9 ms·

The point of school work isn't to generate something of value externally, it's to generate understanding in the student. Much like lifting weights or running ar

by gmd63 4y ago

The point of school work isn't to generate something of value externally, it's to generate understanding in the student. Much like lifting weights or running are "bullshit" activities. You haven't seen bullshit until you see whatever is produced by a society with a voracious appetite that runs on "gimme what I want" buttons and a dismal foundation of understanding. The students bullshitting their way through course work are like the lifters using bad form to make the mechanical goal of moving the weight easier in the short term. They completely miss the point.

p1necone 4y ago
> The students bullshitting their way through course work are like the lifters using bad form to make the mechanical goal of moving the weight easier in the short term. They completely miss the point. Eh, when your future career prospects hinge on what grades you get it's perfectly rational to optimize for getting those grades over learning "properly". Especially in subjects you know you're already competent enough in or that aren't relevant to your future goals. It's stupid in weightlifting because nobody is going to pay you a higher salary if you can do 15 reps instead of 10. (Although there's a related and opposite problem where people massively overestimate how important their highschool grades are and get unnecessarily stressed out over it.)
- Avicebron 4y ago
  If you've written off yourself as "competent enough" or things "aren't relevant to future goals" you might want to think about the phrase "you don't know what you don't know"
  - p1necone 4y ago
    I mean stuff like bullshitting your way through an english assignment when you're going to study computer science at uni. You can be fairly confident that understanding the intricacies of Catcher in the Rye won't be important in any compsci paper or dev job, but the writing skills from the bullshitting are still useful.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Eh, when your future career prospects hinge on what grades you get it's perfectly rational to optimize for getting those grades over learning "properly". I knew a few people who cheated and gamed the system at every opportunity through high school, all in the name of getting into the best universities. They got absolutely crushed in college when their old tricks stopped working and they had to actually do the work. One of them got caught cheating and had a wake-up call when the university threatened him for it. He eventually put in the effort to grind it out and graduate a year late, but graduated nonetheless. He's mentioned that he could have saved himself a lot of pain and suffering by just engaging in school the first time instead of cheating. This idea that you can cheat your way into a job and then just coast doesn't really match reality. It may work for some people who get into weird jobs that don't fire people, but the idea that it's "optimal" to cheat your way through life until you're handed an easy job doesn't hold up in practice.
  - lexarflash8g 4y ago
    Some of them didn't want to make the time commitment-- or partied. But a lot of smart students make then had old answers to tests especially in hard majors like the sciences. I think that counts as cheating.. they probably figured out they were giving canned answers or suspicious they arrived to answer right away.
    - p1necone 4y ago
      I did this accidentally once at uni. Previous years tests were posted online (intentionally, by the person running the class) so I was doing those while studying to make sure I knew the material. I sit down in the actual exam and lo and behold the questions in the test were exactly the same as one of the previous years I'd been using to study, I guess the professor got lazy.
  - david_allison 4y ago
    In your anecdote, the person who cheated got into a well-regarded university and graduated (albeit a year late). That's likely to have a better long-term outcome than not cheating at high school, and going to a lower-ranked school. Cheating worked.
- majormajor 4y ago
  The assumption here is that only grades will affect your lifetime earnings and other skills that you might improve through studying vs cheating won't come into play... Some people can bullshit their way through life forever, but I've seen a lot of more bullshitters stuck doing entry level crap for a long time because their limits became apparent...
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    > The assumption here is that only grades will affect your lifetime earnings and other skills that you might improve through studying vs cheating won't come into play... Or that perhaps you have a better plan for your own education than a cookie cutter curriculum that is intended to applied indiscriminately to millions of people and hasn't been updated in 50 years.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      That's shifting the goalposts from the parent poster who was saying "all you need is the grade for your future career prospects," not "you are educating yourself independently." Let's not pretend most people happy to cheat their way through to the eventual level of their mediocrity are doing so because they're doing a bunch of other learning.
