11 ms·

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less acc

by bko 2y ago

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately. For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc Not that these aren't noble things or worth doing, but they won't impact your life too much if you're not interest in penmanship, spelling, or cartography. I believe LLMs are different (I am still stuck in the moral panic phase), but I think my children will have a different perspective (similar to how I feel about memorizing poetry and languages without garbage collection). So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me"

nyeah 2y ago
Spell check isn't really adequate. You get a page full of correctly spelled words, but they're the wrong words.
- walthamstow 2y ago
  Try being British, often they're not correctly spelt words at all.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
delusional 2y ago
"More or less" is doing a lot of work there. School, at least where I am, still spends the first year getting children to memorize the order of the numbers from 1-20 and if there's an even or odd number of a thing on a picture. Do you google if 5 is less than 6 or do you just memorize that? If you believe that creativity is not based on a foundation of memorization and experience (which is just memorization) you need to reflect on the connection between those.
noitpmeder 2y ago
This is an insane take. The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart. The AI becomes their brain, such that they cannot function without it. I'd never want to work with someone who is this reliant on technology.
- Vvector 2y ago
  Do you have the skills and knowledge to survive like a pioneer from 200 years ago? Technology is rapidly changing humanity. Maybe for the worse.
  - tux1968 2y ago
    Indeed. More people need to grow their own vegetables. AI may undermine our ability for high level abstract thought, but industrial agriculture already represents an existential threat, should it be interrupted for any reason.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Knowledge itself is the least concern here. Human society is extremely good at transmitting information. More difficult to transmit are things like critical thinking and problem-solving ability. Developing meta-cognitive processes like the latter are the real utility of education.
  - dullcrisp 2y ago
    Did the pioneers 200 years ago have the skills and knowledge to survive as a serf 400 years ago? Or as a mid-level financial analyst today? Or is pioneering 200 years ago an in-demand skillset that we should be picking up?
    - Vvector 2y ago
      My point is that the necessary skill set required by society is ever-changing. Skills like handwriting, spelling, and reading a map are fading from importance. I could see a future where pioneering might be useful again.
HDThoreaun 2y ago
It’s all about critical thinking. The answer to your kid is that LLMs are a tool and until they run the entire economy there will still need to be people with critical thinking skills making decisions. Not every task at school helps hone critical thinking but many of them do.
dingnuts 2y ago
> That's more or less accepted today. Bullshit! You cannot do second order reasoning with a set of facts or concepts that you have to look up first. Google Search made intuition and deep understanding and encyclopedic knowledge MORE important, not less. People will think you are a wizard if you read documentation and bother to remember it, because they're still busy asking Google or ChatGPT while you're happily coding without pausing
- vonneumannstan 2y ago
  I am 100% certain people said the same thing about arithmetic and calculators and now mental arithmetic skill is nothing more than a curiosity.
  - dwaltrip 2y ago
    I encourage you to reconsider. Mental math is essential for having strong numerical fluency, for estimation, and for reasoning about many systems. Those skills are incredibly useful for thinking critically about the world.
    - vonneumannstan 2y ago
      To a certain point. Basic arithmetic is important but the ability to calculate large square roots or multiply multi-digit numbers is not very relevant when you can trivially calculate them on your phone in seconds.
  - joe5150 2y ago
    Being able to do basic math in your head is valuable just in terms of basic practicality (quickly calculating a tip or splitting a bill, doubling a recipe, reasoning about a budget...), but this is a poor analogy anyway because 3x2 is still 3x2 regardless of how you get there whereas creative work produced by software is worthless.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    That's simply not true. I use mental arithmetic skill every day. It's irritating or funny when you come across someone who struggles with it, depending on the situation.
kibwen 2y ago
The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. Like, Socrates may have been against writing because he thought it made your memory weak, but at least I, an individual, am perfectly capable of manufacturing my own writing implements with a modest amount of manual labor and abundantly-available resources (carving into wood, burning wood into charcoal to write on stone, etc.). But I ain't perfectly capable of doing the same to manufacture an integrated circuit, let alone a digital calculator, let alone a GPU, let alone an LLM. Anyone who delegates their thought to a corporation is permanently hitching their fundamental ability to think to this wagon.
- notyourwork 2y ago
  Although I agree, convincing children to learn using that rationalization won’t work.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    Yes it does. Plenty of children accept "you won't always have (tool)" as a reason for learning.
    - jplusequalt 2y ago
      All adults were once children and there are plenty of adults who cannot read beyond a middle school reading level or balance a simple equation. This has been a problem before we ever gave them GPTs. It stands to reason it will only worsen in a future dominated by them.
    - freeone3000 2y ago
      “You won’t always have a calculator” became moderately false to laughably false as I went from middle to high school. Every task I will ever do for money will be done on a computer. I’m still garbage at arithmetic, especially mental math, and it really hasn’t inhibited my career in any way.
whatshisface 2y ago
I don't think memorizing poetry fits your picture. Nobody ever memorized poetry so that they could answer questions about it.
- bko 2y ago
  A large part was to preserve cultural knowledge, which is kind of like answering questions about it. What wisdom or knowledge does this entail. People do the same with religious texts today The other part I imagine was largely entertainment, social and memory is a good skill to build.
- KronisLV 2y ago
  It doesn’t seem that different from having to write a book report or something like that. Back in school, we also needed to memorize poems and songs to recite them - I quite hated it because my memory was never exactly great. Same as having to remember the vocabulary in a foreign language when learning it, though that might arguably be a bit more directly useful.
AlexandrB 2y ago
> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc What I don't like are all the hidden variables in these systems. Even GPS, for example, is making some assumptions about what kind of roads you want to take and how to weigh different paths. LLMs are worse in this regard because the creators encode a set of moral and stylistic assumptions/dictates into the model and everybody who uses it is nudged into that paradigm. This is destructive to any kind of original thought, especially in an environment where there are only a handful of large companies providing the models everyone uses.
Retric 2y ago
The scope of what’s useful to know changes with tools, but having a bullshit detector requires actually knowing some things and being able to reason about the basics. It’s not that LLM’s are particularly different it’s that people are less able to determine when they are messing up. A search engine fails and you notice, an LLM fails and your boss, customer, ect notices.
