[HN Gopher] AI makes the humanities more important, but also wei...
___________________________________________________________________
AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
Author : findhorn
Score : 261 points
Date : 2025-06-03 03:53 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| antithesizer wrote:
| It's quaint how there are people who think something called "the
| humanities" exerts some occult guiding influence on the world.
| Studying the humanities would disabuse them of that notion.
| simonw wrote:
| The first comment on that article caught my attention:
|
| > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and
| teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class
| toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle
| course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into
| it.
|
| It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them
| an assignment to come up with assignments for their fellow
| students that could _not_ be completed using ChatGPT.
|
| About ten years ago I went to a BarCamp conference where one of
| the events was a team quiz where the questions were designed to
| be difficult to solve using Google - questions like "What island
| is this?" where all you got was the outline of the island. It was
| really fun. Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me
| like a similar level of intellectual challenge.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Yeah, that does sound like a good idea and a good way to prove
| one has learned the ideas presented in the course and the
| relationship between them well
| arvindh-manian wrote:
| I find it difficult to think of examples that aren't just based
| on niche information (what did we talk about on this day? what
| analogy does the teacher make repeatedly?). Maybe multimodal
| stuff?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Even multimodal stuff is something is advancing pretty
| quickly. And with the more widespread incorporation of things
| like this, the information will be fed back into AI systems
| as training data making finding new things more difficult.
| lynx97 wrote:
| > where all you got was the outline of the island
|
| As a blind person I can't help but notice that this
| "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to
| people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't
| help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments
| is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome
| to a new generation of Digital Divide.
| mantas wrote:
| It'd be bad if there was no alternative. But different people
| can get different assignments and that's ok.
|
| Complaining about this is like me complaining about people
| drinking milk since I'm lactose intolerant.
| mootothemax wrote:
| > It'd be bad if there was no alternative. But different
| people can get different assignments and that's ok.
|
| While there are possibly noble goals behind your
| suggestion, in practise this puts anyone outside the
| mainstream in the category of "other," people to be managed
| separately. I'll leave to your imagination how much work is
| often put into supporting these "other" assignments and how
| up-to-date they're kept va the mainstream.
|
| > Complaining about this is like me complaining about
| people drinking milk since I'm lactose intolerant.
|
| If this is genuinely your approach, you are being part of
| the problem; if taking a step back to reassess feels like
| too much work, I'd encourage you to explore why it feels
| that way, what emotions is this bringing up internally?
| imawakegnxoxo wrote:
| I think "everyone gets the exact same test" is a whole
| level of hell worse than "everyone gets a test that makes
| sense for their abilities and goals"
|
| Are you just concerned about the administration side of
| things?
|
| I think the GP here has a pretty reasonable outlook here
|
| "Some people can't do some things the same way as others
| and that's ok, people are different"
|
| Is the vibe I got from that post
| fallingknife wrote:
| Either the test must be the same for everybody or it is
| not a meaningful signal.
| mantas wrote:
| Yes. But there will always be an obscure case you can't
| cover. Let's say a test is written. Someone can't write,
| but can dictate answers. Is it still the same test or
| not?
|
| On the other hand, how far can society tip-tap around
| such alternative takes? Could he go study in a field
| where hand writing is expected and society would still be
| forced to adapt?
| poulpy123 wrote:
| > in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in
| the category of "other," people to be managed separately.
|
| So what ? This is literally the case. The commenter has
| to be managed separately
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| The commenter (rightly or wrongly) is -I think-
| suggesting that assignments etc should be from the outset
| be designed to be accessible in their original form for
| everyone, and not just "okay, this works for 90% of
| people, lets worry about the rest separately".
|
| An example I have personally is when designing board
| games I now have internalised to never _just_ use colour
| to communicate anything. Never solid colour which can be
| difficult to determine by the colour-blind, but different
| colours have different stripes or patterns embedded in
| them. So if you can 't see the colour, you can recognise
| the stripe spacing, if you can't see the stripe spacing
| due to low visual-acuity, you can see the colour... and
| ideally different textures for the blind. (not pratical
| as it would wear off in the shuffling, but the idea is
| there).
| mantas wrote:
| > If this is genuinely your approach, you are being part
| of the problem; if taking a step back to reassess feels
| like too much work, I'd encourage you to explore why it
| feels that way, what emotions is this bringing up
| internally?
|
| How am I part of the problem? Do you mean I should make a
| fuss if I get limited options? Or have emotions towards
| what... My genetical makeup? All in all, I've zero
| emotions about my lactose intolerance. Being mindful
| about what I eat is just natural for me. Just like for
| other people with food allergies/intolerances.
|
| > in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in
| the category of "other," people to be managed separately
|
| Is your goal to get everyone down to the same level by
| removing all learning material that may be inaccessible
| to somebody?
|
| Should people just stop consuming anything with lactose
| to make it more universal for people like me? But then a
| friend of mine will ask to stop eating fish. Someone else
| will take away chocolate. At the end of the day all of us
| will be much worse off.
| WhyIsItAlwaysHN wrote:
| What would you need to tackle this assignment?
|
| I think you're right to complain about the design of the
| question. It used Google's disadvantage in that it couldn't
| process visual information to add difficulty to the task.
|
| However I'm pretty sure there's many of these challenges in
| an average stem subject. An example would be information
| dense diagrams which describe some chemical process.
|
| I'm genuinely curious to understand how someone manages to
| understand these without sight. On my side, I can barely
| visualize so it was always extremely hard to decipher them
| and even worse remember them.
| protocolture wrote:
| Maybe they could 3d print the outline to make it more
| accessible? Or perhaps the goal is to use the image file with
| the outline to find the island, something that could/should
| be achieved via code?
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if a novel solution to the problem
| emerged from students with diverse abilities. I don't think
| that brute forcing the problem by comparing the image of
| every island on the planet vs the outline visually is the
| best path forward. Its probably something like, create a
| ratio of the size of each of the bays and then probe for
| values that fit those quantities on wikipedia.
| math_dandy wrote:
| As a university professor, I admit with some shame that
| accessibility issues for specific problem types is not on my
| radar. "Innovation" isn't the main culprit here.
|
| Fortunately, my university has a good accessibility center
| that takes care of accommodation issues (large print versions
| of tests, etc.). I just send them my tests and they take care
| of it. It's a great service, and absolutely crucial because I
| simply don't have the time to customize assessments. I assume
| they would get in touch if they were unable to retrofit
| accessibility onto an assessment, but that hasn't happened in
| my fifteen years of employment.
| contravariant wrote:
| The good news is that avoiding text-based assignments isn't
| likely to last. Multimodal agents should be more than capable
| of identifying islands by shape, or will be soon.
| svachalek wrote:
| I gave Gemini a mockup of a UI and it generated the stupid
| thing perfectly in code and CSS. Recognizing an island
| seems trivial in comparison.
| simonw wrote:
| Yes, it's true that the one example I presented from a quiz
| game I played at a conference 10+ years ago was not
| accessible to some people. If I could remember the other
| questions they used in that quiz I would share them here, but
| that's the only one that stuck in my brain.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a
| similar level of intellectual challenge.
|
| This is indeed true. But a challenge is that few professors are
| being given the time and training to help do this. When you are
| on a 4/4 and just keeping your head above water you don't tend
| to have enough time to adopt experimental pedagogies and
| completely replan your courses. And professors are largely
| being tasked with doing this independently rather than having
| universities offer training or support with adjusting methods
| to be more AI resistant. And unfortunately the fast speed of
| development of these tools is making good ideas obsolete
| quickly. I know some people who switch to having students make
| podcasts rather than writing papers as a final assignment and
| then we started seeing "create your own podcast" tools appear
| and made it roughly as easy to cheat on this assignment as a
| traditional paper.
| simonw wrote:
| My suggestion here isn't to have the professors do this: it's
| for the professors to challenge their _students_ to do this.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I am friends with an unusually large number of professors,
| many of which are at very top institutions. The "make your
| own pedagogy" approach for students leaves huge portions of
| the classroom doing zero work whatsoever.
| simonw wrote:
| Thats useful, thanks. Sounds like this approach won't
| help most students.
| fallingknife wrote:
| What was the point of having those students in the
| classroom in the first place?
| eyesofgod wrote:
| Taking their (or their parent's) money of course
| tehjoker wrote:
| alternative strategies will have them doing work and
| learning
| fallingknife wrote:
| And then forgetting. If you're not interested, you cram
| for the test and then forget. I see little point in
| forcing people who don't want to learn into classrooms.
| Worth a read
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-
| against-...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Interesting essay. Makes some very good points, however I
| have to disagree with this one.
|
| > ... they keep some sort of overall concept of learning.
| This is a pretty god-of-the-gaps-ish hypothesis, and
| counterbalanced by ...
|
| The author is really missing the obvious here. Learning
| difficult subjects fundamentally changes how you think
| about and approach things. People aren't born able to
| engage in critical thinking or being able to reason
| algebraically or with an ability to navigate formal
| logic. That doesn't mean school is the only way to impart
| such skills, but it is certainly one of the ways.
|
| Of course if the metric you use is "ability to answer
| trivia" then you are going to fail to capture that
| aspect.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| There really are students that will work hard when given
| direction but will flounder when asked to fully self
| direct.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| How does making podcasts solve anything? Students can just
| read out what the AI writes into an audio recording.
|
| Why is this problem being fretted over? In-class written and
| oral tests should be fine to assess students. If AI helps
| them learn or even cram the material, great!
| mapt wrote:
| One of the skills that students are typically _terrible_ at
| is convincingly recreating the flow of a conversation that
| is written down. Shakespeare, spoken in meter-less monotone
| with none of the prosody that indicates actual speech by a
| human being communicating something; Prosody you can often
| decode even in a language you have no knowledge of. If they
| manage to fake it convincingly for an hour-long podcast,
| they have taught themselves acting on a level that is
| commercially useful and honestly understand much of what is
| being said.
|
| If they are just working from AI notes and improvising the
| conversation, arguably they are simply doing the work.
|
| What I don't know is whether an instructor would be allowed
| to earnestly grade an hour-long podcast subjectively.
| simiones wrote:
| Homework and/or project assignments are often a major
| component of scoring for many courses.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| You can do different podcast structures than a single
| person reading a script, which can produce some useful
| social barriers to cheating.
|
| A lot of kids also suck at cheating so the small barrier of
| "ask ai to generate a script and then read it" appears to
| stop a bunch of cheaters.
|
| There are limitations to timed evaluations such that oral
| exams or blue books are not panaceas.
| thfuran wrote:
| >on a 4/4
|
| That's teaching four distinct courses?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| A 4/4 means that you teach four classes each semester. This
| is a pretty typical schedule for non tenure track or
| adjunct professors in the humanities or even tenure track
| faculty at slacs, though I've seen 5/5s before. It is _a
| lot_ of work to update this many classes to adapt to AI.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That seems like a crazy amount of work. Four classes, or
| four sections of the same class?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Depends, but it is often four distinct classes. And yeah,
| it is a lot of work. This is why reusing preps is so
| valuable and why it is a bit ridiculous to see people
| demanding that professors suddenly figure out (on their
| own) how to rewrite their syllabi to mitigate cheating
| with AI.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yikes.
|
| My professor often taught classes with a couple sections,
| I'd help out sometimes--even that was a ton of work,
| pretty hard to do the main job (research) during those
| semesters. I wonder if (given the demographics of the
| board) folks are suggesting things from a similar place
| of informed ignorance to me--coming from research
| oriented STEM universities. In that case it could be
| reasonable to say "well, the situation with our classes
| has gotten so dire with AI, it might make sense to
| sacrifice a semester of research to sort that all out."
| Of course if you are already prepping for four classes,
| there is not much slack to sacrifice...
|
| In that case a lot of us would be specifically more wrong
| than a random person plucked off the street, somebody who
| thinks the main job of every professor is teaching.
| ivape wrote:
| _"Cannot be done with chat gpt"_
|
| Is a military base the only place "no devices" can be enforced
| or something? How deep is this addiction? I'm scared to ask
| what the academic version of fizz-buzz would be at the end of a
| 4 year degree, "hey write one paragraph describing a simple
| paradox, an example of irony, or an example of a metaphor".
