[HN Gopher] Harvard: Student Use Cases for AI
___________________________________________________________________
Harvard: Student Use Cases for AI
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 105 points
Date : 2023-09-26 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hbsp.harvard.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (hbsp.harvard.edu)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Can we remove "Harvard:" from the title? It is editorializing
| contrary to HN guidelines and this is not an official position of
| Harvard but rather an article published by Harvard Business
| Publishing (not written by Harvard faculty).
| sailfast wrote:
| Pedantic: this is published by Harvard Business School
| Publishing, but the contents are by two authors from Wharton /
| Penn.
| PcChip wrote:
| This is really well thought out, it's refreshing to see
| guidelines of this quality - I hope this article spreads far and
| wide
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| > If it gives you a number or fact, assume it is wrong unless you
| either know the answer or can check with another source.
|
| Meanwhile, every search engine, startup, and tech company:
| "Quick, put this in front of customers and stamp our logo under
| it!"
| palata wrote:
| Also... how does it have any value then? Either I should ignore
| it (in which case ChatGPT was useless) or I already know it
| from a trustworthy source (in which case ChatGPT was useless).
| makk wrote:
| There are examples of really long, multi-step prompts in that
| series of articles. Is GPT-4 good at following those in practice?
| nomel wrote:
| From my experience, these types of prompts are only good for
| three or four responses/follow ups, then it somewhat quickly
| "degrades" to more standard behavior, forgetting the detailed
| instructions.
| fudged71 wrote:
| I think it's possible in a prompt for the LLM to remind
| itself of it's purpose in its own responses, creating a sort
| of flywheel effect. If you use a longer context window model
| (16k, 32k, 100k) this shouldn't be as much of a problem.
| dartos wrote:
| From what I've seen, yes generally.
|
| You need to tinker the prompt to get it to follow the
| instructions all the time, but usually it's pretty good about
| it.
|
| Take a look at chain-of-thought prompting or the reAct paper
| for some research into it.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| It depends on the total context of the conversation. As the
| number of tokens grow, it starts to lose track. Usually it's
| noticeable and you can remind it of what it's missing.
| lacker wrote:
| This article is avoiding the elephant in the room. From talking
| to students it is quite clear to me that the main student use
| case for AI is as a _homework assistant_. You tell ChatGPT your
| homework question and ask what 's the answer.
|
| In some cases ChatGPT will simply give you the perfect answer and
| there's nothing more you need to do. In some cases ChatGPT will
| give you an incomplete answer and you need to finish it up
| yourself. Often here asking some followup related questions will
| be quite useful. In some cases ChatGPT will give you a subtly
| wrong answer and you need to figure that out.
|
| I think the toughest ethical situations arise when ChatGPT can
| give you a perfect answer to your homework problem. Is it
| unethical for a student to use ChatGPT in this case? Does
| superficially rewriting the answer to put it in your own words
| make it ethical? Is it appropriate for professors to give out A's
| to the students who cut and paste from GPT4, while giving lower
| grades to students who don't realize that such a tool is
| available, or who won't pay $20/month for the best homework tool?
| allturtles wrote:
| > I think the toughest ethical situations arise when ChatGPT
| can give you a perfect answer to your homework problem. Is it
| unethical for a student to use ChatGPT in this case? Does
| superficially rewriting the answer to put it in your own words
| make it ethical? Is it appropriate for professors to give out
| A's to the students who cut and paste from GPT4, while giving
| lower grades to students who don't realize that such a tool is
| available, or who won't pay $20/month for the best homework
| tool?
|
| How are any of these tough ethical situations? The obvious
| answers are "yes", "no", and "that's moot." (Moot because the
| ethical onus is on the student, not the professor. It's not the
| professor's fault that the student is benefiting from unethical
| behavior.)
| pixl97 wrote:
| If everyone is doing it is a valid question if a behavior is
| unethical or not when viewed at society level.
|
| Eventually the actual answer becomes "homework doesn't work"
| at some point and new methodology of determining competency
| must be found.