andai 2y ago
>Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me This may eventually apply to all human labor. I was thinking, even if they pass laws to mandate companies employ a certain fraction of human workers... it'll be like it already is now: they just let AI do most of the work anyway!
riohumanbean 2y ago
Why have children learn to walk? They're better off learning the newest technology of hoverboards and not getting left behind!
CivBase 2y ago
Why should you learn how to add when you can just use a calculator? We've had calculators for decades! Because understanding how addition works is instrumental to understanding more advanced math concepts. And being able to perform simple addition quickly, without a calculator is a huge productivity boost for many tasks. In the world of education and intellectual development it's not about getting the right answer as quickly as possible. It's about mastering simple things so that you can understand complicated things. And often times mastering a simple thing requires you to manually do things which technology could automate.
light_hue_1 2y ago
> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc. I'm the polar opposite. And I'm AI researcher. The reason you can't answer your kid when he asks about LLMs is because the original position was wrong. Being able to write isn't optional. It's a critical tool for thought. Spelling is very important because you need to avoid confusion. If you can't spell no spell checker can save you when it inserts the wrong word. And this only gets far worse the more technical the language is. And maps are crucial too. Sometimes, the best way to communicate is to draw a map. In many domains like aviation maps are everything, you literally cannot progress without them. LLMs are no different. They can do a little bit of thinking for us and help us along the way. But we need to understand what's going on to ask the right questions and to understand their answers.
jplusequalt 2y ago
>children will have a different perspective Children will lack the critical thinking for solving complex problems, and even worse, won't have the work ethic for dealing with the kinds of protracted problems that occur in the real world. But maybe that's by design. I think the ownership class has decided productivity is more important than societal malaise.
bcrosby95 2y ago
> So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me" It's been my experience that LLMs are only better than me at stuff I'm bad at. It's noticeably worse than me at things I'm good at. So the answer to your question depends: can your child get good at things while leaning on an LLM? I don't know the answer to this. Maybe schools need to expect more from their students with LLMs in the picture.
- gnatolf 2y ago
  Given the rate of improvement wrt to llms, this may not hold true for long
  - yunwal 2y ago
    The rate of improvement with LLMs seems to have halted since Claude3.5, which was about a year ago. I think we’ve probably gone as far as we can go with tweaks to transformer architectures, and we’ll need a new academic discovery which could take years to do better
johndough 2y ago
Use it or lose it. With the invention of the calculator, students lost the ability to do arithmetic. Now, with LLMs, they lose the ability to think. This is not conjecture by the way. As a TA, I have observed that half of the undergraduate students lost the ability to write any code at all without the assistance of LLMs. Almost all use ChatGPT for most exercises. Thankfully, cheating technology is advancing at a similarly rapid pace. Glasses with integrated cameras, WiFi and heads-up display, smartwatches with polarized displays that are only readable with corresponding glasses, and invisibly small wireless ear-canal earpieces to name just a few pieces of tech that we could have only dreamed about back then. In the end, the students stay dumb, but the graduation rate barely suffers. I wonder whether pre-2022 degrees will become the academic equivalent to low-background radiation steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
quantumHazer 2y ago
Universities still teach you calculus and real analysis even though Wolfram Alpha exists. It boils down to your willing to learn something. An LLM can't understand things for you. I'm "early genz" and I write code without llm because I find data structure and algorithm very interesting and I want to learn the concepts not because I'm in love with the syntax of C or Rust (I love the syntax of C btw).
an_aparallel 2y ago
This is how we end up with people who cant write legibly, cant smell bad maths (on the news/articles/ads), cant change tires, have no orienteering or sense of direction and memories like swiss cheese. Trust the oracle son. /s I think all of the above do one thing brilliantly, built self confidence. Its easy to get bullshitted if what youre able to hold in your head is effectively nothing.
palmotea 2y ago
> When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. And those people are wrong, in a similar way to how it's wrong to say: "There's no point in having very much RAM, as you can just page to disk." It's the cognitive equivalent of becoming morbidly obese (another popular decision in today's world).
OptionOfT 2y ago
The problem with GPS is that you never learn to orient yourself. You don't learn to have a sense of place, direction or elapsed distance. [0] As to writing, just the action of writing something down with a pen, on paper, has been proven to be better for memorization than recording it on a computer [1]. If we're not teaching these basic skills because an LLM does it better, how do learn to be skeptical of the output of the LLM. How do we validate it? How do we bolster ourselves against corporate influences when asking which of 2 products is healthier? How do we spot native advertising? [2] [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/531573a https://www.nature.com/articles/531573a [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001691804001167 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00016... [2]: Example: https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/netflix/women-inmates-separate-but-not-equal.html https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/netflix/women-inmates-separ...
dylan604 2y ago
> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc I don't know. I really feel like the auto-correct features are out to get me. So many times I want to say "in" yet it gets corrected to "on", or vice-versa. I also feel like it does the same to me with they're/their/there. Over the past several iOS/macOS updates, I feel like I've either gotten dumber and no longer do english gooder, or I'm getting tagged by predictive text nonsense.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  It will also open you up to getting advertisements shoved up your intestines if you can't spell, or form basic sentences without machine assistance. Imagine always having Tex autocorrect to Texaco
nkrisc 2y ago
> So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me" 1. You won’t always have an LLM. It’s the same reason I still have at least my wife’s phone number memorized. 2. So you can learn to do it better. See point 1. I wasn’t allowed to use calculators in first and second grade when memorizing multiplication tables, even though a calculator could have finished the exercise faster than me. But I use that knowledge to this day, every day, and often I don’t have a calculator (my phone) handy. It’s what I tell my kids.
JSR_FDED 2y ago
Let your children watch the movie Idiocracy - it’s more eloquent than you’ll ever be in answering that question.
milesrout 2y ago