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Is a military base the only place "no devices" can be
| enforced or something?
|
| I mean with the force of law, yea. Businesses get away with a
| little bit more in places _because they pay you to show up_.
|
| But if you think anyone is going to university/college to
| have all their devices taken away all the time _and pay for
| the privilege_ then you might be confused.
| cvwright wrote:
| No but people do pay universities for (among other things)
| a meaningful credential that testifies to their knowledge
| and abilities.
|
| If taking away phones is what's required to make that
| credential meaningful again, then the universities must do
| it.
|
| I think of it like a personal trainer. Do you pay them to
| make you sweaty and sore? Not really, but sweat and
| soreness are consequences of doing what it takes to build
| muscle/endurance/etc.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >meaningful credential that testifies to their knowledge
| and abilities.
|
| No they don't, or at least a significant percentage of
| them don't. They pay the university because it is a
| paywall between them and even getting an interview in the
| first place.
| aydyn wrote:
| But that isnt a good long term strategy. If degrees hold
| no real signal, employers are going to start noticing and
| the value of a degree decreases.
|
| So its in universities best interest to actually test for
| competence.
|
| ... In theory.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| I mean, before you get to military bases, there are Pearson's
| testing centers that have lockers for your phone/gear and
| proctored exams.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| How broadly do you propose to enforce such a ban? Most
| students do their homework at home so I'm not sure how you're
| imagining this would work.
|
| Even for exams I had my cellphone and backpack on me. You
| just weren't allowed into them. The only exception to that in
| my experience was exams proctored in a dedicated testing
| center where there are lockers, multiple human observers, and
| lots of cameras.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Among others, Howard Rheingold has been active in this space.
| For those interested, check out the Peeragogy Handbook and the
| post that sparked the idea[0].
|
| > The more I give my teacher-power to students and encourage
| them to take more responsibility for their own learning, the
| more they show me how to redesign my ways of teaching
|
| [0]: https://clalliance.org/blog/toward-peeragogy/
| dirkc wrote:
| It's fun to see how old that article is and that the ideas
| still apply! Power dynamics are not considered enough when
| people talk about education. My believe is that the more you
| balance the power dynamic, the more learning is prioritized
| over education.
| dleeftink wrote:
| For an even earlier account, see the learning networks
| described by Illich (1971) in the _Deschooling Society_
| [0].
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society
| homarp wrote:
| https://bsky.app/profile/hrheingold.bsky.social/post/3lprsqu.
| .. points to a compiled syllabus and links to recordings of
| lectures and video chats in a free pdf, about an "intro to
| cooperation studies":
| https://rheingold.com/texts/IntroToCooperationStudies.pdf
| sampl3username wrote:
| I am a zoomer. Is it really that hard for everyone to _NOT_ use
| AI? Using AI very clearly atrophies your cognitive skills.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I'm a millennial who has watched the complete failure of my
| generation to realize the promise of those Obama 'Hope'
| posters.
|
| "Everyone don't do X" runs into problems when there are clear
| incentives to do X. Like, say, grades which eventually will
| be used to determine who gets to graduate, who gets into
| which schools, who ultimately gets easier access to higher
| paying jobs. And simple convenience is an incentive in itself
| - if doing X saves time, it will be the default.
|
| This same dynamic is why we still have a climate crisis, even
| though everyone has known about the problem for thirty years.
|
| "Everyone just do Y" is what we call a collective action
| problem. When there are clear incentives to defect, it is
| also a free rider problem.
| exe34 wrote:
| Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/810/
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| If a teacher knows the topic that they're teaching, then a 30
| second talk with a student is enough to determine if the
| student actually knows anything. Maybe "assignments" aren't the
| best method of building and verifying knowledge.
| lapcat wrote:
| That comment struck me as odd if only because Plato is not
| commonly part of the standard critical thinking curriculum.
| Introduction to philosophy or history of philosophy yes, but
| critical thinking no.
|
| This is not to say that Plato didn't think critically. Of
| course he did, as do all (or most) philosophers. I'm just
| talking about university courses and textbooks.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a
| similar level of intellectual challenge.
|
| Designing a "mostly ChatGPT-proof class" is in my opinion
| actually rather simple: just be inspired by the German
| university system:
|
| Each week you have to complete exercise sheets which are often
| hard. But being capable of solving a certain quota of the
| exercises is just the beginning: this only qualifies you for
| being allowed to take the actual (oral or written) exam.
|
| In this sense (as many professors will tell you), the basically
| sole purpose of the quota for solving (often hard) exercise
| sheets is actually preventing students from the "self-inflicted
| harm" of doing an exam that they are not yet prepared for.
|
| And yes: while it is forbidden to "cheat" (e.g. ChatGPT) on
| your exercise sheets, this policy is typically not strongly
| enforced (you will nearly always just get a unequivocal,
| strongly worded oral reprimand by the tutor). Instead, if you
| did this, you _will_ for sure not be prepared for the upcoming
| exam, and flunk it (and most students are _very_ aware of
| this).
|
| Oh yeah, I didn't mention yet that if you flunked the same exam
| typically 3 times (depending on the university), you have
| "finally failed" (endgultig nicht bestanden), and are not
| allowed anymore to study the same degree course at _every_
| German university.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > I didn't mention yet that if you flunked the same exam
| typically 3 times (depending on the university), you have
| "finally failed" (endgultig nicht bestanden), and are not
| allowed anymore to study the same degree course at every
| German university.
|
| When Europeans wonder why they are falling behind the United
| States both economically and technologically (Especially in
| the AI race), here's a perfect example of why. A culture that
| turns you into a some kind of a permanent failure because you
| failed to check a box some arbitrary number of times isn't
| one that produces innovation.
| tstenner wrote:
| Of course, the next European neighbor country where you can
| continue your studies (even taking most of your credits
| with you) is often only a few hundred kilometres away.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| If you really think that a university degree course is
| still the right thing for you, you typically just choose
| another "related, but different" degree course at some
| university in the _same_ country.
|
| Concerning "next European country", on the other hand,
| keep in mind that in this country often a different
| language is spoken; in particular for your daily life,
| you cannot assume that everybody understands English or
| even your native language.
| xquce wrote:
| And when Muricans wonder why the rest of the world laughs
| at your simplestic greed based view of "winning", this
| comment is a perfect example of why.
|
| What a weird way to try and connect inter continental
| economics and private company valuation as a sole metric
| for success or achievement with test taking at a university
| level in Germany...
| mebizzle wrote:
| It's weird to correlate how the idiosyncracies of a
| deeply-rooted developmental system might affect the
| sensibilities or perspectives of the adults that said
| systems develop?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I want to agree with you. In fact I do agree with the point
| you're making about how policies, cultural values, and
| outcomes are intertwined.
|
| However you need to realize that the country you're holding
| up as a counterexample brands people as felons over some
| fairly absurd things and more generally has a remarkably
| dysfunctional justice system that exhibits precisely the
| same cultural failures that you're objecting to here.
| Balgair wrote:
| > Designing a "mostly ChatGPT-proof class" is in my opinion
| actually rather simple: just be inspired by the German
| university system:
|
| Now the real question is the costs. In that, can you somehow
| make this system work at scale with the same _profit_ as
| before? I know that the German system is a lot different than
| in the US, including things like tracking in 9th grade and
| below. But the real question is if the Universities make as
| much, if not more, cash. Because if the answer is 'no', then
| it's unlikely to be adopted.
|
| > Oh yeah, I didn't mention yet that if you flunked the same
| exam typically 3 times (depending on the university), you
| have "finally failed" (endgultig nicht bestanden), and are
| not allowed anymore to study the same degree course at every
| German university.
|
| That is an insanely awesome and clever idea. I love it. It
| puts real stakes there, if only perceived ones. I imagine
| that in the US if you flunk out of a major's classes twice or
| more, the number of students that continue on in that major
| is probably pretty low already though.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It's not clever, it's pointless red tape. I don't know if
| it's different in Germany but at least at US universities
| most higher level courses are part of a sequence and are
| thus only offered at a specific time of year. Thus failing
| delays your degree by a year and creates all sorts of
| logistical issues for the student.
|
| Doing that more than 3 times would be absurd, and anyway
| the sort of student who has 3 F's on his transcript within
| his chosen major is unlikely to be maintaining a GPA above
| the minimum for his program (or any program for that
| matter). Rather than transferring to another degree such a
| student is likely to be forced out of the university
| entirely in short order.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > but at least at US universities most higher level
| courses are part of a sequence and are thus only offered
| at a specific time of year. Thus failing delays your
| degree by a year and creates all sorts of logistical
| issues for the student.
|
| This often also holds in Germany. And indeed if you thus
| fail an exam, your degree is delayed and you might have
| logistical issues.
|
| The moral of this: learn hard so that you don't fail
| exams. :-)
| SkyBelow wrote:
| A complete ban feels like overkill. A cooldown period of X
| years would give someone time to reconsider and grow as a
| person.
|
| Granted, this is without consider the financial side of
| things.
| ModernMech wrote:
| As a professor of Computer Science, I'm about ready to allow my
| students to use AI -- if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. But
| they're not going to like it, because what I'm going to do is
| significantly raise the bar.
|
| For the last several years I've been allowing students (college
| sophomores) to do take home exams where they essentially have
| to build a networked system in C++. I tell them not to use AI
| but I have to assume they are.
|
| Even still, the solutions are not all that great, despite
| unlimited time and resources, they still submit work that falls
| into a roughly B average. Which, if they didn't have AI, maybe
| that would be a C average, so perhaps the standards just need
| to go up. Still, it's not like they're all getting 100%.
|
| AI is still really only as good as the person driving it, and
| it still, despite all the hype, hallucinates like crazy, such
| that if they don't pay close attention and constantly course
| correct, they can't expect the project to actually work.
| quanto wrote:
| > Today, engineers working on AI systems also need to think
| deeply and critically about the relationship between language and
| culture and the history and philosophy of technology. When they
| fail to do so, their systems literally start to break down.
|
| Perhaps so. But not in the (quasi-)academic sense that the author
| is thinking. It's not the lack of an engineer's academic
| knowledge in history and philosophy that makes an AI system fail.
|
| > Then there's the newfound ability of non-technical people in
| the humanities to write their own code. This is a bigger deal
| than many in my field seem to recognize. I suspect this will
| change soon. The emerging generation of historians will simply
| take it for granted that they can create their own custom
| research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less
| for free.
|
| This is the lede buried deep inside the article. When the basic
| coding skill (or any skill) is commoditized, it's the people with
| complementary skills that benefit the most.
| treyd wrote:
| > When the basic coding skill (or any skill) is commoditized,
| it's the people with complementary skills that benefit the
| most.
|
| I think that "knowing how to ask good questions" that you then
| solve has always been a valuable skill.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for
| granted that they can create their own custom research and
| teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free.
|
| And they will spend 12 hours trying to figure out which is the
| fake python library and the citation that the LLM has
| hallucinated from the real one. Vibe coding is just WYSIWYG on
| steroids in good and bad. WYSIWYG didn't go anywhere.
| mastazi wrote:
| > which is the fake python library and the citation that the
| LLM has hallucinated from the real one. Vibe coding is just
| WYSIWYG on steroids
|
| Maybe you haven't used AI coding tools in a while, the latest
| ones can run build tools, write and run unit tests, run
| linters, and will try and fix any errors that may arise
| during those steps. Of course it's possible that a library
| may have been been hallucinated, but this will just trigger
| an error during the build job and the AI agent will go back
| and fix it. Same thing for failing unit tests.
|
| Just last week I saw Copilot fixing a failing unit test, then
| running the test, then making some more changes and repeating
| the process until the test was running successfully. At some
| point during this process, it asked me if it could install a
| VS Code extension so that it could run the test by itself, I
| agreed then it went from there until the issue was resolved.
| This was with the bottom-tier free version of Copilot.
|
| Of course there are limits to what AI tools can do, but they
| are evolving all the time and at some point in a not too
| distant future they will be good enough in most cases.
|
| Regarding hallucinated citations, I imagine that the problem
| can be solved by allowing the LLM to access and verify
| citations, then the agent can fix its own hallucinations just
| like most coding agents already do.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| You have one skill that no historian possess - the
| intuition what could go wrong and how and what to do if
| there is hiccup on this chain
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > WYSIWYG didn't go anywhere
|
| Like MS Word?
|
| These are pretty easy to solve problems tbh. LLM tools
| already exist that can work around "hallucinating libraries"
| effectively, not that this a real concern. It's not magic,
| but these tired skeptic takes are just not based on reality.
|
| It's much more likely that LLMs will be used to supercharge
| visualizations with custom UIs and widgets, or in conjunction
| with things like MS excel for data analysis. Non-engineers
| won't be vibe-coding a database anytime soon, but they could
| be making a PWA that marketing can use to add a filter on
| photos or help guide a biologist towards a python script to
| sort pictures of specimens based on an OpenCV model.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It's really embarrassing to put a stake in these. It's like
| when Gary Marcus said that an image generator won't be able
| to draw a horse riding an astronaut and will make the
| astronaut ride the horse because that is a more frequent
| pattern in the training set. Or when an urban legend
| (academic legend?) started that state of the art classifiers
| misclassify cows when they are on sandy beaches and it only
| works on grass (it happened in some cases with small datasets
| and shortcut learning but there was no sota image classifier
| with such glaring and straightforward errors, but it trickled
| down to popular consciousness and grade school teaching
| materials on AI limitations.) Now it's about hallucinating
| nonexistent libraries. But reasoning models and RAG and large
| contexts and web search make this much less of an issue. The
| limitations everyone point at that trickle down to a
| soundbite that everyone repeats usually don't turn out to be
| fundamental limitations at all.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| It is not about fundamental limitations. It is about black
| boxes and magic. If you don't understand a system then you
| know not what lurks within and how it can bite you in the
| ass. Black boxes break - and when they break, you are
| helpless.
|
| If you already know how to build software LLM are a
| godsend. I have actually had a quite a nice case recently
| when LLM invented some quite nice imaginary graphql
| mutators. I had enough experience in the field to not waste
| time debugging, a historian that hadn't shipped software
| before won't.