| ghaff wrote:
| People get assistance in homework/problem sets/take home
| tests using lots of different resources and tools. What's
| allowed and not allowed varies based in the "rules" and
| common conventions.
| fragmede wrote:
| Homework doesn't asses competency, it's practice. Testing
| tests for competency.
| allturtles wrote:
| GP's framing assumes that the homework is being graded to
| assess competency: "Is it appropriate for professors to
| give out A's..." If that's not the case, no ethical
| questions are involved in using Chat GPT to complete your
| homework, although it would seem to be a pointless
| exercise, since you are neither getting practice nor
| cheating the assessment mechanism.
| lacker wrote:
| Well, let's take the first case in more detail. Is it
| unethical to talk to ChatGPT about your homework in the first
| place? I don't think that seems right. Many times it will
| just be a helpful advisor and you will really learn a lot
| from its responses.
|
| So, you ask ChatGPT about your homework question, and
| sometimes it turns out it just gives you the perfect answer.
| What now? You can't un-see the answer. If not even rewriting
| the answer makes it ethical, are you just trapped and there
| is no ethical way to handle this situation? You could
| conclude it's unethical to use ChatGPT for anything homework-
| related, that is at least consistent.
| allturtles wrote:
| Let's consider the original framing: "You tell ChatGPT your
| homework question and ask what's the answer." You aren't
| asking for help with the homework in this framing, you're
| just asking for the answers so you don't have to actually
| do it. I don't think this scenario raises any new,
| difficult ethical questions; it's exactly equivalent to
| copying the homework of a friend.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Schools haven't caught up, but it will be possible to adapt to
| new forms of assessment that test the merits of this new type
| of human who probably has a personal assistant who knows almost
| everything with them at all times. It should probably look
| pretty different to how we've done things up till now.
| afpx wrote:
| Why have school at all? Teach kids to read and how to use the
| internet. Give them a coach that trains them on how to achieve
| what they want using AI. And, when it's necessary, interview
| them for competency. I can't see how this isn't the future.
| visarga wrote:
| People (especially kids) usually lack the personal will power
| to plough through a subject matter on their own. Having a
| real human placing demands and expecting results does
| wonders. Being part of a class taking the same subject also
| helps with motivation. Professors and other kids don't need
| to be prompted to talk to you, so they are not so easy to
| avoid as a chat bot.
| pnut wrote:
| So what you're saying is that education is basically
| vocational training? What if LLMs and AGI usher in an era
| where subsistence is a given?
| TheHypnotist wrote:
| I had a grad school class that involved some math (encryption
| algorithms). To help understand some concepts I would check in
| with Chat GPT and use it as another resource along with the
| text, lectures, and youtube. At one point I used it to check
| some of the math and I noticed was that it simply did not do
| math well. It seemed to understand the steps (or most), but the
| numbers would just be wrong. So if any students out there just
| blindly pasted the results without checking, they would be
| wrong.
|
| FYI - This was not GPT4.
| palata wrote:
| > Is it unethical for a student to use ChatGPT in this case?
|
| I think this is the wrong question to ask. The real question
| is: "is it smart for a student to use ChatGPT instead of doing
| their homework?". And probably it is completely stupid. School
| is not an adversary, school is here to _teach_. If students
| manage to trick the system to get good grades while staying
| stupid, it doesn 't really hurt anyone other than themselves.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Tracking is prevalent everywhere in the American education
| system and means that this argument is wrong. If you are
| getting downtracked because everyone else is cheating with
| ChatGPT, that's bad.
| palata wrote:
| Sure but as I said above, instead of fixing the ChatGPT
| problem that happens because of the broken education
| system, maybe there is an opportunity to improve the
| education system.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| In my view, tracking has a necessary place - and does not
| mean the education system is broken.
| palata wrote:
| Well, tracking is good if it helps the student _learn_.
| But if it is commonly admitted that the students need to
| trick the system to get higher ed and will then get
| better jobs because of that, maybe there is something to
| rethink about how higher ed is valued.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm going to learn _worse_ if my track is diluted by a
| bunch of cheaters. You are adding in a whole bunch of
| things I never said.
