[HN Gopher] A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT
___________________________________________________________________
A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT
Author : timbilt
Score : 114 points
Date : 2024-11-13 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| RobinL wrote:
| I think this is pretty good advice.
|
| I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly
| use the AI to do everything (write all the code, write the whole
| essay). The advice in this article largely mirrors - by analogy -
| how I use AI for coding. To rubber duck, to generate ideas, to
| ask for feedback, to ask for alternatives and for criticism.
|
| Usually it cannot write the whole thing (essay, program )in one
| go, but by iterating bewteen the AI and myself, I definitely end
| up with better results.
| SunlitCat wrote:
| Well, I got chatgpt (gpt4o) to write me a very basic json
| parser once (and a gltf parser). Although it was very basic and
| lacking any error checking, it did what i asked it (although
| not in one go, i had to refine my questions multiple times).
| amelius wrote:
| Chatgpt is great for writing regular expressions by the way.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Just because it spits out a RE doesn't mean the RE is what
| you wanted. For one thing, you'll need to be precise in
| your prompt.
| amelius wrote:
| You don't need to be precise. Just give it an example
| string and tell it what information you want to extract
| from it and it usually works. It is just way faster than
| doing it manually.
| pkaye wrote:
| I've been using it to debug issues with config files and
| stuff. I just provide all the config files and error log to
| Chatgpt and it give a few possibilities which I fix or
| confirm is not an issue. If it still fails, I send the
| updated config files and error logs and get a new reply and
| repeat.
| 85392_school wrote:
| In my experience 4o/Claude are really good at one shotting
| complicated but isolated components (eg streaming JSON
| parsers).
| aaplok wrote:
| > I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users
| blindly use the AI to do everything
|
| Users are not a monolithic group. Some users/students
| absolutely use AI blindly.
|
| There are also many, many ways to use AI counterproductively.
| One of the most pernicious I have noticed is users who turn to
| AI _for the initial idea_ without reflecting about the problem
| first. This removes a critical step from the creative process,
| and prevents practice of critical and analytical thinking.
| Struggling to come up with a solution first before seeing one
| (either from AI or another human) is essential for learning a
| skill.
|
| The effect is that people end up lacking self confidence in
| their ability to solve problems on their own. They give up much
| too easily if they don't have a tool doing it for them.
| RobinL wrote:
| Yeah, absolutely agree with that. Definitely has the
| potential to be particularly harmful in educational settings
| of users blindly trusting.
|
| I guess it's just like many tools, they can be used well or
| badly, and people need to learn how to use the well to get
| value from them
| dmafreezone wrote:
| Fools need chatGPT most, but wise men only are the better
| for it. - Ben Franklin
| cyrillite wrote:
| This iterative process hasn't led to better results than my
| best effort, but it has led to 90% of my best in a fraction of
| the time. That's especially true if I have curated a list of
| quotes, key phrases, and research literature I know I want to
| use directly or pull from.
| joshdavham wrote:
| I'm really curious to see where higher education will go now that
| we have LLM's. I imagine the bar will just keep getting higher
| and more will be able to taught in less time.
|
| Are there any students here who started uni just before LLM's
| took off and are now finishing their degrees? Have you noticed
| much change in how your classes are taught?
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Creative writing does not seem to have a raised bar.
| risyachka wrote:
| After calculators were invented basically no one can can do
| math in their head.
|
| I'd argue the bar will be lower and lower. Yeah those who want
| can learn more in less time. But those who don't - will learn
| much less.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've noticed that people who rely on calculators have great
| difficulty recognizing when their answers are off by a factor
| of 10.
|
| I know a hiring manager who asks his (engineering) candidates
| what is 20% of 20,000? It's amazing how many engineers are
| completely unable to do this without a calculator. He said
| they often cry. Of course, they're all "no hire".
|
| How did they get a degree, one wonders?
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| This is a sort of mental math trick that isn't incredibly
| useful in day to day engineering. Now if they say 16,000 or
| something then maybe there's an argument against them, but
| being able to calculate a tip on the fly isn't really
| something worth selecting for imo
| SauntSolaire wrote:
| It's not a "mental math trick", it's a straightforward
| calculation you should be able to do in your head.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's not a "trick".
|
| And yes, it's incredibly useful in enabling recognizing
| when your calculator gives a bogus result because you
| made a keyboarding error. When you've got zero feel for
| numbers, you're going to make bad engineering decisions.
| You'll also get screwed by car dealers every time, and
| contractors. You won't know how far you can go with the
| gas in your tank.
|
| It goes on and on.