|
| There were WYSIWYG before, before them was visual
| programming - we have tried to abstract that pesky
| complexity since forever. So far with no success. I don't
| see anything in LLM/Gen AI whatever that will change it. It
| will make good people more productive, it would make sloppy
| sloppier, it won't make people bad at solving problems good
| at it.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yes, the consequences will be that mediocre devs will
| have a harder time finding jobs. The higher skilled will
| be fine (for some time at least), but the trend is clear.
| LLMs are going to make the top engineers more effective
| and the less skilled will have less and less to
| contribute. The skill floor for useful contributions is
| rising. Just like in other industries. Most of the
| world's software projects aren't at the forefront of
| humanity's knowledge that needs brilliant minds. It's
| integration, dependencies, routing around edge cases,
| churning out some embedded code for another device,
| mostly standard stuff but enough differences that
| previous automation paradigms couldn't handle the
| uniqueness. LLMs plus a few highly skilled people (who
| know how to prompt them effectively) will get it done in
| less time than a team does today.
|
| It's not that LLMs turn low skilled people into geniuses,
| it's that a large segment of even those with enough
| cognitive skills to work in software today will no longer
| have marketable skill levels. The experienced good ones
| will have some, but a lot won't.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I am generally pretty skeptical of ai coding. At my job I'm
| resisting it pretty constantly. However, my wife is a
| historian with minimal programming skills and these tools
| have allowed her to build some things that she'd never have
| been able to build without them (without spending a
| thoroughly unreasonable amount of time learning). Sometimes
| she comes to me with some code that is clearly just totally
| wrong but most of the time she's able to stumble her way to
| something useful for exploring her documents and data. Then
| we just do a code review before anything goes into a
| publication to check that it is actually doing what she
| intends.
| lwo32k wrote:
| The kids are not even trying to do either. They are already
| gravitating towards multidisciplinary teams, cause unlike past
| generations they are dealing with a rate of change at a totally
| different level. In such an environment, people get to see
| their own limitations much faster no matter the quality of
| their training and they end up having to rely on others.
|
| The big challenge is getting very different people with ever
| growing different skillsets and interests to coordinate, stay
| in sync and row in one direction.
| sdoering wrote:
| The field of history had their - oh, this is a thing - moment
| quite a few decades ago with Hayden White. It is a good example
| of the underlying issue.
|
| Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was (and
| still is) a complex one, not intended to dismiss the factual
| accuracy of historical narratives (as it is more often than not
| portraied).
|
| Instead, it highlights the interpretive nature of historical
| writing and the way historians shape their accounts of the past
| through literary and rhetorical techniques. White argues that
| historians, like novelists, use narrative structures and
| stylistic devices to construct meaning from historical events.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| The failures we see in AI systems usually come from neglecting
| real-world complexity
| amelius wrote:
| Basically a reformulation of Joel Spolsky's "commoditize your
| complement".
| throw8393949 wrote:
| > My idea is that students will read Darwin's writings first,
| then demonstrate what they learned via the choices they make in
| game. To progress, you must embody the real epistemologies and
| knowledge of a 19th century naturalist.
|
| It is kind of funny, since modern sociology and humanities are in
| a deep denial of theory of evolution, Darwinism and any of its
| implications.
|
| > producing a generation of students who have simply never
| experienced the feeling of focused intellectual work.
|
| This was already blamed on phones. Some study said like 30% of
| university graduates are functionally illiterate; they are unable
| to read book, and hold its content in memory long enough to
| understand it!
| bios444 wrote:
| Yes
| carbonguy wrote:
| I spent some years as a teacher and so have some first-hand
| experience here; my take, for what it's worth, is that LLMs have
| indeed blown a gaping hole in the structure of education as
| actually practiced in the USA. That hole is: much of education is
| based on the assumption that the unsupervised production of
| written artifacts is proof of progress in learning. LLMs can
| produce those artifacts now, incidentally disrupting the paid
| essay-writing industry (one assumes).
|
| From this, I agree with the article - since educators now have to
| figure out another hook to hang evaluation on, the questions
| "what the hell does it mean to 'learn', anyway?" and "how the
| hell do we meaningfully measure that 'learning', whatever it is?"
| have even more salience, and the humanities certainly have
| something meaningful to say on both of them. I'll (puckishly)
| predict that recitations and verbal examinations are going to
| make a comeback - harder to game at this point, but then, who
| knows how long 'this point' will last?
| dotancohen wrote:
| The definition of learning has not changed. One of our first
| written records is a man complaining that this newfangled
| writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer
| have to remember their studies.
|
| Education will adapt.
| palmotea wrote:
| > One of our first written records is a man complaining that
| this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy,
| they will no longer have to remember their studies.
|
| And if your summary is correct, he was right. If you don't
| remember what you've learned (i.e. integrate it into your
| mind), you haven't learned anything. You're just, say, a book
| operator.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The solution has been around a very long time: closed-book
| tests (verbal or written). Works against LLMs too!
| dotancohen wrote:
| Exactly my point. It sometimes takes time for education to
| adapt to new tools. Writing, calculators, search engines,
| etc. I was in the last semester to learn mechanical
| drawing, the next semester learned CAD. Education adapts.
| pixl97 wrote:
| """Solution"""
|
| The particular problem here is the number of staff needed
| to actually administer and grade these kinds of tests.
| We're already talking about how expensive education is,
| just wait till this happens.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| What record is that? Just out of curiosity.
| gm678 wrote:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/#Pha
| empath75 wrote:
| https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
| Zorass wrote:
| For a long time, schools assumed that if a student turned in a
| written essay, it meant they had learned something. But now AI
| can write those essays too ,so that assumption doesn't hold up
| anymore.
|
| The real question is: if writing alone doesn't prove learning,
| then what does?
|
| Maybe we'll see a return to oral exams or live discussions. Not
| because they're perfect, but because they're harder to fake.
|
| In a way, AI didn't ruin education it just exposed problems
| that were already there.
| empath75 wrote:
| A shockingly large percentage of education in the US is
| teaching kids to produce bullshit essays, so it's no surprise
| that AI is blowing a hole in it.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Bingo. If you want to just write an essay, then ChatGPT is
| perfect. If you want to write an essay that says something
| very particular, then ChatGPT starts to give you issues
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I think the main subject of that hole is _objectivity_ , and it
| affects much more than education.
|
| By obsessively structuring education around measurement, we
| have implied that what is taught is objective fact. That's
| always been bullshit, but - for the most part - it's been
| consistent enough with itself to function. The more strict your
| presentation of knowledge is, the more it can pretend to be
| truly objective. Because a teacher has total authority over the
| methodology of learning, this consistency can be preserved.
|
| The reality has always been that anything written is
| subjective. The only way to learn objective fact is to explore
| it through many subjective representations. This is obvious to
| anyone who learns mathematics: you don't just see x^2+y^2=z^2,
| and suddenly understand the implications of the Pythagorean
| theorem.
|
| Because objectivity can't be written, objectivity is not
| computable. We can't give a computer several subjective
| representations of a concept, and have it figure it out. This
| is the same problem as ambiguity: there is no objectively
| correct way to compute an ambiguous statement. This is why we
| write in programming languages: each programming language
| grammar is "context-free", which means that everything must be
| completely and explicitly defined. To write a computable
| statement, we must subject the abstract concept in mind to the
| language (grammar and environment) we write it in.
|
| Most of the writing in our society is done with software.
| Because of this, we are implicitly encouraged to establish
| shared context. If what we write is consistent with the context
| of others' writing, it can pretend to be objective, and be more
| computable. Social interactions that are facilitated by
| software are also implicitly structured by that software's
| structure. There can be no true free-form dialogue in social
| media.
|
| The exciting thing about LLMs is that they don't have this
| problem. They conveniently dodge it, by not doing any logic at
| all! Now instead of the software subjecting you to a strict
| environment, it subjects you to a _familiar_ one. There is no
| truth, only vibes. There is no calculation, only guesses. This
| _feels_ a lot like objectivity, but it 's just a new facade.
| The difference is that the boundary is somewhere new and
| unfamiliar.
|
| ---
|
| I think the death of objectivity is good progress overall. It's
| been a long time coming. Strict structure has always been
| overrated. The best way to learn is to explore as many
| perspectives as you can find. We humans can work with vibes
| _and_ logic, _together_.
| neilv wrote:
| > > _Maintain professionalism and grounded honesty that best
| represents OpenAI and its values._
|
| I think a humanities person could tell you in an instant how that
| part of the system prompt would backfire catastrophically (in a
| near-future rogue-AI sci-fi story kind of way), exactly because
| of the way it's worded.
|
| In that scenario, the fall of humanity before the machines wasn't
| entirely due to hubris. The ultimate trigger was a smarmy
| throwaway phrase, which instructed the Internet-enabled machine
| to gaze into the corporate soul of its creator, and emulate it.
| :)
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| That's what would happen if it was a logical system. It's not.
| This is where it gets interesting.
|
| Instead, it's a statistical model, and including that prompt is
| more like a narrative weight than a logical demand. By
| including these words in this order, the model will be more
| likely to explore narratives that are statistically likely to
| follow them, with that likelihood determined by the content the
| model was trained on, and the extra redistribution of weights
| via training.
|
| We don't really need to worry about technically misstating our
| objectives to an LLM. It doesn't follow objectivity. Instead,
| we need to be concerned about misrepresenting the overall vibe,
| which is a much more mysterious task.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _When I was a postdoc at Columbia, I taught one of the core
| curriculum classes mentioned here, with a reading list that
| included over a dozen weighty tomes (one week was spent on the
| Bible, the next week on the Quran, another on Thomas Aquinas, and
| so on). There wasn't much that was fun or easy about it._
|
| This sums up the problem. It's not fun and the only thing that
| matters is the credential anyway , so unsurprisingly students are
| outsourcing to drudgery to AI. In the past it was CliffsNotes.
| The business model of college-to-career needs to be overhauled.
|
| The humanities are important, yet at the same time, not everyone
| should be req. to study them. AI arguably makes it easier to
| learn, so think this is a welcome development.
| Animats wrote:
| The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he
| describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation.
| It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's
| more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards.
|
| Military officers study much history, but in a different way.
| They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war?
| Why did they even get into that particular battle? Why was the
| situation prior to WWI so strategically unstable that the killing
| of a minor player touched off a world war? The traditional
| teaching of history tends to focus on the winners, especially if
| they write well. Reading what the losers wrote, or what was
| written about them, can be more productive than reading the
| winners.
|
| If you want to understand Cicero's era, for example, read [1].
| This is a study of Cicero by an experienced and cynical newspaper
| political reporter. The author writes that too many historians
| take Cicero's speeches at face value. The author knows better,
| having heard many politicians of his own day.
|
| This sort of approach tends to take one out of the area where
| LLMs are most useful, because, as yet, they're not that good at
| detecting sycophancy.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/thiswasciceromod0000henr
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction.
|
| This is not what academic historians generally do. The study of
| history tells us about the story of humanity and exists for
| wider reasons than direct application to decision making today.
| This is even true for military history, which is among the
| slowest subfields at adopting new methods and practices.
| sdoering wrote:
| Thanks. Came here to say that. Having studied history - esp.
| in a time where Hayden White's assertion that "history is
| fiction" was strongly (and sometimes emotionally) discussed
| in between students and professors alike, taught me, that -
| while we might learn from history - that that is not the
| reason to "do" history.
|
| I also learned to appreciate history on a fundamentally
| different level than I did, when I loved history as a subject
| in school. But that would lead too far out from this thread
| here.
|
| I can relate to the original piece, because - while I use AI
| daily for work and in private life - I also see the dangers.
| Yes, it is a new medium - and I heard roughly the same
| critique about the internet, when I was at university - but I
| think it is quite a fundamentally different paradigm shift
| that we are living through.
|
| I feel (used intentionaly here) it is more like the invention
| of the printing press (from an societal impact standpoint)
| than the dissemination of the internet into the wider
| society. But that is just my current working hypothesis.
| quanto wrote:
| > while we might learn from history - that that is not the
| reason to "do" history.
|
| If we don't learn from history, why do we do history? Is it
| a form of pure entertainment, i.e. of arts? If so, does
| that give more credence to White's argument?
|
| I have had a PhD colleague who genuinely believed that
| history ought to be (in the philosophical normative sense)
| contributing to national propaganda, thus of national
| interest. By extension, this is why history departments
| should be funded by tax dollars.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I agree that goal should be to "learn from history" but
| not in the narrow sense of how could a specific
| historical catastrophe could have been avoided. We need a
| general understanding of histopry because it helps us
| understand human behavior in general. It helps us
| understand ourselves.
| roenxi wrote:
| A fun party game is to get some pure mathematicians
| together, speculate loudly that they must be motivated in
| their work by the numerous practical applications of
| maths and watch cheekily to see which of their faces fail
| to conceal the spasm of fury. 1 point per asymmetric eye
| twitch.
|
| They're academics, their job is to make true statements
| and maintain a culture that cares a lot about whether
| their colleagues can prove them false. Beyond that, it is
| hard to figure out what purpose they might be fulfilling.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > If we don't learn from history, why do we do history?
