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I think these points resonate most with a worldview where college is just a status competition, where it doesn't matter if you actually learn anything. By anal

I think these points resonate most with a worldview where college is just a status competition, where it doesn't matter if you actually learn anything. By analogy, we could replace the human players of a sport with identical robots and it would level the playing field, but it would also completely defeat the purpose of sport. It is an activity done by humans for the benefit and enjoyment of humans. Rich students have long cheated themselves out of an education by using expensive tutors to do their homework. Now that's available to everyone, yes, and that somewhat levels the playing field, yes, but it's not a good thing if you care about education. It's more like, narcotics used to be only for rich people, but now we have powerful cheap ones that everyone can get easily.

TuringNYC 1y ago
>> Rich students have long cheated themselves out of an education by using expensive tutors to do their homework. Students in a crunch or those who are short-sighted use it to do homework. There have always been ways to cheat. Students who want to learn use it for guidance, insight, examples, detail. There have not always been ways to do this unless you were wealthy. So much of education is just mediocre. You are lucky (or rich) if you get access to great education.
- getnormality 1y ago
  I think the difference between us here is, I don't think current LLMs are well-suited to actually help people learn. In my assessment, they lack the bedrock understanding of the material to resolve student confusion, and their understanding of student needs is very poor. It's probably not impossible to learn from them, but I think they strongly encourage shortcuts that only give the impression of learning. I do hope this changes. LLMs are of course an amazing technology, but sometimes being amazing isn't enough to actually solve human problems.

TuringNYC 1y ago

>> Rich students have long cheated themselves out of an education by using expensive tutors to do their homework. Students in a crunch or those who are short-sighted use it to do homework. There have always been ways to cheat. Students who want to learn use it for guidance, insight, examples, detail. There have not always been ways to do this unless you were wealthy. So much of education is just mediocre. You are lucky (or rich) if you get access to great education.

getnormality 1y ago
I think the difference between us here is, I don't think current LLMs are well-suited to actually help people learn. In my assessment, they lack the bedrock understanding of the material to resolve student confusion, and their understanding of student needs is very poor. It's probably not impossible to learn from them, but I think they strongly encourage shortcuts that only give the impression of learning. I do hope this changes. LLMs are of course an amazing technology, but sometimes being amazing isn't enough to actually solve human problems.