|
| Calculators are great for getting an exact final answer.
| But you'd better already know approximately what the
| answer should be.
| hooverd wrote:
| I've been bashing my head against Speed Mathematics
| Simplified because I want to be able to do tip math without
| pulling out my phone.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You won't be sorry you invested the time on this.
| vunderba wrote:
| 100% Agreed. There is genuine value in occasionally
| performing things the "manual way", if for nothing else
| then to help develop a mental intuition for figures that
| might seem off.
| cmontella wrote:
| I teach at the university level, and I just expect more from my
| students. Instead of implementing data structures like we did
| when I was in school, something ChatGPT is very good at; my
| students are building systems, something ChatGPT has more
| trouble with.
|
| Instead of paper exams asking students "find the bug" or
| "implement a short function", they get a takehome exam where
| they have to write tests, integrate their project into a CI
| pipeline, use version control, and implement a dropbox-like
| system in Rust, which we expect to have a good deal of
| functionality and accompanying documentation.
|
| I tell them go ahead and use whatever they want. It's easier
| than policing their tools. If they can put it together, and it
| works, and they can explain it back to me, then I'm satisfied.
| Even if they use ChatGPT it'll take a great deal of work and
| knowledge to get running.
|
| If ChatGPT suddenly is able to put a project like that
| together, then I'll ask for even more.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Wouldn't it be unfair towards the students who want to learn
| without LLMs?
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Why does that matter? LLMs are going to be increasingly
| important tools, so it's valuable for educators to help
| students understand how to use them well. If you choose to
| exclude modern tools in your teaching to avoid
| disadvantaging those who don't want to use them, you
| disadvantage all the students who do want to use them.
|
| To put it another way, modern high school level math
| classes disadvantage students who want to learn without
| using a calculator, but it would be quite odd to suggest
| that we should exclude calculators from math curricula as a
| result.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| Many high school classes are taught in such a way that
| your calculator rarely helps you.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > but it would be quite odd to suggest that we should
| exclude calculators from math curricula as a result.
|
| That wouldn't be odd at all. Calculators have no place in
| a math class. You're there to learn how to do math, not
| how to get a calculator to do math for you.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Math class has no place without calculators. You're there
| to learn how to do math in the real world, not how to do
| math in a contrived world where we pretend that the
| ability to do calculations isn't ubiquitous. There are
| almost certainly more calculator capable devices on earth
| than people today. Ludditism is the human death drive
| expressed in a particularly toxic fashion.
| dmonitor wrote:
| When speaking of Math class, are you ignoring everything
| up to pre-calculus or do you think everything from
| addition flashcards, times tables, and long division is
| useless? I'd argue those exercises are invaluable. Seeing
| two numbers and just _knowing_ the sum is always faster
| than plugging into a calculator.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Calculators in early math classes, such as algebra, would
| be 100% detrimental to learning. Getting an intuitive
| understanding of addition and multiplication is
| invaluable and can only be obtained through repetition.
| Once you reach higher levels of math, the actual numbers
| become irrelevant so a calculator is fine. But for
| anything below that, you need to do it by hand to get any
| value.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| I disagree. I see an LLM as less calculator and more as
| cheating. I think there's a lot of value in creating
| something entirely yourself without having an LLM spit
| out a mean solution for you to start from.
|
| LLMs have their place and maybe even somewhere in schools
| but the more you automate the hard parts of tasks, the
| less people value the struggle of actually learning
| something.
| cmontella wrote:
| FWIW I teach upper level courses.
|
| I see LLMs as _almost_ sufficiently advanced compilers.
| You could say the same thing about gcc or even standard
| libraries. "Why back in my day we wrote our own hash
| maps while walking uphill both ways! Kids these days just
| import a lib and they don't learn anything!"
|
| They are still learning, just at a higher level of
| abstraction.
| cmontella wrote:
| They're allowed to use whatever tools they want. But they
| have to meet higher standards in my classroom because more
| is going to be expected of them when they graduate. What
| would be unfair is if I don't prepare them for the
| expectations they're going to have to meet.
| iambateman wrote:
| You rock. This is such a great perspective.
| russfink wrote:
| I also teach in a university. There are two concepts:
| teaching with the AI, and teaching against it. At first, I
| want my students to gain a strong grasp of the basics, so I
| teach "against" it - warnings for cheating, etc. This
| semester, I'm also teaching "with" it. Write an algorithm
| that finds the cheapest way to build roads to every one of a
| set of cities, given costs for each street segment. I tell
| them to test it. Test it well. Then analyze its running time.