|
| Historians uncover and communicate the story of humanity
| in as rich and diverse of a way as possible. This is, in
| my mind, somewhat comparable to the process of doing pure
| math research or fundamental physics research. While
| there may be practical outcomes for today (either
| unexpected or intended as a goal of a particular research
| direction), we also understand that doing math for its
| own purposes is valuable.
|
| The process of doing archival research, putting sources
| in dialog with other research, and even simply reading
| secondary source writing achieves some positive outcomes.
| It widens and deepens empathy for the rich diversity of
| human behavior. It builds skills for critical analysis of
| media and communication. It can provide narrative and
| argument for people advocating for change today (both
| good and bad). But these do not need to be the reasons
| why we embark on history research. They are side outcomes
| of undirected analysis.
|
| I'll also add that concern about "history departments
| funded by tax dollars" is just factually unfounded. My
| wife is a history and the size of grants is _hilarious_
| coming from my background in CS. Like, a grant for
| $2,000-$5,000 would be considered chunky. And grants are
| often coming from weird places like random corporations
| or donor funding rather than from the government. The NEH
| was already basically dead before Trump 2.0 and now is
| dead and buried. People upset about academic history can
| rest easy knowing that there aren 't historians living
| large on your tax dollars.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| One of the primary advantages of having a software
| engineer (or lawyer, for that matter) on staff isn't that
| they produce software, not exactly. It's that they guide
| the flow of process, and can adapt the river as needed to
| keep the business running smoothly.
|
| Historians, imho, serve a similar purpose for society at
| large. They digest the information of the past to make
| sense of it for today, and sometimes they build dams that
| redirect the informational flow of future history.
| oersted wrote:
| That's a good point, beyond prediction, history does have
| utility for surfacing "shared stories" that bring people
| together. Let's not underestimate the real-world impact
| of such stories. Most big societal movements, both very
| good and very bad, have been fueled by shared history, or
| the making of shared history.
|
| What's tricky is that indeed such stories need not be
| factual to be powerful, just as long as they resonate
| well-enough with the current "common-sense" and have some
| kind authority behind it giving it credence.
|
| Historians do have an important responsibility here in
| making sure that people are aware of the real story so
| that they are not easily manipulated, just like
| journalists have a similar responsibility in a democracy,
| fourth estate and all.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| Oh, it's not just the "big stories". History is a pretty
| big flag that covers a lot of territory. At heart,
| history is about asking perennial questions like "where
| do we come from?", "how did the past shape us today?" and
| "how could the past inform us?".
|
| This is true on an individual as well as a collective
| level, and goes well beyond academia. Consider genealogy
| & family history, local and regional culture and
| traditions, remembrance,... There is always a personal
| connection, and that tends to become extremely tangible
| in individual stories. Whether that's finding a lost
| relative, honoring one's culture, or just being able to
| empathize with the lives of people who are centuries gone
| and discovering that they weren't all that different from
| us today.
|
| Historians do carry a big responsibility. That's why
| accountability is at the heart of anyone who does
| historical research on a professional level; or are
| motivated to spread their interpretation of the
| historical record well beyond a few listeners. That's why
| historians are instilled with a reflex to keep a
| pragmatic attitude and ask critical questions.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| > Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction"
|
| Your comment made me dig up "Historical text as literary
| artifact".
|
| I have several thoughts on that, but one very important
| analogy stood out to me and is succinct enough to comment
| here. In statistics, one talks about the population,
| collecting data (sampling from the popluation), and
| building a model from the collected data. You may have
| guessed that the collected data alone does not typically
| make much sense, but for the patterns encapsulated by the
| model, which then has explanatory power; yet among the
| three classes I mentioned, it is the most fictitious and
| constructed for a particular goal, the most inauthentic.
| vkou wrote:
| The thing is, this statistics data-to-model only works on
| large datasets.
|
| History deals with very small, very heterogeneous
| datasets. Finding patterns in them (if they even exist)
| is very difficult, and it's _why_ historical models and
| grand unified theories are so often bunk.
| spankibalt wrote:
| > Military officers study much history, but in a different way.
| They look for mistakes.
|
| Amongst other things...
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| > It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction.
|
| Because this isnt the goal of history. You cant use history to
| predict the future.
|
| > If you want to understand Cicero's era, for example, read
| [1]. This is a study of Cicero by an experienced and cynical
| newspaper political reporter. The author writes that too many
| historians take Cicero's speeches at face value. The author
| knows better, having heard many politicians of his own day.
|
| No they dont. This is yet another example of an outsider
| looking at another field, thinking he knows better and making a
| fool of himself. Also, why would you ignore 80 years of
| scholarship about Cicero and read a book from 1942???
| pixl97 wrote:
| >You cant use history to predict the future.
|
| I mean this statement is somewhat false.
|
| If I show you a picture of a cup from 100 ms ago and it's in
| midair probability favors that the cup will be on it's way to
| the ground to its demise. Statistically this will be true.
|
| History is filled with analogous times where by watching the
| present you can make predictions far better than flipping a
| coin.
| _elephant wrote:
| It makes a good point by separating history as strategic
| analysis from history as cultural appreciation. Most teaching
| today leans toward the latter, which is also easier for AI to
| replicate. But the most valuable historical thinking often
| comes from uncomfortable questions failure, unintended
| consequences, and perspectives that usually get ignored.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| When history is approached as a pattern of decisions, risks,
| and consequences (not just narratives) it starts to feel a lot
| more relevant to other complex domains, including AI itself.
| And yeah, studying the losers (or the overlooked) often yields
| more insight than lionizing the winners.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > But what he describes as teaching history is more like
| history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an
| aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics",
| from Cicero onwards.
|
| How are those things dissociated?
|
| I always saw history as a waht to explain "why things are the
| way they are". Whatever we are now, this amalgamation of good
| or bad things, is a consequence of what came before.
|
| Is "studying the classics" from a historical standpoint even
| done for "appreciation"? I always presumed that one should do
| so critically, and that's more or less what I found from actual
| historians.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The "explain how we got here" approach to history has some
| pretty big limitations. The historical actors had no idea
| where the future was going. When we examine their actions
| from the perspective of the single contingency that ended up
| happening we will almost necessarily miss meaningful
| understanding and make things seem inevitable when they
| really weren't.
|
| There's interesting writing to be done in this mode but it is
| definitely not the primary mode.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > The historical actors had no idea where the future was
| going.
|
| Does it matter in order to explain how things came to be?
|
| Understanding their motivations, the incentives that led
| them to do what they did, the sociopolitical context they
| were inserted into, the limitations of a historical
| perspective (quite often the accounts of past historical
| figures were written by people invested in portraying it in
| one way or another).
|
| All those things would help, when looking at history
| critically, to make some sense of the present and where
| things might be going in the future.
|
| In a sense, things that happened were inevitable because
| they came to pass. We are not talking about a possibility,
| we are talking about a certainty long after the fact.
| Understanding that it might have been avoided in some ways
| can be helpful, but also is an exercise in wishful thinking
| and guesswork.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > Does it matter in order to explain how things came to
| be?
|
| Yes. Writing on historiography has been detailed about
| the ways that this sort of framing can be limiting.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Studying the winners is also a surefire way to learn only
| survivorship bias.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Another day, another Substack ad by this "science historian",
| naturally with a quote by AI shill Simon Willison. The entire
| world rests on his shoulders.
| Caelus9 wrote:
| I think that when a new era comes, we should choose to embrace it
| actively. Today, the humanities face unprecedented challenges,
| but they also contain new opportunities. The rise of artificial
| intelligence has undoubtedly subverted traditional teaching
| methods, but it also forces us to rethink a fundamental question:
| What is the real value of the humanities? As a historian at
| Princeton University once pointed out, artificial intelligence
| can process data and generate text, but it can never replace
| human subjective experience, moral judgment, and our exploration
| of meaning, such as questions like "Who am I?" In the final
| analysis, the value of the humanities may not be "useful" in the
| traditional sense, but in helping us better understand ourselves
| and the world we live in.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| When effort becomes optional, so does growth. And the quote from
| the student who sees college as networking with a side of AI-
| cheating? Painfully on the nose. There's a real risk of LLMs
| flattening the educational journey into a kind of performance
| optimization game
| phito wrote:
| > There's a real risk of LLMs flattening the educational
| journey into a kind of performance optimization game
|
| It's already been the case for a long time, it's just going to
| get worse.
| wisty wrote:
| A lazy physics teacher can make every question a math question in
| disguise. If a physics teacher is worried that a better
| calculator will make their test trivial, maybe they need to teach
| physics instead of testing math.
|
| A lazy humanities teacher can make every question a writing
| question in disguise. If a better spell checker will make a
| humanities assessment trivial, then maybe they need to teach
| humanities instead of testing essay writing.
|
| I'm saying this in a kinda inflammatory way, but does the quality
| of ones ideas really correlate well with a well written essay?
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I think if you removed the economic incentive to cheat then
| humanities wouldn't have the problem it does with LLMs
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| There's _always_ an incentive to cheat: economic,
| reputational... people cheat in _single-player video games_.
| People cheat in _sudoku puzzles_. By removing all incentives,
| all you do is destroy the concept of "cheating", not prevent
| the behaviour.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| It's definitionally not cheating if it's a single player
| environment. That's like saying skipping to the end of a
| movie is cheating.
| Timwi wrote:
| I think you've listed several disparate incentives that
| should be looked at separately.
|
| Economic incentives are what this thread is about. If those
| are removed, some instances of cheating will subside.
|
| Reputational incentives are similar and harder to address,
| but they are also less strong because the cheating has a
| much higher chance to backfire. If you are found out, your
| economic benefits might continue, but your reputation is
| immediately damaged.
|
| Singleplayer games are an entirely different situation.
| There's clearly no economic incentive here, and
| reputational incentive only applies if you are looking to
| share your singleplayer result with other people, in which
| case I could argue it's no longer singleplayer in the game
| theoretic sense. If it's not that, the only remaining
| motivation to cheat at something like Sudoku or a
| singleplayer videogame is to learn or at least satisfy an
| itch or curiosity, which I think is a perfectly legitimate
| motivation.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Economic incentives are what this thread is about.
|
| You cannot remove economic incentives for the most part,
| 'economy' is attached to all facets of peoples lives,
| especially where rival goods exist.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You forgot laziness.
| this15testingg wrote:
| equating chatgpt to "a better spell checker" is wild; how is
| writing not also a skill that should be taught?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| It's the thinking that precedes writing that should be the
| bulk of your grade. Possessing what looks like an artifact of
| organized thought isn't enough these days to evaluate a
| student.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| The "thinking that precedes the writing" is not where the
| gold is. That kind of thinking is often confused,
| internally inconsistent, liable to miss critical details or
| nuance, and full of deductive leaps which may or may not
| pan out. Writing demands rigor of thought, it forces us to
| question premises, find evidence for a point of view,
| discern between the hypothetical and the factual, and try
| to organize these such that they cohere.
|
| The thinking _is_ the writing. To be able to write is to be
| able to think, and if you are surrendering the writing to a
| machine that's not ultimately what you're surrendering--
| you're giving up independent thought itself.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| You misunderstand. I mean the thinking that you say "_is_
| the writing". But the final words aren't the thoughts
| that you should be graded on (aka "this is not a pipe",
| but your essay is not your thoughts). What a new
| assessment could look like is an open book debate with a
| human (or, hell, with a rubber duck LLM). If at the end
| your thoughts are organized and self consistent you've
| done well.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I agree that professors can probably develop ai resistant
| evaluations.
|
| But there is minimal institutional support for this. Everybody
| is going it on their own. And the ai tools are changing
| rapidly. Telling a ntt faculty member teaching a 4/4 that they
| just need to stop being lazy and redo their entire evaluation
| method is not really workable.
|
| Iteration is also slow. You do a new syllabus to try to
| discourage cheating. You run the course for a semester. You see
| the results with now just a few weeks to turn around for your
| spring semester courses. At best you get one iteration cycle
| per six months. More likely it is one per year since it is
| basically impossible to meaningfully digest the outcome of what
| you tried and to meaningfully try something different mere
| weeks later.
| wrp wrote:
| I've been urging this kind of adaptation for the past couple
| years, with very little success. Switching to evaluation by
| only on-site work was simple to do, but creating new work
| forms has been largely a non-starter. Young professors are
| focused on their publication count and most old codgers (like
| me) have their eyes on retirement and hoping to escape before
| accountability hits the fan. When I offer to help explore
| restructuring their teaching materials, the typical response
| is glazed eyes and sudden awareness of the need to be
| elsewhere.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, I've been thinking about when the calculator came to
| bear. I was in high school physics when (rich) kids started
| bringing in "scientific" calculators. There was a flap then
| about whether they should be allowed at all.
|
| I'm not sure they are analogous to LLMs, but a compelling
| argument at the time was that the students were going to use
| them in the field anyway. (That certainly seems to be the
| future for software engineering students.)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| What needs to happen is a return to a more Socratic method of
| teaching the humanities.
|
| Instead of being about the consumption and production of texts
| -- texts which only the TA and maybe the prof will read ...
| ever -- the class should be more about the dialectical process
| of discussing the ideas in the texts and lectures the students
| consume.
