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I’ve come across this analogy that I think works well: Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym. If all we were interested in was mo

I’ve come across this analogy that I think works well: Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym. If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. But we’re doing this work for the effect it will have on you. The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.

mlsu 1y ago
The point of education isn't to actually learn though. It's to receive the credential. This is much larger than a cultural problem with the students of today. They believe, rightfully and accurately, that the university degree is yet another part of the machine that they will become a cog in. What should be alarming to everyone is that these students will graduate without having learned anything and then go into the workplace where they will continue to not use their atrophied critical thinking skills, to simply do yet more, as a cog in the machine.
- bumby 1y ago
  This attitude is part of a more general cultural shift. Back in the 1960s, the majority of students said the primary motivation for going to college was to develop a philosophy of life, and a minority said the main goal was to be very financially successful. Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted. * according to the UCLA CIRP freshman survey
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted. Yeah, that's when the great "push for education" came, as well as neoliberalism which preached continuous hustling and individuality. And in the 90s, the ADA and other anti discrimination laws hit, and requiring a college degree was and still is a very useful pre-screening filter for HR to continue discrimination.
    - shawn-butler 1y ago
      It's also as I recall when tuition and student costs started to spike in the US which is probably more directly related than some "philosophical" change in the zeitgeist[0]. When students and parents start racking up debt like this, you become very interested in the fastest way to pay it back. For me the impact of the university administrators as they chased higher endowments for more buildings with naming rights and expanded their own bureaucracies with direct hires that did not directly contribute to the faculty mission did more to alter the university experience than anything else. [0]: https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year
  - MengerSponge 1y ago
    We (America) made university educations super expensive. Causality is complicated, but it probably started as an effort to destroy the anti-war movement in the 70's.
    - sgustard 1y ago
      "Most financial experts attribute he sudden increases that started in the 1970s with an influx of federal funding designed to make college more affordable." https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - MengerSponge 1y ago
        Expensive things can be affordable. A house is expensive, but with stable employment and a bank loan you can afford it. When we're talking about college costs, public schools are really the only institutions that matter. The Ivies (or even Ivy+) are a rounding error compared to the big midwestern land-grant universities and the UC and Cal State systems. States have substantially reduced their per-student support for universities: https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in... This coincides with federal funding programs, but student loans are famously not dischargeable, which makes them more instruments of social control than conventional financial vehicles.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - tcmart14 1y ago
    I would also say some of the attitude shift is also contradictory. The amount of people I interact with who have a lot of bad things to say about the education who tell me universities should focus on education in a general meanwhile also say that schools to should focus on student getting jobs. Probably one that has been heard before, something along the lines of, "why don't high schools teach plumbers courses." I mean they can. While also, "colleges are too focused on checking the boxes so students can get jobs."
    - hnfong 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - andai 1y ago
        Our CS department head was overheard saying, "Our job is to create researchers." I found this quite striking, since something like 10% of undergrads go into research. Most people really are there to help them get a job. So the program is designed not to meet the needs of 90% of its "customers".
        bumby 1y ago
        There’s an argument that treating students as “customers” has led to all kinds of bad outcomes. One example is it creates an incentive to invest in all kinds of fancy infrastructure (fancy halls/dorms and even lazy rivers) because that is how they attract more “customers” but this ultimately becomes a huge driver of educational costs. The same can be said for watered down courses etc.
        tcmart14 1y ago
        I would also add, look at the astonishing success (sarcasm), of for-profit colleges. They would have to be considered the extreme of treating students as customers and I don't really know any serious employer who accepts a degree from for-profit colleges. Unless the college is so new the employees hadn't heard of it before and don't know much about it.
  - PKop 1y ago
    And there were fewer students going to university and so you had a higher proportion of people doing it for the love of learning. It was easier to get a job without a degree. It's not just a cultural shift, it's a change of supply and demand.
  - lazide 1y ago
    Notably, the late 70’s and early 80’s is when large scale social changes started to happen due to high inflation and major problems in the US economy. Also a lot of social unrest, and a pretty unhinged president (Tricky Dick).
    - mike_hearn 1y ago
      The same issues are seen in other countries. It's not specific to US presidents or policy. The insistence on maximizing university attendance was a widespread idea coming out of the left, e.g. in Britain it was heavily pushed by Tony Blair. The Blair government also raised tuition fees considerably. The stated rationale at the time was that degree holders earn more, so if everyone gets a degree, everyone will earn more. I am doubtful that was the true rationale but it's how the policy was sold to people.
      - Ekaros 1y ago
        Also I think massaging unemployment numbers for a while is reasonable goal. After all those in education are not counted as unemployed.
      - johnnyanmac 1y ago