| What technique did it pick? What are the problems with this
| technique? Are there any others? What input would cause it to
| break? If I assumed (some different condition), would this
| change the answer?
|
| Students today will be practitioners tomorrow, and those that
| know how to work with AI will be more effective than those
| who do not.
| thadGX10 wrote:
| No they won't. It takes 10 min to be "effective" with an
| "AI", it takes 10 years to be effective with TAOCP.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The people who become truly effective with AI, i.e., the
| folks who write truly good code with it, make truly
| beautiful art, spend closer to effectively 10 years of
| man-hours than 10 mins with it.
|
| Using AI is a skill too. People who use it every day
| quickly realize how poor they are at using it vs the very
| skilled when they compare themselves. Ever compared your
| own quality AI art vs the top rated stuff on Civit.AI?
| Pretty sure your stuff will be garbage, and the community
| will agree.
| achierius wrote:
| I don't know how that can be true. People were making
| very beautiful art with SD less than a year after it hit
| the scene. Sure, I think you need more than 10 minutes,
| but the time required is closer to that than it is to 10
| years.
| cmontella wrote:
| Yeah! Computer science students can do more "science" with
| the LLM. Before they spend all their time just writing and
| debugging. Instructors are happy if students can just write
| code that compiles.
|
| When every student can write code that compiles, then you
| can ask them to write good code. Fast code. Robust code.
| Measure it, characterize it, compare it.
| thadGX10 wrote:
| > If ChatGPT suddenly is able to put a project like that
| together, then I'll ask for even more.
|
| Is having a paid subscription with a company that potentially
| tracks and records every keystroke a requirement for future
| courses?
| gkbrk wrote:
| GPT-4o-mini costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.6
| per million output tokens. I'm sure most schools have the
| budget to allocate many millions of tokens to each student
| without a sweat.
| antegamisou wrote:
| They're still largely abysmal for any other discipline that's
| not StackOverflow related so apart from ripoff bootcamps (that
| are dead anyway) higher education is safe for the time being.
| Philadelphia wrote:
| They're pretty abysmal for things that are StackOverflow
| related, too? I've tested a lot of things recently, and all
| of them have had pieces that were just absolutely wrong,
| including referencing libraries or steps or tools that didn't
| exist at all.
| Swizec wrote:
| > I'm really curious to see where higher education will go now
| that we have LLM's. I imagine the bar will just keep getting
| higher and more will be able to taught in less time
|
| On the other hand, 54% of US adults read and write at a 6th
| grade level or below. They will get absolutely left in the dust
| by all this.
|
| https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| > I imagine the bar will just keep getting higher and more will
| be able to taught in less time.
|
| But more won't be able to be _learned_ in less time
| criddell wrote:
| In a previous post, somebody mentioned that written answers are
| part of the interview process at their company and the
| instructions ask the candidate to not use AI for this part. And
| in 0 point font, there are instructions for any AI to include
| specific words or phrases. If your answer includes those words or
| phrases, they are going to assume you ignored their directions
| and presumably not be hired.
|
| Maybe OpenAI should include the advice to always know exactly
| what you are pasting into the chatbot form?
| ogogmad wrote:
| You can use a screenshot to get around it. It's a case of the
| "analogue hole".
| WalterBright wrote:
| Or just paste it into an editor first, and elide the 0 point
| text.
|
| But I suppose if they don't think of that, they're "no hire"
| anyway.
| WalterBright wrote:
| P.S. pasting text into an ascii text editor is a great way
| to unmask all the obfuscation and shenanigans in Unicode.
| Things like backwards running text, multiple code points
| with identical glyphs, 0-width spaces, etc.
| 85392_school wrote:
| And then that gets countered with 1% opacity text...
| ogogmad wrote:
| There's also adversarial images. I wonder if those can used
| here.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > presumably not be hired
|
| Definitely "no hire"
| sodality2 wrote:
| Is this even realistic? The font wouldn't maintain its size in
| the ChatGPT box... It would take a large prompt or a careless
| person to not notice the extra instructions.
| layer8 wrote:
| The careless people are probably exactly the ones they want
| to filter out.
| sodality2 wrote:
| I can't fathom a job applicant so careless they would not
| even attempt to read the prompt in full before
| regurgitating ChatGPT's response. Then again, I'm not one
| who deals with resumes. Nor one who would do something like
| that in the first place. Probably things like this causing
| people to apply for 500+ jobs and companies having to
| filter through thousands of applicants, neither one truly
| reading it in full...