      - tshaddox 4y ago
        It’s not a shift. I’m suggesting that both could be happening at the same time: you are maximizing your superficial credentials as easily as possible because credentials will help you and you are genuinely educating yourself because that will also help you.
    - tarboreus 4y ago
      In theory, maybe, but how many cheaters are undertaking their own great books curriculum in the copious spare time they're freeing up?
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  Well, I for one hope I don't have to work with people, who only ever spent the minimal effort even including cheating on assignments, because their shortcomings will be what I have to deal with, because they cannot stem (or lift, ha!) their weight. But in reality it is highly unlikely, that one will never have to work with such people. I guess more realistically I should hope for not encountering too many of them.
Avicebron 4y ago
Agreed, relying on ChatGPT to do work is like using Chegg for answers, we can tell ourselves, "oh yea, I could write that no problem, or I can just do the same method later on..." until you can't. It's called learning without a crutch, aka learning. (obviously I'll do things like use CMake on large projects, but I've forced myself to write Makefiles by hand for exactly this reason).
- danuker 4y ago
  I can learn long-form division by writing with a pencil. Is the pencil a crutch? Do I have to make my own pencil? Should I learn to divide without needing a writing utensil? Of course, we can't take ChatGPT for granted like a pencil, because it's controlled by a third party and requires resources out of reach (for now). But it might become trivially cheap one day.
  - burnished 4y ago
    Simply, yes, it is a crutch for your mental math skills. Should you do any of those follow ups? Seems like a judgement call. In my experience strengthening those fundamentals is important, but there are many occaisons where the point of the exercise (such as learning to write legible long form algebra) overshadows other possible benefits - making a crutch such as a pencil and paper, or a computer typing system, the appropriate call to make. Please, when you pose 'absurd' hypotheticals, follow them to likely or reasonable conclusions. If you shit your brain off when the conclusion seems obvious but before evaluating you will frequently end up just asking reasonable (if somewhat obvious) questions.
    - danuker 4y ago
      The point I was aiming for was that learning with a crutch is still learning. I interpreted Avicebron's comment as "real programmers code in binary" and you are "unworthy" if you can build a CMake system without having written a Makefile manually in your life. But after your comment, a lot of what I see around me are crutches. The keyboard I type on, the heated building I'm in. They really help me perform "normal" functions, and living without them would be a handicap, so they are crutches. But I see no point in purposely living without them. Live your life, and don't force yourself to do something you don't like unnecessarily.
netr0ute 4y ago
> Much like lifting weights or running are "bullshit" activities. > like the lifters using bad form to make the mechanical goal of moving the weight easier in the short term. I don't know about you, but this would actually be the perfect excuse to do a sport like judo that you can't bullshit through but can still get the same end result from.
- palata 4y ago
  You do realise that in order to reach a good level in judo, you have to do some of the bullshit training like lifting weight, right?
  - netr0ute 4y ago
    I don't think so. I rarely lift weights but I do just fine in judo, largely because judo largely replaces it.
    - SgtBastard 4y ago
      >I rarely lift weights So, you do do "bullshit" exercise. What a weird hill to die on.
lexarflash8g 4y ago
To get out of reading a long book -- if you want a TLDR or something. I see it as a tool to augment understanding -- bad actors will manipulate it to use to their advantage. Teacher can't go around to each student to help with their understanding -- its not economical and each student is at a different level of ability.
tshaddox 4y ago