>When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Au contraire! It is quite wrong and was wrong then too. "Rote memorisation" is a slur for knowledge. Knowledge is still important. Knowledge is the basis for skill. You can't have skill or understanding without knowledge because knowledge is illustrative (it gives examples) and provides context. You can know abstract facts like "addition is abelian" but that is meaningless if you can't add. You can't actually program if you don't know the building blocks of code. You can't write a C program if you have to look up the function signature of read(2) and write(3) every time you need to use them. You don't always have access to Google, and its results have declined procipitously in quality in recent years. Someone relying on Google as their knowledge base will be kicking themselves today, I would claim. It is a bit like saying you don't need to learn how to do arithmetic because of calculators. It misses that learning how to do arithmetic isn't just important for the sake of being able to do it, but for the sake of building a comfort with numbers, building numerical intuition, building a feeling for maths. And it will always be faster to simply know that 6x7 is 42 than to have to look it up. You use those basic arithmetical tasks 100 times every time you rearrange an equation. You have to be able to do them immediately. It is analogous. Note that I have used illustrative examples. These are useful. Knowledge is more than knowing abstract facts like "knowledge is more than knowing abstract facts". It is about knowing concrete things too, which highlight the boundaries of those abstract facts and illustrate their cores. There is a reason law students learn specific cases and their facts and not just collections of contextless abstract principles of law. >For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), Writing legibly is important for many reasons. Note taking is important and often isn't and can't be done with a computer. It is also part of developing fine motor skills generally. >spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), Spell checking can't help with confusables like to/two/too, affect/effect, etc. and getting those wrong is much more embarrassing than writing "embarasing" or "parralel". Learning spelling is also crucial because spelling is an insight into etymology which is the basis of language. >reading a map to get around (GPS), etc Reliance on GPS means never building a proper spatial understanding. Many people that rely on GPS (or being driven around by others) never actually learn where anything is. They get lost as soon as they don't have a phone. >but I think my children will have a different perspective (similar to how I feel about memorizing poetry and languages without garbage collection). Memorising poetry is a different sort of thing--it is a value judgment not a matter of practicality--but it is valuable in itself. We have robbed generations of children of their heritage by not requiring them to learn their culture.
wrp 2y ago
"Technology can do X more conveniently than people, so why should children practice X?" has been a point of controversy in education at least since pocket calculators became available. I try to explain by shifting the focus from neurological to musculoskeletal development. It's easy to see that physical activity promotes development of children's bodies. So although machines can aid in many physical tasks, nobody is suggesting we introduce robots to augment PE classes. People need to recognize that complex tasks also induce brain development. This is hard to demonstrate but has been measured in extensive tasks like learning languages and music performance. Of course, this argument is about child development, and much of the discussion here is around adult education, which has some different considerations.
- boredhedgehog 2y ago
  I would add that we don't pretend PE or gyms serve any higher purpose besides individual health and well-being, which is why they are much more game-ified than formal education. If we acknowledge that it doesn't particularly matter how a mind is being used, the structure of school would change fundamentally.
- Footprint0521 2y ago
  This is the motivation I needed right now
- nicbou 2y ago
  My last calculator had a "solve" button and we could bring it in an exam. You still needed to know what to ask it, and how to interpret the output. This is hard to do without an understanding of how the underlying math works. The same is true with LLMs. Without the fundamentals, you are outsourcing work that you can't understand and getting an output that you can't verify.
ViscountPenguin 2y ago
I think the biggest issue with LLMs is basically just the fact that we're finally coming to the end of the long tail of human intellectual capability. With previous technological advancements, humans had places to intellectually "flee", and in fact, previous advancements were often made for the express purpose of freeing up time for higher level pursuits. The invention of computers, for example, let mathematicians focus on much higher level skills (although even there an argument can be made that something has been lost with the general decrease in arithmetic abilities amoung modern mathematicians). Large language models don't move humans further up the value chain, though. They kick us off of it. I hear lots of people prosletizing wonderful futures where humans get to focus on "the problems that really matters", like social structures, or business objectives; but there's no fundamental reason that large language models can't replace those functionalities aswell. Unlike, say, a Casio, which would never be able to replace a social worker no matter how hard you tried.
- j_w 2y ago
  > coming to the end of the long tail of human intellectual capability Really? We invent LLMs, continue to improve them, and that's the end of our intellectual capability? > a Casio, which would never be able to replace a social worker no matter how hard you tried And LLMs can't replace a social worker no matter how hard you try today.
II2II 2y ago
Perhaps that mode of thinking is wrong, even if it is accepted. Take rote memorization. It is hard. It sucks in so many ways (just because you memorized something doesn't mean you can reason using that information). Yet memorization also provides the foundations for growth. At a basic level, how can you perform anything besides trivial queries if you don't know what you are searching for? How can you assess the validity of a source if you don't know the fundamentals? How can you avoid falling prey to propaganda if your only knowledge of a subject is what is in front of your face? None of that is to say that we should dismiss search and depend upon memorization. We need both. I can't tell you what to say to your children about LLMs. For one thing, I don't know what is important to them. Yet it is important to remember that it isn't an either-or thing. LLMs are probably going to be essential to manage the profoundly unmanagable amount of information our world creates. Yet it is also important to remember that they are like the person who memorizes but lacks the ability to reason. They may be able to impress people with their fountain of facts, yet they will be unable to create a mark on the world since they will lack the ability to create anything unique.
- viraptor 2y ago
  > At a basic level, how can you perform anything besides trivial queries if you don't know what you are searching for? That's actually pretty doable. Almost every resource provides more context than just the exact thing you're asking. You build on that knowledge and continue asking. Nobody knows everything - we've been doing the equivalent of this kind of research forever. > How can you assess the validity of a source if you don't know the fundamentals? Learn about the fundamentals until you get to the level you're already familiar with. You're describing an adult outside of school environment learning basically anything.
_carbyau_ 2y ago
