3 ms·

On the other hand you might be getting worse at reading those papers yourself. The more youngsters skip the hassle of banging their heads on some topic the les

On the other hand you might be getting worse at reading those papers yourself. The more youngsters skip the hassle of banging their heads on some topic the less able they will be to learn at later age. There's more to learning than getting information, it's also about processing it (which we are offloading to LLMs). In fact I'd say that the whole point of going through school is to learn how to process and absorb information. That might be the cognitive laziness.

parpfish 2y ago
What if the LLMs are teaching us that long form prose/technical writing is just a really bad, unnatural format for communication but natural dialogues are a good format?
- amrocha 2y ago
  If that was the case every scientific paper would be written as socratic dialogue. But it’s not. Because that’s a good format for beginners, but not for science.
  - parpfish 2y ago
    the reason the current format exists and is used is because it's very information dense. i think scientific papers would be better if they were socratic dialogues. but the limitation in publishing a dialogue is that you'd just get to publish one of them and each reader is going to come in with different questions and goals for what they want out of the paper.
- epolanski 2y ago
  The way I see it it is sort of like debugging code you're not well accustomed with. While you're still going to learn whether you go through the hassle of understanding the system, develop a method for debugging it and learning about it along the way... Of course a senior could point you to the issue right away, probably an llm too, and even provide a learning opportunity, but does it hold the same lasting impact of being able to overcome the burden yourself? Which one makes a more lasting effect on your abilities and skills? Again, LLMs are a tool, but if people in school/college start using it to offload the reasoning part they are not developing it themselves.
cube2222 2y ago
Sure, same as I'm probably pretty bad at going to the library and looking up information there, with the advent of the internet. In practice, this lets you reasonably process the knowledge from a lot more papers than you otherwise would, which I think is a win. The way we learn is evolving, as it has in the past, and that's a good thing. Though I agree that this will be another way for lazy children to avoid learning (by just letting AI do the exercises), and we'll need to find a good solution for that, whatever it may be.
- miltonlost 2y ago
  Not being able to glean information from a paper is wildly different than being unable to use a card catalog. The former is basic reading comprehension; the latter is a technology. You AREN'T learning what that paper is saying; you're learning parts of what the LLM says is useful. If you read just theorems, you aren't learning math. You need to read the proof too, and not just a summary of the proof.
jcims 2y ago
I do read the paper, but when you run into dense explanations like this: >To realize a programmable coherent optical activation function, we developed a resonant electro-optical nonlinearity (Fig. 1(iii)). This device directs a fraction of the incident optical power ∣b∣2 into a photodiode by programming the phase shift θ in an MZI. The photodiode is electrically connected to a p–n-doped resonant microring modulator, and the resultant photocurrent (or photovoltage) detunes the resonance by either injecting (or deplet-ing) carriers from the waveguide. It becomes very difficult to pick apart each thing, find a suitable explanation of what the thing (eg. MZI splitter, microring modulator, how a charge detunes the resonance of the modulator) is or how it contributes to the whole. Picking these apart and recombining them with the help of something like ChatGPT has given me a very rapid drill-down capability into documents like this. Then re-reading it allows me to intake the information in the way its presented. If this type of content was material to my day job it would be another matter, but this is just hobby interest. I'm just not going to invest hours trying to figure it out.

parpfish 2y ago

What if the LLMs are teaching us that long form prose/technical writing is just a really bad, unnatural format for communication but natural dialogues are a good format?

amrocha 2y ago
If that was the case every scientific paper would be written as socratic dialogue. But it’s not. Because that’s a good format for beginners, but not for science.
- parpfish 2y ago
  the reason the current format exists and is used is because it's very information dense. i think scientific papers would be better if they were socratic dialogues. but the limitation in publishing a dialogue is that you'd just get to publish one of them and each reader is going to come in with different questions and goals for what they want out of the paper.
epolanski 2y ago
The way I see it it is sort of like debugging code you're not well accustomed with. While you're still going to learn whether you go through the hassle of understanding the system, develop a method for debugging it and learning about it along the way... Of course a senior could point you to the issue right away, probably an llm too, and even provide a learning opportunity, but does it hold the same lasting impact of being able to overcome the burden yourself? Which one makes a more lasting effect on your abilities and skills? Again, LLMs are a tool, but if people in school/college start using it to offload the reasoning part they are not developing it themselves.

cube2222 2y ago

Sure, same as I'm probably pretty bad at going to the library and looking up information there, with the advent of the internet. In practice, this lets you reasonably process the knowledge from a lot more papers than you otherwise would, which I think is a win. The way we learn is evolving, as it has in the past, and that's a good thing. Though I agree that this will be another way for lazy children to avoid learning (by just letting AI do the exercises), and we'll need to find a good solution for that, whatever it may be.

miltonlost 2y ago
Not being able to glean information from a paper is wildly different than being unable to use a card catalog. The former is basic reading comprehension; the latter is a technology. You AREN'T learning what that paper is saying; you're learning parts of what the LLM says is useful. If you read just theorems, you aren't learning math. You need to read the proof too, and not just a summary of the proof.

jcims 2y ago

I do read the paper, but when you run into dense explanations like this: >To realize a programmable coherent optical activation function, we developed a resonant electro-optical nonlinearity (Fig. 1(iii)). This device directs a fraction of the incident optical power ∣b∣2 into a photodiode by programming the phase shift θ in an MZI. The photodiode is electrically connected to a p–n-doped resonant microring modulator, and the resultant photocurrent (or photovoltage) detunes the resonance by either injecting (or deplet-ing) carriers from the waveguide. It becomes very difficult to pick apart each thing, find a suitable explanation of what the thing (eg. MZI splitter, microring modulator, how a charge detunes the resonance of the modulator) is or how it contributes to the whole. Picking these apart and recombining them with the help of something like ChatGPT has given me a very rapid drill-down capability into documents like this. Then re-reading it allows me to intake the information in the way its presented. If this type of content was material to my day job it would be another matter, but this is just hobby interest. I'm just not going to invest hours trying to figure it out.