3 ms·

A home can also be built of mud bricks and heated by dung. The issue you’re describing is a mindset/cultural one, not a technological one. The same cheating m

by _aavaa_ 2mo ago

A home can also be built of mud bricks and heated by dung. The issue you’re describing is a mindset/cultural one, not a technological one. The same cheating machine can be used as a tutor. Those same cheating students understand, that at the gym, they themselves have to lift the weights to get strong, but that mindset doesn’t carry over to their classes.

d_silin 2mo ago
LLMs are like anabolic steroids for the brain. Surely you can do more with them, but you are better without them. Access to them should be restricted, especially for untrained minds.
- _aavaa_ 2mo ago
  That’s a bad analogy, you still have to put all the effort yourself at the gym while on steroids. Perhaps LLMs are a forklift.
  - d_silin 2mo ago
    Ha! Steroids give you muscle mass without lifting, believe it or not. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101 Of course, side effects are a different story.
    - NopIdoN 2mo ago
      but I can deal with the side effects using my free strength!
  - thegreenswede 2mo ago
    Not true actually
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
GPerson 2mo ago
This is the most profound comment I’ve ever read on this website. How do we do push the culture in a direction such that productive intellectual pursuits will actually be intrinsically desirable in the AI era?
- _aavaa_ 2mo ago
  > "It's easier to get and raise a child > Than to put character in him. No one > Has ever found a way to make a fool > Wise or a bad man good. If god had taught > This to the children of Asclepius— > How to cure badness or a muddled brain— > What handsome fees they'd earn!" That was Theogenis from the 6th century BC. I don’t think we’re any closer today than they were back then.
  - NateEag 2mo ago
    I'm an agnostic, but the closest thing I've seen to consistent success in producing wise, selfless people are mystical spiritual experiences. Even they are not very reliable. The drug-induced ones don't seem to work as well, in my study of anecdotes on the topic, so it may well be that trying to scale up mystical experience would defeat the purpose of so doing.
bunderbunder 2mo ago
To go with the gym analogy, thus far it would seem that using AI to help study seems to be working out about as well as the Enhanced Games did. Before we get ahead of ourselves and hype up AI as a tool for making people smarter, let’s first demonstrate that AI really does help them learn better. Otherwise we risk wasting a lot of time and money on silicon snake oil.
- _aavaa_ 2mo ago
  I don’t think the comparison is fair, consider the incentives for the Enhanced Games. Once an athletic declared their taking banned substances, they are barred from every other competition, so it’s no surprise that “clean” athletes dominate. As for proof, I think it’s self evident for anyone who has tried to us it in that way. If you’re studying math ask it to generate more questions for you to try. If you don’t understand a concept, have it use the Socratic method on you. Learning a language, talk back and forth with it over voice. Writing an essay, have it mark and proofread it and provide feedback based on known good criteria.
  - bunderbunder 2mo ago
    The thing that really made the Enganced Games à debacle isn’t that the participants failed to beat top clean athletes. It’s that they failed to beat their own performance from when they were still clean. Meaning that they didn’t just fail to demonstrate that these supplements could lead to superhuman performance. They didn’t even just fail to demonstrate that they enhance performance. They failed to demonstrate that their overall effect isn’t deleterious. And yet everyone involved believed quite firmly, based in part on personal experience, that it was self-evident that these supplements would make them better athletes. A lot of the arguments for AI in education aren’t far off from the reasoning behind the kinds of popular supplements they used in the Enhanced Games. The limits of that style of thinking are demonstrated quite nicely in the 2010 Canadian Medical Association Journal article “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/
pjc50 2mo ago
As all the cheating comments are referencing, the students don't necessarily want to get strong (that is a lot of work), but to get the qualification which unlocks the good jobs. We haven't yet got to the downstream question of what white collar jobs are going to look like in the AI era.

by _aavaa_ 2mo ago

d_silin 2mo ago

LLMs are like anabolic steroids for the brain. Surely you can do more with them, but you are better without them. Access to them should be restricted, especially for untrained minds.

_aavaa_ 2mo ago
That’s a bad analogy, you still have to put all the effort yourself at the gym while on steroids. Perhaps LLMs are a forklift.
- d_silin 2mo ago
  Ha! Steroids give you muscle mass without lifting, believe it or not. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101 Of course, side effects are a different story.
  - NopIdoN 2mo ago
    but I can deal with the side effects using my free strength!
- thegreenswede 2mo ago
  Not true actually
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

GPerson 2mo ago

This is the most profound comment I’ve ever read on this website. How do we do push the culture in a direction such that productive intellectual pursuits will actually be intrinsically desirable in the AI era?

_aavaa_ 2mo ago
> "It's easier to get and raise a child > Than to put character in him. No one > Has ever found a way to make a fool > Wise or a bad man good. If god had taught > This to the children of Asclepius— > How to cure badness or a muddled brain— > What handsome fees they'd earn!" That was Theogenis from the 6th century BC. I don’t think we’re any closer today than they were back then.
- NateEag 2mo ago
  I'm an agnostic, but the closest thing I've seen to consistent success in producing wise, selfless people are mystical spiritual experiences. Even they are not very reliable. The drug-induced ones don't seem to work as well, in my study of anecdotes on the topic, so it may well be that trying to scale up mystical experience would defeat the purpose of so doing.

bunderbunder 2mo ago

To go with the gym analogy, thus far it would seem that using AI to help study seems to be working out about as well as the Enhanced Games did. Before we get ahead of ourselves and hype up AI as a tool for making people smarter, let’s first demonstrate that AI really does help them learn better. Otherwise we risk wasting a lot of time and money on silicon snake oil.

_aavaa_ 2mo ago
I don’t think the comparison is fair, consider the incentives for the Enhanced Games. Once an athletic declared their taking banned substances, they are barred from every other competition, so it’s no surprise that “clean” athletes dominate. As for proof, I think it’s self evident for anyone who has tried to us it in that way. If you’re studying math ask it to generate more questions for you to try. If you don’t understand a concept, have it use the Socratic method on you. Learning a language, talk back and forth with it over voice. Writing an essay, have it mark and proofread it and provide feedback based on known good criteria.
- bunderbunder 2mo ago
  The thing that really made the Enganced Games à debacle isn’t that the participants failed to beat top clean athletes. It’s that they failed to beat their own performance from when they were still clean. Meaning that they didn’t just fail to demonstrate that these supplements could lead to superhuman performance. They didn’t even just fail to demonstrate that they enhance performance. They failed to demonstrate that their overall effect isn’t deleterious. And yet everyone involved believed quite firmly, based in part on personal experience, that it was self-evident that these supplements would make them better athletes. A lot of the arguments for AI in education aren’t far off from the reasoning behind the kinds of popular supplements they used in the Enhanced Games. The limits of that style of thinking are demonstrated quite nicely in the 2010 Canadian Medical Association Journal article “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/

pjc50 2mo ago

As all the cheating comments are referencing, the students don't necessarily want to get strong (that is a lot of work), but to get the qualification which unlocks the good jobs. We haven't yet got to the downstream question of what white collar jobs are going to look like in the AI era.