>>>For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc Not that these aren't noble things or worth doing, but they won't impact your life too much if you're not interest in penmanship, spelling, or cartography. <<< For me it is the second order benefits, notably the idea of "attention to detail" and "a feel for the principles". The principles of each activity being different: writing -> fine motor control, spelling -> word choice/connotation, map -> sense of direction, (my own insert here) money handling -> cost of things All of them involve "attention to detail" because that's what any activity is - paying attention to it. But having built up the experience in paying attention to [xyz], you can now be capable when things go wrong. IE catch disputable transaction on the credit card, or note being told by the shop clerk "No Returns" when their policy says otherwise, un-losting yourself when the phone runs out of battery in the city. Notably, you don't have to be trained for the details in traditional ways like writing the same sentence 100 times on a piece of paper. Learning can be fun and interesting. Children can write letters to their friends well before they get their own phone. Geocaching/treasure hunts(hand drawn mud maps!)/orienteering for map use. As for LLM ... well currently "attention to detail" is vital to spot the (handwave number) 10% of when it goes wrong. In the future LLMs may be better. But if you want to be better than your peers at any given thing - you will need an edge somewhere outside of using an LLM. Yet still, spelling/word choice/connotations are especially linked to using an LLM currently. Knowing how to "pay attention to detail" when it counts - counts.
Wowfunhappy 2y ago
> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc However, I am going to hazard a guess that you still care about your child's ability to do arithmetic, even though calculators make that trivial. And if I'm right, I think it's for a good reason—learning to perform more basic math operations helps build the foundation for more advanced math, the type which computers can't do trivially. I think this applies to AI. The AI can do the basic writing for you, but you will eventually hit a wall, and if all you've ever learned is how to type a prompt into ChatGPT, you won't ever get past that wall. ---- Put another way: > So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me" "Because eventually, you will be able to do X better than any LLM, but it will take practice, and you have to practice now."
malux85 2y ago
> Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me The same way you answer - "Why should I memorise this if I can always just look it up" Because your perceptual experience is built upon your knowledge and experiences. The entire way you see the universe is altered based on these things, including what you see through your eyes, what you decide is important and what you decide to do. The goal of life is not always "simply to do as little as possible", or "offload as much work as possible" but lots of the time includes struggling through the fundimentals so that you become a greater version of yourself, it is not the complete task that we desire, it is who you became while you did the work that we desire.
BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2y ago
you will benefit from the beauty of appreciation, lad, just hang on a little bit longer. It is beautifully explained in this essay https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat
victor106 2y ago
I thought the same as you. But I think not developing those skills will come back and bite you at some point. For instance your point about: > reading a map to get around (GPS) https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-research-taxi-drivers-hippocampus-dementia-link/ https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-resea... After reading the above it dawned on me that the human brain needs to develop spatial awareness and not using that capability of the brain very slowly shuts it off. So I purposefully turn off the gps when I can. I think not fully developing each of those abilities might have some negative effects that will be hard to diagnose.
sorokod 2y ago
For the same reason you should learn how to walk in a world that has utility scooters.
foxglacier 2y ago
Your child perhaps shouldn't learn things that computers can do. But they should learn something to make themselves more useful than every uneducated person. I'm not sure schools are doing much good anymore teaching redundant skills. Without any abilities beyond the default, they'll grow up to be poor. I don't know what that useful education is but I expect something sort of thinking skills, and perhaps even giant piles of knowledge to apply that thinking to.
mock-possum 2y ago
Even if you use a tool to do work, you still have to understand how your work will be checked to see whether it meets expectations. If the expectation is X, and your tool gives you Y, then you’ve failed - no matter if you could have done X by hand from scratch or not, it doesn’t really matter, because what counts is whether the person checking your work can verify that you’ve produced X. You agreed to deliver X, and you gave them Y instead. So why should you learn to do X when the LLM can do it for you? Because unless you know how to do X yourself, how will you be able to verify whether the LLM has truly done X? Your kid needs to learn to understand what the person grading them is expecting, and deliver something that meets those expectations. That sounds like so much bullshit when you’re a kid, but I wish I had understood it when I was younger.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
> there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. It's not true even though it's accepted. Rote memorization has a place in an education. It does strengthen learning and allow one to make connections between the things seen presently and things remembered, among other things.
globnomulous 2y ago
> When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. It absolutely isn't.
- chrz 2y ago
  My memory got worse, and google search got bad and now I cant find anything
fransje26 2y ago
> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc That sounds like setting-up your child for failure, to put it bluntly. How do you want to express a thought clearly if you already fail at the stage of thinking about words clearly? You start with a fuzzy understanding of words, which you delegated to a spellchecker, added to a fuzzy understanding of writing, which you've delegated to a computer, combined with a fuzzy memory, which you've delegated to a search engine, and you expect that not to impact your child's ability to create articulate thoughts and navigate them clearly? To add irony to the situation, the physical navigation skills have, themselves, been delegated to a GPS.. Brains are like muscles, they atrophy when not used. Reverse that course before it's too late, or suffer (and have someone else suffer) the consequences.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  I agree with your point, but I just want to say that understanding a word and knowing how to spell it are orthogonal.
  - fransje26 2y ago
    This is a good point, and part of the unwritten rationale of the argument I was trying to make. At first glance, knowing how to spell a word and understanding a word should be perfectly orthogonal. How could it not be? Saying that it is not so would imply that civilizations without writing would have no thought or could not communicate through words, which is preposterous. And yet, once we start delegating our thinking, our spelling and our writing to external black boxes, our grasp on those words and our grasp of those words becomes weaker. To the point that knowing how to spell a word might become a much bigger part, relatively, of our encounter with those words, as we are doing less conceptual thinking about those words and their meaning. And therefore, I argue that, in a not too far-fetched extremum, understanding a word and knowing how to spell a word might not be fully orthogonal.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
Suppafly 2y ago
>So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me" Realistically it comes down to the idea that being an educated individual that knows how to think is important for being successful, and learning in school is the only way we know to optimize for that, even if it's likely not the most efficient way to do so.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by bko 2y ago

