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An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI

washingtonpost.com

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Re: An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI

#41

Post by juniperror »

latency-guy2 wrote: post #24
juniperror wrote: post #12

> and never coughs up answers. I have fought this my whole life, and only in my adulthood, and self guided learning, have I found the freedom to accept it: I learn better from being given the answer and working backwards. (Even literally reading textbooks “backwards”) I hope there’s more nuance to this than this quote suggests, because I shudder to imagine a student experiencing what I did but now with a tireless une…

> Aligning digital teachers with our broken education system that thinks “answers” are the important part of education is a terrible terrible idea. Your position is inherently incorrect and a conflation of what you think is being done. Being provided the answer might be a decent method to learning X concept. But the answer is ALWAYS downwind of the techniques, which you are actually being taught every step of the way…

> How would you solve a problem that no one has ever touched before, and that no one knows the answer to? Where are you going to be provided the answer?

This is very near and dear to my heart.

We are talking about “teaching” and I doubt anyone who supports the current education status quo is advocating to teach using unsolved problems.

That said, I do feel, personally, and have long advocated for, teaching using unsolved problems as a better technique, because you learn strategies for approaching a problem much better than: here’s theorem 13.4 heres an exercise problem that uses the theorem, what’s the answer?

It reads like you see my opinions are black and white and yours as spectra.

Using your own reading on your own comment the logical conclusion is “a system that teaches to an answer will be unable to answer unanswered questions because the students were only taught to answer questions that already have answers.”

A great example of the answer being the most useless part of one’s own personal knowledge is Timothy Gowers YouTube content:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=byjhpzEoXFs

But who’s cares what some YouTuber is up to? He’s just out here promoting an inherently incorrect education method wrought from a dysfunctional mind.

Re: An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI

#42

Post by swatcoder »

julienchastang wrote: post #37
edtechdev wrote: post #10

It struggles with basic math: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-is-tutoring-students-but-stil...

I've done a lot of experimentation in this space with ChatGPT4 and also the Wolfram plugin. I've mixed but generally good results when working through basic physics problems though you have to be careful about how you prompt. In particular, you want to break down the problem into smaller bite size chunks and eliminate ancillary information. Interestingly, even when it gets the math and algebra wrong, I still find it…

That doesn't sound anything like a product suited for young learners, many of whom are unprepared to practice the finesse you're talking about and many of whom will want to put no more effort in than strictly necessary.

That sounds like something an especially patient autodidact might use to automate some busy work or help them explore the basics of a new topic, which is fine, but not what the article is trying to champion.

Re: An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI

#43

Post by sp332 »

juniperror wrote: post #12

> and never coughs up answers. I have fought this my whole life, and only in my adulthood, and self guided learning, have I found the freedom to accept it: I learn better from being given the answer and working backwards. (Even literally reading textbooks “backwards”) I hope there’s more nuance to this than this quote suggests, because I shudder to imagine a student experiencing what I did but now with a tireless une…

I think some textbooks are really just written that badly.

Re: An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI

#44

Post by ska »

Aaronstotle wrote: post #7

I think the people who automatically had a negative view of AI didn't think it through, when ChatGPT came out in Nov 2022, the realization was that something like this tutor friendly AI would be on the horizon. Personally, I am looking forward to AI enabled healthcare, my sister has been dealing with health problems and she has to wait up to a month between appointments. At the very least AI can be used to speed up a…

Versions of this have been in use since the 90s, but haven't really made a dent in the systemic issues that cause these delays. What do you think has changed to make that different now?

Re: An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI

#45

Post by _a_a_a_ »

patcon wrote: post #31
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I understand them as quite dysfunctional, and not something that should be catered to I'd be happier to accept this if you'd explain why it's dysfunctional.

Maybe my rationale was just unconvincing to you (and I respect that), but I said it in the next paragraph. If you felt inclined to offer what's unconvincing about that, I'm open-minded about changing my perspective, or maybe I can better articulate beyond those words EDIT: I realize maybe I prematurely submitted and it was just the first paragraph for a minute. It was all one thought, so apologies if that's what happ…

Thank you, but I did see the whole answer (the second paragraph) when I responded. I sort of know what you're saying about not spoon feeding people, but learning happens best for a person according to that person, and working backwards from an answer can be as illuminating for me as it was for the other guy (and it can be illuminating for the wrong reason – revealing that it was a poor question in the first place).

I don't think you can be prescriptive about how people should learn. In the end we'll have to be able to operate without someone giving us the answers, but in the beginning however we get the learning process we need, that's all that counts.

Re: An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI

#46

Post by juniperror »

adastra22 wrote: post #17
juniperror wrote: post #12

> and never coughs up answers. I have fought this my whole life, and only in my adulthood, and self guided learning, have I found the freedom to accept it: I learn better from being given the answer and working backwards. (Even literally reading textbooks “backwards”) I hope there’s more nuance to this than this quote suggests, because I shudder to imagine a student experiencing what I did but now with a tireless une…

Getting the answer and working backwards teaches you to use what others have created within very narrow guide rails. Figuring out the answer for yourself (with some minimal guidance) teaches you to create new things. We should strive for the latter.

Getting the answer and working backwards teaches you to use what others have created in novel ways to find new solutions to old problems. Figuring out the answer for yourself (with some minimal guidance) teaches you toy problems with answers have answers. We should strive for the former.

Re: An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI

#47

Post by scblock »

latency-guy2 wrote: post #24
juniperror wrote: post #12

> and never coughs up answers. I have fought this my whole life, and only in my adulthood, and self guided learning, have I found the freedom to accept it: I learn better from being given the answer and working backwards. (Even literally reading textbooks “backwards”) I hope there’s more nuance to this than this quote suggests, because I shudder to imagine a student experiencing what I did but now with a tireless une…

> Aligning digital teachers with our broken education system that thinks “answers” are the important part of education is a terrible terrible idea. Your position is inherently incorrect and a conflation of what you think is being done. Being provided the answer might be a decent method to learning X concept. But the answer is ALWAYS downwind of the techniques, which you are actually being taught every step of the way…

Hilarious, given how many real world problems start with the "answer" and the actual question is "how do we get there?".

Re: An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI

#49

Post by _a_a_a_ »

patcon wrote: post #23
westhanover wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nonsensical statement produced by a chat bot. There are no invalid ways of learning.

There are 100% at least some ways of learning that ill prepare us for the world we're eventually going to be thrown into I mean, we're talking "learning". Even negative reinforcement and beatings are a way that was a "learning style" at one point, that ppl defended as "worked for me". "Every way of learning is fine" is not a sensible way to enter the conversation about education

umm, "Even negative reinforcement and beatings are a way that was a "learning style" at one point" is a teaching style, not a learning style.

Re: An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI

#50

Post by wdh505 »

mjr00 wrote: post #30
Aaronstotle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with my uncles law firm and know that the process for getting medical records is a huge pain. Back then I never understood why there couldn't be some better system for getting medical records between authorized parties. Growing up, my family friend who is a trauma surgeon always told me she hated all the paperwork she had to do.

Okay. How, specifically, does AI help with any of that?

1) Transcript of the patient and doctor conversation. 2) Creation of possible icd10 diagnosis and treatment codes from the transcript. With suggestions of which ones are most likely to be properly processed the first time per the insurance company of this patient. 3) Quick review of the transcripts of previous visits to determine if there are any overriding concerning trends for this patient. 4) suggested additional tests to reduce uncertainty in the diagnosis and prognosis according to a pre programmed cost to benefit ratio.

I could go on. The local personal health information (phi) approved ai could greatly reduce time spent on paperwork and double work like resubmitting procedure codes to billing.

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