|
| An LLM will be able to easily rattle off an undergrad level
| paper. But it can't sit in the classroom and have an
| intelligent conversation with peers.
|
| Of course none of this will happen because it doesn't scale
| economically nearly as well. It is far more labour intensive.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| What most people don't know about history & humanities is how
| much work there is to do.
|
| People get (rightly!) excited about decoding burnt scrolls in
| Herculaneum. But most don't realize that less than 10% of Neo-
| Latin texts from the renaissance to the early modern period have
| been translated to English.
|
| One example: Marsilio Ficino was a brilliant philosopher who was
| hired by Cosimo Medici to translate Greek texts (Plato, Plotinus,
| the Hermetica, etc) into Latin. This had a massive impact on the
| renaissance and European enlightenment. But many of Ficino's own
| texts have not been translated to English!
|
| LLMs will, of course, have a massive impact on this... but so can
| students! Any student can make a meaningful contribution if they
| care to. There is so much to be discovered and unpacked.
| Unfortunately, so much of the humanities in high school is
| treated as an exercise rather than real discovery. I judge my
| students now based on _how much I learn from them._ Why not?
| verisimi wrote:
| The history we have inevitably passes through bottlenecks. Much
| is left out, edited away, embellished.
|
| We have no idea what happened over 500 years ago, but the idea
| of a brilliant scholar translating the Greek texts on behalf of
| the Medicis, shouldn't simply be accepted as stated. If you are
| running the world (like the Medicis did) history would be a
| lever of control. It seems inevitable that the stories should
| be directed (carefully) towards whatever ends.
|
| History is actually a present day activity - it provides the
| backdrop to the present. Altering that backdrop has present
| value.
|
| I can't see how ai will help us the endeavour of trying to get
| a better handle on what happened in the past. I do see how it
| would provide modern-day Medicis a way to change the backdrop
| more quickly.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| > I can't see how ai will help us the endeavour of trying to
| get a better handle on what happened in the past.
|
| Well, AI democratizes the power of translation (and
| interrogating texts). Before only a few specialists could go
| directly to the source. Now anyone can try to make sense of
| it.
| verisimi wrote:
| We don't get to the source. Have you ever personally seen
| any historical sources? Eg the sources for classical
| writings or the Bible? At best you get high resolution
| imagery provided by suspicious folks such as RB Toth.
|
| If the source is corrupt - as I suggest and as is possible
| because the Medicis provided/sanctioned their version - all
| you have is interpretation based on flawed data. Endless
| production of information (by ai) based on flawed sources
| (this is our history) only serves to increase the haystack
| rather than helping you to converge on truth.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Paleography, transcription, and translation are hellishly
| difficult to learn and really make it difficult for
| interested people to explore the archive. LLMs have become
| pretty darn good at doing this out of the box. Prior to this
| you needed specially trained ML models and before that there
| was no automation whatsoever.
| vintermann wrote:
| I can't find any big AI model which can read historical
| Kurrent-family handwriting well out of the box. You still
| need specially trained models (i.e. transkribus) which
| generalize terribly.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Transkribus is definitely still the best option in some
| cases. But there are a bunch of cases where it was
| necessary two years ago and isn't necessary anymore,
| which is pretty remarkable.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The transformer architecture was originally developed for
| translation tasks, but massive, overfit generative models are
| _awful_ at translation. (Seriously, part-of-speech
| classification + dictionary lookup + grammar mapping - an
| incredibly simplistic system with performance measurable in
| chapters per second - does a _better job_ , and you even get
| confidence intervals.) If you want a translation tool, use
| something like Project Bergamot (https://browser.mt/), not
| generative AI.
|
| > _Unfortunately, so much of the humanities in high school is
| treated as an exercise rather than real discovery._
|
| I, too, find this exceptionally annoying.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| That's an absurd claim. Show me the translation benchmark
| where you saw such a result.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Does "every time I've challenged people about this on
| Hacker News" count as a benchmark? See e.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35531558.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| No, it doesn't. I don't find the linked thread remotely
| convincing regarding your (frankly preposterous) claim
| that preexisting non-deep-learning solutions are better
| at translation in the general case.
|
| Don't get me wrong. I'm sure that once fine tuned by a
| human for a specific language pair that such systems are
| better at performing literal translation. But the value
| proposition of deep learning here is that you don't need
| a large team of experts to laboriously train a given
| language pair, that the entire training process is
| largely unsupervised, and that the translations aren't
| hopelessly literal. The ML algorithms can pick up on
| idioms given a sufficiently large dataset.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Found the other good post in that thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35532941. Google
| Translate and DeepL were capable of mostly-accurate
| Japanese translation two (or even 5) years ago (as seen
| in my previous link). _Multiple_ people ran this text
| through GPT-4, and none of its translations were any
| good, as assessed by this Japanese-speaker.
|
| There's a reason we needed the Rosetta stone to give as
| an in for translating Egyptian hieroglyphics. You can't
| just throw Big Data at the problem and expect it to give
| accurate results. Dedicated translation setups _can_ get
| good results, but ChatGPT 's ilk doesn't.
|
| Convincing translations are not the same thing as
| accurate translations. RLHF optimises for convincing, not
| accurate.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| https://lokalise.com/blog/what-is-the-best-llm-for-
| translati...
|
| Claims Sonnet 3.5 wins
| seydor wrote:
| Humans are mimetic creatures. The biggest damage (some call it
| influence) that LLMs will do is that next generation will be
| talking like an LLM. They might even normalize hallucination
| krapp wrote:
| We've already begun to normalize the belief that humans
| hallucinate as often as LLMs, and are categorically less
| reliable and less trustworthy than LLMs. The political and
| social ramifications of this are bound to be negative.
| thijson wrote:
| That reminds me of a professor that would play various forms of
| music compressed in different ways. The class actually
| preferred the distortion produced by mp3 over uncompressed.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Is hype cycle effect hitting hard on AI recently? The arguments
| aren't changing for years, and emotional components in them feel
| progressively toned down.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| The hype cycle is running on FOMO. "as a developer, you will be
| left behind" And is sustained by fear tactics. "there wont be
| any developer jobs left"
|
| Giant investments are being made, and a lot of people's
| outcomes rest on them, which incentivizes them to become
| evangelists for the cause.
|
| End-of-day it is a productivity boosting tool like a search-
| engine or a calculator - whats funny to see the human drama
| playing out around its adoption.
| rwmj wrote:
| I'm pretty sceptical about the entire use of computers in
| education. For myself, I seem to be incapable of learning
| anything unless I read it from paper and write down notes in the
| margin or in my (paper) notebook. Obviously I use screens every
| day (being a programmer ...) but for actual recall of new
| material, I need to use paper. Also if I'm in a physical meeting
| or conference, I never have a laptop open, and I take notes on
| paper. This makes me doubt that you learn anything if laptops or
| tablets are involved. Nothing specific to AI, just my general
| observation.
| aniviacat wrote:
| > This makes me doubt that you learn anything if laptops or
| tablets are involved.
|
| This may be true for you, but it certainly isn't generally
| true.
|
| I haven't written anything substantial on paper in years, and I
| certainly have learned new things in that time.
| kraftman wrote:
| I think this comes down to how you first learnt to learn. If I
| write notes in nodepad i dont remember them as well as if i
| write them by hand, but I think that's just a byproduct of
| years of school, and other people have learnt their own ways
| and are just as effective.
| ordersofmag wrote:
| There's an entire generation that is evidence that your
| personal case is not the general case.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Gamified learning apps, in a broad sense, seem to be very
| effective for _practice_.
| Leo-thorne wrote:
| AI hasn't destroyed the humanities, but it definitely made things
| more complicated and harder to teach. I've seen students rely
| entirely on chatbots to write essays, and it really does make
| teaching harder. As the article says, we need to find ways to
| make AI and the humanities work together, not just hold on to the
| old way of doing things.
| thijson wrote:
| A lot of my engineering exams didn't allow certain calculators,
| so I guess that's what will happen for humanities, supervised
| and timed essay writing.
|
| I remember going to museums and seeing all the modern art, and
| wondering why art went to such weird places compared to the
| realism of the 1600's, and my conclusion was that invention of
| photography made realism obsolete. I wonder if something
| similar will happen to the humanities.
| throwaway75 wrote:
| What is the general take on the ethics of using AI as a much more
| powerful search engine? For example, "Find all occurences in the
| text where Odysseus' will is overridden by the Gods." The
| question is not something that would be directly set by an
| instructor, but might be required to substantiate an
| interpretation that a student is aiming for.
|
| Finding something like this is difficult and requires reading the
| text closely. But with AI, you could get away by reading around
| the passages returned by AI.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Will the AI find ALL the occurrences. Finding hallucinated ones
| is OK here as the user can check each one.
| throwaway75 wrote:
| Perhaps not. But it'll probably find sufficient
| passages/instances that are useful.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Yes but the question did say ALL.
|
| Finding some yes it might well be quicker than a manual
| read.
|
| So it depends on what the actual requirement is.
| throwaway75 wrote:
| Let's say sufficient instances for the student to prove
| his/her point - the student used "all" in the AI prompt,
| but really meant as many as possible from which they
| could pick and choose. Is it ethical or should it be
| viewed as cheating?
| thenthenthen wrote:
| I have been saying this (not sure about the weird part), but is
| it not obvious that in an AI saturated 'field', actual, factual,
| practical work should have an easy advantage?
| Tycho wrote:
| I would love to be a literature student today. Consume the
| classics in audiobook form while flaneuring or gaming. Red team
| every essay with ChatGPT. Become a top tier Genius.com
| contributor for poetry. Listen to all the online lectures from
| Oxford, Yale etc. Effortlessly pick up where past critics have
| left off because the AI can summarise all contributions on any
| topic. Find every reference to support your thesis in the
| reference text -- without scanning for hours.
| peterldowns wrote:
| You can do this without being in a formal college program, go
| for it!
| KineticLensman wrote:
| (source: am a literature student - UK open university)
|
| I just asked get ChatGPT a question about use of language in a
| specific book (China Mieville's _Kraken_ ). It gave a plausible
| answer but used a common English word ('knackering') instead of
| the word 'knacking' that is actually used (the word
| 'knackering' isn't in the text). I then asked it to give me a
| quote using 'knackering' and it gave me a quote with the word
| 'knacking'. I asked it to put the quote into Harvard reference
| style which it did, but didn't provide a page number, which it
| said I'd have to look up myself.
|
| I think relying on ChatGPT for an essay would be fairly
| frustrating, and if you used ChatGPT to develop your thesis,
| you could very quickly get a generic plagiaristic answer (based
| on the quotes everyone else used) rather than one than that
| captured your own response to the text, and which contained
| factual errors.
|
| [Edit] It also said that "gods inhabiting USB sticks are
| presented matter-of-factly" in _Kraken_ which is false (there
| are no mentions of USB). When I asked it for a quote to support
| its assertion, it replied "While the novel doesn't explicitly
| depict gods inhabiting USB sticks..."
| Tycho wrote:
| Did you upload the text of the novel? It's under copyright so
| wouldn't be in the training data or retrievable via search.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I didn't upload the text; I was trying to see what happened
| if one asked a question about a specific book, as if I was
| someone trying to do an essay in a hurry. I know the text
| quite well so could easily spot the hallucinated answers
| but someone with less knowledge might have been fooled. The
| experience reconvinced me not to rely on this specific LLM
| for help with my essays.
| Tycho wrote:
| Well, you have to give the tool a chance. If it can't
| even see the text you're asking about, it's going to rely
| on whatever quotes and references it can crib together
| from reviews and blogs and comments.
|
| Try it for a text that is in the training data, or the
| public internet, or can be put into the context window -
| then it might help.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Well, yes, I'm sure if I uploaded a full text and spent
| time on the prompts I could get better results, although
| these might be similar to other students doing the same
| thing, which might get me a plagiarism fail.
|
| My point was that I would be very hesitant to rely on
| ChatGPT as an assistant in a real literature task. Many
| of the texts on my Eng Lit course are in copyright, as is
| all of the module material (the OU's course-specific
| textbooks). The hallucinations are a real show-stopper.
| Tycho wrote:
| Your position seems to be "if you use the tool like a
| total dumbass, you might get a bad outcome." Like...
| maybe use it intelligently?