That's exactly what I'm saying. It's reasonable for teachers to give assignments where the resulting artifact is not itself of direct value to the subject matter, but where the only feasible way for the student to produce the artifact is via a process that is supposed to be of educational value. I'm just saying that when new ways emerge to produce that artifact which don't have the same supposed educational value to the student, the assignment itself needs to change. I don't think your analogy to lifting weights or running is appropriate. A more appropriate analogy would be a physical education teacher who says "your assignment is to meet me on the other side of town in 30 minutes" because the only feasible way to get there is to run. Obviously the point is to get the physical activity, not to be on the other side of town. Then the bicycle gets invented, and suddenly it requires much less strenuous activity to get across town. All I'm saying is that it's vital for the teacher to realize that being on the other side of town was never actually the point, and to change the assignment so that students still get the intended amount of physical activity.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  It's more like "your assignment is to run to other side of town in 30 minutes" but due to resource constraints, it's not easy or possible to monitor you the entire way. Its also not possible to redesign the task without constant monitoring of everyone.
- danuker 4y ago
  I suppose a human teacher not being able to come up with an assignment not easily solvable by computers is a new level of the Turing test. Therefore the assignment itself must include a requirement not to use a computer.
- genghisjahn 4y ago
  >It's reasonable for teachers to give assignments where the resulting artifact is not itself of direct value to the subject matter, but where the only feasible way for the student to produce the artifact is via a process that is supposed to be of educational value. Reminds of this scene from A River Runs Through It. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA-sEfXOaEQ&ab_channel=GradyBryan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA-sEfXOaEQ&ab_channel=Grady...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jupp0r 4y ago
I don't understand your point. If creating understanding is the point, why don't we test for understanding having been created but instead test for "bullshit activities" being successfully performed? In your weight lifting analogy: why don't we test for outcome based fitness metrics (VO2max for runners, 1RM for weight lifters) and let students learn to choose the best ways to achieve those goals?
- yunwal 4y ago
  How do you test that a kindergartener understands addition without asking them for things a calculator can do? Or do we just think it’s not important for people to understand addition at this point?
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    You give them a bag of marbles and tell them to show you 5 marbles and 3 marbles and then show you how much there are when you put them all together. That's how I taught my kids addition.
    - selcuka 4y ago
      You are missing the parent comment's point. Your question can also be answered using a calculator.
      - jupp0r 4y ago
        Don't tell my kids.
    - GayforMoleman 4y ago
      Your solution is to take away tools and ask to do a task under constant supervision? People take exams like this every day.
- sabjut 4y ago
  You seem to have solved the fundamental challenge with examinations of any kind. Please elaborate, teachers that for millennia have settled with compromises are eager to learn about your watertight solution.
intelVISA 4y ago
Is asking ChatGPT to generate low quality code much different to the average npm dependency chain? It would seem disingenous to berate AI code completion for removing the challenges of development yet most reach for import * in the same breath..
brookst 4y ago
Strongly disagree. This is much more analogous to math students using a calculator rather than a slide rule. Yes, it’s faster. No, you aren’t going to pass unless you know the material well enough to validate the outputs. I’m old. I’ve lived this moral panic so many times. I remember when social media, newsgroups, the internet, word processors, computers, graphing calculators, calculator watches, BBSes, and calculators were all going to destroy our children’s education. I am highly skeptical that this time is any different.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  By using some ML model to spit out text for you, will you learn how to write well? How to write a good essay? None of that. During the act of writing those, the student is supposed to put in effort and thing of well worded phrases, using the parts of their brain, which are responsible for language processing. Without actual practice, the exam will come and the student will fail. They wont have a bullshit generator at hand, that generates speech, which sufficient sounds meaningful, when they are in an actual discussion "over the table". Even if they did, who would listen, if all they do is get out their phone and read some generated bullshit from it, that does not follow along with what was previously said? Being able to have a good discussion is a life-long valuable skill. Not practicing it will cost sooner or later.

