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Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, t

• blamestross 1y ago
  Turns out education done right is vaguely a speed-run of how the knowledge was developed. Adding calculating tools makes sense as you advance the the corresponding point in the process. Honestly, I think there should be a chunk of precal and calc where they use slide rules only, then calculators of increasing complexity (or just increasingly complex features of one calculator). "When will I use this in real life" is a declaration that you have no expectations of learning the next lesson that builds upon this one.
• ortusdux 1y ago
  The concepts of adding machines and calculators were also slowly phased in over the span of a century. The first commercially successfully adding machines hit the market in the 1890's, and pocket calculators took off in the 1980's. AI went from theory to answering hand written math homework questions from a photograph in a few years.
  • ghaff 1y ago
    I only had a calculator (at a technical university) starting in the mid-1970s. Prices were dropping like a stone in about that period. In high school it was pretty much slide rules.
• grimnebulin 1y ago
  As a teen in the late 80's I had an HP calculator that I programmed to compute molecular weights given an input string like "H2SO4". It felt like having a secret superpower, especially when I participated in competitive exams. I was a very straightlaced kid and would not have used the program if it such things were explicitly forbidden, but as far as I could tell, they never were.
  • viraptor 1y ago
    Reminds me of when I write a j2me app for matrix diagonalization because we could use the old feature phones as calculators. Nobody thought we'd be mad enough to use those to cheat...
    • QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
      Do you still have the source code for the j2me app? I hadn’t yet learned to program back when I was still using a feature phone, but I have a lot of fond memories of J2ME applications that I installed on my phones. Mostly games, of course. I encourage anyone that wrote J2ME games and utilities, no matter how small or big, to upload the source to GitHub :)
      • viraptor 1y ago
        That one would be definitely lost to time...
        • QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
          Yeah makes sense. I have very little left of my early stuff too, heh
      • nicman23 1y ago
        well a lot of bio info stuff are still using java.
        • QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
          But surely not so much J2ME for feature phones stuff right? Those bio info stuff are probably rather desktop applications.
          • nicman23 1y ago
            they are mostly terminal with some gui optinally
• the_af 1y ago
  >> Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial > Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes. The author of TFA means specifically for his cohort of students, not in general. He polled his students, and the result was that they thought calculators weren't seen as unethical but they were more skeptical/uncertain about AI. By his current students, now, not in general.
  • brudgers 1y ago
    LLM’s have been widely available for approximately five years. Five years into the availability of a calculator with an arbitrary advanced feature, it was controversial in academic contexts. Some of the author’s students could be grand-children of students from the early days of consumer calculators. The author is comparing a new technology with an old one. And ignoring programable calculators which are still sometimes banned after fifty years…and many of the author’s students probably have used LLM’s for homework despite their statements that please the author.
    • the_af 1y ago
      The author is doing nothing of the sort. Among other things, he's analyzing his students attitudes' re: AI and cheating with AI, and also comparing what they claim to feel vs what they actually do! It's mostly a reflection of what his students feel about the use of AI in English writing, not about calculators vs AI. It seems as if you're responding to the line you quoted (out of context) through your preconceptions of what the article is about instead of actually reading the article! > and many of the author’s students probably have used LLM’s for homework despite their statements that please the author. "Probably have used LLM's"!? Don't take this the wrong way, but it seems you didn't read past the line you quoted, am I right? Because this is explicitly addressed multiple times, and the answer may surprise you.
      • brudgers 1y ago
        The teacher is asking a rhetorical question and getting an et cum spiritu tuo response. am I right? Of course not...and did-you-read-the-article comments are contrary to HN community standards. Such comments wallow in lameness.
• voxl 1y ago
  No middle schooler is using a graphing calculator on their algebra exam
  • atleastoptimal 1y ago
    I literally used a graphing calculator on my algebra exams in middle school.
    • voxl 1y ago
      Yeah I don't believe you, especially because you have an axe to grind about AI singularity bullshit. No one in their right mind should allow a graphing calculator to be used on an algebra exam, might as well let them bring a laptop and open Wolfram alpha.
      • atleastoptimal 1y ago
        Maybe my teachers didn’t know you could program equation solvers into it. Either way it helped me understand that those in authority didn’t understand the nature of the world changing beneath them, which prepared me for how many people would end up misunderstanding AI and under-appreciating it despite how much it is evidently changing the world.