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| On the topic of hammers: "if you don't hold the hammer at
| exactly 2.6cm from the end of the handle and strike the
| nail with 6N of force at an angle of 58 degrees then of
| course you won't get a good nail strike into the wood. Oh
| and you must only use acacia sourced from the
| subtropics".
|
| Give me a break, it's a hammer. This is a perfectly
| normal "use" of ChatGPT and a good example of how a
| literature student may opt to try and use AI to make
| their work easier in some way. It also conveniently
| demonstrates some of the shortcomings of using a LLM for
| this sort of task. No need to call them a dumbass.
| piltdownman wrote:
| Mieville is a wonderfully challenging prompt for ChatGPT. In
| the same vein, I would imagine 'The City and The City' would
| end up with a bunch of half-hallucinated forum-posting and
| reviews regarding Disco Elysium.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Mieville is a wonderfully challenging prompt for ChatGPT.
|
| Indeed. I'm doing a close reading of _Kraken_ and have been
| amazed at the number of 'weird' entities and plot events
| that Mieville introduces [0]. It would be very easy to
| hallucinate a few more.
|
| There are more than 100 passages in _Kraken_ where Mieville
| names people, places and events that occur in other media
| or culture. For example, in a list of people associated
| with submarine technology, he throws in the name of the
| underwater stuntman [1] who played the Creature from the
| Black Lagoon. Again, it would be easy to hallucinate
| additional content.
|
| [0] For example, a secondary character who was originally
| an ancient Egyptian burial slave-statue who went on strike
| in the afterlife, and in modern London is now the trade-
| union convenor for the Union of Magicked Assistants.
|
| [1] Ricou Browning, if anyone is interested.
| piltdownman wrote:
| What a wonderful bit of satire.
|
| To those that missed the joke - 'consuming' the classics is the
| antithesis of a liberal arts education. The value lies in the
| engagement, the debate, the Hegellian dialectic involved in
| arriving at a true grok level understanding of the text or
| topic.
|
| It would be akin to reading the Sparknotes of Ulysses and being
| able to reference how it draws heavily on Homer's Odyssey, or
| utilises stream-of-consciousness narrative to great effect; and
| thinking that, as a result, you have the faintest understanding
| of the text, its conception, or its impact.
|
| The OP almost hit on this with the 'Listen to all the online
| lectures from Oxford,Yale,MIT etc...'. Unlike coding bootcamps
| or similar, universities are not VOCATIONAL TRAINING - no
| matter how skewed towards that end-goal the American Economy is
| dictating such. As just about any Educator can attest, no
| amount of listening to youtube lectures will replace the
| University experience, nevermind the Oxbridge/Ivy League
| experience.
|
| The pedagogical benefits are simply unrealisable from an AI
| prompt 'streamlining'- i.e. being forced to read and engage
| with topics outside of your comfort zone to maintain your GPA,
| engaging and working with people from a diversity of outlooks
| and backgrounds, benefitting from the 1:1 and small group
| sessions with the Academics who often wrote the literal book on
| the subject in question.
|
| If the intersection of JSTOR and Machine Learning didn't reduce
| humanities to Cory Doctorow level script-kiddyism, the hoi
| polloi throwing prompts into a hallucinatory markov chain isn't
| likely to advance or diminish Academia anymore than the excess
| of 'MBA IN 5 DAYS!' or '...for Dummies' titles previously
| available.
| Tycho wrote:
| I'm not being satirical. And nowhere did I suggest that you
| don't still read the actual text you're studying. There are
| more ways to "engage" with literature than just going to
| seminars.
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| I ask this as someone with a lot of respect for education and
| the Humanities: do the majority of Humanities students
| actually get this type of education?
|
| Any conversations I've had with students or graduates of
| Arts, Literature, etc. indicates that their education was
| very much about consuming and regurgitating. Maybe the top 5%
| approach their studies the way you're describing but I've
| never seen anyone like that in the wild.
| j33zusjuice wrote:
| OK, that last sentence would be incredible. I think this is
| tongue in cheek, but I was an English lit major so I feel the
| need to defend my honor. XD
|
| I don't think you'd do well in 400-level classes this way.
| English Lit isn't as much of a joke as STEM students make it
| out to be[1]: it gets a lot harder than the bullshit 101/201
| courses everyone is required to take. You're supposed to try to
| be original in your analysis, and it has to be rigorously
| proven within the text itself.
|
| Probably as a grad student you'd start arguing against other
| critics points, but not undergrad. I think that would hold for
| almost all schools because no one at that level in that field
| wants to hear from someone who doesn't know how to analyze a
| text in the first place. It'd be like a high school student
| trying to tell you about software (or systems, network, data,
| etc.) engineering.
|
| For similar reasons, AI summarizations for past contributions
| wouldn't work, either. If you're arguing someone else's
| analysis is wrong, you're going to need to read and understand
| the whole thing. And if you're just copying from AI, you'll
| have a hard time defending your position.
|
| Although, man, if you can understand the subtext of a book from
| listening to an audiobook *while gaming*, AND you have time to
| watch all the online lectures about a book!? I need to talk to
| you about time management, my friend!
|
| 1 - I have been involved in so many forums and subreddits where
| people try to analyze books, comics, TV, or movies. Based on
| what I have seen come out of people there --- most of you MFers
| couldn't pass 300-level classes.
|
| People can't analyze literature for shit, and I think it's
| because everyone gets such a negative perception of literary
| analysis because high school and required college classes are
| junk. It's actually really hard to read five novels in month,
| keep track of all the characters and plots and themes and so
| on, and understand all of them well enough to write a coherent
| argument. I saw so many kids in my major crying about their GPA
| getting tanked because they weren't ready for rigorous
| analysis. FWIW, I was 25 as a Junior (third year of uni, in the
| US), and had spent the last few years reading exercise
| physiology papers while bored at work. Seeing real science
| changed my life, and I wanted to apply their level of rigor to
| my own analysis of any kind. It's why I'm good at my job now,
| tbh.
| piltdownman wrote:
| //For similar reasons, AI summarizations for past
| contributions wouldn't work, either. If you're arguing
| someone else's analysis is wrong, you're going to need to
| read and understand the whole thing. And if you're just
| copying from AI, you'll have a hard time defending your
| position.
|
| QFT. It's like the Sparknotes scenario I outlined in my post
| above - what you get from this level of engagement isn't
| insight, least of all a debatable position, it's just a
| loosely cohesive bunch of table-quiz facts.
|
| //People can't analyze literature for shit, and I think it's
| because everyone gets such a negative perception of literary
| analysis because high school and required college classes are
| junk.
|
| Because most of what is being examined is passive/active
| voicings, brain-dead symbolism, and ham-fisted and dated
| metaphors as literary vehicles.
|
| Even at University level there should be an emphasis on a 101
| level course hammering home the importance of Critical Theory
| in Literary Criticism as a framework and approach for
| disseminating texts. Without a basic understanding of the
| cultural, historical, and ideological dimensions under which
| a text was conceived and published, you haven't a hope of
| climbing the foothills of Beckett, Camus, Dickens,
| Dostoevsky, Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Shaw...
| Tycho wrote:
| You probably wouldn't be arguing that previous critics are
| wrong but surely to get top marks you'd be expected to know
| what relevant literary criticism has already been published
| and then build on that in some fashion. No doubt just reading
| that stuff would sharpen your own insights. AI should make it
| much easier to find the most relevant criticism and put it in
| context.
|
| AI should also be able to help you gather evidence from the
| reference texts, because it can exercise reasonable judgement
| without any constraint on patience or access or time.
| Consider the recent social media sensation about the lady who
| got a PhD for analysing how smell factors into the fates of
| literary characters. AI can quickly find thousands of
| examples, and then filter them as desired.
|
| You could even have the AI write essays for you - "analyse
| this novel through the lens of ____ theory" - where no
| literary criticism already exists to review. You could have
| it generate any number of such essays, applying
| theories/frameworks you might not even know, but want to
| understand better.
|
| I think it's possible to "read" an audiobook while doing
| something monotonous like walking, driving, or, yes, gaming.
| The lectures you probably have to treat like podcasts and
| just play them in the background and pick up some ideas.
| nluken wrote:
| > Consume the classics in audiobook form while flaneuring or
| gaming
|
| I can't tell if you're serious or not, but this would be like
| saying you've "watched" a movie because you had it on your
| second monitor while you were playing counter strike. There's a
| fundamental difference in hearing a book read to you and
| actually listening and engaging with the audio on a meaningful
| level. The latter requires focus, and you're not going to be
| able to do that if you're gaming away at the same time.
|
| Put another way, why would someone who presumably loves reading
| bother studying literature if they don't actually care enough
| to pay attention to the books they supposedly loved?
| Tycho wrote:
| I've listened plenty of audiobooks while driving or walking,
| why would I not be able to do the same while playing GTA?
|
| The reason to do this is that just sitting in a chair
| ploughing through books gets very unappealing after a while.
| And there's a lot of books to get through.
| nluken wrote:
| If you're getting what you want out of your reading then
| more power to you, but I think you'll find that devoting
| your full attention to what you're doing fundamentally
| differs from doing it in the background. Why play GTA when
| you could just listen and enjoy the book? What is GTA
| adding to that experience?
|
| I think a lot of people, including, I presume, most who
| willingly choose to study literature, enjoy reading as an
| activity unto itself and so don't feel the need to add
| additional distractions. Not everybody finds sitting down
| and "ploughing through" (how disdainful a phrase!) a book
| unappealing.
| Tycho wrote:
| A serious literature degree might prescribe a reading
| list of ~10 books per week. Some of it stuff you don't
| even like but is "important context" or whatever. At a
| certain point it becomes a chore for anyone. You need to
| find ways to help you get through more.
|
| The reading (listening) of course is not "in the
| background". Maybe sometimes you're distracted and have
| to skip back 30s and re-listen. Fine. If the game is too
| distracting, fine, play something simpler, or watch
| soccer, do chores, anything where the moment to moment
| continuity does not require effort to track, but still
| gives you some benefit.
| meroes wrote:
| Sounds like all ways to skirt around the actual learning bit.
| Consuming the classics while gaming? Really?
| gdubs wrote:
| There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the
| making which is that students are trained to see school and work
| as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is
| to 'get a job'. Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs
| will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. Except
| maybe the trades - and we mostly cut those programs out of
| schools a long time ago.
|
| If college students are using AI to breeze through their work
| rather than doing the reading themselves, developing grit - I
| don't see how we can blame them rather than ourselves for the
| educational and career system we've created. This problem didn't
| happen overnight, and it's not just AI.
| bluGill wrote:
| Nobody ever could say with confidence what jobs will pe
| available. those who know the basics and flexible can find
| something.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > those who know the basics and flexible can find something.
|
| I'm not so sure about that: I have a feeling that at least
| the current trend in quite some jobs is that they are looking
| for two kinds of people:
|
| 1. beginners who know the basics and are cheap
|
| 2. deep experts; these are paid well
|
| What is in-between gets more and more hollowed out.
|
| Thus the people who follow your advice will mostly stay in
| the "cheap" pool - I wouldn't consider this to be desirable.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > Thus the people who follow your advice will mostly stay
| in the "cheap" pool - I wouldn't consider this to be
| desirable.
|
| Cheap... but employed. Expertise is only valuable if its
| valued. That means you not only need to be an expert in the
| thing, but also the market for the thing, and that's a lot
| to ask.
| bluGill wrote:
| You can move between groups. If your expertise turns out
| not needed get a cheap job while learning something else.
| panzagl wrote:
| The only way to develop deep expertise is to do it as
| your job.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| There exist in my opinion rather few jobs where you will
| develop a deep expertise in some area.
| zaphar wrote:
| I got my job/career precisely because I developed deep
| expertise on my own time. So no, that is not the only way
| to develop that expertise.
| panzagl wrote:
| I guess it depends on what you consider deep expertise- I
| assumed a 10000 hours/PhD level of expertise, which would
| be hard to achieve in a couple years while working.
| const_cast wrote:
| For most people, if your expertise isn't guided by boards
| of already experienced people then it's probably not
| really worth it. Most people are _shockingly_ bad at
| learning on their own. They 're gonna go home and watch
| TV, go to the gym, and spend time with their loved ones.
|
| Look, I would not want a doctor to perform my surgery who
| did not do a residency. I don't care if they carved up
| 1,000 cadavers in their free time. I want somebody where
| the board of their specialty has said "yup, this guys
| good". I'm not gonna spend the time to try to trust the
| doctor, because that's really really hard. I'm not a
| doctor, I don't know shit. I have to rely on institutions
| of trust to do that work for me.
|
| And that's really what universities are at their core -
| institutions of trust. When you get a degree, there's
| trust you understand the material to an appropriate
| degree. When you pass a residency, there's trust you
| understand the material to an appropriate degree. If we
| lose that trust, such as by letting students cheat by AI,
| that is a big problem.
|
| Could I hire someone who says they're an expert, with no
| degree, and just give them a leetcode problem? Sure. But
| if I hire someone with a degree, I have a much greater
| level of certainty they can actually code. Same goes for
| work experience.