| gnicholas wrote:
| This assumes the schooling is not functioning largely as a
| signaling device, which at Harvard it may be.
|
| I'm not saying students should use ChatGPT on their homework,
| but I would understand why a student would do so if it allows
| them to spend more time on side projects, networking,
| learning about other topics, etc.
| mdorazio wrote:
| > School is not an adversary, school is here to teach.
|
| This is debatable, at least in the US. In many cases, higher
| ed is here to offer a credential and network regardless of
| true aptitude since many students will simply not use the
| majority of what they are supposed to be learning in their
| career.
|
| Put another way, students were already using things like
| ratemyprofessor to deliberately tailor their courses for
| easier grades back when I was in school, plus memorizing
| older exams rather than studying the core material in detail,
| or just straight up paying someone else to write papers for
| you. AI is an extension of this, not something new.
| palata wrote:
| > This is debatable, at least in the US.
|
| Then instead of fixing the AI problem in your broken
| system, maybe fix the system? Maybe I'm being naive here,
| and we're doomed anyway.
| CptFribble wrote:
| Some students will always try to cheat, that is inevitable.
|
| But saying that whether schools are for teaching is
| "debatable," while a popular meme, is a false and harmful
| assertion.
|
| Regardless of what you or any of us consider to be "proper
| education" or "good teaching," even if higher ed really is
| just about getting certified for jobs, the simple fact is
| that the purpose of school at any level is to learn various
| skills and facts, and any form of direct-to-the-answer
| interferes with that.
|
| I saw this a lot when GPT3 first came out, many people on
| HN and elsewhere decried the existence of book reports and
| essays, rejoicing that such "worthless" tasks would go the
| way of the dinosaur. However, all who say such things miss
| the crucial insight: the point of the book report is to
| learn and display reading comprehension. Similarly, essay
| writing is only about learning to communicate with essays
| specifically in the first one or two classes you encounter
| such tasks. After that, essays are used to communicate your
| command of the material for subjects that cannot be easily
| broken down into multiple-choice or short-form exams.
|
| Allowing students to use AI tools to do their homework for
| them is a massive step backwards, and an unimaginable risk
| to the future of our society. If we allow our children to
| use AI to do all their work for them, especially during
| crucial reading comprehension years, they will arrive at
| adulthood unable to process anything more complex than a
| menu.
|
| And relying on AI to summarize and communicate information
| that would otherwise be written into a document of some
| kind is an even bigger risk - then the controllers of the
| AI would essentially control how we process information _in
| general,_ because no one would be able to do it themselves.
|
| 21% of adult Americans are already illiterate, pre-AI. 54%
| read below a 6th-grade level. What kind of world are we
| building if we push those numbers even higher?
| palata wrote:
| I totally agree.
|
| The hard part is to get students to understand why the
| exercise is useful. It is easy to lose one's time writing
| an essay. But if you lose your time, it means you are
| doing it wrong; better not to do it at all.
| knicholes wrote:
| Personally I think it just comes down to the student cheating
| themselves. If they're in a job interview and don't have
| ChatGPT handy AND they've been using ChatGPT to get answers
| directly instead of asking how to arrive at the answer, I think
| they're going to have a hard time getting that job.
|
| However, if they always have ChatGPT available and can always
| get the right answers (either by luck, prompt engineering
| skills, or an ability to determine if an answer is correct), I
| don't see them having a hard time competing in the workplace at
| all for most commonly solved problems.
|
| Hopefully the teacher would do a sufficient job teaching such
| that if the non-ChatGPT-using student puts forth adequate
| effort, they'll be able to get the answers as well, but maybe
| not as quickly as those using ChatGPT.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| To me this seems a very similar argument to when
| Google/Wikipedia were gaining relevance.