• Barrin92 1y ago
  It's also an extremely misleading comparison. Basic calculator functions do not in the slightest replace anything taught in a maths class. Using ChatGPT not just to write entire paragraphs (replacing composition), or even providing the writer with ideas (replacing the creative aspects of writing) isn't comparable to adding two large numbers together. The equivalent in maths would be if you handed students a theorem prover or have Wolfram Alpha give you step-by-step solutions and obviously nobody to this day allows this, because like ChatGPT for writing it'd defeat the point, that students think. When I was in uni we were allowed basic but not programmable calculators during exams and a lot of CS classes even were pen&paper, if the prof was a bit hardcore
• verelo 1y ago
  Totally correct. In the 90's as a kid in school using a calculator was highly debated amongst teachers and the ability to bring one out on your desk depended on the teacher. In grade 2 i had a teacher who would say "I don't believe in erasers", you know, the things that "undo" pencil. As a ~6 yr old i actually didn't understand this phrase: "Well I have one, they're real!"
• treyd 1y ago
  The point that you're (and everyone is) glossing over here is relative positions on the skill gradient. A first grader probably would be prohibited from using any kind of calculator on arithmetic tests, 4-fn or not. But 8th graders are usually permitted scientific (non-programmable) calculators. As you go up in grade level, you "get access to" calculators capable of functionality at the level below you. Because the point is that when we're educating students we want them to actually learn the subject matter, but once we've deemed them to have understood it and we have them move onto the next goal, we give them the tools to make that prior goal easier. We lessen the burden of the little mechanical concepts they already know so that they have an easier time becoming familiar with the next more advanced concepts. AI systems are so much more advanced than what's capable on a TI programmable calculator. It's hard to draw clean boundaries around the tiers and enforce them by telling the model "help the user with tasks of tier 1-4 but not 5+". That's the issue, that it's really infeasible to strictly use them strictly as learning tools. You can almost do it with a lot of self-discipline and self-reflection to analyze your own workflow, but it's not generalizable across domains.
  • pishpash 1y ago
    Why can't they be restricted to produce only the concepts of a grade below you? It sounds doable and is actually a great idea.
    • tomsmeding 1y ago
      How are you going to ensure that it is impossible for the student to work around whatever measures you take?
    • estearum 1y ago
      Can LLMs be reliably restricted to produce any specific subset of content? AFAICT they're still consistently jailbroken.
      • wat10000 1y ago
        It’s easy to do at the syntactic level by controlling the sampling. For example, it’s easy and common to restrict output to be valid JSON but just not allowing any tokens that would make it not valid JSON. But reliably restricting output at the semantic level is very much an open problem.
• cyberax 1y ago
  > Calculators are uncontroversial now. Yes, they are uncontroversially bad. Schools that don't use them have higher scores. Unfortunately, even SAT/ACT have calculator slop now.
• analog31 1y ago
  >>> imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable It didn't. I was in math class when calculators were introduced. At least for high school level and beyond, the curricula were designed to make problems solvable without calculators, and they weren't of much use. This was still the case when I taught an undergrad college math class in 1997. Graphing calculators were allowed, and the kids who tried to use them just screwed themselves up. I would have gladly changed the curriculum to use calculators and computers from the very beginning. As tools, and not just to administer the same old exercises and quizzes. Give them Jupyter Notebook. Math education has never been a success story. Education faces a dilemma, which is that it has always used heuristics to guide study and assess performance. Exercises such as the "three paragraph essay" had no use in the real world, even long before AI could generate them on demand. When one of those heuristics is broken, another one has to be found. Even word processing forced teachers to grade papers on content, rather than mechanics.
  • ewoodrich 1y ago
    > Exercises such as the "three paragraph essay" had no use in the real world The rigid formatting imposed by graded assignments may not have any use. But on the other hand, having completed a liberal arts/"soft" science degree before my CS degree I've greatly benefited in the workplace from the writing experience it provided. I had to write so many papers that it became more or less effortless to produce long form, well structured writing and those written communication skills have helped me distinguish myself far more than my technical ability at work. The generic ChatGPT overly formal corporate tone has no nuance or subtlety and is a poor substitute for well crafted, deliberate communication. I am always conscious of how my exact words and phrasing would be perceived by the intended audience, frequently requiring a balancing act between competing interests while maintaining clarity. Due to that I manage to avoid stepping on toes or sabotaging relationships due to inartful phrasing. It's frustrating to receive emails consisting of LLM boilerplate because it has such low information density and is so much more difficult to infer tone and emotion from the other side . I'm very grateful I completed my education without the temptation to just churn out low effort writing or code and depriving myself of that experience. I'm not confident at all I would have been able to maintain that self-discipline.