3 ms·

I have wondered if future generations will struggling with critical thinking / problem solving - without the aided technology assistance.

klodolph 2y ago
Current and previous generations struggle too. Critical thinking and problem solving skills have always been an absolute bear to teach, and few teachers or school systems have the stomach to teach it. I’m thinking of science education, for example. It’s not just a matter of teaching kids a bunch of disconnected facts about science like “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” but teaching kids to use the scientific method. To teach the scientific method well, you have to get the kids to design experiments and be comfortable with the prospect of failure. This is, sadly, a very modern approach and requires training the teachers how to do this. Some schools don’t but it’s not something you would have likely gotten much of in the 20th century. Instead, people are still fighting over dumb shit like which facts are taught in class. “Critical thinking skills” are not on the menu most of the time.
al_borland 2y ago
I think they will be the case. When I was a kid my high school math class was very calculator driven. I have a lot to say about that, but won’t bore you with it. I would often see adults pull out a pencil and paper and do a whole bunch of math very quickly, or do a lot of math quickly in their head. I couldn’t do this as well as them, and my math classes weren’t doing anything to move me in that direction. When the calculators were taken away, most of the kids were useless. I saw a guy in National Math Honor Society put 1-1 in his calculator, unironically. This was almost 25 years ago. I assume it’s only gotten worse, and will continue to get worse as more tools that provide answers are given to the students. I think new tools are great, but it seems to me that the people who can utilize them the best are the ones who learned without them. Those are the people who understand the concepts behind them, so they can ask the right questions, with the right terminology, and they can recognize if an answer makes sense. When learning is done with these tools, even just calculators, little is being learned. Memorize the button sequence to press leading up to the test. Once the test is over, forget the sequence… and even if the buttons are relented, it won’t matter, because while we all walk around with a calculator in our pockets now, it’s not a TI-83 (or whatever people use now), so without the conceptual knowledge, what good is the button sequence. That doesn’t even prepare a person to leverage ChatGPT well.
godelski 2y ago
This is my biggest fear of AI technology. That we outsource our reasoning to things that can't. As a ML researcher myself I'm often baffled with the direction we go with these tools. It feels like we try to use then to do the things humans like and are best at and then have humans do the things ML models are better at and humans hate doing. The tech is no doubt exciting (it's why I research it!) but that neither justifies unbounded hype nor blind ourselves. But I guess that's the classic engineering problem: it's easy to get lost in the good and exciting parts of what you're building and lose sight of the harm it can do. It's hard to not fall victim to this and I'm sure we're all guilty of it to some extent, I know I am

klodolph 2y ago

Current and previous generations struggle too. Critical thinking and problem solving skills have always been an absolute bear to teach, and few teachers or school systems have the stomach to teach it. I’m thinking of science education, for example. It’s not just a matter of teaching kids a bunch of disconnected facts about science like “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” but teaching kids to use the scientific method. To teach the scientific method well, you have to get the kids to design experiments and be comfortable with the prospect of failure. This is, sadly, a very modern approach and requires training the teachers how to do this. Some schools don’t but it’s not something you would have likely gotten much of in the 20th century. Instead, people are still fighting over dumb shit like which facts are taught in class. “Critical thinking skills” are not on the menu most of the time.

al_borland 2y ago

I think they will be the case. When I was a kid my high school math class was very calculator driven. I have a lot to say about that, but won’t bore you with it. I would often see adults pull out a pencil and paper and do a whole bunch of math very quickly, or do a lot of math quickly in their head. I couldn’t do this as well as them, and my math classes weren’t doing anything to move me in that direction. When the calculators were taken away, most of the kids were useless. I saw a guy in National Math Honor Society put 1-1 in his calculator, unironically. This was almost 25 years ago. I assume it’s only gotten worse, and will continue to get worse as more tools that provide answers are given to the students. I think new tools are great, but it seems to me that the people who can utilize them the best are the ones who learned without them. Those are the people who understand the concepts behind them, so they can ask the right questions, with the right terminology, and they can recognize if an answer makes sense. When learning is done with these tools, even just calculators, little is being learned. Memorize the button sequence to press leading up to the test. Once the test is over, forget the sequence… and even if the buttons are relented, it won’t matter, because while we all walk around with a calculator in our pockets now, it’s not a TI-83 (or whatever people use now), so without the conceptual knowledge, what good is the button sequence. That doesn’t even prepare a person to leverage ChatGPT well.

godelski 2y ago

This is my biggest fear of AI technology. That we outsource our reasoning to things that can't. As a ML researcher myself I'm often baffled with the direction we go with these tools. It feels like we try to use then to do the things humans like and are best at and then have humans do the things ML models are better at and humans hate doing. The tech is no doubt exciting (it's why I research it!) but that neither justifies unbounded hype nor blind ourselves. But I guess that's the classic engineering problem: it's easy to get lost in the good and exciting parts of what you're building and lose sight of the harm it can do. It's hard to not fall victim to this and I'm sure we're all guilty of it to some extent, I know I am