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is at odds with professional specialisms which take
| years to learn.
|
| I don't think it's likely that AI will obliterate the job
| category of "lawyer", but that's what its boosters are
| claiming, and people need to make a car to house sized
| investment at age 18 depending on how true that is.
| bluGill wrote:
| it always has been. You make what looks like a good bet and
| if you are wrong adjust-
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| How this works for most people in reality is "if you are
| wrong, you're screwed"
|
| Most people do not have the ability to adjust like that,
| for one reason or another
|
| And even if you do, it still means your life is likely to
| hit an extremely rough patch while your adjusting catches
| up to where you were before
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I think the profession of "laywer" may come to an end
| sooner rather than later for many, unless they are able to
| get legislators to ban AI from practicing law. A lot of
| lawyering is writing in a particular legal vocabulary and
| style, and forming arguments based on precident, things
| that an LLM AI should be able to get very good at.
|
| It won't be long before an impoverished criminal defendant
| will be able to chose between an AI that can spend
| practically unlimited time on his case and have perfect
| recall of any precident that might be relevant, or an
| overworked public defender who has 2 hours a week to spare
| in his schedule.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Go read lawyers complaining on reddit about _pro se_
| litigants using AI. They hallucinate precedents like APIs
| or get confused about what is supported.
|
| If you think SWEs that build the same CRUD apps every day
| are vulnerable but SWEs that do "real work" aren't, apply
| that logic to lawyers.
|
| Except lawyers don't have an automated compiler to check
| for fabricated precedents as case law databases are
| monopolized by one company.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| It costs money but KeyCite is real.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Trades would collapse if even 10% of the population switched to
| them. What does no one get about this?
| cafp12 wrote:
| This is a good point and also why are people so certain that
| superhuman capable robots aren't right around the corner.
| mtillman wrote:
| I'm convinced plumbing would pay better than programming in
| certain neighborhoods right now now.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Plumbers never realized that they should be selling service
| plans and leasing toilets to people.
|
| Software's golden goose is not letting people own things.
| toyg wrote:
| I'm pretty sure plumbers do sell service plans to
| businesses. It's just that households don't really need
| regular work.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The people who lease toilets to people are landlords, as
| part of leasing the rest of the building or unit.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Service for what? I'm in my 40s and now that I think
| about it, I've never had to call a plumber in my entire
| life. The only time I can think of is my parents calling
| one when they got a new dishwasher 25 years ago.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I've had the plumber out twice this year. Probably
| depends on how handy you are with plumbing issues. Me not
| so much.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| That's not new though. My colleague does IT for a few years
| then works as a construction worker for a few years,
| depending on the market. He's ready for anything :-)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Trades tend to do a good job of preventing people from
| switching in due to apprenticeship systems. Depends on your
| jurisdiction, but you probably can't just hang out a sign
| saying "plumber".
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like kids are encouraged to move not to jobs
| that will be profitable to _them_ (ie the children) but that
| the moneyed want to pay less for, because the number of
| people being swayed would collapse any market.
|
| It's like a boat captain telling all his passengers to rush
| to one side of the boat. Any single side will tip the boat
| over.
| guappa wrote:
| Well in sweden it's forbidden to fix anything electrical on
| your own. You're allowed to change your lamps and little
| else.
| the-mitr wrote:
| Is it so? Is it true for other work also? Genuinely asking.
| belorn wrote:
| There is a concept called regulated professions. The US
| equivalent would likely be accredited or certified.
| Typically, anything in health, security, and education,
| but also things like accounting or commercial diving. EU
| has Directive 2005/36/EC that specify how this kind of
| laws may operate in EU.
| triceratops wrote:
| But I wonder if lower labor costs would change the repair vs
| replace calculus by a lot.
| eyesofgod wrote:
| > What does no one get about this?
|
| Its all idiotic romanticisation. Thats why all the out-of-
| their-ass anecdotes involve someone who's more of an
| entrepreneur than a tradesmen as well.
|
| Theres some bizzare analog of the noble savage myth, but
| applied to blue collar work.
| lostphilosopher wrote:
| Related - there needs to be individuals and businesses that
| want/need and can afford upgrades and repairs. If office
| workers are getting replaced with AI we don't need to build
| and maintain offices and the ecosystems that support them
| (see also WFH/Covid) and those workers won't have income to
| pay for plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc. for their
| personal property. A worst case scenario AI workforce
| revolution would attack trades from both supply and demand.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's just viral memes. Most people are inferior to the
| average LLM in reasoning and repeat phrases wholesale without
| comprehension of what it means. Few, if any, have even
| approached understanding what they are saying. Among those,
| fewer still have validated their assumptions.
|
| Many years ago we had to deploy an HFT trading strategy on a
| specific hardware platform because that was the one that was
| (in this field) closest in network topology to the exchange.
| I just read the released docs for the platform, and watched a
| couple of videos where they hinted at certain architectural
| decisions and then you could work something out from there.
| Latency was reliable and our strats made money.
|
| But this was public information and we were actually _late_
| to it. It had been released for 3 years at the time. And many
| people I talked to had told me that what they had was as good
| as it gets. But they were each just repeating what the other
| guy said.
|
| Many of the things you see on Hacker News are just that: it's
| deterministic parrotry.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I agree but the signal noise ratio is slightly better here.
| But it's fine down hill over the decade.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be
| available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence.
|
| I am very sure that those jobs that have been existing for a
| long time will continue existing for a long time (and no: even
| if some disruption occurs, these jobs won't suddenly disappear,
| but will rather phased out slowly; you thus have sufficient
| time to make a decent plan for you).
|
| In other words: in my opinion one can predict rather well many
| jobs that will be available in 5 to 10 years.
|
| The "inconvenient" truth rather is that many high-paying jobs
| in the new economy sector don't satisfy this criterion of
| "existing for a long time". So by this criterion you might miss
| out some hard to predict high-earning opportunities. Thus, if
| you are the kind of person who tends to easily become envious
| if your friends suddenly experience a windfall, such a job
| perhaps won't make you happy.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient
| scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of
| ZIRP, now we see it also being used to blame for the failures
| of our modern education system.
|
| Mostly which are that our system only rewards one thing in
| education: the grade. Not understanding, knowledge,
| intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily
| gamified than anything. And this single number (your GPA) is
| the single most important thing for every level from middle
| school to college where it will unironically determine your
| entire (academic/academic-adjacent) future.
| throwawaybob420 wrote:
| Our modern education system in the US is broken, but acting
| as if AI is a scapegoat is comical.
|
| Capitalism is what has destroyed higher education in this
| country. The concept of going to school to get a job isn't a
| failure of education but of economics.
|
| AI is just another capitalist tool made to not only extract
| wealth out of you but something that they want you to rely on
| more and more so they can charge you even more down the road.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Even the Soviet Union made people go to school, and getting
| a degree was a route to higher status.
|
| (there have been a few Communist revolutions against the
| concept of "university", for various political reasons, but
| China rebuilt theirs after the purges and Cambodia is a sad
| historical footnote)
| NoOn3 wrote:
| At least in the Soviet Union, they were free...
| thatoneguy wrote:
| In Soviet Union, university education free but came at
| cost of living in Soviet Union
|
| - Yakov Smirnoff, probably
| realitybit3z wrote:
| IN RESPONSE TO Even the Soviet Union made people go to
| school, and getting a degree was a route to higher
| status.
|
| Also people did that to avoid Dedovshchina
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina
|
| https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/russia1004/2.htm
| fallingknife wrote:
| Before college was a means to get a job, it was status
| signalling for the upper class by showing they could spend
| 4 years not working and learning things with no economic
| value that few could afford. There was never a time when a
| large portion of society went to school past 18 for any
| reason other than economic or status gain, and why should
| they?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Learning stuff is cool?
| RankingMember wrote:
| I think learning stuff and making art just for the hell
| of it is going to become a lot more accepted as society
| continues on and more and more peoples' jobs get
| automated away. Obviously that's a huge simplification of
| a much more complex situation, but in general I think the
| best future is one where people are free to pursue
| interests without regard for those interests ability to
| pay for their food and housing.
| altruios wrote:
| UBI: the dream!
|
| Decoupling working from living: means only intrinsically
| valuable things get worked on. No more working a 9-5 at a
| scam call center or figuring out how to make people click
| on ads. There is ONLY BENEFIT (to everyone) from giving
| labor such leverage.
|
| Not every job needs to or should even exist: everyone
| having a job isn't utopia. Utopia is being free to choose
| what you work on. This directs market value for labor to
| go up. Work that needs to get done will be aligned with
| financial incentives (farmers, janitors, repair
| industries would soar to new heights).
|
| UBI is a necessary and great idea: A bottom floor to
| capitalism means we all can stand up and lift this
| sinking ship.
| awkward wrote:
| Economic OR status gain is putting a lot of work on the
| or.
|
| We've put into place a context for intellectual
| achievement at scale. Why shouldn't status be apportioned
| to someone who is recognized by a panel of peers and
| teachers to have useful insight into their field?
| aydyn wrote:
| > Why shouldn't status be apportioned to someone who is
| recognized by a panel of peers and teachers to have
| useful insight into their field
|
| Because many "fields" in colleges are not useful.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >and why should they?
|
| Because modern life is radically more complicated than
| humans can naturally deal with.
|
| Your average peasant for millenia didn't need to
| understand Information security to avoid getting phished,
| didn't need to understand compounding interest for things
| like loans and saving for retirement (they'd just have
| kids and pray enough of them survive), didn't need to
| have some kind of mental model for the hordes of
| algorithms deployed against us for the express purpose of
| taking all of our available attention (a resource that
| people before a couple decades ago had so much excess of
| that _boredom_ was a serious concern) for the express
| purpose of selling it to people who want to extract any
| dollar you may have access to, did not need to understand
| spreadsheets(!), etc etc etc etc
|
| Like, being productive in modern society is complicated.
| That's what education is for.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There is nothing wrong with going to school to obtain
| knowledge and skills to secure a job.
|
| The problem with the modern educational system is that it
| isnt very efficient at this task. Instead, most of the
| value relies on the screening that took place before the
| students even entered the institution, not the knowledge
| obtained while there.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Yep, this is a huge problem. I've long argued that we
| need value add metrics for colleges, and it probably
| won't be a single number, but rather a set of values
| depending on input values, e.g., some schools may deliver
| a lot of value for kids with 1550 SATs, but other schools
| may do better for kids with 1200.
|
| Today we simply use college as a proxy for intelligence,
| so people just like to go to the highest rated college
| they can to be viewed as intelligent. What happens in the
| four years at the college is secondary.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > There is nothing wrong with going to school to obtain
| knowledge and skills to secure a job.
|
| That can't be the only goal. We also need to transmit
| culture, values, and teach them to become citizens.
| aydyn wrote:
| Teach them "values" as determined by a central governing
| authority?
| goatlover wrote:
| Yes, within a reason. Not in an authoritarian or
| dismissive manner. But the ideals of our western liberal
| societies.
| aydyn wrote:
| What happens if that centeal authority becoms subverted
| (as many people here would argue is the case right now)?
|
| Doesnt that single point of failure indicate a weakness?
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Values are your culture. The Nazis were elected and
| supported (at least initially) so you are right some
| what, but the answer is multiple countries.
|
| But a country without a culture and without shared values
| is a sled being pulled by dogs in different directions
| and not a real team (as many people would argue has been
| the case for quite some time).
|
| You need common values to work together to achieve goals.
| That's what a country is, people working together. When
| you don't, you just become tenants with passports.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| you dont need 4-10 years of post-secondary school at
| 100k/yr to do that.
|
| nor do our current institutions do a good job of what you
| describe.
| realitybit3z wrote:
| IN RESPONSE TO: Just like AI seems like it's being used as a
| convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following
| the end of ZIRP
|
| there are like 4 factors besides ZIRP i've witnessed as a
| hiring manager
|
| - Layoff or dont hire locals in favor of H1b/H4
|
| - Layoff or dont hire locals in favor of Nearshore and
| Offshore
|
| - Section 174 Tax code on software:
| https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
|
| - More productivity via LLMs, Code Assist
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| Most students see education as a video game - the goal is to
| score as many points as possible in a framework controlled by
| some apparently arbitrary rules. That educators fail to
| distinguish school from video games is mostly the fault of
| educators. And video games are more fun.
| eyesofgod wrote:
| > I don't see how we can blame them rather than ourselves for
| the educational and career system we've created
|
| I dont know man, you do it every time.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| This is rooted in the idea that a person should need
| _permission_ to work. The reason we do this is because our
| capitalist society is structured around competition instead of
| collaboration. Because all work must be framed as a
| competition, the only way collaboration is _allowed_ is by
| explicitly joining a team.
|
| This rule is made explicit with copyright: derivative work is,
| by default, _illegal_. The only way that derivative work is
| allowed to be made is after making a contract with the
| rightsholder.
|
| This system can only be enforced with incompatibility. You
| can't actually stop someone from making derivative work unless
| your help is actually required. The most familiar instance of
| this requirement is software: it's simply not pragmatic for
| someone to extend your code, when they only have access to a
| compiled binary. Software work can only be extended from a
| shared context: what you write must be compatible with what is
| written. That's generally unfeasible when what is written is a
| compile-time optimized binary executable.
|
| Incompatibility is not a perfect barrier. It's possible to
| decompile software. It's possible to edit text, images, video,
| audio, etc. Copyright depends on incompatibility, and LLMs are
| simply the newest, most compelling way to call that bluff.
| realitybit3z wrote:
| IN RESPONSE TO: There's a deeper educational problem that's
| been decades in the making which is that students are trained
| to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to
| achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'.
|
| This one is really bad. I have waves of local grads begging for
| unpaid internships or work now. They all were AP students, good
| GPAs, good schools, "learned to code", took on 200k of college
| debt -- _only to find the promised job is just not frigging
| there at the end of the line_. Meanwhile, they are told there
| is a "massive shortage of coders" and see overseas workers
| hired into those same jobs. How do younger people trust the
| system anymore? Further, in light of this, why would any steel-
| worker (metaphorically speaking) want to retrain and learn to
| code if even the geeks learning to code face dismal outcomes?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| For every Quinton Tarantino there are dozens of people who could
| make amazing films but never had the opportunity for a wide
| variety of reasons that now mostly go away.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| And for each of those dozens, there are now millions of
| untalented people who can generate terrible films with a few
| clicks. How does a Tarantino, or even one of your new talents,
| ever get discovered?