        The mentality isn't, but the costs are US unique. You can afford to "explore" a bit of your youth if you're not going into 6 figures of debt.
  - kipchak 1y ago
    Arguably the cause of the cultural shift is economic. Wages began stagnating in the early 1970s, which caused increased demand for diplomas as a way to increase wages. This is most striking in the number of students seeking law degrees, which shoots off at around the same time.
  - bluecheese452 1y ago
    Yeah because in the 60s you could support a wife and 4 kids, buy a house and 2 cars, without a high school diploma, all before turning 25. There was no reason to go to college unless you were interested in learning. These days you need a college degree just to afford a 1 bedroom apartment by the time you are 40.
- andrehacker 1y ago
  Well, the credentials defintely help to GET the first job. As a cog in the machine though you are most often valued for skills more than for credentials, at least in the U.S.
- kharak 1y ago
  An anecdote to add to this: Me and most of my peers in college had the choice between two courses. Course A was interesting, yet vastly more challenging and therefore time consuming, with the additional downside of lower grade expectation. Course B was boring, a gentle breeze in comparison, yet with an almost guaranteed perfect grade. Imagine which course most students choose? Even if a student wants to take on the more interesting course, incentives matter, and the incentive is: better grades qualify for better compensated positions and prestigious degrees. Only students who didn't care about this or were confident enough in their ability did choose Course A. In the end, barely a handful of students out of hundreds went with A.
jjmarr 1y ago
> The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer. A decent amount of my professors don't know the answers because they bought the course, test questions, and lectures from Cengage. During exam review, they just regurgitate the answer justification that Cengage provided. During the lectures, they struggle to explain certain concepts since they didn't make the slides. Professors automate themselves out of the teaching process and are upset when students automate themselves out of the learning process. I can tell when the faculty views teaching as a checkbox that they officially have to devote 40% of their time to. I can tell when we are given busywork to waste our time instead of something challenging. To use your analogy, I'm being told to move 1000 plush reproductions of barbells from Point A to B by hand because accreditation wants to see students "working out" and the school doesn't want high failure rates. We are all pulling out the forklift. Some of us are happy because we don't have to work as hard. Others are using the forklift so we can get in a real workout at home, as school is not a good use of our time. Either way, none of us see value moving paperweights all day. edit: My favourite course during my Computer Engineering degree was Science Fiction because that professor graded us on substance instead of form. It was considered a hard class because one would get good marks on the essays by focusing on building substantive points instead of strict adherence to the form of a five-paragraph hamburger essay. The call to action is to make courses harder and stop giving students plush barbells. For example, University of Toronto Engineering Science (hardest program in Canada) gives first-year students a "vibe coding" lab in which students learn how to solve a problem that AI cannot. https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~guerzhoy/vibecoding/vibecoding.html https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~guerzhoy/vibecoding/vibecoding.h...
- lazide 1y ago
  But that requires professors to do work and give a damn!
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    These projections about bad professor experience is exactly why colleges became so hyperconpetitive. The difference between a competitive (and not even exclusive level like Ivies) and a "semi-competitive" is night and day in terms of rigor, staff talent, and overall environment. But sure, you're always going to find a few meh or bad professors. And they will stick out as much ad thr great professors
gsf_emergency 1y ago
I think LLMs, if used correctly, can be useful for BOTH the credentialing and the human resource development (*cough*) Essentially, since they are a summary of "the" state of knowledge, the teacher should be able to ask them to put a number on how novel a piece of text is. Once LLMs are able to evaluate, independently, the soundness of an argument... (Hopefully, this will be achieved AFTER $5 H100s reach the average consumer)
- grey-area 1y ago
  LLMs are sometimes wrong, and they don’t know they are wrong, nor do students. They are the wrong tool for pedagogy.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
ChadNauseam 1y ago
If students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't bother giving diplomas. Compare: My piano teacher doesn't give diplomas because none of her students would care, her students actually want to learn. When my piano teacher cancels class, I am disappointed because I wanted to learn. My piano teacher doesn't need to threaten me with bad grades to get me to practice outside of class (analogous to homework), because I actually want to learn. There are many college students for whom none of these tests would pass. They would not attend if there was no diploma, they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class. What made us think these students were ever interested in learning in the first place? Instead, it seems more likely that they just want a degree because they believe that a degree will give them an advantage in the job market. Many people will never use the information that they supposedly learn in college, and they're aware of this when they enroll. Personally, the fact that they can now get a degree with even less wasted effort than before doesn't bother me one bit. People who want to learn still have every opportunity to.
- Suppafly 1y ago
  I don't think that's a good comparison. I went college to learn and was also relieved occasionally when professors canceled class and still had to force myself to study. I'm sure plenty of your piano teachers students don't enjoy practicing the same notes over and over but do so because they want to know how to play piano.
- MengerSponge 1y ago