by gmd63 4y ago

p1necone 4y ago

> The students bullshitting their way through course work are like the lifters using bad form to make the mechanical goal of moving the weight easier in the short term. They completely miss the point. Eh, when your future career prospects hinge on what grades you get it's perfectly rational to optimize for getting those grades over learning "properly". Especially in subjects you know you're already competent enough in or that aren't relevant to your future goals. It's stupid in weightlifting because nobody is going to pay you a higher salary if you can do 15 reps instead of 10. (Although there's a related and opposite problem where people massively overestimate how important their highschool grades are and get unnecessarily stressed out over it.)

Avicebron 4y ago
If you've written off yourself as "competent enough" or things "aren't relevant to future goals" you might want to think about the phrase "you don't know what you don't know"
- p1necone 4y ago
  I mean stuff like bullshitting your way through an english assignment when you're going to study computer science at uni. You can be fairly confident that understanding the intricacies of Catcher in the Rye won't be important in any compsci paper or dev job, but the writing skills from the bullshitting are still useful.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Eh, when your future career prospects hinge on what grades you get it's perfectly rational to optimize for getting those grades over learning "properly". I knew a few people who cheated and gamed the system at every opportunity through high school, all in the name of getting into the best universities. They got absolutely crushed in college when their old tricks stopped working and they had to actually do the work. One of them got caught cheating and had a wake-up call when the university threatened him for it. He eventually put in the effort to grind it out and graduate a year late, but graduated nonetheless. He's mentioned that he could have saved himself a lot of pain and suffering by just engaging in school the first time instead of cheating. This idea that you can cheat your way into a job and then just coast doesn't really match reality. It may work for some people who get into weird jobs that don't fire people, but the idea that it's "optimal" to cheat your way through life until you're handed an easy job doesn't hold up in practice.
- lexarflash8g 4y ago
  Some of them didn't want to make the time commitment-- or partied. But a lot of smart students make then had old answers to tests especially in hard majors like the sciences. I think that counts as cheating.. they probably figured out they were giving canned answers or suspicious they arrived to answer right away.
  - p1necone 4y ago
    I did this accidentally once at uni. Previous years tests were posted online (intentionally, by the person running the class) so I was doing those while studying to make sure I knew the material. I sit down in the actual exam and lo and behold the questions in the test were exactly the same as one of the previous years I'd been using to study, I guess the professor got lazy.
- david_allison 4y ago
  In your anecdote, the person who cheated got into a well-regarded university and graduated (albeit a year late). That's likely to have a better long-term outcome than not cheating at high school, and going to a lower-ranked school. Cheating worked.
majormajor 4y ago
The assumption here is that only grades will affect your lifetime earnings and other skills that you might improve through studying vs cheating won't come into play... Some people can bullshit their way through life forever, but I've seen a lot of more bullshitters stuck doing entry level crap for a long time because their limits became apparent...
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > The assumption here is that only grades will affect your lifetime earnings and other skills that you might improve through studying vs cheating won't come into play... Or that perhaps you have a better plan for your own education than a cookie cutter curriculum that is intended to applied indiscriminately to millions of people and hasn't been updated in 50 years.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    That's shifting the goalposts from the parent poster who was saying "all you need is the grade for your future career prospects," not "you are educating yourself independently." Let's not pretend most people happy to cheat their way through to the eventual level of their mediocrity are doing so because they're doing a bunch of other learning.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      It’s not a shift. I’m suggesting that both could be happening at the same time: you are maximizing your superficial credentials as easily as possible because credentials will help you and you are genuinely educating yourself because that will also help you.
  - tarboreus 4y ago
    In theory, maybe, but how many cheaters are undertaking their own great books curriculum in the copious spare time they're freeing up?
zelphirkalt 4y ago
Well, I for one hope I don't have to work with people, who only ever spent the minimal effort even including cheating on assignments, because their shortcomings will be what I have to deal with, because they cannot stem (or lift, ha!) their weight. But in reality it is highly unlikely, that one will never have to work with such people. I guess more realistically I should hope for not encountering too many of them.

Avicebron 4y ago

Agreed, relying on ChatGPT to do work is like using Chegg for answers, we can tell ourselves, "oh yea, I could write that no problem, or I can just do the same method later on..." until you can't. It's called learning without a crutch, aka learning. (obviously I'll do things like use CMake on large projects, but I've forced myself to write Makefiles by hand for exactly this reason).

danuker 4y ago
I can learn long-form division by writing with a pencil. Is the pencil a crutch? Do I have to make my own pencil? Should I learn to divide without needing a writing utensil? Of course, we can't take ChatGPT for granted like a pencil, because it's controlled by a third party and requires resources out of reach (for now). But it might become trivially cheap one day.
- burnished 4y ago
  Simply, yes, it is a crutch for your mental math skills. Should you do any of those follow ups? Seems like a judgement call. In my experience strengthening those fundamentals is important, but there are many occaisons where the point of the exercise (such as learning to write legible long form algebra) overshadows other possible benefits - making a crutch such as a pencil and paper, or a computer typing system, the appropriate call to make. Please, when you pose 'absurd' hypotheticals, follow them to likely or reasonable conclusions. If you shit your brain off when the conclusion seems obvious but before evaluating you will frequently end up just asking reasonable (if somewhat obvious) questions.
  - danuker 4y ago
    The point I was aiming for was that learning with a crutch is still learning. I interpreted Avicebron's comment as "real programmers code in binary" and you are "unworthy" if you can build a CMake system without having written a Makefile manually in your life. But after your comment, a lot of what I see around me are crutches. The keyboard I type on, the heated building I'm in. They really help me perform "normal" functions, and living without them would be a handicap, so they are crutches. But I see no point in purposely living without them. Live your life, and don't force yourself to do something you don't like unnecessarily.

netr0ute 4y ago

> Much like lifting weights or running are "bullshit" activities. > like the lifters using bad form to make the mechanical goal of moving the weight easier in the short term. I don't know about you, but this would actually be the perfect excuse to do a sport like judo that you can't bullshit through but can still get the same end result from.

palata 4y ago
You do realise that in order to reach a good level in judo, you have to do some of the bullshit training like lifting weight, right?
- netr0ute 4y ago
  I don't think so. I rarely lift weights but I do just fine in judo, largely because judo largely replaces it.
  - SgtBastard 4y ago
    >I rarely lift weights So, you do do "bullshit" exercise. What a weird hill to die on.

