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Except that the traditional way of teaching the subject does not reason from first principles which is what you are advocating. The new math stuff does... I th
by theGnuMe 4y ago
Except that the traditional way of teaching the subject does not reason from first principles which is what you are advocating. The new math stuff does... I think parents hate it cause we don't understand it and it screws up the college pipeline.
To illustrate my point of the uselessness of our conventional mathematical training. ChatGPT gets a 700 out of 800 on the SAT Math section, but ask ChatGPT a reasoning question that requires math... it can't do it. That shows you just how useless the SAT actually is except for training kids to pattern match.
- ekidd 4y agoChatGPT 4's math abilities are really hit or miss. I asked it to act as a "Socratic tutor" for the de-biasing terms in exponential moving averages. And it walked me through the problem, and it actually pointed out errors in my derivation (even though I was using a half-baked mix of Unicode and LaTeX). That was honestly pretty impressive. On the other hand, GPT 3.5 is painfully bad at basic arithmetic. Apparently it can add long numbers, but you actually need to explain the addition algorithm and give it some examples. Then it can walk through the process step by step, just like an elementary school student. In a lot of cases, I suspect ChatGPT 4 is pulling from a tiny corner of the training distribution. It has seen most of the web, and it doesn't need to see things often to talk about them. I've seen it successfully summarize the contents of obscure personal blogs, or of a very minor news story that was current for a week in 2009. So it wouldn't surprise me if GPT 4 performs well on tasks that are mentioned on a half dozen obscure web pages, or something like that.