  This is, famously, why nobody gets a degree in fine arts. (/s) Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is not offering a university education. If she worked with a few other experts and they designed a coordinated curriculum and shepherded students through it over the course of two to four years, and documented that process to the point where they could file with an accrediting agency, then she could issue a degree in piano.
  - godelski 1y ago
    > then she could issue a degree in piano. It's worth noting, plenty of universities do this. You can get a degree "in piano".
code_biologist 1y ago
Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to a gym where you're told the goal is to be healthy and strong, but they can't really stop you from using a forklift, and jobs and compensation are given out according to how much you lifted irrespective of forklift use.
- karpierz 1y ago
  Except part of the job involves lifting things in places where forklifts can't fit.
  - dyauspitr 1y ago
    They fit in most places or will over the next few years with the next “forklift” version.
    - sn9 1y ago
      Any job that can be done by a forklift will be done by an automated forklift that doesn't require a driver.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
> The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer. I remember illustrating a point to a class by posing a question and then calling on a student I figured wasn't smart enough to answer correctly so that everyone could see her make the mistake. The ethics of that still bother me.
sgustard 1y ago
Why do some countries cheat in the Olympics? Because it is no longer a contest of human achievement, it's just about the medals as a symbol of national glory. Of course: once all countries are doping, the medals will become meaningless. College degrees will suffer the same fate if everyone cheats to get them.
- dyauspitr 1y ago
  The problem is there is no reliable way to test for LLM usage unlike for doping. There’s no way to police this problem.
  - lazide 1y ago
    Sure there is - evaluate the candidates actual skill level without the ability to use automated tools. The current and old school way is a proctored exam.
    - dyauspitr 1y ago
      Testing doesn’t work for everything, especially for dissertations, publications, research etc. That being said I’m wholeheartedly in favor of using extensive in class testing when applicable.
      - johnnyanmac 1y ago
        It works for enough that 99% of cheaters are weeded out. Perfection is the enemy of "good enough". Also, always keep in mind the most underrated kind of cheater: the clearly smart kid who cheats to go from an A- to an A. That level of student can't be "caught" with tests because by all accounts they already know and have even mastered the material. The pressure at that level of competitiveness simply requires zero room for doubt. Not really what the article is about, but some food for thought.
  - biker142541 1y ago
    Diversity in evaluation methodology is a reliable way for many subject. Even short, minimal handwritten exams would help to assess student understanding at a few key checkpoints and should should be reintroduced.
Mbwagava 1y ago
> If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. Does the use of a quantifiable metric like a GPA not exacerbate this? In a world where people take a GPA seriously, you'd have to be irrational to not consider cheating a viable option. You could say the same about credit score and dating apps. These institutions assist the most predatory and harm the most vulnerable.
- Mbwagava 1y ago
  Ooh ranked gaming, too. Also any kind of market activity.
beAroundHere 1y ago
I think you're quoting the Sci Fi author - Ken Liu from his article in some major news outlet. I related with that analogy too, infact that whole piece is worth reading. I can't seem to find it's link though!
- I-M-S 1y ago
  It's because you've mixed him up with Ted Chiang - the article in question is Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art [1] [1] https://archive.is/kS8NY https://archive.is/kS8NY
Balgair 1y ago
I think we have to hold off a bit on the whole thing here. Look, we have no idea what the feedback is like that this grad student gives, what the class sizes are like, what the cadence is, what the grade percentages are, etc. All we know is that Clayton Ramsey is a grad student at Rice in the robotics department and that he wrote a hot take here. For me, the most important thing is if this grader is bothering to really grade at all. I think we've all had a harried grad student just dash off a few red lines on the week one HW about a week before the final exam. That's not a 2 way street, and if the feedback isn't as in-depth as he wants the work to be, well, he shouldn't be surprised. He can't be expecting students to put in the time unilaterally. But, we don't know any of that really. Personally, I think that before the decade is out, we're not going to be talking about this at all. Because the students will be adept enough at using the LLMs to make it look like their own writing anyways. This is a problem that experience will solve for them. And also, I think that the days of the massive lectures and essays are pretty much cooked. That 'cheap' model of education can't survive this LLM revolution. We obviously have to change what the heck higher education is trying to do. My take is that we're going to go to smaller class sizes like those at St. John's or Oxbridge. Under 10 people, you have to have done the reading or look like a fool, all with a PhD in the subject as a guide/teacher. Large classes weren't cutting it for decades (ask any Frat about their test banks), and now the veil is just ripped off.
- thugthrasher 1y ago
  We will never reduce all class sizes to under 10 people. Large R1 schools are not going to reduce their number of students by a factor of 10 or increase their hiring by a factor of 10.
  - StefanBatory 1y ago
    I have classes like these, but at a small Masters programme and only on our courses directly related to specialisation :D
mewpmewp2 1y ago
But going to school to prepare for life is like going to gym to lift weights to prepare for a marathon.
dep_b 1y ago
If I could have a healthy and good looking physique by never going to the gym I would never go to the gym.
- 59nadir 1y ago
  Right, but people using LLMs aren't actually getting the mental equivalent of a healthy and good looking physique if they let LLMs do stuff for them.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Well, you could. Most people prefer their pre-processed food over never going to the gym though.
agumonkey 1y ago