|
| The friction is a feature, not a bug.
| physicsguy wrote:
| > The friction is a feature, not a bug.
|
| The friction means only wealthy people can do anything in a
| sphere.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| We've seen unprecedented democratization of media over the
| last 30 years, primarily due to the internet. I'm
| personally not seeing a corresponding positive impact on
| cultural creativity. I see a lot of tweets and a lot of
| Etsy stores, and the audience for long novels (for example)
| is aging out.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Quality rises to the top organically.
| LurkandComment wrote:
| 1. PhD Defenses in the humanities have both a written thesis and
| an oral on the spot defense. You can't ChatGPT that easily
| because a professor will know how to curve ball to things that
| are seemingly unrelated but comparable to a human.
|
| 2. As an MA student I was solving semantic problems for engineers
| for analysis that they couldn't fathom. They were very smart at
| technical things (and great writers), but when language problems
| come up, it was a challenge. You can be a great communicator but
| not understand language itself.
|
| 3. Most people in positions for AI are being evaluated by things
| AI is good at. So as a candidate with a very good understanding
| of language, the AI wouldn't know how to evaluate my ability. I
| would really have to outline a problem in language AI has to face
| and explain it to a human. Then get them to understand it's
| value.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I think all PhDs have an oral defense. Not only that its common
| to have Quals where you have to present the state of the art
| research in your field and answer oral questions about it. Even
| if you had ChatGPT it would be tough because a lot of questions
| are like, "Why did XYZ do ABC after seeing result 123?" The
| problem is that often its an untrue statement they are trying
| to get you to justify -- XYZ didn't do ABC or didn't do it
| after seeing 123. This is something I imagine most LLMs to
| struggle with today and say, "No, that didn't happen -- here's
| actually what happened" when its in a nuanced field.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I have never even _heard_ of a trick or misleading question
| for quals or for a defense. That'd be ridiculous. You don't
| need to do that.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| Opposite the Turing test, there is its dual: "Can you administer
| a turing test? Can you tell if you are talking to a person?"
|
| There are lots of people who fail this test. Many of them are
| professional evaluators in the humanities. They should
| unquestionably lose their jobs as evaluators.
| greenavocado wrote:
| That is the reverse turing test:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTWLm9vT_o
| lapcat wrote:
| > When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get
| to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning
| to a robot, he said, "It's the best place to meet your co-founder
| and your wife."
|
| On the one hand, this guy is not wrong, from a personal
| perspective. On the other hand, guys like this are a total waste
| of time and space in the classroom.
|
| Schools have always faced a fundamental internal conflict, i.e.,
| dueling purposes, and recent developments such as the rise of
| ChatGPT and the rise of student loan debt may have finally
| brought the entire educational system to a crisis.
|
| We like to think of education as the primary purpose of the
| educational system, hence the name. And education is indeed
| essential, not just for job training but also for the enrichment
| of human life, as well as the preservation of democracy and
| freedom. Arguably, the latter are more important. Yet we also
| rely on the educational system for social and economic sorting.
| It's a ranking system that has a monumental effect on the future
| prospects of students. And as the above quotation notes, it's a
| club, an exclusive club, where the lucky few get to meet the
| right people and enter into important social circles.
|
| At the university level, things become even more muddled, because
| professors and scientists are performing important research that
| may have little or nothing to do with the education of
| undergraduate students. A lot of this research is important for
| society, and for industry, but it still comes into conflict with
| the other purposes of the university.
|
| So how do we resolve the inherent conflict? Is there a way to
| split the educational system into separate entities that are
| truer to their individual purposes? Can we make a place for the
| social ladder climber that's separate from a place where real
| learning happens, where nobody is tempted to cheat because
| there's nothing to be gained from cheating? It should also be
| noted that not everyone is ready to learn. Our current
| educational system is designed like an assembly line, based on
| age and social promotion. Everyone of the same age is expected to
| follow the same track. I personally wasn't ready to study and
| learn when I was a teenager; it took several more years for me to
| mature emotionally, develop ambition and discipline. It's
| difficult to force-feed students: "Most assignments in college
| are not relevant," he told me. "They're hackable by AI, and I
| just had no interest in doing them." Perhaps, though, there might
| be more motivation to learn if learning was not tied to future
| economic and social prospects. If students view school as merely
| a tool to achieve certain benefits, then of course they'll view
| anything else in school as a waste of time.
|
| In a sense, our educational system finds failure to educate to be
| acceptable, even desirable, because failure fulfills the
| alternative purpose of social ranking.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Can we make a place for the social ladder climber that's
| separate from a place where real learning happens, where nobody
| is tempted to cheat because there's nothing to be gained from
| cheating?
|
| I don't think so. Let me suggest a set of hypotheses:
|
| - the social ladder always exists; it's basically fundamental
| to human existence, especially when trying to do anything (see
| tyranny of structurelessness)
|
| - people are always trying to climb the hierarchy
|
| - the examocracy(+) was introduced by ancient Chinese and/or
| Prussia in an attempt to bring actual competence into the
| social hierachy, in large part to help the leader fight wars
|
| - if there isn't a "fair" route to the top, competent outsiders
| will resort to unfair ones, which can be remarkably lethal and
| destructive
|
| - the university provides its own small academic and
| intellectual hierarchy, but this exists in dialogue with the
| needs of a wider society and its demand for non-academic
| intellectually specialized work. Whether that's priests,
| lawyers, doctors, army officers, weapons designers, civil
| servants, or programmers
|
| - this comes down to: does the wider society demand human
| competence in intellectual operations still, or does ALL of
| that get AI-automated away? Do we get "humans, but with a
| smarter Clippy" or do we get "AI runs the world for
| billionaires and everyone else is surplus peasantry".
|
| - the secret third, worse, case is that AI destroys the concept
| of competence and things stop working on a large scale.
|
| (+) I do not want to have a huge fight over the word
| "meritocracy"
| lapcat wrote:
| It's unclear why you think the educational system needs to be
| part of the social ladder.
|
| I'm imagining for example that all citizens are required to
| receive an education, and demonstrate the same level of
| mastery in the subjects taught as everyone else, without
| grades or rankings. You might call it "pass-fail", but I
| resist that idea, because I don't consider failure to be an
| option, except in rare cases of learning disability.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > why you think the educational system needs to be part of
| the social ladder.
|
| Depends if you want the people running the country to be
| competent or not.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Depends if you want the people running the country to
| be competent or not.
|
| In some sense, the goal of the educational system should
| be to make _everyone_ competent. In any case, it 's
| unclear what you mean by "running the country".
| Politically speaking, the people currently running the US
| are _not_ competent, despite the fact that the
| educational system and the social hierarchy are
| inextricably entangled.
|
| Whatever kind of -ocracy you're proposing (I'm personally
| not proposing here that we abolish democracy), I don't
| see any inherent reason why a social ranking system and
| the educational system can't be separate rather than
| combined into one.
|
| When employers start looking the alma mater of
| applicants, their grades in school, and such (reportedly
| Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical is obsessed with high
| school!), that's when the entire educational system gets
| warped. Learning gets cast aside in favor of
| credentialism, and consequently, cheating to get ahead.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Do you reject the idea that some people are better at
| things than others? 99% of people simply can't learn the
| same level of mathematics that a pure mathematician does,
| no matter how hard they try or how competently they're
| taught, and then what happens in your system to people who
| would have been pure mathematicians?
| lapcat wrote:
| > Do you reject the idea that some people are better at
| things than others?
|
| No. Of course not.
|
| > 99% of people simply can't learn the same level of
| mathematics that a pure mathematician does
|
| Why would this be a requirement for all citizens? Perhaps
| you misunderstood "demonstrate the same level of
| mastery". I meant that there would be a specified minimum
| requirement, though we definitely shouldn't set the bar
| too low. What I would reject is social promotion, where
| students get to move along to the next level as long as
| they have a D grade or higher. This does not demonstrate
| sufficient understanding of the material taught.
|
| Grades are for ranking. I'm suggesting that we ditch
| grades and simply demand that everyone learn what we
| expect them to learn. If students learn _more_ than what
| 's expected, good for them, that's not a problem.
|
| > what happens in your system to people who would have
| been pure mathematicians
|
| I'm not sure what you mean. How am I preventing people
| from becoming pure mathematicians?
| umanwizard wrote:
| How do you decide who to filter into the more difficult
| and faster-paced classes that will prepare someone to be
| a pure mathematician, other than grades?
| lapcat wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "filter into" or at
| what level or stage of classes you're referring to.
|
| To a large extent, it's self-filtering: who is going to
| voluntarily take advanced math classes except those who
| are intered in advanced math?
|
| There are of course larger societal questions of how much
| schooling is funded by the government and how much needs
| to be self-funded.
|
| I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but I
| had to take the Graduate Records Exam in order to get
| into grad school. But the GRE is not taught or
| administered by the university, so in that sense it's not
| part of the educational system. You don't actually have
| to be in the math department to take an advanced math
| class, though, and other students may take the classes as
| part of a PhD minor or just for some other interest.
| umanwizard wrote:
| You need to filter them way before that. Certainly by 16,
| probably even earlier like 12 or 13, someone destined for
| a career in STEM will be bored and wasting time by any
| material that 90% of people are capable of learning.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Let's be honest: majoring in the humanities is the easy way to a
| college degree and thus attracts people put off by the hard
| sciences and all the mathematical rigor which can't be offloaded
| onto an LLM as you do have to solve problems in real time on
| exams without any external assistance.
|
| If the student's goal at any Ivy League college is to 'meet their
| partner and their co-founder' then attending social functions
| where they can expand their networks and meet new candidates for
| those roles will take precedence over spending three hours
| diligently studying difficult material for every hour spent in
| lecture.
|
| Of course, computer science students and others in hard sciences
| have been gaming the system for decades, with many solutions to
| take-home programming exercises found in online forums, and
| there's always the option of paying a tutor to ease the way
| forward - and LLMs are essentially inexpensive tutors that vastly
| help motivated students learn material - a key aide when many
| university-level professors view teaching as an unpleasant burden
| and devote minimal time and effort to it, with little material
| preparation and recycling tests from a decade ago that are all
| archived in fraternity and sorority collections.
|
| The solution to students using LLMs to cheat is obvious - more
| in-class work, more supervised in-section work, and devaluing
| take-home assignments - but this means more time and toil for the
| instructors, who are often just as lazy and unmotivated as the
| students.
|
| [note the in-person coding interview seems to have been invented
| by employers who realized anyone could get a CS degree and good
| grades without being a good programmer via cheating on
| assignments, and this happened well before LLMs hit the scene]
| renewiltord wrote:
| Everyone's always claiming the humanities are important the
| humanities are important but everyone I know in STEM is more
| learned than everyone in humanities. More philosophy, more
| history, more classical literature. This means that humanities
| education is relatively bogus.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| I have no doubt AI will impact the field, as it will many (most)
| others. That said, some assertions that may warrant
| reconsideration IMO:
|
| > The machines best us across nearly every subject
|
| This feels overstated, given the well-known limitations of AI in
| reasoning, factual reliability, and depth in specialized domains
|
| Describing traditional scholarship as mere "archaeological
| artifacts" feels like prematurely dismissing the enduring value
| of books and other research practices
|
| - The idea that AI offers "pure attention" seems to romanticize
| what is, in essence, statistical pattern
| recognition...potentially misrepresenting the nature of the
| exchange
|
| > Factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of
| the humanities
|
| maybe inadvertent, but devalues serious academic work that
| follows rigorous, methodical research traditions
|
| Beyond that, there's a few claims that would benefit from some
| additional evidence:
|
| - student paralysis rely heavily on anecdote; broader empirical
| data across varied institutions would strengthen the case - His
| comparisons between AI and human experts feel selective...would
| be interested to see a more systematic evaluation to see where AI
| meaningfully matches or falls short of expert performance
|
| - I'm somewhat partial to the author's view, but in terms of
| long-term educational outcomes, no real evidence to show that AI
| integration improves learning or contributes meaningfully to
| human development - the idea of a "singularity of self-
| consciousness" is pretty... under-argued? - The supposed link
| between declining humanities enrollment and AI's potential lacks
| concrete data to support the correlation
| timewizard wrote:
| > Generative AI elevates the value of humanistic skills
|
| No. It just steals them, whitewashes their copyright, then passes
| them off as a "machine creation." If there were no humans
| actively using language there would be no language models.
|
| > Generative AI makes it harder to teach humanistic skills
|
| Yea. That's what happens when you steal for a living.
|
| > For this reason, it is vitally important that educators learn
| how to personally create and deploy AI-based assignments and
| tools that are tailored directly for the type of teaching they
| want to do.
|
| All with zero evidence that this will improve outcomes for them.
| For this reason you should TEST YOUR HYPOTHESIS.
|
| I hate AI hype.
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