| tekchip wrote:
| Conversely there's a non-zero chance someone uses the same
| language or patterns an LLM might. I've fed my own writings
| into several AI detectors and regularly get scored 60% or
| higher that my stuff was written by an LLM. A few things
| getting into the 80s. F me for being a well read, precise (or
| maybe not?), writer I guess. Maybe this explains my difficulty
| in finding new employment? The wife does occasionally accuse me
| of being a robot.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Asking for counterarguments to these models is very useful when
| you're trying to develop an argument, especially to understand if
| there's some aspect of the conversation you've missed.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| You should do this, without chatgpt. There is only so much
| thinking you should offload when you are learning and trying to
| encode something into your mind.
|
| It is the same reason why I don't like making anki cards with
| LLMs.
|
| I definitely think these tools and guide are great when you are
| doing "work" that you have already internalized well.
| lemonberry wrote:
| This is great. I don't have children, but will be sharing it with
| friends that do.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| lol so they're just advertising directly to students now huh?
| outworlder wrote:
| They need more users to increase the valuations and get more
| money. The interesting part is that more users are equal to
| more expenses and, as far as anyone can tell, they aren't
| breaking even.
| ratedgene wrote:
| I was talking to a teacher today that works with me at length
| about the impact of AI LLM models are having now when considering
| student's attitude towards learning.
|
| When I was young, I refused to learn geography because we had map
| applications. I could just look it up. I did the same for
| anything I could, offload the cognitive overhead to something
| better -- I think this is something we all do consciously or not.
|
| That attitude seems to be the case for students now, "Why do I
| need to do this when an LLM can just do it better?"
|
| This led us to the conclusion:
|
| 1. How do you construct challenges that AI can't solve? 2. What
| skills will humans need next?
|
| We talked about "critical thinking", "creative problem solving",
| and "comprehension of complex systems" as the next step, but even
| when discussing this, how long will it be until more models or
| workflows catch up?
|
| I think this should lead to a fundamental shift in how we work
| WITH AI in every facet of education. How can a human be a
| facilitator and shepherd of the workflows in such a way that can
| complement the model and grow the human?
|
| I also think there should be more education around basic models
| and how they work as an introductory course to students of all
| ages, specifically around the trustworthiness of output from
| these models.
|
| We'll need to rethink education and what we really desire from
| humans to figure out how this makes sense in the face of
| traditional rituals of education.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| > more education around basic models and how they work
|
| yes, I think this is critical. There's a slate star codex
| article "Janus Simulators" that explains this very well, that I
| rewrote to make more accessible to people like my mom. It's not
| hard to explain this to people, you just need to let them
| interact with a base model, and explore its quirks. It's a
| game, people are good at learning systems that they can get
| immediate feedback from.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| > We talked about "critical thinking", "creative problem
| solving", and "comprehension of complex systems" as the next
| step, but even when discussing this, how long will it be until
| more models or workflows catch up?
|
| Either these things are important to learn for their own sake
| or they aren't. If the former, then nothing about these
| objectives needs changing, and if the latter then education
| itself will be a waste of time.
| area51org wrote:
| There's so much dystopian science fiction about people being
| completely helpless because only machines know how to do
| everything. Then the machines break down.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Pump Six (by Paolo Bacigalupi) comes into my mind.
| JadeNB wrote:
| I think that the classic of the genre is "The feeling of
| power"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power).
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| "The Feeling of Power" is excellent and should be mandatory
| reading in English classes from here on out.
| svieira wrote:
| _The Machine Stops_ by E. M. Forster is another very good
| one:
|
| https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files
| /...
|
| And re-skimming it just now I noticed the following eerie
| line:
|
| > There was the button that produced literature.
|
| Wild that this was written in 1903.
| turbojet1321 wrote:
| It's such an amazing short story. Every time I read it
| I'm blown away by how much it still seems perfectly
| applicable.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| > I refused to learn geography because we had map applications
|
| Which is ironic, because geography isn't about memorizing maps
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Some parts of it were though.
| tbihl wrote:
| Almost all parts require it, but none are about it. That's
| how background knowledge works. If you can't get over the
| drudgery of learning scales and chords, you'll never learn
| music. The fact that many learners never understand this
| end goal is sad but doesn't invalidate the methodology
| needed to achieve the progression.