nyeah 2y ago

Spell check isn't really adequate. You get a page full of correctly spelled words, but they're the wrong words.

walthamstow 2y ago
Try being British, often they're not correctly spelt words at all.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

delusional 2y ago

"More or less" is doing a lot of work there. School, at least where I am, still spends the first year getting children to memorize the order of the numbers from 1-20 and if there's an even or odd number of a thing on a picture. Do you google if 5 is less than 6 or do you just memorize that? If you believe that creativity is not based on a foundation of memorization and experience (which is just memorization) you need to reflect on the connection between those.

noitpmeder 2y ago

This is an insane take. The issue is that, when presented with a situation that requires writing legibly, spelling well, or reading a map, WITHOUT their AI assistants, they will fall apart. The AI becomes their brain, such that they cannot function without it. I'd never want to work with someone who is this reliant on technology.

Vvector 2y ago
Do you have the skills and knowledge to survive like a pioneer from 200 years ago? Technology is rapidly changing humanity. Maybe for the worse.
- tux1968 2y ago
  Indeed. More people need to grow their own vegetables. AI may undermine our ability for high level abstract thought, but industrial agriculture already represents an existential threat, should it be interrupted for any reason.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Knowledge itself is the least concern here. Human society is extremely good at transmitting information. More difficult to transmit are things like critical thinking and problem-solving ability. Developing meta-cognitive processes like the latter are the real utility of education.
- dullcrisp 2y ago
  Did the pioneers 200 years ago have the skills and knowledge to survive as a serf 400 years ago? Or as a mid-level financial analyst today? Or is pioneering 200 years ago an in-demand skillset that we should be picking up?
  - Vvector 2y ago
    My point is that the necessary skill set required by society is ever-changing. Skills like handwriting, spelling, and reading a map are fading from importance. I could see a future where pioneering might be useful again.

HDThoreaun 2y ago

It’s all about critical thinking. The answer to your kid is that LLMs are a tool and until they run the entire economy there will still need to be people with critical thinking skills making decisions. Not every task at school helps hone critical thinking but many of them do.

dingnuts 2y ago

> That's more or less accepted today. Bullshit! You cannot do second order reasoning with a set of facts or concepts that you have to look up first. Google Search made intuition and deep understanding and encyclopedic knowledge MORE important, not less. People will think you are a wizard if you read documentation and bother to remember it, because they're still busy asking Google or ChatGPT while you're happily coding without pausing

vonneumannstan 2y ago
I am 100% certain people said the same thing about arithmetic and calculators and now mental arithmetic skill is nothing more than a curiosity.
- dwaltrip 2y ago
  I encourage you to reconsider. Mental math is essential for having strong numerical fluency, for estimation, and for reasoning about many systems. Those skills are incredibly useful for thinking critically about the world.
  - vonneumannstan 2y ago
    To a certain point. Basic arithmetic is important but the ability to calculate large square roots or multiply multi-digit numbers is not very relevant when you can trivially calculate them on your phone in seconds.
- joe5150 2y ago
  Being able to do basic math in your head is valuable just in terms of basic practicality (quickly calculating a tip or splitting a bill, doubling a recipe, reasoning about a budget...), but this is a poor analogy anyway because 3x2 is still 3x2 regardless of how you get there whereas creative work produced by software is worthless.
- goatlover 2y ago
  That's simply not true. I use mental arithmetic skill every day. It's irritating or funny when you come across someone who struggles with it, depending on the situation.

kibwen 2y ago

The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions. Like, Socrates may have been against writing because he thought it made your memory weak, but at least I, an individual, am perfectly capable of manufacturing my own writing implements with a modest amount of manual labor and abundantly-available resources (carving into wood, burning wood into charcoal to write on stone, etc.). But I ain't perfectly capable of doing the same to manufacture an integrated circuit, let alone a digital calculator, let alone a GPU, let alone an LLM. Anyone who delegates their thought to a corporation is permanently hitching their fundamental ability to think to this wagon.

notyourwork 2y ago
Although I agree, convincing children to learn using that rationalization won’t work.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Yes it does. Plenty of children accept "you won't always have (tool)" as a reason for learning.
  - jplusequalt 2y ago
    All adults were once children and there are plenty of adults who cannot read beyond a middle school reading level or balance a simple equation. This has been a problem before we ever gave them GPTs. It stands to reason it will only worsen in a future dominated by them.
  - freeone3000 2y ago
    “You won’t always have a calculator” became moderately false to laughably false as I went from middle to high school. Every task I will ever do for money will be done on a computer. I’m still garbage at arithmetic, especially mental math, and it really hasn’t inhibited my career in any way.

whatshisface 2y ago

I don't think memorizing poetry fits your picture. Nobody ever memorized poetry so that they could answer questions about it.

bko 2y ago
A large part was to preserve cultural knowledge, which is kind of like answering questions about it. What wisdom or knowledge does this entail. People do the same with religious texts today The other part I imagine was largely entertainment, social and memory is a good skill to build.
KronisLV 2y ago
It doesn’t seem that different from having to write a book report or something like that. Back in school, we also needed to memorize poems and songs to recite them - I quite hated it because my memory was never exactly great. Same as having to remember the vocabulary in a foreign language when learning it, though that might arguably be a bit more directly useful.

AlexandrB 2y ago

> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc What I don't like are all the hidden variables in these systems. Even GPS, for example, is making some assumptions about what kind of roads you want to take and how to weigh different paths. LLMs are worse in this regard because the creators encode a set of moral and stylistic assumptions/dictates into the model and everybody who uses it is nudged into that paradigm. This is destructive to any kind of original thought, especially in an environment where there are only a handful of large companies providing the models everyone uses.

