161–170 of 523 posts
Waiting for those people who post the "how do you use LLMS for X" questions on HN to come here and explain how this is a good thing.
Would you be upset if in the 70s you found out your sister was using a calculator to check her math homework?
I'm not trying to justify, or infer here, but I read recently that around 20% of American adults are functionally illiterate. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp I wonder how LLMs are going to affect these metrics.
The best way to handle this would be to talk to her and convince her to not use ChatGPT...
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Teachers aren't dumb here; they know what's going on. And they're actively working to figure out how best to navigate this situation. They're not looking to grade how well ChatGPT does in their course.
I have many teachers among my friends. So far, they're mostly powerless. If a student is creative, there is basically nothing that will prevent them from cheating at any homework/exam. My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.
My 13 y/o was lamenting something the other day and it turns out that she had written a paper and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to grade the paper and it returned a "B+". She was using GPT to basically pre-check the quality of her paper before submitting it after having actually written it herself. But it occurred to me that there are probably teachers out there who are taking the lazy route of using GPT to gra…
Tip for students: do well on your first assignment. The better teachers will give you the benefit of the doubt for mistakes on your future work. The bad teachers will just give you the same grade.
Having older siblings and friends with older siblings and resubmitting their essay is eye opening.
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When I taught a class of engineering students Python in 2015 they were all copying from each other, did some basic plagiarism checks and 40% had submitted identical code. The University then didn’t care, lots of international students paying higher fees than domestic students.
That's how universities lose their reputation, and that's why the programmer hiring process is so complicated.
The quality of the teaching or learning seems almost irrelevant already.
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Maybe Im reiterating the same point as you, but the experiment is an illustration of distinction between understanding and performance. Size of the model or perfect performance does not negate the distinction. IMO, the line of thinking in the metaphor is contingent on unanswered questions about self-awareness, which seems to be a definitional prerequisite for semantic understanding.
If we hypothesis perfect performance, the philosophical question is if that's a distinction without (or with) a difference. Perfect performance would simulate semantic understanding, no? More relevant to the real world though, how do we rate imperfect performance? If a Chinese Room that I have access to can make some logical leaps but not others, how do we rate this artificial intelligence? We have words to describe…
The thought experiment argues the exact opposite. The idea is you can have perfect Chinese but not understand a single word of what you are saying. The argument is that syntax (procedure based operation) and semantics (understanding) are distinct and separable.
As you extend the scope of the Chinese room from a single task (e.g. Chinese conversation) to human behavior in general, it converges with the question of if philosophical zombies can exist.
In terms of the Chinese room, the distinction IS the difference.
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Grades determine what college you go to, which determines the connections you make, which determines the trajectory of your entire life.
This never made sense to me, Unless the child is a literal genius or very charismatic, wouldn’t they almost certainly have worse prospects after graduating in the 10th to 30th percentile of their class at Harvard than from the 80th to 90th percentile of their class at Boston U? (Assuming they could even manage to squeak into Harvard in the first placd)
Parents are worried about the worst case scenario, and going to Harvard raises that floor by ensuring they can get noticed straight out of graduation, even if they are bottom of the class.
Waiting for those people who post the "how do you use LLMS for X" questions on HN to come here and explain how this is a good thing.
Would you be upset if in the 70s you found out your sister was using a calculator to check her math homework?
Change 'check' to 'do' and we'll have a discussion.
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How do you figure that? Isn't Harvard very much about the network of contacts?
‘The network of contacts’ isn’t some automatic mechanism that by default joins everyone in a class…? By definition to join a network they need to be accepted by their class peers.
But you'll be exposed to different people and opportunities by going to a state school instead of a community college, or a better school out of state with a scholarship vs. a state college, etc. The small differences matter.
I literally got my first job because my roommate's dad knew of someone looking for a software developer job. Would I have met that person in community college? Maybe! Lots of people with good networks go to community colleges, too - but I'd bet fewer than more expensive schools.