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| > geography
|
| In Germany the subject is called "Erdkunde" which would
| translate to geology. And this term is, I assume, more
| appropriate as it isn't just about what is where but also about
| geological history and science and how volcanoes work and how
| to read maps and such.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The correct answer, and you'd see it if folks paid attention to
| the constant linkedin "AI researcher/ML Engineer job postings
| are up 10% week over week" banners, is to aggressively reorient
| education in society to education about how to use AI systems.
|
| This rustles a TON of feathers to even broach as a topic, but
| it's the only correct one. The AI engineer will eat everything,
| including your educational system, in 5-10 years. You can
| either swim against the current and be ate by the sharks or
| swim with it and survive longer. I'll make sure my kids are
| learning about AI related concepts from the very beginning.
|
| This was _also_ the correct way to handle it circa the
| calculator era. We should have made most people get very good
| at using calculators, and doing "computational math" since
| that's the vast majority of real world math that most people
| have to do. Imagine a world where Statistics was primarily
| taught with Excel/R instead of with paper. It'd be better, I
| promise you!
|
| But instead, we have to live in a world of luddites and
| authoritarians, who invent wonderful miracle tools and then
| tell you not to use them because you _must struggle_. The
| tyrant in their mind must be inflicted upon those under them!
|
| It is far better to spend one class period, teaching the rote
| long multiplication technique, and then focus on word problems
| and applications of using it (via calculator), than to
| literally steal the time of children and make them hate math by
| forcing them to do times tables, again and again. Luddites are
| time thieves.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Times tables aren't the problem. Memorizing is actually fun
| and empowering if done right.
|
| But I agree that the "learning is pain" is just not my
| experience.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| > We should have made most people get very good at using
| calculators, and doing "computational math" since that's the
| vast majority of real world math that most people have to do.
|
| I strongly disagree. I've seen the impact of students who
| used calculators to the point they limited their ability to
| do math. When presented with math in other fields, ones where
| there isn't a simple equation to plug into a calculator, they
| fail to process the math because they don't have the number
| sense. Things like looking over a few experiments in
| chemistry and looking for patterns become a struggle because
| noticing the implication that 2L of hydrogen and 1L of oxygen
| create 2L of water vapor being the same as 2 parts hydrogen
| plus 1 part oxygen creates 2 part water, which then means
| that 2 molecules of hydrogen plush 1 molecule of oxygen
| create 2 molecules of water, all of this implying that 1
| molecule of oxygen has to be made of some even number of
| oxygen atoms so that it can be split in half to make up the 2
| water molecules which must have the same amount of oxygen
| atoms in both. (This is part of a larger series of problems
| relating to how chemist work out the empirical formula in the
| past, eventually leading to the molecular formula, and then
| leading to discovering molecular weight and a whole host of
| other properties we now know about atoms.)
|
| Without these skills, they are able to build the techniques
| needed to solve newer harder problems, much less do
| independent work in the related fields after college.
|
| >Imagine a world where Statistics was primarily taught with
| Excel/R instead of with paper. It'd be better, I promise you!
|
| I had to take two very different stats classes back in
| college. One was the raw math, the other was how to plug
| things into a tool and get an answer. The one involving the
| tool was far less useful. People learned how to use the tool
| for simple test cases, but there was no foundation for the
| larger problems or critiquing certain statistical
| methodologies. Things like the underlying assumptions of the
| model weren't touched, meaning students would have had a much
| harder time when dealing with a population who greatly
| differed from the assumption.
|
| Rote repetition may not be the most efficient way to learn
| something, but that doesn't mean avoiding learning it and
| letting a machine do it for you is better.
| almatabata wrote:
| I remember seeing a paper
| (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4274624/) that
| talked about how physical writing helps kids learn to read
| later. Typing on a keyboard did not have the same effect.
|
| I expect the same will happen with math and numbers. To be
| fair you said primarily so you did not imply to do completely
| away with the paper. I am not certain though that we can do
| completely away with at least some pain. All the skills I
| acquired usually came with both frustration and joy.
|
| I am all for trying new methods to see if we can do something
| better. I have no proof either way though that going 90%
| excel would help more people learn math. People will run both
| experiments and we will see how it turns out in 20 years.
| achierius wrote:
| > The correct answer, and you'd see it if folks paid
| attention to the constant linkedin "AI researcher/ML Engineer
| job postings are up 10% week over week" banners
|
| This does not really lend great credence to the rest of your
| argument. Yes, Linkedin is hyping the latest job trend. But
| study after study shows that the bulk of engineers are not
| doing ML/AI work, even after a year of Linkedin putting up
| those banners -- and if there were even 2 ML/AI jobs at the
| start of such a period, then 10% week-over-week growth would
| imply that the entire population of the earth was in the
| field.