Retric 2y ago

The scope of what’s useful to know changes with tools, but having a bullshit detector requires actually knowing some things and being able to reason about the basics. It’s not that LLM’s are particularly different it’s that people are less able to determine when they are messing up. A search engine fails and you notice, an LLM fails and your boss, customer, ect notices.

andai 2y ago

>Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me This may eventually apply to all human labor. I was thinking, even if they pass laws to mandate companies employ a certain fraction of human workers... it'll be like it already is now: they just let AI do most of the work anyway!

riohumanbean 2y ago

Why have children learn to walk? They're better off learning the newest technology of hoverboards and not getting left behind!

CivBase 2y ago

Why should you learn how to add when you can just use a calculator? We've had calculators for decades! Because understanding how addition works is instrumental to understanding more advanced math concepts. And being able to perform simple addition quickly, without a calculator is a huge productivity boost for many tasks. In the world of education and intellectual development it's not about getting the right answer as quickly as possible. It's about mastering simple things so that you can understand complicated things. And often times mastering a simple thing requires you to manually do things which technology could automate.

light_hue_1 2y ago

> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc. I'm the polar opposite. And I'm AI researcher. The reason you can't answer your kid when he asks about LLMs is because the original position was wrong. Being able to write isn't optional. It's a critical tool for thought. Spelling is very important because you need to avoid confusion. If you can't spell no spell checker can save you when it inserts the wrong word. And this only gets far worse the more technical the language is. And maps are crucial too. Sometimes, the best way to communicate is to draw a map. In many domains like aviation maps are everything, you literally cannot progress without them. LLMs are no different. They can do a little bit of thinking for us and help us along the way. But we need to understand what's going on to ask the right questions and to understand their answers.

jplusequalt 2y ago

>children will have a different perspective Children will lack the critical thinking for solving complex problems, and even worse, won't have the work ethic for dealing with the kinds of protracted problems that occur in the real world. But maybe that's by design. I think the ownership class has decided productivity is more important than societal malaise.

bcrosby95 2y ago

> So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me" It's been my experience that LLMs are only better than me at stuff I'm bad at. It's noticeably worse than me at things I'm good at. So the answer to your question depends: can your child get good at things while leaning on an LLM? I don't know the answer to this. Maybe schools need to expect more from their students with LLMs in the picture.

gnatolf 2y ago
Given the rate of improvement wrt to llms, this may not hold true for long
- yunwal 2y ago
  The rate of improvement with LLMs seems to have halted since Claude3.5, which was about a year ago. I think we’ve probably gone as far as we can go with tweaks to transformer architectures, and we’ll need a new academic discovery which could take years to do better

johndough 2y ago

Use it or lose it. With the invention of the calculator, students lost the ability to do arithmetic. Now, with LLMs, they lose the ability to think. This is not conjecture by the way. As a TA, I have observed that half of the undergraduate students lost the ability to write any code at all without the assistance of LLMs. Almost all use ChatGPT for most exercises. Thankfully, cheating technology is advancing at a similarly rapid pace. Glasses with integrated cameras, WiFi and heads-up display, smartwatches with polarized displays that are only readable with corresponding glasses, and invisibly small wireless ear-canal earpieces to name just a few pieces of tech that we could have only dreamed about back then. In the end, the students stay dumb, but the graduation rate barely suffers. I wonder whether pre-2022 degrees will become the academic equivalent to low-background radiation steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

quantumHazer 2y ago

Universities still teach you calculus and real analysis even though Wolfram Alpha exists. It boils down to your willing to learn something. An LLM can't understand things for you. I'm "early genz" and I write code without llm because I find data structure and algorithm very interesting and I want to learn the concepts not because I'm in love with the syntax of C or Rust (I love the syntax of C btw).

an_aparallel 2y ago

This is how we end up with people who cant write legibly, cant smell bad maths (on the news/articles/ads), cant change tires, have no orienteering or sense of direction and memories like swiss cheese. Trust the oracle son. /s I think all of the above do one thing brilliantly, built self confidence. Its easy to get bullshitted if what youre able to hold in your head is effectively nothing.

palmotea 2y ago

> When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. And those people are wrong, in a similar way to how it's wrong to say: "There's no point in having very much RAM, as you can just page to disk." It's the cognitive equivalent of becoming morbidly obese (another popular decision in today's world).

OptionOfT 2y ago

The problem with GPS is that you never learn to orient yourself. You don't learn to have a sense of place, direction or elapsed distance. [0] As to writing, just the action of writing something down with a pen, on paper, has been proven to be better for memorization than recording it on a computer [1]. If we're not teaching these basic skills because an LLM does it better, how do learn to be skeptical of the output of the LLM. How do we validate it? How do we bolster ourselves against corporate influences when asking which of 2 products is healthier? How do we spot native advertising? [2] [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/531573a https://www.nature.com/articles/531573a [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001691804001167 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00016... [2]: Example: https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/netflix/women-inmates-separate-but-not-equal.html https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/netflix/women-inmates-separ...

dylan604 2y ago

> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc I don't know. I really feel like the auto-correct features are out to get me. So many times I want to say "in" yet it gets corrected to "on", or vice-versa. I also feel like it does the same to me with they're/their/there. Over the past several iOS/macOS updates, I feel like I've either gotten dumber and no longer do english gooder, or I'm getting tagged by predictive text nonsense.

aprilthird2021 2y ago
It will also open you up to getting advertisements shoved up your intestines if you can't spell, or form basic sentences without machine assistance. Imagine always having Tex autocorrect to Texaco

nkrisc 2y ago

> So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me" 1. You won’t always have an LLM. It’s the same reason I still have at least my wife’s phone number memorized. 2. So you can learn to do it better. See point 1. I wasn’t allowed to use calculators in first and second grade when memorizing multiplication tables, even though a calculator could have finished the exercise faster than me. But I use that knowledge to this day, every day, and often I don’t have a calculator (my phone) handy. It’s what I tell my kids.

