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A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

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Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#291

Post by wrp »

Eisenstein wrote: post #284
sinuhe69 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have forgotten that pedagogy is based on science and research. That is why it is effective for the masses . Anecdotal evidence will never refute the result. Take learning to read, for example. While you can learn to read in a number of ways, some of which are quite unusual, such as memorising the whole picture book and its sound, research has clearly shown that using the phonics approach is the most effective. Or…

"Although some studies have shown various gains in achievement (Marzano & Pickering, 2007), the relationship between academic achievement and homework is so unclear (Cooper & Valentine, 2001) that using research to definitively state that homework is effective in all contexts is presumptive." American Secondary Education 45(2) Spring 2017 Examining Homework Bennett

About a decade ago, it was a hot fashion in Education schools to argue that homework did not promote skill development. I don't know if that's still the case, as fashions in Education can change abruptly. But consider what this position means. They are saying "practice does not improve skill", which goes completely against the past century or so of research in psychology.

If your field depends on underpowered studies run by people with marginal understanding of statistics, you can gather support for any absurd position.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#292

Post by jbmilgrom »

dawidloubser wrote: post #266
kamaal wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come... Well that's not how LLMs work. Don't use an LLM to do thinking for you. You use LLMs to work for you, while you tell(after thinking) it what's to be done. Basically things like- . Attach a click handler to this button with x, y, z params and on click route it to the path /a/b/c . Change the color of this header to purple. . Parse the json in param…

I think that anybody who finds the process of clumsily describing the above examples to an LLM in some text box using english and waiting for it to spit out some code which you hope is suitable for your given programming context and codebase more efficient than just expressing the logic directly in your programming language in an efficient editor, probably suffers from multiple weaknesses: - Poor editor / editing set…

There's a new mode of programming (with AI) that doesn't require english and also results in massive efficiency gains. I now only need to begin a change and the AI can normally pick up on the pattern and do the rest, via subsequent "tab" key hits as I audit each change in real time. It's like I'm expressing the change I want via a code example to a capable intern that quickly picks up on it and can type at 100x my speed but not faster than I read.

I'm using Cursor btw. It's almost a different form factor compared to something like GH copilot.

I think it's also worth noting that I'm using TypeScript with a functional programming style. The state of the program is immutable and encoded via strongly typed inputs and outputs. I spend (mental) effort reifying use-cases via enums or string literals, enabling a comprehensive switch over all possible branches as opposed to something like imperative if statements. All this to say, that a lot of the code I write in this type of style can be thought of as a kind of boilerplate. The hard part is deciding what to do; effecting the change through the codebase is more easily ascertained from a small start.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#293

Post by skydhash »

kamaal wrote: post #280
skydhash wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm too good at my editor (currently Emacs, previously Vim), but the fact is that I can type all of this faster than dictating it to an AI and verifying its output.

Yes, editor proficiency is something that beats these things any day. In fact if you are familiar with keyboard macros, in both vim and emacs you can do a lot of text heavy lifting tasks. I don't see these as opposing traits. One can use both the goodness of vim AND LLMs at the same time. Why pick one, when you can pick both?

> One can use both the goodness of vim AND LLMs at the same time. Why pick one, when you can pick both?

I mostly use manuals, books, and the occasional forum searches. And the advantage is that you pick surrounding knowledge. And more consistent writing. And today, I know where some of the good stuff are. You're not supposed to learn everything in one go. I built a knowledge map where I can find what I want in a more straightforward manner. No need to enter in a symbiosis with an LLM.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#294

Post by low_tech_love »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #258
low_tech_love wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a (senior) lecturer in a university, I’m with you on most of what you wrote. The truth is that every teacher must immediately think: if any of their assignments or examinations involve something that could potentially be GPT-generated, it will be GPT-generated. It might be easy to spot such a thing, but you’ll be spending hours writing feedback while sifting through the rivers of meaningless artificially-generated…

A genuine question, have you evaluated AI for marking written work? I'm not an educator, but it seems to me like gippity would be better at analyzing a students paper than writing it in the first place. Your prompt could provide the AI the marking criteria, or the rubric, and have it summarize how well the paper hits the important points.

Never say never, but I do not plan on doing this. This sounds quite surreal: a loop where the students pretend to learn and I pretend to teach? I would… hm… I’ve never heard of such… I mean, this is definitely not how it is in reality… right…

(Jokes aside, I have an unhealthy, unstoppable need to feel proud of my work, so no I won’t do that. For now…)

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#295

Post by visarga »

treflop wrote: post #170
margalabargala wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the presence of sufficiently good and ubiquitous tools, knowing how to do some base thing loses most or all of its value. In a world where everyone has a phone/calculator in their pocket, remembering how to do long division on paper is not worthwhile. If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454", it is not worth your time to do that by hand rather than plugging it into your phone's calculator. In a world where…

Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours. The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right. If we get a point where the output of AI is trustworthy, that's a whole different kind of world altogether.

> Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours.

