9 ms·

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requ

• daniel3303 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• daymanstep 5mo ago
  Wonderful teachers that give unreliable information with total confidence?
  • k__ 5mo ago
    Anti-intellectualism is at it again, hu?
  • Bawoosette 5mo ago
    To be fair, that was much of my actual experience with human professors in university.
    • IshKebab 5mo ago
      Yeah one of my teachers was able to identify which high school I had come from due to something I had been mistaught.
    • renticulous 5mo ago
      Veritasium proved that in a difficult challenge. A Physics Prof Bet Me $10,000 I'm Wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCsgoLc_fzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCsgoLc_fzI
  • victorbjorklund 5mo ago
    Like humans.
    • CoastalCoder 5mo ago
      I think we should go a little deeper on this idea. We can all agree that both human "experts" and LLMs can sometimes be right, and sometimes be confidently wrong. But that doesn't imply that they're equally fit for purpose. It just means that we can't use that simple shortcut to conclude that one is inferior to the other. So where do we go from here?
      • oofbey 5mo ago
        I’ve always thought of the definition of “expert” as reliably knowing the difference between what is known, what is speculated but unproven, and what is unknown. People claim expertise in all sorts of things that they aren’t experts in. But true experts should not be wrong. They should qualify levels of certainty. This definition certainly works in the sciences.
        • victorbjorklund 5mo ago
          In reality few humans are true experts on every topic they open their mouth on. A high school teacher in science is hardly a true expert in every single thing they teach.
  • entropyneur 5mo ago
    I had human teachers who did that in middle/high school. Took me many years to pick out all the hallucinated bits of "knowledge". I don't think the current models are any less reliable that what we currently have on average.
    • dguest 5mo ago
      I'll always remember my middle school science teaching telling us that nuclear fusion violates conservation of mass because the 2 protons in a pair of hydrogen nuclei combine to make helium with 4 nucleons. It's not true, but that's not the point. But he was a great teacher anyway. He was engaging and kept the kids in line and learning. I eventually learned the truth, and most of my classmates forgot about it. Teaching, like flying a plane or driving a train, might become more about keeping watch over a small group of people and ensuring that things don't go off the rails, and that's fine.
      • 3form 5mo ago
        This one feels less sinister than some other things at least to me, personally. You can reasonably doubt that the conservation of mass is violated and find out the truth based on that. But understanding more complex biology or historical context for some things? Granted, many of these things seem to be low stakes, but I'm sure there are some there are not (sex ed comes to mind).
        • zem 5mo ago
          to be fair, fusion does violate conservation of mass, just not the way the teacher explained it. the loss of mass is where the energy comes from.
          • 3form 5mo ago
            Yes, together with mass-energy equivalency it would form a coherent argument, and then also a correct one - but the thing is that if incomplete, it still might sound funky enough to you to research it if you care. I think it helps that it's a very narrow field to look at, compared to fuzzy and big-picture view of social studies, for example. So much room to be confidently wrong... And sadly I can't think of a solution, LLMs or not.
  • p-e-w 5mo ago
    The amount of bullshit and blatant lies I’ve heard from my human teachers dwarfs the hallucinations produced by today’s LLMs.
  • Levitz 5mo ago
    Off the top of my head: DOMS being little crystals in muscles, tongue having separate areas for each type of taste, food pyramid, blue blood in the veins, the appendix being useless, body temperature doesn't change disregarding whether it's exposed to cold or to heat, and a whole lot of stuff related to politics and history I'd rather just omit (I don't live in the US). All things I learned in school which were wrong information. Not to mention, the current state of education is far worse. I don't think most realize how low the bar is.
    • akdev1l 5mo ago
      My biology teacher in school once tried to teach us that winds created by God. Not like spiritually or something but that God literally made the wind I guess. My “earth sciences” teacher also once tried to argue with me against the universal law of gravitation. (no, she was not referring to Special/General Relativity. She didn’t agree two objects in a vacuum fall at the same speed regardless of mass.
    • Sesse__ 5mo ago
      One of my teachers in elementary school told us that people in the Arabic world wore long garments because as Muslims, they believed the Messiah would be born by a male, and thus, it was important to have something to catch the baby as it unexpectedly popped out one day and would otherwise hit the ground. She only really had two faults: She wasn't very bright, and she wasn't fond of children. I had her in about 80% of all my classes for six years. High school was a relief.