I use chatgpt in a socratic way from time to time because I don't want answers I want the joy of thinking and learning. I heard there were efforts to make educational LLMs (whatever that means). Maybe it will help multiply teachers leverage so that more kids get inspired without having the teacher spend 1-on-1 time with them.. I don't know.
dogcomplex 1y ago
If you took a forklift to the gym, you'd come out of the experience not only very good at "lifting weights", but having learned a whole lot more about the nature and physics of weightlifting from a very different angle. Sure, you should lift them yourself too. But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover. It's a very different but powerful educational experience.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  > But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover. If you never learn to research, sure. Otherwise, you should be worried about accuracy, up to date information, opinionated takes, and outright lies/misinformation. The tool you use doesn't change these factors.
  - dogcomplex 1y ago
    No but it increases the speed and ease at which you can check any of those - making a lot of those steps practical when they were a slog before. If people aren't double-checking LLM claims against sources then they were never on guard for those without an LLM either. Besides, those are incredibly short-term concerns. Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      Does it? You google a query, get results, compare a few alternative results. You ask a prompt and what? Compare outputs to each other? Or just defer back to googling for alternative sources. Firstly, these prompts tend to be shockingly close in behavior. Secondly, Google tends to rank reputable or self curated sites which have some accountability. It can be wrong but you know thr big news sites tend to at least defer to interviews to back up facts. Wikipedia has an overly strict process to prevent blatant, source less information. There's room for error, but there's at least more accountability compared to what an LLM is going through. > Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately. Lastly, prompts are still treated as black boxes, which is a whole other issue. For the above reasons I still would simply defer to human curated resources. That's what LLMs are doing anyway without transparency. People want to give up transparency for speed? It seems completely counter to hacker culture.
mFixman 1y ago
The tragedy is not that some students are going to college to get a diploma while learning as little as possible. It is that the boards of many private universities see their students' cash as more important than their education, and force the professors to pass everybody who went to higher education to buy a diploma. This has a negative feedback loop where universities have to lower standards to bring dumber and lazier students to compete with other diploma mills.
indymike 1y ago
> Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym. I'm sure the time has come for college students to master using LLMs. It's just as important as grammar or basic math now. The software I build (and the entire tech industry) automates huge swaths of business processes with AI. Students need to be able to understand, work with, and manage swarms of AI agents doing work. To stick to the analogy: I need skilled forklift drivers, not big buff workers like I used to.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- doctorwho42 1y ago
  But the thing you are missing is that one needs a solid foundation of knowledge of the actual work to be able to manage it well. Someone with years of coding experience is going to be able to laser guide an AI agent to the answer/result than someone who has muddled their way through comp sci 101 using an AI chatbot.
  - indymike 1y ago
    No one is saying they don't need a solid foundation of knowledge. The knowledge needed is different. What we're seeing now is lot like teaching people to care for a horse even though the automobile is now the dominant form of transportation
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  If you need forkloft drivers, don't recruit at the gym and be mad no one is forklift certified there. This isn't even an opinion on LLMs, it's recruiting 101. You're free to convince the gym to train forklift drivers, but don't be surprised when you're laughed out the room.
  - whattheheckheck 1y ago
    It's the other way around... people will happily pay to be "forklift driver certified" and a piece of paper that gets them a bit higher in the hiring line. Especially when they'll pay way more for that than ethereal "thinking skills" that they can't even reason why they'd need that in the first place
Kapura 1y ago
forklift gym gang gang
thesz 1y ago
> like taking a forklift to the gym. First, you will have excellent forklift skills in the end. A real profession! Second, girls dig forklift operators or so I was told.
normyguy 1y ago
Dangers of Intelligence and Other Scientific Essays by Asimov predicted all this hullabaloo quite a while ago. So, yeah, seems like evidence to support your position. Welcome to the party. :)
vendiddy 1y ago
That's a good one. One analogy I use a lot: if I have a professor sitting next to me, what is the best way to learn a topic? Struggle through it on my own and I won't be leveraging the professors knowledge. Ask the professor to do everything for me and I won't be learning anything at all. Now if the professor is an AI, the same trade-offs hold. For example, I will back and forth conversations with AI to explain subjects to me. I ask questions, push back, ask for examples, and so on. If I do ask the AI to answer something for me, I then ask it to break down the answer for me so I can make sure I understand it deeply. And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn something :)
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  The fatal flaw here is that an AI is more like asking a politician. Except maybe it won't gaslight you. It often has no idea what it's talking about, and pushing back may even have it change it's tune. >And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn something :) Society makes people do a lot of things they don't want. I wonder if we're going to hit a breaking point this generation.
switchbak 1y ago
It's an e-bike for the mind!
chias 1y ago
I love this analogy because it's also not a waste of time to learn how to use a forklift! But the gym isn't the best place to engage in forklift training. And you engage in forklift training at the gym, expect to learn how to use a forklift to lift gym weights. Don't expect to also get the benefits that the gym is designed to impart.