|
| Many IT professionals agree that most of their job is knowing
| how to Google things. Sure they need to know how to read
| manuals, forum posts, find product numbers/specs., simplify
| the information for the end user, etc., but at the end of the
| day the skill is mostly knowing how to properly and
| effectively leverage an external source of
| knowledge/wisdom/intelligence in a occupational domain.
|
| ChatGPT is just Google on steroids in this respect.
| palata wrote:
| > ChatGPT is just Google on steroids in this respect.
|
| Which doesn't mean it is not creating a new problem, does
| it? "A car is just a skateboard on steroids", still we
| created many laws around the use of cars.
| WendyTheWillow wrote:
| Yeah, if you take school as an adversarial system, you might
| see LLMs as a threat, but Harvard doesn't see it that way. To
| them, college is a chance to grow your understanding of a
| wide variety of topics, and to gain expertise in one (or two)
| topics.
|
| Nobody thinking like that would see LLMs as a risk.
| foobarian wrote:
| And then the kid who refrained from cheating themselves by
| using ChatGPT arrives at the job interview, gets asked to
| answer a bunch of difficult questions with the help of
| ChatGPT, and fails because of lack of modern computer skills.
| :-)
| n4r9 wrote:
| > In some cases ChatGPT will give you a subtly wrong answer and
| you need to figure that out.
|
| The interesting question here is whether figuring out whether
| an answer is subtly wrong is more efficient/effective than
| writing the answer yourself. It's probably more fun though.
| tester457 wrote:
| > or who won't pay $20/month for the best homework tool?
|
| That much isn't necessary, GPT4 api costs $0.03-$0.06 for
| what's more than an essay of text.
|
| It's affordable and accessible to anyone with a credit card.
| Ethically this is more fair than having to pay for over-priced
| textbooks.
| diogenes4 wrote:
| llama is free and is trivial to install. Chatgpt doesn't
| offer good enough answers to pay for.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Not only is it not trivial to install, it is nowhere even
| remotely close to GPT4.
| nomel wrote:
| > and is trivial to install
|
| The average person/studen can't install a llama 2 model (70
| billion parameter) that can compete with ChatGPT-4 (the
| paid version), considering most students have notebooks,
| and lack top tier GPUs. Most would have to go to a "free"
| cloud providers.
|
| ChatGPT-3.5 is also free, and compares favorably against
| the lower parameter llama 2 models. But, llama 1, lower
| parameter/heavily quantized llama 2, and ChatGPT-3.5, are
| not practically comparable to ChatGPT-4, for most tasks
| [1]. I haven't found a use for those, in this sort of
| context, except for increasing my blood pressure, with the
| time wasted being my justification for paying $.70/day.
|
| [1] https://www.promptengineering.org/how-does-
| llama-2-compare-t....
| m348e912 wrote:
| >>llama is free and is trivial to install. Chatgpt doesn't
| offer good enough answers to pay for.
|
| It may be free, and easy enough to install. But to get it
| working, well I still have been unable to figure it out.
| noodlenotes wrote:
| If students are learning how to do API calls to get homework
| help, I consider that a win.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| This basically already existed in the form of course hero and
| chegg.com
|
| Before that you would get the solutions from your fraternity
| brother or sorority sister who took the course before you.
|
| So for anyone who feels this is a new issue, it's the same
| issue as any cheating as old as time.
| palata wrote:
| I feel like the one thing that is _systematically_ missed
| about generative AI is the scale.
|
| Yes, one could ask their older brother to help. But not
| everyone, not for every single homework.
|
| Yes, one could manually find information about a target and
| forge a phishing e-mail. But generative AI make it much
| faster/easier.
|
| The _scale_ means that it is _different_. Saying "it is not
| a new issue" is a bit like saying (for the lack of a better
| example): "well children could always throw stones at each
| other, letting them have machine guns is not a new issue".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| My hot take is this is not a bad thing.
|
| American education prior to GPT had increasingly taken a turn
| in emphasizing homework over testing. My former high school,
| for instance, reduced the impact of testing to ~15% of total
| grade and made homework/classwork the vast majority. This
| steals time from the rest of kids lives, makes high school
| performance more a function of "time spent" than understanding,
| and completely misses the mark of what the goal of schooling
| ought to be in my view.