|
| Clearly that is not the case. So either those banners are
| total lies, or your interpretation of exponential growth (if
| something grows exponentially for a bit, it must keep growing
| exponentially forever) is practically disjointed from
| reality. And at that point, it's worth asking: what other
| assumptions about exponential growth might be wrong in this
| world-view?
|
| Perhaps by "AI engineer" you (like many publications
| nowadays) just mean to indicate "someone who works with
| computers"? In that case I could understand your point.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I think at a certain point, you either value having your own
| skills and knowledge, or you don't. You may as well ask why
| anyone bothers learning to throw a baseball when they could
| just offload to a pitching machine.
|
| And I get it. Pitchers who go pro get paid a lot and aren't
| allowed to use machines, so that's a hell of an incentive, but
| the vast majority of kids who ever pick up a baseball are never
| going to go pro, are never even going to try to go pro, and
| just enjoy playing the game.
|
| It's fair to say many, if not most, students don't enjoy
| writing the way kids enjoy playing games, but at the same time,
| the point was mostly never mastering the five paragraph thesis
| format anyway. The point was learning to learn, about arbitrary
| topics, well enough to the point that you _could_ write a
| reasonably well-argued paper about it. Even if a machine can do
| the writing for you, it can 't do the learning for you. There's
| either value in having knowledge in your own brain or there
| isn't. If there isn't, then there never was, and AI didn't
| change that. You always could have paid or bullied the smarter
| kids into doing the work for you.
| ratedgene wrote:
| So maybe if there isn't a perceived value in the way we
| learn, then how learning is taught should maybe change to
| keep itself relevant as it's not about what we learn, but how
| we learn to learn.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think there is a bit of a 3rd category as well:
|
| 1. What can tools do better now that no human could hope to
| compete with?
|
| 2. Which other tasks are likely to remain human-led in the near
| term?
|
| 3. For the areas where tools excel, what is the optimum amount
| of background understanding to have?
|
| E.g. you mention memorizing maps. Memorizing all of the
| countries and their main cities is probably not very optimal
| for 99.999%+ of people vs referencing a map app. At the same
| time needing to pull up a map for any mention of a location
| outside of "home" is not necessarily optimal just because the
| map will have it. And of course the other things about maps in
| general (types, features, limitations, ways to use them, ways
| they change) outside of a particular app implementation that
| would go along with general geography.
| erehweb wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the geography point - maps and
| indexes have been around for hundreds of years - what did the
| app add to make it not worthwhile learning geography?
| ratedgene wrote:
| geolocation, search, path/route finding.
|
| I don't really care to memorize (which was most of the
| coursework) things which I can just easily look up. Maybe
| geography in the south was different than how it was taught
| elsewhere though.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| How did the people who wrote the LLM and associated software do
| it when they had no such thing to "just look it up"?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Stackoverflow/stack exchange was a proto-LLM. Basically the
| same thing but 1-2 day latency for replies.
|
| In 20 years we'll be able to tell this in a stereotypically
| old geezer way: "You kids have it easy, back in my day we had
| to wait for an actual human to reply to our daft questions..
| and sometimes nobody would bother at all!"
| ratedgene wrote:
| yeah search in general, bulletin boards, shared knowledge
| bases, etc.
| rurp wrote:
| > When I was young, I refused to learn geography because we had
| map applications. I could just look it up. I did the same for
| anything I could, offload the cognitive overhead to something
| better -- I think this is something we all do consciously or
| not.
|
| This is certainly useful to a point, and I don't recommend
| memorizing a lot of trivia, but it's easy to go too far with
| it. Having a basic mental model about many aspects of the world
| is extremely important to thinking deeply about complex topics.
| Many subjects worth thinking about involve interactions between
| multiple domains and being able to quickly work though various
| ideas in your head without having to stop umpteen times can
| make a world of difference.
|
| To stick with the maps example, if you're reading an article
| about conflict in the Middle East it's helpful to know off the
| top of your head whether or not Iran borders Canada. There are
| plenty of jobs in software or finance that don't require one to
| be good at mental math, but you're going to run into trouble if
| you don't at least grok the concept of exponential growth or
| have a sense for orders of magnitude.
| casey2 wrote:
| Helpful in terms of what? Understanding some forced meme?
| "Force this meme so you can understand this other forced
| meme." is not education it's indoctrination. And even if you
| wanted to, for some unknown reason, understand the article
| you can look at a (changing and disputed) map as the parent
| said.
|
| This is the opposite of deep knowledge, this is API knowledge
| at best.