mlsu 1y ago

The point of education isn't to actually learn though. It's to receive the credential. This is much larger than a cultural problem with the students of today. They believe, rightfully and accurately, that the university degree is yet another part of the machine that they will become a cog in. What should be alarming to everyone is that these students will graduate without having learned anything and then go into the workplace where they will continue to not use their atrophied critical thinking skills, to simply do yet more, as a cog in the machine.

bumby 1y ago
This attitude is part of a more general cultural shift. Back in the 1960s, the majority of students said the primary motivation for going to college was to develop a philosophy of life, and a minority said the main goal was to be very financially successful. Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted. * according to the UCLA CIRP freshman survey
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted. Yeah, that's when the great "push for education" came, as well as neoliberalism which preached continuous hustling and individuality. And in the 90s, the ADA and other anti discrimination laws hit, and requiring a college degree was and still is a very useful pre-screening filter for HR to continue discrimination.
  - shawn-butler 1y ago
    It's also as I recall when tuition and student costs started to spike in the US which is probably more directly related than some "philosophical" change in the zeitgeist[0]. When students and parents start racking up debt like this, you become very interested in the fastest way to pay it back. For me the impact of the university administrators as they chased higher endowments for more buildings with naming rights and expanded their own bureaucracies with direct hires that did not directly contribute to the faculty mission did more to alter the university experience than anything else. [0]: https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year
- MengerSponge 1y ago
  We (America) made university educations super expensive. Causality is complicated, but it probably started as an effort to destroy the anti-war movement in the 70's.
  - sgustard 1y ago
    "Most financial experts attribute he sudden increases that started in the 1970s with an influx of federal funding designed to make college more affordable." https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - MengerSponge 1y ago
      Expensive things can be affordable. A house is expensive, but with stable employment and a bank loan you can afford it. When we're talking about college costs, public schools are really the only institutions that matter. The Ivies (or even Ivy+) are a rounding error compared to the big midwestern land-grant universities and the UC and Cal State systems. States have substantially reduced their per-student support for universities: https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in... This coincides with federal funding programs, but student loans are famously not dischargeable, which makes them more instruments of social control than conventional financial vehicles.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- tcmart14 1y ago
  I would also say some of the attitude shift is also contradictory. The amount of people I interact with who have a lot of bad things to say about the education who tell me universities should focus on education in a general meanwhile also say that schools to should focus on student getting jobs. Probably one that has been heard before, something along the lines of, "why don't high schools teach plumbers courses." I mean they can. While also, "colleges are too focused on checking the boxes so students can get jobs."
  - hnfong 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - andai 1y ago
      Our CS department head was overheard saying, "Our job is to create researchers." I found this quite striking, since something like 10% of undergrads go into research. Most people really are there to help them get a job. So the program is designed not to meet the needs of 90% of its "customers".
      - bumby 1y ago
        There’s an argument that treating students as “customers” has led to all kinds of bad outcomes. One example is it creates an incentive to invest in all kinds of fancy infrastructure (fancy halls/dorms and even lazy rivers) because that is how they attract more “customers” but this ultimately becomes a huge driver of educational costs. The same can be said for watered down courses etc.
        tcmart14 1y ago
        I would also add, look at the astonishing success (sarcasm), of for-profit colleges. They would have to be considered the extreme of treating students as customers and I don't really know any serious employer who accepts a degree from for-profit colleges. Unless the college is so new the employees hadn't heard of it before and don't know much about it.
- PKop 1y ago
  And there were fewer students going to university and so you had a higher proportion of people doing it for the love of learning. It was easier to get a job without a degree. It's not just a cultural shift, it's a change of supply and demand.
- lazide 1y ago
  Notably, the late 70’s and early 80’s is when large scale social changes started to happen due to high inflation and major problems in the US economy. Also a lot of social unrest, and a pretty unhinged president (Tricky Dick).
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    The same issues are seen in other countries. It's not specific to US presidents or policy. The insistence on maximizing university attendance was a widespread idea coming out of the left, e.g. in Britain it was heavily pushed by Tony Blair. The Blair government also raised tuition fees considerably. The stated rationale at the time was that degree holders earn more, so if everyone gets a degree, everyone will earn more. I am doubtful that was the true rationale but it's how the policy was sold to people.
    - Ekaros 1y ago
      Also I think massaging unemployment numbers for a while is reasonable goal. After all those in education are not counted as unemployed.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      The mentality isn't, but the costs are US unique. You can afford to "explore" a bit of your youth if you're not going into 6 figures of debt.
- kipchak 1y ago
  Arguably the cause of the cultural shift is economic. Wages began stagnating in the early 1970s, which caused increased demand for diplomas as a way to increase wages. This is most striking in the number of students seeking law degrees, which shoots off at around the same time.
- bluecheese452 1y ago
  Yeah because in the 60s you could support a wife and 4 kids, buy a house and 2 cars, without a high school diploma, all before turning 25. There was no reason to go to college unless you were interested in learning. These days you need a college degree just to afford a 1 bedroom apartment by the time you are 40.
andrehacker 1y ago
Well, the credentials defintely help to GET the first job. As a cog in the machine though you are most often valued for skills more than for credentials, at least in the U.S.
kharak 1y ago
An anecdote to add to this: Me and most of my peers in college had the choice between two courses. Course A was interesting, yet vastly more challenging and therefore time consuming, with the additional downside of lower grade expectation. Course B was boring, a gentle breeze in comparison, yet with an almost guaranteed perfect grade. Imagine which course most students choose? Even if a student wants to take on the more interesting course, incentives matter, and the incentive is: better grades qualify for better compensated positions and prestigious degrees. Only students who didn't care about this or were confident enough in their ability did choose Course A. In the end, barely a handful of students out of hundreds went with A.