      • samatman 5mo ago
        It may interest you to know that this was a misremembered truth. It is widely believed by their neighbors, that the _Druze_ wear baggy pants because they believe that the Mahdi will be born to a male, and the pants will catch the baby etc. I say "widely believed", the Druze are famously secretive and will not confirm or deny most things about their religion. The 'elect' Druze men do wear distinctive baggy trousers with the crotch down around the knees: no one else does. The Druze are people in the Arabic world: moreover, they are Arabs. They began as an Isma'ili sect, but do not identify as Muslim: they call themselves al-Muwaḥḥidūn, meaning 'the monotheists', or 'unitarians'. Much closer to correct than not!
  • autoexec 5mo ago
    They'll also encourage and praise you even when you're heading down the wrong path until you think you've uncovered the secret of the universe or proven that established science was wrong this whole time when really you've just been bullshitting with an engagement bot.
    • CamperBob2 5mo ago
      No, they don't really do that anymore, if you use the latest models with reasoning enabled. Like almost everything else about LLMs, this unfortunate tendency has gotten a lot better recently, which you might not realize if you gave up after getting some lame answers or bogus glazing on the free ChatGPT page a couple of years ago.
• mold_aid 5mo ago
  >LLMs can be wonderful teachers Are they or aren't they
  • p-e-w 5mo ago
    A million times better than any human teacher I’ve ever had, for sure. Now I’m certain that there exist those mythical human instructors who can do better, but that’s not worth much if 99.99% of people don’t have access to them. Just like a good human physician who takes their time with the patient is better than an LLM, but that’s not worth much either given that this doesn’t match most people’s experience with their own physicians.
    • vladms 5mo ago
      Did an LLM teach you a topic you did not feel like learning? For me the best human teachers were the ones that managed to make me interested on topics that I thought are boring/useless (many times my opinion being stupid, mostly due to lack of experience). So far with LLM I learn about things I know something (at least that they exist) and I am interested in, which is a small subset of things that one should learn during lifetime.
      • jimnotgym 5mo ago
        Well I have some evidence to support your hypothesis. During Covid my kids were at home, eventually with some kind of self learning website from school. I was upstairs working, checking in with progress on the parents app. Finish your daily school work and then you can game. The kids learnt all about Team Fortress 2, Roblox, Rainbow Six etc. They also learnt how to game the learning system so it looked like they were doing their work.
      • throwaway132448 5mo ago
        Good point well made.
      • deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
• pjc50 5mo ago
  "Education is just a CTF for the valuable flag of a credential. In this essay I will --"
• magic_hamster 5mo ago
  Education is also figured out. You just need to learn, do and practice for yourself. Telling the agent "to just do it for you" is tempting, but it's not learning. You need to be deliberate when you're trying to actually learn and internalize. Also, you could spin up your own educational agent with very strict instructions on guiding the user instead of just doing the work. Of course you can always go around it but if you're making an effort to learn, this is a good middle ground.
• Gigachad 5mo ago
  We are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.
  • Retr0id 5mo ago
    > I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI. If you remove the "without AI" and the end, I've been hearing similar anecdotes about fizzbuzz for years (isn't the whole point of fizzbuzz to filter out those candidates?)
    • Gigachad 5mo ago
      While this is true, it seems undeniable that if you use AI to do everything for you, you will never learn the skills. I'm seeing a massive amount of developers submitting stuff for review and admitting they have no idea how it works and they just generated it.
    • raincole 5mo ago
      Because "the next generation is ruined" is always a popular sentiment. It has been with us for at least two thousand years, and it surely won't go away in our lifetime. When this AI era's devs grow older they'll complain the newer generation can't even vide code too.
      • brookst 5mo ago
        I remember when everyone bemoaned the kids not knowing assembly language. How can anyone understand software if you don’t know assembly? “Kids these days don’t work as hard / know as much / value the important things” is as tired as it is universal.
        • jkubicek 5mo ago
          OK sure, but back when old heads were complaining about the kids not knowing assembly, those same kids knew C or Fortran or something. In 2026, if you call yourself a developer and can't solve FizzBuzz without help, it's hard to argue that you know anything useful at all.