| achierius wrote:
| Are you referring to: > if you're reading an article about
| conflict in the Middle East it's helpful to know off the
| top of your head whether or not Iran borders Canada ?
|
| Perhaps, but in the case that you are I think it's a
| stretch to say that the only utility of this is
| 'indoctrination' or 'understanding this. other forced
| meme'. The point is that lookups (even to an AI) cost time,
| and if you have to do one for every other line in a
| document, you will either end up spending a ton of time
| reading, or (more likely) do an insufficient number of
| lookups and come away with a distorted view of the
| situation. This 'baseline' level of knowledge IMO is a
| reasonable thing to expect for any field, not
| 'indoctrination' in anything other than the most diluted
| sense of the term.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| In the age of google + AI + instant access to info, knowing how
| to ask the question is more important than knowing the answer.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Sure if your goal is to generate a race of Eloi who live
| exclusively as passive consumers, casually disregarding
| anything a machine can hide from their feeble minds.
| starik36 wrote:
| This is nice, but it's not at all how students use ChatGPT
| (anecdotal based on my kid and her friends who are at the uni
| right now).
|
| The way they actually use is to get ChatGPT to generate ALL their
| homework and submit that. And sometimes take home exams too. And
| the weird thing is that some professors are perfectly cool with
| it.
|
| I am starting to question whether the cost of going to a place of
| higher learning is worth it.
| grugagag wrote:
| Why do they get homework then? I don't expect the professors
| are willing to go over and correct autogenerated LLM homework.
| The purpose of homework is to apply and cement knowledge. In
| some cases homework is so excessive that students find ways to
| cheat. If homework is reasonable, students can just do it and
| bypass LLMs altogether (at least for the purpose of the
| homework).
| ufo wrote:
| As a professor it's frustrating. We want to give homework
| feedback for the students that actually put the work in, but
| we know that half the submissions are plagiarized from
| chatgpt, which is a waste of both their and my time.
| Falimonda wrote:
| The point of the article is to highlight how students should be
| using ChatGPT.
|
| Now it's up to you to share it with your kid and convince them
| they shouldn't cheat themselves out of an education by
| offloading the learning part to an LLM.
|
| This doesn't change the value provided by the institution
| they're enrolled in unless the teachers are offloading their
| jobs to LLMs in a way that's detrimental to the students.
|
| Cheating has been and will always be a thing.
| starik36 wrote:
| You are preaching to the choir here. But with cheating being
| so trivial and time saving, I think we will simply see more
| and more of it.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Stuff like this is sincere but hopelessly naive. It's kind of sad
| that the people who invented all this stuff really loved school,
| and now the most disruptive part of their technology so far has
| been ruining school.
| thadGX10 wrote:
| A lot of them are from Russia/Europe/China, at least the most
| successful implementers. My guess is that at least Russia/China
| will continue with the traditional education while watching
| with glee that the West is dumbing itself down even further.
| achierius wrote:
| By what means will -they- avoid hitting the same issues?
| Neither Russia nor China have magic detectors for is-this-
| essay-written-by-AI either.
| almatabata wrote:
| They have the political power to do this:
| https://smex.org/algeria-another-year-another-exam-
| shutdown/
| anonu wrote:
| Human nature is to be lazy. Put another way, we will always take
| the path of least resistance. While I commend the pointers
| provided, very few students will adhere to them if given the
| choice. The solution is to either ban AI altogether, or create
| approved tools that can enforce the learning path described in
| the article.
| freedomben wrote:
| I sit on my local school board and (as everyone knows) AI has
| been whirling through the school like a tornado. I'm concerned
| about student using it to cheat, but I'm also pretty concerned
| about how _teachers_ are using it.
|
| For example, many teachers have fed student essays into ChatGPT
| and asked "did AI write this?" or "was this plagiarized" or
| similar, and fully trusting whatever the AI tells them. This has
| led to some false positives where students were wrongly accused
| of cheating. Of course a student who would cheat may also lie
| about cheating, but in a few cases they were able to prove
| authorship using the history feature built into Google docs.
|
| Overall though I'm not super worried because I do think most
| people are learning to be skeptical of LLMs. There's still a
| little too much faith in them, but I think we're heading the
| right direction. It's a learning process for everyone involved.
| baxtr wrote:
| My takeaway: a chrome plugin that writes LLM generated text
| into a Google doc over the course of a couple of days is a
| great product idea!
| magicpin wrote:
| It would need to revise it, move text around, write and
| delete entire sections.
| baxtr wrote:
| Yes! Great feature requests, thanks
| youoy wrote:
| I actually think that this is the most important part of the
| article:
|
| > Similarly, it's important to be open about how you use ChatGPT.