jjmarr 1y ago

> The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer. A decent amount of my professors don't know the answers because they bought the course, test questions, and lectures from Cengage. During exam review, they just regurgitate the answer justification that Cengage provided. During the lectures, they struggle to explain certain concepts since they didn't make the slides. Professors automate themselves out of the teaching process and are upset when students automate themselves out of the learning process. I can tell when the faculty views teaching as a checkbox that they officially have to devote 40% of their time to. I can tell when we are given busywork to waste our time instead of something challenging. To use your analogy, I'm being told to move 1000 plush reproductions of barbells from Point A to B by hand because accreditation wants to see students "working out" and the school doesn't want high failure rates. We are all pulling out the forklift. Some of us are happy because we don't have to work as hard. Others are using the forklift so we can get in a real workout at home, as school is not a good use of our time. Either way, none of us see value moving paperweights all day. edit: My favourite course during my Computer Engineering degree was Science Fiction because that professor graded us on substance instead of form. It was considered a hard class because one would get good marks on the essays by focusing on building substantive points instead of strict adherence to the form of a five-paragraph hamburger essay. The call to action is to make courses harder and stop giving students plush barbells. For example, University of Toronto Engineering Science (hardest program in Canada) gives first-year students a "vibe coding" lab in which students learn how to solve a problem that AI cannot. https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~guerzhoy/vibecoding/vibecoding.html https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~guerzhoy/vibecoding/vibecoding.h...

lazide 1y ago
But that requires professors to do work and give a damn!
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  These projections about bad professor experience is exactly why colleges became so hyperconpetitive. The difference between a competitive (and not even exclusive level like Ivies) and a "semi-competitive" is night and day in terms of rigor, staff talent, and overall environment. But sure, you're always going to find a few meh or bad professors. And they will stick out as much ad thr great professors

gsf_emergency 1y ago

I think LLMs, if used correctly, can be useful for BOTH the credentialing and the human resource development (*cough*) Essentially, since they are a summary of "the" state of knowledge, the teacher should be able to ask them to put a number on how novel a piece of text is. Once LLMs are able to evaluate, independently, the soundness of an argument... (Hopefully, this will be achieved AFTER $5 H100s reach the average consumer)

grey-area 1y ago
LLMs are sometimes wrong, and they don’t know they are wrong, nor do students. They are the wrong tool for pedagogy.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

ChadNauseam 1y ago

If students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't bother giving diplomas. Compare: My piano teacher doesn't give diplomas because none of her students would care, her students actually want to learn. When my piano teacher cancels class, I am disappointed because I wanted to learn. My piano teacher doesn't need to threaten me with bad grades to get me to practice outside of class (analogous to homework), because I actually want to learn. There are many college students for whom none of these tests would pass. They would not attend if there was no diploma, they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class. What made us think these students were ever interested in learning in the first place? Instead, it seems more likely that they just want a degree because they believe that a degree will give them an advantage in the job market. Many people will never use the information that they supposedly learn in college, and they're aware of this when they enroll. Personally, the fact that they can now get a degree with even less wasted effort than before doesn't bother me one bit. People who want to learn still have every opportunity to.

