3 ms·

This is not a silver bullet that will make everyone a genius. Not even the best human tutor can do that. But it can be a massive clearer of certain roadblocks f

This is not a silver bullet that will make everyone a genius. Not even the best human tutor can do that. But it can be a massive clearer of certain roadblocks for people with no better human help available. Countless people have to resort to learning from teachers who themselves are confused and know the material only shallowly and give confused and wrong explanations that can be very hard to untie for the learner. For most undergrad level things, LLMs have a breadth and depth of knowledge and online search capability that it can make you unstuck on some misunderstanding quite effectively. You still have to work. It's not magic. But the goalpost cannot be to catapult the median person to become Einstein. It's a tool. Luckily I had my dad available who is a scientist, during my high school and he corrected several fundamental mis-explanations of my teacher that even to my mind logically simply didn't add up. I learned not to relay this back to the teacher of course and sometimes regurgitated the wrong answer in tests. Not everyone is so lucky. This has been my frustration quite often. Textbooks are sometimes wrong, both because the author really doesn't have good expertise on that slice of the topic or out of didactic simplification reasons. Having an LLM that can consult the real grownup literature and give the full story, not the birds-and-bees is quite useful.

yoz-y 2mo ago
I remember books using simplified models, but being flat out wrong?
- bonoboTP 2mo ago
  It is sometimes typos, but even those can be confusing. But okay I'll admit books are usually on the end of simplification, at least for hard sciences. But sometimes they do handle the edges of the authors knowledge and sometimes misconceptions creep in. Famous ones include the reason for airplanes flying or similar "let's relate the hard science to practical reality" and making mistakes there where they think they can just improvise and wing it. Even evolution is sometimes explained very wrong. History and humanities is more murky. Of course "it's just simplified" is a defense that can be attempted to explain away all mistakes.

yoz-y 2mo ago

I remember books using simplified models, but being flat out wrong?

bonoboTP 2mo ago
It is sometimes typos, but even those can be confusing. But okay I'll admit books are usually on the end of simplification, at least for hard sciences. But sometimes they do handle the edges of the authors knowledge and sometimes misconceptions creep in. Famous ones include the reason for airplanes flying or similar "let's relate the hard science to practical reality" and making mistakes there where they think they can just improvise and wing it. Even evolution is sometimes explained very wrong. History and humanities is more murky. Of course "it's just simplified" is a defense that can be attempted to explain away all mistakes.