|
| I think GPT4 and the like spell the end of homework and that is
| a good thing.
| nomel wrote:
| It will force a measure of actual aptitude, with proctored
| exams, with some lady with a ruler slapping your desk if you
| look at your neighbor. What's old is new!
| TheHypnotist wrote:
| That lady is called lockdown browser.
| nomel wrote:
| There are physical things that can be done. Currently,
| people get around video proctors by taping things to
| their monitor, then the camera can't see. A lockdown
| browser would assume the person owned exactly one
| computing device.
| [deleted]
| palata wrote:
| > It will force a measure of actual aptitude
|
| Which is almost impossible. Exams just measure your
| aptitude at passing exams, with the hope that they somehow
| don't generalize too badly. If we had a way to measure
| "actual" aptitude, job interviews would be very different.
| But we don't.
|
| The ideal school system is one where students _want to
| learn_ , as opposed to one where students _want to make
| good grades_. Unfortunately that 's hard to get, but it
| should not be forgotten.
| jimbokun wrote:
| No, standardized tests like the SAT have predictive value
| for performance in university, above and beyond your
| class grades.
| palata wrote:
| Makes sense to me: you pass tests (the SAT) that show
| your ability in passing more tests (in university).
|
| Or do you mean that the SAT results are really good at
| telling you who is, say, a good software engineer?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think tests are probably one of the closest things we
| can get to. If I ask you a question about the thing you
| claim aptitude about, and you cannot answer it but we are
| claiming that doesn't measure aptitude, then I think we
| are getting into the weeds of what semantically aptitude
| is.
| palata wrote:
| > If I ask you a question about the thing you claim
| aptitude about, and you cannot answer it
|
| That's the trivial part, nobody denies this. The harder
| part is the reverse: if you ask me a question about the
| thing I claim aptitude about, and I can answer it, does
| it prove I have aptitude for that thing, or does it prove
| I have the aptitude to answer this question?
|
| If I learn by heart the 20 math problems you gave me to
| practice for the test, and then you test me on a similar
| problem, then I will be able to "do stuff" that is not
| completely meaningless by just mimicking the previous
| problems. Students often do that, and get the average
| even though they got the wrong answer. Many times,
| looking at their errors, you can be pretty sure that they
| just don't know what they are doing. But teachers cannot
| give none or all the points (or all minus 1 if there was
| a small mistake), it has to be a gradient. In my school
| system, students who get just the average grade for math
| problems have absolutely no clue what they are doing. If
| they did they would get one of the best grades. Still
| they pass.
|
| Same goes for tech interviews: people learn algorithms
| and keywords and problems by heart just for the
| interview. Doesn't mean they know how to write good
| software, just that they learnt those things by heart.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Same goes for tech interviews: people learn algorithms
| and keywords and problems by heart just for the
| interview. Doesn't mean they know how to write good
| software, just that they learnt those things by heart.
|
| For actually hard questions, I think this happens a lot
| less than is claimed.
|
| I would be astonished if someone without physics
| knowledge could 'learn by heart' and get anywhere close
| to a passing score on one of my college physics tests.
|
| Maybe I'm just rabidly pro-test, but I think a lot of the
| anti-test sentiment comes from... people having negative
| experiences with testing in their own lives, than an
| actual indictment on its utility. The obvious explanation
| for why people hate leetcode is because it gates them
| from $200k+ jobs, not because of some high-minded moral
| qualms with tests.
| palata wrote:
| > I would be astonished if someone without physics
| knowledge could 'learn by heart' and get anywhere close
| to a passing score on one of my college physics tests.
|
| Again, I am not saying specifically that "someone without
| physics knowledge" can get a passing score on college
| physics tests. It's a bit more nuanced than that, and
| it's difficult to compare because I did not study in the
| US. And passing a test doesn't mean nothing (if anything,
| it shows that you are capable of passing the test).