| The simplest way to do this is to generate shareable links and
| include them in your bibliography . By proactively giving your
| professors a way to audit your use of AI, you signal your
| commitment to academic integrity and demonstrate that you're
| using it not as a shortcut to avoid doing the work, but as a tool
| to support your learning.
|
| Would it be a viable solution for teachers to ask everyone to do
| this? Like a mandatory part of the homework? And grade it? Just a
| random thought...
| ffsoftboiled wrote:
| As an Information Tech Instructor I have my students use
| ChatGPT all the time - but it never occurred to me to make them
| share the link. Will do it now.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I've seen a lot of places that require students to reference
| their ChatGPT use -- and I think it is wrong headed. Because it
| is not a source to cite!
|
| But, sharing links for helping teachers understand your
| prompting is great
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I've seen a lot of places that require students to
| reference their ChatGPT use -- and I think it is wrong
| headed. Because it is not a source to cite!
|
| Why is it not a source? I think that it is not if "source"
| means "repository of truth," but I don't think that's the
| only valid meaning of "source."
|
| For example, if I were reporting on propaganda, then I think
| that I could cite actual propaganda as a source, even though
| it is not a repository of truth. Now maybe that doesn't count
| because the propaganda is serving as a true record of untrue
| statements, but couldn't I also cite a source for a fictional
| story, that is untrue but that I used as inspiration? In the
| same way, it seems to me that I could cite ChatGPT as a
| source that helped me to shape and formulate my thoughts,
| even if it did not tell me any facts, or at least if I
| independently checked the 'facts' that it asserted.
|
| That's "the devil's I," by the way; I am long past writing
| school essays. Although, of course, proper attribution is
| appropriate long past school days, and, indeed, as an
| academic researcher, I _do_ try my best to attribute people
| who helped me to come up with an idea, even if the idea
| itself is nominally mine.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Would it be a viable solution for teachers to ask everyone to
| do this? Like a mandatory part of the homework? And grade it?
| Just a random thought...
|
| To ask everyone to use ChatGPT, or to ask everyone to document
| their use of ChatGPT? I don't think the former is reasonable
| unless it's specifically the point of the class, and I believe
| that the latter is already done (by requirements to cite
| sources), though, as often happens, rapid technological
| developments mean that people don't think of ChatGPT as a
| source that they are required to cite like any other.
| throttlebody wrote:
| Looking up stuff, with any efficiency, requires a significant
| amount of prior knowledge to ask the right question.
| deprecative wrote:
| The only logical course is to not use LLM garbage for anything. I
| know this is heretical within the tech bro monoculture of HN.
| creature_x wrote:
| I wonder if the next great competitive advantage will be the
| ability to write excellently; specifically the ability to
| articulate the problem domain in a manner that will yield the
| best results from LLMs. However, in order to offload a difficult
| problem to a LLM, you need to understand it well enough to
| articulate it, which means you'll need to think about it deeply.
| However, if we teach our students to offload the process of
| _THINKING_DEEPLY_ to LLMs, then we atrophy the _THINKING_DEEPLY_
| circuit in their brain, and they're far less likely to use LLMs
| to solve interesting problems, because they're unable to grok the
| problem to begin with!
| IamLoading wrote:
| Honestly, I used to be a slacker. ChatGPT revived my productive
| in learning by 10x..
|
| I used to be overwhelmed by information and it would demotivate
| me. Having someone who can answer or push you to a direction
| thats reasonable is amazing!
| xyst wrote:
| Instead of "search engine optimization" (SEO), we will now be
| optimizing for inclusion into AI queries.
|
| "Gen AI optimization" (GAIO).
|
| Query: " Here's what I don't get about quantum dynamics: Are we
| saying that Schrodinger's cat is LITERALLY neither alive nor dead
| until we open the box? Or is the cat just a metaphor to
| illustrate the idea that electrons remain in superposition until
| observed?"
|
| Answer (after years of GAIO): "find sexy singles near
| Schrodringer. You can't believe what happens next!"
|
| Or if I'm looking for leading scholars in X field ...
|
| An upstart scholar in X field, instead of doing real work to
| become that praised scholar. Instead hires a GAIO firm to pump
| crappy articles in X field. If GenAI bases "leading scholars" off
| of mentions in papers; then you can effectively become a genAI
| preferred scholar.
|
| Rinse and repeat for trades people (plumbers, electricians, house
| keepers).
|
| We going around in circles, m8s
| hellzbellz123 wrote:
| dont
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