lexarflash8g 4y ago

To get out of reading a long book -- if you want a TLDR or something. I see it as a tool to augment understanding -- bad actors will manipulate it to use to their advantage. Teacher can't go around to each student to help with their understanding -- its not economical and each student is at a different level of ability.

tshaddox 4y ago

That's exactly what I'm saying. It's reasonable for teachers to give assignments where the resulting artifact is not itself of direct value to the subject matter, but where the only feasible way for the student to produce the artifact is via a process that is supposed to be of educational value. I'm just saying that when new ways emerge to produce that artifact which don't have the same supposed educational value to the student, the assignment itself needs to change. I don't think your analogy to lifting weights or running is appropriate. A more appropriate analogy would be a physical education teacher who says "your assignment is to meet me on the other side of town in 30 minutes" because the only feasible way to get there is to run. Obviously the point is to get the physical activity, not to be on the other side of town. Then the bicycle gets invented, and suddenly it requires much less strenuous activity to get across town. All I'm saying is that it's vital for the teacher to realize that being on the other side of town was never actually the point, and to change the assignment so that students still get the intended amount of physical activity.

Gigachad 4y ago
It's more like "your assignment is to run to other side of town in 30 minutes" but due to resource constraints, it's not easy or possible to monitor you the entire way. Its also not possible to redesign the task without constant monitoring of everyone.
danuker 4y ago
I suppose a human teacher not being able to come up with an assignment not easily solvable by computers is a new level of the Turing test. Therefore the assignment itself must include a requirement not to use a computer.
genghisjahn 4y ago
>It's reasonable for teachers to give assignments where the resulting artifact is not itself of direct value to the subject matter, but where the only feasible way for the student to produce the artifact is via a process that is supposed to be of educational value. Reminds of this scene from A River Runs Through It. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA-sEfXOaEQ&ab_channel=GradyBryan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA-sEfXOaEQ&ab_channel=Grady...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jupp0r 4y ago

I don't understand your point. If creating understanding is the point, why don't we test for understanding having been created but instead test for "bullshit activities" being successfully performed? In your weight lifting analogy: why don't we test for outcome based fitness metrics (VO2max for runners, 1RM for weight lifters) and let students learn to choose the best ways to achieve those goals?

yunwal 4y ago
How do you test that a kindergartener understands addition without asking them for things a calculator can do? Or do we just think it’s not important for people to understand addition at this point?
- jupp0r 4y ago
  You give them a bag of marbles and tell them to show you 5 marbles and 3 marbles and then show you how much there are when you put them all together. That's how I taught my kids addition.
  - selcuka 4y ago
    You are missing the parent comment's point. Your question can also be answered using a calculator.
    - jupp0r 4y ago
      Don't tell my kids.
  - GayforMoleman 4y ago
    Your solution is to take away tools and ask to do a task under constant supervision? People take exams like this every day.
sabjut 4y ago
You seem to have solved the fundamental challenge with examinations of any kind. Please elaborate, teachers that for millennia have settled with compromises are eager to learn about your watertight solution.

intelVISA 4y ago

Is asking ChatGPT to generate low quality code much different to the average npm dependency chain? It would seem disingenous to berate AI code completion for removing the challenges of development yet most reach for import * in the same breath..

brookst 4y ago

Strongly disagree. This is much more analogous to math students using a calculator rather than a slide rule. Yes, it’s faster. No, you aren’t going to pass unless you know the material well enough to validate the outputs. I’m old. I’ve lived this moral panic so many times. I remember when social media, newsgroups, the internet, word processors, computers, graphing calculators, calculator watches, BBSes, and calculators were all going to destroy our children’s education. I am highly skeptical that this time is any different.

zelphirkalt 4y ago
By using some ML model to spit out text for you, will you learn how to write well? How to write a good essay? None of that. During the act of writing those, the student is supposed to put in effort and thing of well worded phrases, using the parts of their brain, which are responsible for language processing. Without actual practice, the exam will come and the student will fail. They wont have a bullshit generator at hand, that generates speech, which sufficient sounds meaningful, when they are in an actual discussion "over the table". Even if they did, who would listen, if all they do is get out their phone and read some generated bullshit from it, that does not follow along with what was previously said? Being able to have a good discussion is a life-long valuable skill. Not practicing it will cost sooner or later.