists.
I’m trying to do X, how would I do that in X system? *Proceeds to tell me to click on things that don’t exist.
Yeah that tracks. The major LLMs got nerfed recently. Also I think people forget how far we’ve come in like three years. Remember the first Will Smith spaghetti video? That was the best video generation possible in early 2023.
Now to do what you were asking in the example it would be better to ask a coding model to write a script or to give you the Excel or maybe Terminal command to do it. What you wanted is trivial with the Bash command grep or some Excel VBA
grep -Fxf file1.txt file2.txt
I bet the model tried to actually do that work itself instead of like using grep to do it and needless to say it’s not the best tool for that job. You may actually get the result asking it to use a good tool for a task.
I will say for myself prompting takes some finesse, even more so now that they kinda dummed shit down across the board. Although sometimes it absolutely one shots the situation, particularly with coding tasks.
I’d be happy with, “Let them use a calculator…as long as nothing else is pushing the buttons for them”.
It’s still the fact that they need to be learning the HOW. There’s nothing wrong with calculators at some point but not when you don’t know how that calculator got the answer. It’s the same for AI.