JSR_FDED 2y ago

Let your children watch the movie Idiocracy - it’s more eloquent than you’ll ever be in answering that question.

milesrout 2y ago

>When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. Au contraire! It is quite wrong and was wrong then too. "Rote memorisation" is a slur for knowledge. Knowledge is still important. Knowledge is the basis for skill. You can't have skill or understanding without knowledge because knowledge is illustrative (it gives examples) and provides context. You can know abstract facts like "addition is abelian" but that is meaningless if you can't add. You can't actually program if you don't know the building blocks of code. You can't write a C program if you have to look up the function signature of read(2) and write(3) every time you need to use them. You don't always have access to Google, and its results have declined procipitously in quality in recent years. Someone relying on Google as their knowledge base will be kicking themselves today, I would claim. It is a bit like saying you don't need to learn how to do arithmetic because of calculators. It misses that learning how to do arithmetic isn't just important for the sake of being able to do it, but for the sake of building a comfort with numbers, building numerical intuition, building a feeling for maths. And it will always be faster to simply know that 6x7 is 42 than to have to look it up. You use those basic arithmetical tasks 100 times every time you rearrange an equation. You have to be able to do them immediately. It is analogous. Note that I have used illustrative examples. These are useful. Knowledge is more than knowing abstract facts like "knowledge is more than knowing abstract facts". It is about knowing concrete things too, which highlight the boundaries of those abstract facts and illustrate their cores. There is a reason law students learn specific cases and their facts and not just collections of contextless abstract principles of law. >For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), Writing legibly is important for many reasons. Note taking is important and often isn't and can't be done with a computer. It is also part of developing fine motor skills generally. >spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), Spell checking can't help with confusables like to/two/too, affect/effect, etc. and getting those wrong is much more embarrassing than writing "embarasing" or "parralel". Learning spelling is also crucial because spelling is an insight into etymology which is the basis of language. >reading a map to get around (GPS), etc Reliance on GPS means never building a proper spatial understanding. Many people that rely on GPS (or being driven around by others) never actually learn where anything is. They get lost as soon as they don't have a phone. >but I think my children will have a different perspective (similar to how I feel about memorizing poetry and languages without garbage collection). Memorising poetry is a different sort of thing--it is a value judgment not a matter of practicality--but it is valuable in itself. We have robbed generations of children of their heritage by not requiring them to learn their culture.

wrp 2y ago

"Technology can do X more conveniently than people, so why should children practice X?" has been a point of controversy in education at least since pocket calculators became available. I try to explain by shifting the focus from neurological to musculoskeletal development. It's easy to see that physical activity promotes development of children's bodies. So although machines can aid in many physical tasks, nobody is suggesting we introduce robots to augment PE classes. People need to recognize that complex tasks also induce brain development. This is hard to demonstrate but has been measured in extensive tasks like learning languages and music performance. Of course, this argument is about child development, and much of the discussion here is around adult education, which has some different considerations.

boredhedgehog 2y ago
I would add that we don't pretend PE or gyms serve any higher purpose besides individual health and well-being, which is why they are much more game-ified than formal education. If we acknowledge that it doesn't particularly matter how a mind is being used, the structure of school would change fundamentally.
Footprint0521 2y ago
This is the motivation I needed right now
nicbou 2y ago
My last calculator had a "solve" button and we could bring it in an exam. You still needed to know what to ask it, and how to interpret the output. This is hard to do without an understanding of how the underlying math works. The same is true with LLMs. Without the fundamentals, you are outsourcing work that you can't understand and getting an output that you can't verify.

ViscountPenguin 2y ago

I think the biggest issue with LLMs is basically just the fact that we're finally coming to the end of the long tail of human intellectual capability. With previous technological advancements, humans had places to intellectually "flee", and in fact, previous advancements were often made for the express purpose of freeing up time for higher level pursuits. The invention of computers, for example, let mathematicians focus on much higher level skills (although even there an argument can be made that something has been lost with the general decrease in arithmetic abilities amoung modern mathematicians). Large language models don't move humans further up the value chain, though. They kick us off of it. I hear lots of people prosletizing wonderful futures where humans get to focus on "the problems that really matters", like social structures, or business objectives; but there's no fundamental reason that large language models can't replace those functionalities aswell. Unlike, say, a Casio, which would never be able to replace a social worker no matter how hard you tried.

j_w 2y ago
> coming to the end of the long tail of human intellectual capability Really? We invent LLMs, continue to improve them, and that's the end of our intellectual capability? > a Casio, which would never be able to replace a social worker no matter how hard you tried And LLMs can't replace a social worker no matter how hard you try today.

II2II 2y ago

Perhaps that mode of thinking is wrong, even if it is accepted. Take rote memorization. It is hard. It sucks in so many ways (just because you memorized something doesn't mean you can reason using that information). Yet memorization also provides the foundations for growth. At a basic level, how can you perform anything besides trivial queries if you don't know what you are searching for? How can you assess the validity of a source if you don't know the fundamentals? How can you avoid falling prey to propaganda if your only knowledge of a subject is what is in front of your face? None of that is to say that we should dismiss search and depend upon memorization. We need both. I can't tell you what to say to your children about LLMs. For one thing, I don't know what is important to them. Yet it is important to remember that it isn't an either-or thing. LLMs are probably going to be essential to manage the profoundly unmanagable amount of information our world creates. Yet it is also important to remember that they are like the person who memorizes but lacks the ability to reason. They may be able to impress people with their fountain of facts, yet they will be unable to create a mark on the world since they will lack the ability to create anything unique.

viraptor 2y ago
> At a basic level, how can you perform anything besides trivial queries if you don't know what you are searching for? That's actually pretty doable. Almost every resource provides more context than just the exact thing you're asking. You build on that knowledge and continue asking. Nobody knows everything - we've been doing the equivalent of this kind of research forever. > How can you assess the validity of a source if you don't know the fundamentals? Learn about the fundamentals until you get to the level you're already familiar with. You're describing an adult outside of school environment learning basically anything.