Suppafly 1y ago
I don't think that's a good comparison. I went college to learn and was also relieved occasionally when professors canceled class and still had to force myself to study. I'm sure plenty of your piano teachers students don't enjoy practicing the same notes over and over but do so because they want to know how to play piano.
MengerSponge 1y ago
This is, famously, why nobody gets a degree in fine arts. (/s) Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is not offering a university education. If she worked with a few other experts and they designed a coordinated curriculum and shepherded students through it over the course of two to four years, and documented that process to the point where they could file with an accrediting agency, then she could issue a degree in piano.
- godelski 1y ago
  > then she could issue a degree in piano. It's worth noting, plenty of universities do this. You can get a degree "in piano".

code_biologist 1y ago

Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to a gym where you're told the goal is to be healthy and strong, but they can't really stop you from using a forklift, and jobs and compensation are given out according to how much you lifted irrespective of forklift use.

karpierz 1y ago
Except part of the job involves lifting things in places where forklifts can't fit.
- dyauspitr 1y ago
  They fit in most places or will over the next few years with the next “forklift” version.
  - sn9 1y ago
    Any job that can be done by a forklift will be done by an automated forklift that doesn't require a driver.

thaumasiotes 1y ago

> The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer. I remember illustrating a point to a class by posing a question and then calling on a student I figured wasn't smart enough to answer correctly so that everyone could see her make the mistake. The ethics of that still bother me.

sgustard 1y ago

Why do some countries cheat in the Olympics? Because it is no longer a contest of human achievement, it's just about the medals as a symbol of national glory. Of course: once all countries are doping, the medals will become meaningless. College degrees will suffer the same fate if everyone cheats to get them.

dyauspitr 1y ago
The problem is there is no reliable way to test for LLM usage unlike for doping. There’s no way to police this problem.
- lazide 1y ago
  Sure there is - evaluate the candidates actual skill level without the ability to use automated tools. The current and old school way is a proctored exam.
  - dyauspitr 1y ago
    Testing doesn’t work for everything, especially for dissertations, publications, research etc. That being said I’m wholeheartedly in favor of using extensive in class testing when applicable.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      It works for enough that 99% of cheaters are weeded out. Perfection is the enemy of "good enough". Also, always keep in mind the most underrated kind of cheater: the clearly smart kid who cheats to go from an A- to an A. That level of student can't be "caught" with tests because by all accounts they already know and have even mastered the material. The pressure at that level of competitiveness simply requires zero room for doubt. Not really what the article is about, but some food for thought.
- biker142541 1y ago
  Diversity in evaluation methodology is a reliable way for many subject. Even short, minimal handwritten exams would help to assess student understanding at a few key checkpoints and should should be reintroduced.

Mbwagava 1y ago

> If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. Does the use of a quantifiable metric like a GPA not exacerbate this? In a world where people take a GPA seriously, you'd have to be irrational to not consider cheating a viable option. You could say the same about credit score and dating apps. These institutions assist the most predatory and harm the most vulnerable.

Mbwagava 1y ago
Ooh ranked gaming, too. Also any kind of market activity.

beAroundHere 1y ago

I think you're quoting the Sci Fi author - Ken Liu from his article in some major news outlet. I related with that analogy too, infact that whole piece is worth reading. I can't seem to find it's link though!

I-M-S 1y ago
It's because you've mixed him up with Ted Chiang - the article in question is Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art [1] [1] https://archive.is/kS8NY https://archive.is/kS8NY

Balgair 1y ago

I think we have to hold off a bit on the whole thing here. Look, we have no idea what the feedback is like that this grad student gives, what the class sizes are like, what the cadence is, what the grade percentages are, etc. All we know is that Clayton Ramsey is a grad student at Rice in the robotics department and that he wrote a hot take here. For me, the most important thing is if this grader is bothering to really grade at all. I think we've all had a harried grad student just dash off a few red lines on the week one HW about a week before the final exam. That's not a 2 way street, and if the feedback isn't as in-depth as he wants the work to be, well, he shouldn't be surprised. He can't be expecting students to put in the time unilaterally. But, we don't know any of that really. Personally, I think that before the decade is out, we're not going to be talking about this at all. Because the students will be adept enough at using the LLMs to make it look like their own writing anyways. This is a problem that experience will solve for them. And also, I think that the days of the massive lectures and essays are pretty much cooked. That 'cheap' model of education can't survive this LLM revolution. We obviously have to change what the heck higher education is trying to do. My take is that we're going to go to smaller class sizes like those at St. John's or Oxbridge. Under 10 people, you have to have done the reading or look like a fool, all with a PhD in the subject as a guide/teacher. Large classes weren't cutting it for decades (ask any Frat about their test banks), and now the veil is just ripped off.

thugthrasher 1y ago
We will never reduce all class sizes to under 10 people. Large R1 schools are not going to reduce their number of students by a factor of 10 or increase their hiring by a factor of 10.
- StefanBatory 1y ago
  I have classes like these, but at a small Masters programme and only on our courses directly related to specialisation :D

mewpmewp2 1y ago

But going to school to prepare for life is like going to gym to lift weights to prepare for a marathon.

dep_b 1y ago

If I could have a healthy and good looking physique by never going to the gym I would never go to the gym.