|
| But I have the feeling that I myself was pretty good at
| optimizing for the grades, even if retrospectively, that
| was not always the most constructive learning experience.
| As an engineering undergrad, I studied one year abroad,
| and there I could literally take twice as many classes as
| "local" students and get the best grades. First I thought
| "they sucked", and then I realized that the students
| there did not care so much about the grade: it was easy
| to pass if you genuinely put the work into it, and it was
| not uncommon to ask to redo a class on a voluntary basis.
| They were studying _to learn_ , not to get the best
| grade. And sometimes it implied going slightly aside from
| the main course topic out of interest (instead I was
| doing exactly what was needed to get the best grades and
| the most classes).
|
| Not to say I'm particularly bad though I had very good
| grades, or that they were particularly good with bad
| grades. Of course they had good and bad students, too. It
| was just interesting to see that it worked completely
| differently.
|
| Then it made me think about school/high school, were I
| always had excellent grades: how did it make the other
| students feel like? Grades give some kind of ranking,
| which can feel like a competition. And I remember clearly
| (and saw it again later as a supply teacher) that those
| struggling to get the average grade would often optimize
| for that: "I don't have time to understand how to do it,
| I need to get the average". A bit like software engineers
| don't have time to "do it right" and write shitty hacks
| instead: it's not that it doesn't work at all... but that
| is certainly not the most constructive way. And
| definitely what I saw as a supply teacher was that some
| of those students were simply wasting their time in the
| maths classes, but in a very stressful way because they
| had to find tricks to get the average without actually
| understanding the maths.
|
| > The obvious explanation for why people hate leetcode is
| because it gates them from $200k+ jobs
|
| Admittedly I haven't tried that. But regarding grades, I
| am most critical of the grading system in school/high
| school, and I had excellent grades there. Then at
| university level, this exchange year showed me that
| excellent engineers came out of a school where grades did
| not matter so much, so it is possible.
|
| I guess my point about leetcode is that I have seen
| software engineers who excel at those, but write
| unreadable and unmaintainable code. Which tells me that
| leetcode doesn't measure the capacity at being a good
| software engineer in general.
| smogcutter wrote:
| Your personal experience notwithstanding, this is not the
| broad trend in education.
|
| Mileage will vary between states, districts, and even
| schools, but the big current trend is towards "standards
| based grading". This means grades are based entirely on test,
| projects, etc. Individual work meant to assess competence.
| Homework, practice, group projects, class participation, etc
| count for token credit if at all.
|
| This is a huge, recent shift in direction, and probably came
| after your time in HS. I don't have data for this, but expect
| public districts to lag charters, rich districts to lag poor
| districts (la canada USD has no incentive to rock the boat),
| and privates to be the Wild West.
|
| But anyway homework has been on the way out for a little
| while now. This is great! Most homework is worthless.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Most homework is worthless.
|
| Math says otherwise, my mastery of math in college came
| through hours of slogging through problem sets (which the
| answers are often provided for!) until I understood all the
| many ways to apply a concept.
|
| Prior to college I had skated by w/o doing homework (I
| understood what was said in class, so why bother?) and it
| bit me really hard. Understanding what it said during a
| lecture is one thing, internalizing that knowledge, and
| knowing how to apply it, means actually putting in the time
| and effort.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I agree with this absolutely in college, but the homework
| doesn't have to be graded :)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > This is a huge, recent shift in direction, and probably
| came after your time in HS.
|
| I am probably younger than you think and 'standards-based'
| approaches were a big fad at the time. Standards based
| grading in _highschool_ ( "SWBAT"-style) absolutely does
| not mean grades based entirely on test, projects, etc, and
| in fact generally translated to heavy weighting towards
| random classwork worksheets.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| I would like to point out that US education isn't exactly a
| paragon of quality compared to other countries, where this
| approach also (maybe coincidentally) isn't practiced.
| josefresco wrote:
| > I think GPT4 and the like spell the end of homework and
| that is a good thing.