_carbyau_ 2y ago

>>>For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc Not that these aren't noble things or worth doing, but they won't impact your life too much if you're not interest in penmanship, spelling, or cartography. <<< For me it is the second order benefits, notably the idea of "attention to detail" and "a feel for the principles". The principles of each activity being different: writing -> fine motor control, spelling -> word choice/connotation, map -> sense of direction, (my own insert here) money handling -> cost of things All of them involve "attention to detail" because that's what any activity is - paying attention to it. But having built up the experience in paying attention to [xyz], you can now be capable when things go wrong. IE catch disputable transaction on the credit card, or note being told by the shop clerk "No Returns" when their policy says otherwise, un-losting yourself when the phone runs out of battery in the city. Notably, you don't have to be trained for the details in traditional ways like writing the same sentence 100 times on a piece of paper. Learning can be fun and interesting. Children can write letters to their friends well before they get their own phone. Geocaching/treasure hunts(hand drawn mud maps!)/orienteering for map use. As for LLM ... well currently "attention to detail" is vital to spot the (handwave number) 10% of when it goes wrong. In the future LLMs may be better. But if you want to be better than your peers at any given thing - you will need an edge somewhere outside of using an LLM. Yet still, spelling/word choice/connotations are especially linked to using an LLM currently. Knowing how to "pay attention to detail" when it counts - counts.

Wowfunhappy 2y ago

> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc However, I am going to hazard a guess that you still care about your child's ability to do arithmetic, even though calculators make that trivial. And if I'm right, I think it's for a good reason—learning to perform more basic math operations helps build the foundation for more advanced math, the type which computers can't do trivially. I think this applies to AI. The AI can do the basic writing for you, but you will eventually hit a wall, and if all you've ever learned is how to type a prompt into ChatGPT, you won't ever get past that wall. ---- Put another way: > So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me" "Because eventually, you will be able to do X better than any LLM, but it will take practice, and you have to practice now."

malux85 2y ago

> Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me The same way you answer - "Why should I memorise this if I can always just look it up" Because your perceptual experience is built upon your knowledge and experiences. The entire way you see the universe is altered based on these things, including what you see through your eyes, what you decide is important and what you decide to do. The goal of life is not always "simply to do as little as possible", or "offload as much work as possible" but lots of the time includes struggling through the fundimentals so that you become a greater version of yourself, it is not the complete task that we desire, it is who you became while you did the work that we desire.

BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2y ago

you will benefit from the beauty of appreciation, lad, just hang on a little bit longer. It is beautifully explained in this essay https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat

victor106 2y ago

I thought the same as you. But I think not developing those skills will come back and bite you at some point. For instance your point about: > reading a map to get around (GPS) https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-research-taxi-drivers-hippocampus-dementia-link/ https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-resea... After reading the above it dawned on me that the human brain needs to develop spatial awareness and not using that capability of the brain very slowly shuts it off. So I purposefully turn off the gps when I can. I think not fully developing each of those abilities might have some negative effects that will be hard to diagnose.

sorokod 2y ago

For the same reason you should learn how to walk in a world that has utility scooters.

foxglacier 2y ago

Your child perhaps shouldn't learn things that computers can do. But they should learn something to make themselves more useful than every uneducated person. I'm not sure schools are doing much good anymore teaching redundant skills. Without any abilities beyond the default, they'll grow up to be poor. I don't know what that useful education is but I expect something sort of thinking skills, and perhaps even giant piles of knowledge to apply that thinking to.

mock-possum 2y ago

Even if you use a tool to do work, you still have to understand how your work will be checked to see whether it meets expectations. If the expectation is X, and your tool gives you Y, then you’ve failed - no matter if you could have done X by hand from scratch or not, it doesn’t really matter, because what counts is whether the person checking your work can verify that you’ve produced X. You agreed to deliver X, and you gave them Y instead. So why should you learn to do X when the LLM can do it for you? Because unless you know how to do X yourself, how will you be able to verify whether the LLM has truly done X? Your kid needs to learn to understand what the person grading them is expecting, and deliver something that meets those expectations. That sounds like so much bullshit when you’re a kid, but I wish I had understood it when I was younger.

aprilthird2021 2y ago

> there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. It's not true even though it's accepted. Rote memorization has a place in an education. It does strengthen learning and allow one to make connections between the things seen presently and things remembered, among other things.

globnomulous 2y ago

> When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today. It absolutely isn't.

chrz 2y ago
My memory got worse, and google search got bad and now I cant find anything

fransje26 2y ago

> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc That sounds like setting-up your child for failure, to put it bluntly. How do you want to express a thought clearly if you already fail at the stage of thinking about words clearly? You start with a fuzzy understanding of words, which you delegated to a spellchecker, added to a fuzzy understanding of writing, which you've delegated to a computer, combined with a fuzzy memory, which you've delegated to a search engine, and you expect that not to impact your child's ability to create articulate thoughts and navigate them clearly? To add irony to the situation, the physical navigation skills have, themselves, been delegated to a GPS.. Brains are like muscles, they atrophy when not used. Reverse that course before it's too late, or suffer (and have someone else suffer) the consequences.

lupusreal 2y ago
I agree with your point, but I just want to say that understanding a word and knowing how to spell it are orthogonal.
- fransje26 2y ago
  This is a good point, and part of the unwritten rationale of the argument I was trying to make. At first glance, knowing how to spell a word and understanding a word should be perfectly orthogonal. How could it not be? Saying that it is not so would imply that civilizations without writing would have no thought or could not communicate through words, which is preposterous. And yet, once we start delegating our thinking, our spelling and our writing to external black boxes, our grasp on those words and our grasp of those words becomes weaker. To the point that knowing how to spell a word might become a much bigger part, relatively, of our encounter with those words, as we are doing less conceptual thinking about those words and their meaning. And therefore, I argue that, in a not too far-fetched extremum, understanding a word and knowing how to spell a word might not be fully orthogonal.
  - lupusreal 2y ago

Suppafly 2y ago

>So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me" Realistically it comes down to the idea that being an educated individual that knows how to think is important for being successful, and learning in school is the only way we know to optimize for that, even if it's likely not the most efficient way to do so.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]