59nadir 1y ago
Right, but people using LLMs aren't actually getting the mental equivalent of a healthy and good looking physique if they let LLMs do stuff for them.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
Well, you could. Most people prefer their pre-processed food over never going to the gym though.

agumonkey 1y ago

I use chatgpt in a socratic way from time to time because I don't want answers I want the joy of thinking and learning. I heard there were efforts to make educational LLMs (whatever that means). Maybe it will help multiply teachers leverage so that more kids get inspired without having the teacher spend 1-on-1 time with them.. I don't know.

dogcomplex 1y ago

If you took a forklift to the gym, you'd come out of the experience not only very good at "lifting weights", but having learned a whole lot more about the nature and physics of weightlifting from a very different angle. Sure, you should lift them yourself too. But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover. It's a very different but powerful educational experience.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
> But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover. If you never learn to research, sure. Otherwise, you should be worried about accuracy, up to date information, opinionated takes, and outright lies/misinformation. The tool you use doesn't change these factors.
- dogcomplex 1y ago
  No but it increases the speed and ease at which you can check any of those - making a lot of those steps practical when they were a slog before. If people aren't double-checking LLM claims against sources then they were never on guard for those without an LLM either. Besides, those are incredibly short-term concerns. Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    Does it? You google a query, get results, compare a few alternative results. You ask a prompt and what? Compare outputs to each other? Or just defer back to googling for alternative sources. Firstly, these prompts tend to be shockingly close in behavior. Secondly, Google tends to rank reputable or self curated sites which have some accountability. It can be wrong but you know thr big news sites tend to at least defer to interviews to back up facts. Wikipedia has an overly strict process to prevent blatant, source less information. There's room for error, but there's at least more accountability compared to what an LLM is going through. > Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately. Lastly, prompts are still treated as black boxes, which is a whole other issue. For the above reasons I still would simply defer to human curated resources. That's what LLMs are doing anyway without transparency. People want to give up transparency for speed? It seems completely counter to hacker culture.

mFixman 1y ago

The tragedy is not that some students are going to college to get a diploma while learning as little as possible. It is that the boards of many private universities see their students' cash as more important than their education, and force the professors to pass everybody who went to higher education to buy a diploma. This has a negative feedback loop where universities have to lower standards to bring dumber and lazier students to compete with other diploma mills.

indymike 1y ago

> Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym. I'm sure the time has come for college students to master using LLMs. It's just as important as grammar or basic math now. The software I build (and the entire tech industry) automates huge swaths of business processes with AI. Students need to be able to understand, work with, and manage swarms of AI agents doing work. To stick to the analogy: I need skilled forklift drivers, not big buff workers like I used to.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
doctorwho42 1y ago
But the thing you are missing is that one needs a solid foundation of knowledge of the actual work to be able to manage it well. Someone with years of coding experience is going to be able to laser guide an AI agent to the answer/result than someone who has muddled their way through comp sci 101 using an AI chatbot.
- indymike 1y ago
  No one is saying they don't need a solid foundation of knowledge. The knowledge needed is different. What we're seeing now is lot like teaching people to care for a horse even though the automobile is now the dominant form of transportation
johnnyanmac 1y ago
If you need forkloft drivers, don't recruit at the gym and be mad no one is forklift certified there. This isn't even an opinion on LLMs, it's recruiting 101. You're free to convince the gym to train forklift drivers, but don't be surprised when you're laughed out the room.
- whattheheckheck 1y ago
  It's the other way around... people will happily pay to be "forklift driver certified" and a piece of paper that gets them a bit higher in the hiring line. Especially when they'll pay way more for that than ethereal "thinking skills" that they can't even reason why they'd need that in the first place

Kapura 1y ago

forklift gym gang gang

thesz 1y ago

> like taking a forklift to the gym. First, you will have excellent forklift skills in the end. A real profession! Second, girls dig forklift operators or so I was told.

normyguy 1y ago

Dangers of Intelligence and Other Scientific Essays by Asimov predicted all this hullabaloo quite a while ago. So, yeah, seems like evidence to support your position. Welcome to the party. :)

vendiddy 1y ago

That's a good one. One analogy I use a lot: if I have a professor sitting next to me, what is the best way to learn a topic? Struggle through it on my own and I won't be leveraging the professors knowledge. Ask the professor to do everything for me and I won't be learning anything at all. Now if the professor is an AI, the same trade-offs hold. For example, I will back and forth conversations with AI to explain subjects to me. I ask questions, push back, ask for examples, and so on. If I do ask the AI to answer something for me, I then ask it to break down the answer for me so I can make sure I understand it deeply. And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn something :)

johnnyanmac 1y ago
The fatal flaw here is that an AI is more like asking a politician. Except maybe it won't gaslight you. It often has no idea what it's talking about, and pushing back may even have it change it's tune. >And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn something :) Society makes people do a lot of things they don't want. I wonder if we're going to hit a breaking point this generation.

switchbak 1y ago

It's an e-bike for the mind!

chias 1y ago

I love this analogy because it's also not a waste of time to learn how to use a forklift! But the gym isn't the best place to engage in forklift training. And you engage in forklift training at the gym, expect to learn how to use a forklift to lift gym weights. Don't expect to also get the benefits that the gym is designed to impart.