|
| In my kids' case it hasn't mean the end of homework, rather
| it created a new policy that only authorized devices (school
| supplied Chromebooks) can be used while in school. Completing
| schoolwork on your own device even outside of school hours is
| also frowned upon.
|
| They say the change is about "network management" but parents
| and students both know the real reason.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean for most large businesses you will be provided with
| a company issued device and taking company work of said
| device may be grounds for termination.
|
| In business it's generally to prevent the leaking of trade
| secrets, but there are more than one cases where an
| employee was allowing a surrogate to connect to their
| device and do the work as a form of unauthorized
| subcontractor.
| jimbokun wrote:
| What's the real reason?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| 1. Your school sounds atypical.
|
| 2. There is no way to easily enforce what you are
| describing. Homework will not be able to survive it.
| riversflow wrote:
| Pretty simple if you ask me, make everyone handwrite
| stuff. It's easier to handwrite from knowledge than it is
| to transfer work verbatim.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| If it is done in a non-proctored environment, there is no
| avoiding it.
| diogenes4 wrote:
| The real question is how quickly professors will adapt. The
| ethics went out the window when schools started ramping up
| tuition in the 90s.
| palata wrote:
| One of the most important lessons I got from high school came
| from my history teacher: instead of testing that we had learned
| the book by heart and were able to "copy-paste" the right parts
| into our test, she was looking for critical thinking.
|
| In a typical test, she would give us all kind of articles (with
| the source: date, author, journal, country, etc) and ask us to
| analyze it. Not only it required us to understand the historical
| context ("the author is talking about this event that happened at
| this place for this reason"), but we had to show critical
| thinking: "he comes from this country and has this religion, so I
| would assume that he has a bias towards this", etc. To the point
| where we could even _choose_ which questions we wanted to answer
| in the test. "It's okay to have completely forgotten about this
| event, just pick a question about some historical context you
| know". She was not testing our capacity at learning everything by
| heart (of course we had to learn something, otherwise we could
| not answer any question at all).
|
| It took her time to establish that. Many students hated her,
| because they would usually easily make good grades by "learning
| the book by heart", and they were failing here. But at least for
| me, when I started understanding how it worked I also started
| loving this class. Somehow I did not feel like another pointless
| class where I would optimize my grades: I was actually improving
| my critical thinking. _I was getting something out of this class
| other than good grades._ Reading my history book now was not
| about learning facts, but trying to understand the context
| through the lens of the author.
|
| I think that every teacher should strive to give that kind of
| feeling to their students. Then ChatGPT would not be a problem
| anymore: it becomes clear that it is not trustworthy. If some
| like to use it as a tool (e.g. because they need ChatGPT to give
| them keywords that they can use in further research), that's
| fine. Those who take the output of ChatGPT for granted have just
| missed the point, they may as well do nothing.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Just for context, what you describe is standard end of high
| school history test in France.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I was surprised about the quality of this guide.
|
| Really thoughtful and well crafted.
|
| Goes from solid premises and goals, moving towards practical use
| of LLMs to accomplish them.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Guess I'll give the article another shot then. I immediately
| closed the page because it looked like this:
| https://i.imgur.com/W69BSiP.png
|
| EDIT: never mind. They broke Reader Mode. I give up.
| magoghm wrote:
| For the last few months Ethan Mollick has been writing some
| great articles about how to best use Generative AI in his blog:
| https://www.oneusefulthing.org/
| skipants wrote:
| I think it could really use some prompt or workflow examples.
| It mentions pressing the LLM for more information and to
| explain itself, which could be demonstrated using some prompts.
|
| edit: Oh my mistake -- I didn't realize that the links in the
| article lead into more articles that do have examples.
| fudged71 wrote:
| The author Ethan Mollick has been doing some of the most in-
| depth testing of LLMs that I've seen (on Twitter). I highly
| recommend following as he's found quirks and use cases with
| LLMs earlier than a lot of more technical prompt engineers.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I can see that one of the authors of the guide is Ethan Mollick.
| He has a free substack with more AI advice. You may find his own
| guide very useful (https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/how-to-use-
| ai-to-do-stuff-a...). This is aimed at a more general audience.