• repelsteeltje 5mo ago
  I found this interview [0] on the subject of AI in CS education on the Oxide & Friends podcast very illuminating. Of course, Brown University CS != All education, but interesting angle nevertheless. [0] Episode webpage: https://share.transistor.fm/s/31855e83 https://share.transistor.fm/s/31855e83
• otabdeveloper4 5mo ago
  The best frontier LLMs can't solve 4th grade math homework yet. Don't hold your breath on that collapse of education. (Real mathematics problems, not American-style ""math"".)
  • npilk 5mo ago
    Do you have an example of a 4th grade problem in mind that isn't "American-style"?
• andai 5mo ago
  They were a forcing function for skillz and they no longer are. We need new forcing functions for skillz or we will become WALL-E blobs. Well, they were ostensibly forcing functions... ten years ago everyone was paying the exchange student to do their homework and assignments for them, and that guy was paying his cousin back in his home country, but the whole thing is a bit more efficient now.
• amazingamazing 5mo ago
  > We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. No we have not.
• aschla 5mo ago
  We've already had consolidation of education for a while now. Even before all the edutech courses, there were Youtubers educating better than many university professors. 10-15 years ago students were already skipping lectures and just showing up for tests.
• jaybrendansmith 5mo ago
  Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is telling us that computers do not help human education in the slightest. We remember better when we write with pen and paper. We learn better with whiteboards and paper books. The simple answer: Remove most computing from education entirely. Blue composition books, pencils, whiteboards is what trains humans. Calculators are helpful perhaps but it is quite possible that slide rules are better. We need humans that can critically think from first principles to counter the recycled information generated by AI.
  • __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
    I think this overlooks the potency and scarcity of 1:1 time with the teacher. If you've only got maybe a few minutes of that in an average schoolday there's a huge difference between whether or not you've talked it through with an AI before trying the question out on the teacher. They're wrong sometimes, but usually in verifiable ways. And they don't seem to know the difference between medicine and bioterrorism, so often they refuse. But these limitations are worth tolerating when the alternative is that our specialists in topic X are bogged down by questions about topic Y to the point where X isn't getting taught.
    • kelvinjps10 5mo ago
      And now they'll have less time because they will be bombarded with slop to no end.
      • __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
        Obviously generating your homework is a bad idea, and maybe assigning homework that can be generated is a bad idea. But neither of those are relevant to the problem I'm talking about which is about due diligence prior to asking for somebody's extended attention. Whether you're in class or at work, it's just courteous to ask an AI first.
  • skulk 5mo ago
    > computers do not help human education in the slightest I had no access to anyone who could teach me calculus as a kid except Khan Academy, so I think this is a gross exaggeration. But I agree in the end, that all my "real" learning did come from pen-and-paper practice, not watching videos.
• UltraSane 5mo ago
  Smart people will use LLMs to learn things faster. Education will adapt by doing all assessments in person.
• djoldman 5mo ago
  > Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. So something like, "Frontier AI has broken the 'high school' or 'university' format"? The hype surrounding AI is just pervasively exhausting: you've got the folks talking about an entire new age for humanity where we're shortly going to take over the entire universe. And you've got the folks talking about how our entire society is crumbling. Education is one place folks seem to throw up their hands and say nothing can be done. The fix is simple: students are to be evaluated on their performance in person. That's it. Any other "collapse of education" isn't due to AI, it's something else.
• HPsquared 5mo ago
  In my university education (2007-2011), 80% of the grade was based on exams at the end of each year, with no resits.
• AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
  I started teaching “how to build quality products using LLMs” full time recently, and most of what I teach is literally just the 101s of systems engineering, reliabily engineering, product development and project management: Exceptional clarity on the problem you have Know how to measure the problem you’re solving Numerically define what “done” is Make a deterministic and fully observable prototype Iterate in production with the user Expand user base as desired with user iteration in parallel forever Etc… Obviously a lot more in the details and these are all case by case, but these chatbots are basically perfect productivity machines for this process. The massive caveat to all of this is this only works for people that can reliably and truthfully define those items above, are willing to structure organization to make those your priorities. And actually most financial incentives demand the opposite of this process If most organizations were honest about it, they would simply say “we’re here to make the most money possible and we’re gonna do whatever it takes to do that” A lot of people don’t like that, so they don’t say it to come up with other bullshit. Ultimately that’s why I felt like my only option right now is to teach people how to do this because I assumed it was obvious and it is not.
• ori_b 5mo ago
  You haven't explained why anyone should value education in the world we're building, other than as a hobby.