This is basically how AI research is conducted. It's alchemy.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#296

Post by visarga »

fhd2 wrote: post #194
aaplok wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly use the AI to do everything Users are not a monolithic group. Some users/students absolutely use AI blindly. There are also many, many ways to use AI counterproductively. One of the most pernicious I have noticed is users who turn to AI for the initial idea without reflecting about the problem first. This removes a critical step from the creative proces…

I'm terrified when I see people get a whiff of a problem, and immediately turn to ChatGPT. If you don't even think about the problem, you have a roundabout zero chance of understanding it - and a similar chance of solving it. I run into folks like that very rarely, but when I do, it gives me the creeps. Then again, I bet some of these people were doing the same with Google in the past, landing on some low quality SEO…

> I'm terrified when I see people get a whiff of a problem, and immediately turn to ChatGPT.

Not a problem for me, I work on prompt development, I can't ask GPT how to fix its mistakes because it has no clue. Prompting will probably be the last defense of reasoning, the only place where you can't get AI help.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#297

Post by Eisenstein »

wrp wrote: post #291
Eisenstein wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Although some studies have shown various gains in achievement (Marzano & Pickering, 2007), the relationship between academic achievement and homework is so unclear (Cooper & Valentine, 2001) that using research to definitively state that homework is effective in all contexts is presumptive." American Secondary Education 45(2) Spring 2017 Examining Homework Bennett

About a decade ago, it was a hot fashion in Education schools to argue that homework did not promote skill development. I don't know if that's still the case, as fashions in Education can change abruptly. But consider what this position means. They are saying "practice does not improve skill", which goes completely against the past century or so of research in psychology. If your field depends on underpowered studies…

> They are saying "practice does not improve skill", which goes completely against the past century or so of research in psychology.

You haven't made the argument that what they are practicing is valuable or effective.

I'm sure they get better at doing homework by doing a lot of homework, but do they develop any transferable skills?

It seems you are begging the question here.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#298

Post by visarga »

ratedgene wrote: post #25

I was talking to a teacher today that works with me at length about the impact of AI LLM models are having now when considering student's attitude towards learning. When I was young, I refused to learn geography because we had map applications. I could just look it up. I did the same for anything I could, offload the cognitive overhead to something better -- I think this is something we all do consciously or not. Tha…

> How can a human be a facilitator and shepherd of the workflows in such a way that can complement the model and grow the human?

Humans must use what the AI doesn't have - physicality. We have hands and feet, we can do things in the world. AI just responds to our prompts from the cloud. So the human will have to test ideas in reality, to validate, do experiments. AI can ideate, we need to use our superior access and life-long context to help it keep on the right track.

We also have another unique quality - we can be punished, we are accountable. AI cannot be meaningfully punished for wrongdoing, what can you do to an algorithm? But a human can assume responsibility for an AI in critical scenarios. When there is a lot of value at stake we need someone who can be accountable for the outcome.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#299

Post by margalabargala »

treflop wrote: post #230
margalabargala wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For replacement like I described, sure. But it will be very useful long before that. AI that writes a bash script doesn't need to be better than an experienced engineer. It doesn't even need to be better than a junior engineer. It just needs to be better than Stack Overflow. That bar is really not far away.

You’re changing the goal post. Your original post was saying that you don’t need to know fundamentals. It was not about whether AI is useful or not.

I'm not changing goalposts, I was responding to what you said about AI spitting out something wrong and you spending 3 hours debugging it.

My original point about not needing fundamentals would obviously require AI to, y'know, not hallucinate errors that take three hours to debug. We're clearly not there yet. The original goalposts remain the same.

Since human conversations often flow from one topic to another, in addition to the goal post of "not needing fundamentals" in my original post, my second post introduced a goalpost of "being broadly useful". You're correct that it's not the same goalpost as in my first comment, which is not unexpected, as the comment in question is also not my first comment.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#300

Post by margalabargala »

abduhl wrote: post #282
TSP00N3 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is only one correct way to calculate 5/2+3. The order is PEMDAS[0]. You divide before adding. Maybe you are thinking that 5/(2+3) is the same as 5/2+3, which is not the case. Improper math syntax doesn’t mean there are two potential answers, but rather that the person that wrote it did so improperly. [0] https://www.mathsisfun.com/operation-order-pemdas.html

So we agree that there is more than one way to interpret 5/2+3 (a correct and an incorrect way) and therefore that the GP statement below is wrong. “Which is a question that can be interpreted in only one way. And done only one way.” The question for calculators is then the same as the question for LLMs: can you trust the calculator? How do you know if it’s correct when you never learned the “correct” way and you’re…

> So we agree that there is more than one way to interpret 5/2+3 (a correct and an incorrect way) and therefore that the GP statement below is wrong.

No. There being "more than one way" to interpret implies the meaning is ambiguous. It's not.

There's not one incorrect way to interpret that math statement, there are infinite incorrect ways to do so. For example, you could interpret as being a poem about cats.

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