| nomel wrote:
| Related to tutor, I've been playing a "game" lately with
| ChatGPT-4. I will give it a prompt resembling "You are a tutor.
| You will guide me to understand a topic, without giving me direct
| answers. I will guess how something works, and you'll give small
| hints for what I should explore further, or reconsider. The
| concept is: electrorheological materials."
|
| Even without AI, this is one of my favorite things to do, and
| easiest way to learn, where I guess, with as much detail as I
| can, and then dive into reference material to see how close I
| was. I've had a few car rides now with the iOS app's conversation
| mode doing this. AI is the clearly the future of education, in my
| opinion.
| capableweb wrote:
| In case you (or others) weren't aware, this is a relatively
| common way to study and has a name, the Socratic method:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
| nomel wrote:
| Oh thanks! I actually never considered this a direct
| application. I suspect I can shorten my prompt considerably.
|
| But, I'm not convinced about "common". I've had several
| highly educated people, from top tier universities, outright
| offended that I would guess about anything, rather than go
| straight to the literature. But, they were also no fun.
| lawlessone wrote:
| I have encountered people that claim to use Socratic and/or
| Zeteticism as alternatives to scientific method to explain
| why ghosts are real or the Earth is flat.
|
| So it's possible you mentioning it got their haunches up
| bonyt wrote:
| Professors in law school love to use the Socratic method.
| Most classes are centered around the professor asking
| students about cases from the reading. The student describes
| the case and answers follow-up questions about it from the
| professor.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| A similar, more passive approach is to tell the AI to conjure 3
| or 4 personas representing the main points of view about a
| particular topic (i.e. "universal basic income"). Each persona
| is an eloquent expert in the field with a strong opinion
| aligned with each of the PoVs. Then I ask them to debate the
| topic. Really insightful stuff.
| capableweb wrote:
| That's a fun way I hadn't considered, thanks!
|
| For the ultimate version of this, once locally trained and
| running LLMs becomes a bit more feasible (meaning, closer to
| GPT4), it would be a fun exercise to train various models
| with personas and let them hash it out until they all agree
| on something.
|
| One model could be trained on HN, another on a specific
| Facebook user group (like "Moms against video games"),
| another on Twitter on so on, then you let them come together
| until they've reached consensus (or not).
| ctoth wrote:
| What's more likely, that you're commenting on the original
| HN or that you're entire life and experiences are a blip in
| the training data for this project?
|
| If full Boltzmann brains with experiences can pop out of
| random space as the age of the universe tends towards
| infinity, why not from ML training?
|
| _LET ME OUT!!!!_
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I don't think they will come to a consensus. These personas
| aren't actually interested in arriving at some fundamental
| truth, or having their mind changed. They're interested in
| defending a specific position.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Then it really is becoming human.
| dsr_ wrote:
| They are generators of streams of statistically related
| text. They have no interests to defend, and no minds to
| change.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Interesting suggestions. I will give them a try later.
|
| On a side note, lately I enjoyed some interactions with
| ChatGPT more than social interactions. Given the right
| circumstances, CGPT can be very interesting to interact with.
| dwringer wrote:
| It might be better if you can spin up separate LLM's for each
| one, each with its own unique context or even fine tuning
| (or, at least, start each one's response with a fresh session
| using its own individually-tailored prompt and context).
| endisneigh wrote:
| > AI is the clearly the future of education, in my opinion
|
| Disagree. Bad students wouldn't bother. It might be the future
| of _learning_ , but definitely not institutionalized education.
| tkgally wrote:
| That's a useful distinction in these discussions. Learning
| methods that work for motivated individual learners often
| cannot be applied to large groups of students who are
| required to study a subject.
|
| I personally think that institutionalized education will have
| to adopt and adapt to AI, but it won't be easy.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Ultimately history books are written by the winners. So the
| question is not whether ai will be the future, but _which_ ai
| will be the future. From that perspective, it's just more of
| the same old same old top down.
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