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

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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But if you are provided the answer, you can work backwards to figure out the technique. There is a large contingent here on HN that learned electronics by taking things apart, not by reading linearly through textbooks.

Reverse-engineering the technique from the answer is a different skill from creating the answer though. The latter requires more creativity, the former is deduction.

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

#62

> 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…

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I hope you are not an education professional with a view that narrow-minded.

Find me an "education professional" that disagrees with me, and we'll work on getting their teaching credentials revoked ASAP.

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 unso…

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

No, we're talking past each other.

Your claim is the current system is "broken" because you think teachers believe the "answer" is the ultimate goal. I refute that. The teacher does not believe the "answer" is the ultimate goal, they are teaching you techniques on how to solve problems, and the answer is the standard upon which you are being measured in correctness.

This is why "show your work" exists, your steps to get to the end (the answer) is employing the techniques, they measure how effective you are at getting there. The best teachers even mark you down if you make a mistake somewhere, but still get the right answer without proving it fully.

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

#65
post #55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Eh, on the surface this seems useful but I'm not sure it makes a dent. Transcript might be useful occasionally, but they aren't going to be referred to often - things still have to be distilled in the doctors notes, including things they don't say during the visit. They already have dictation systems for this, but none of the NLP systems are good enough to do it without checking, so time is about same. Coding isn't d…

The key here is not "a decade of improvements" but rather "can current tech be regulatory approved". The transcript provides context which is phi and invaluable. Doctors care a lot about billing codes

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But if you are provided the answer, you can work backwards to figure out the technique. There is a large contingent here on HN that learned electronics by taking things apart, not by reading linearly through textbooks.

I'd say test your theory, breaking electronics apart need only be a test to reverse the order in which you took them apart. That is only about as good as a memory test.

Test your theory on something that requires quite a few years of intuition building and understanding.

From my days as an MLE: Why does stochastic gradient descent, work?

From that question, you know the answer - it works! Great, now why should I believe you? I.e, prove it.

The knowledge to answer that question only really requires some understanding of stochastic processes, randomness, and vector calculus. But you would be pressed to get an answer like I did out of numerous people who did ML research and put things into all the types of conferences, and these people were not dumb at all, yet all of them used SGD in some form without really getting into why it works, effectively they do not get the tools they're using.

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

#67
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cute, but wrong.

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

#69
post #65
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, on the surface this seems useful but I'm not sure it makes a dent. Transcript might be useful occasionally, but they aren't going to be referred to often - things still have to be distilled in the doctors notes, including things they don't say during the visit. They already have dictation systems for this, but none of the NLP systems are good enough to do it without checking, so time is about same. Coding isn't d…

The key here is not "a decade of improvements" but rather "can current tech be regulatory approved". The transcript provides context which is phi and invaluable. Doctors care a lot about billing codes

Current tech [for reasonable versions of current] can be approved although not all configurations (basically you have to fix the model for a release cycle). It isn't good enough yet for most uses in the space you describe. Improving that state of affairs is more a data limitation than a technology one, probably, but medicine is also very conservative and will take it slowly to prove out.

Doctors care about getting paid, they mostly don't care about coding per se, and they don't do it themselves. It's not at all clear that a NLP AI would be more cost effective at it than the people who do it now. Where you will probably see it is auto-rejects, from the insurance side, forcing more iterations.

None of this stuff is off the radar of (at least some of ) the people who build medtech systems, they've been incorporating aspects for a long time. The idea that there is a sudden radical change to be made with todays tech is naive I think, lacking context of both the history of AI systems in medicine and the current techs' limitations...

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

#70
post #21

AI for improved education is noble, but what's the point of learning when AIs are going to do everything better than us in a few years? I already struggle with some intellectual laziness after subscribing to GPT4, which is fairly out of character for me. Why should I expend the mental energy on something when it can do the task for me? Now imagine GPT5, 6, and so on. People who "learn" are going to become a rarity.

Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; ... his great discovery was the use of letters ... This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.

Thamus replied: ... In this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing...

_The Phaedrus_, Plato, circa 370 BC

This conversation has been going on for a very long time. :-)

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