Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation • Hacker News Board

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#121

Post by ankit219 » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 3:52 PM UTC

regentbowerbird wrote: post #84

ankit219 wrote: post #55

There are two aspects to this from my pov. And I think it might be controversial. When i have a question about any topic, and I ask Chatgpt, i usually chat about more things, coming up with questions based on the answer, and mostly stupid questions. I feel like I am taking in the information, analyzing, and then diving deeper because I am curious. This is based on how I learn about stuff. I know i need to check a few…

> compared this to researching on the internet, there are some good aspects, but more often than not, I end up reading an opinionated post by someone (no matter the topic, if you go deep enough, you will land on an opinionated factual telling). ChatGPT is in fact opinionated, it has numerous political positions ("biases") and holds some subjects taboo. The difference is that a single actor chooses the political opini…

Yes that is true. Though that can be subsumed if you notice it, and ask the model to ignore those biases. (an extreme example would be opposition prep for a debate). I am not interested in politics and other related issues anyway.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#122

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 3:53 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #109

agumonkey wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one to expect a S curve regarding progress and not an eternal exponential ? People moving away from prideful principle to leverage new tech in the past doesn't guarantee that the same idea in the current context will pan out. But as you say.. we'll see.

Oh, you mean an S curve on the progress of the AI? Most of the discussion on the thread is about LLMs as they are right now. There's only one odd answer that throws an "AGI" around as if those things could think. Anyway, IMO, it's all way overblown. People will learn to second-guess the LLMs as soon as they are hit by a couple of bad answers.

hmm yeah sorry, I meant the benefits of humans using current AI.

by that I mean, leveraging writing was a benefit for humans to store data and think over longer term using a passive technique (stones, tablets, papyrus).. but an active tool might not have a positive effect on usage and brains.

if you give me shoes, i might run further to find food, if you give me a car i mostly stop running and there might be no better fruit 100 miles away than what I had on my hill. (weak metaphor)

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#123

Post by largbae » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 3:54 PM UTC

parsimo2010 wrote: post #87

ziddoap wrote: post #67

I'm certainly of two minds on this. On one hand, this reminds me of how all of the kids were going to be completely helpless in the real world because "no one carries a calculator in their pocket". Then calculators became something ~everyone has in their pocket (and the kids ended up just fine). On the other hand, I believe in the value of "learning to learn", developing media literacy, and all of the other positives…

tl;dr: I agree. We don't teach slide rules and log tables in school anymore. Calculators and computers have created a huge metacognitive laziness for me, and I teach calculus and have a PhD in statistics. I barely remember the unit circle except for multiples of pi/4 radians. I can do it in multiples of pi/6 but I'm slower. But guess what? I don't think I'm a worse mathematician because I don't remember these things…

I think you're right at the edge of explaining why this "laziness" is a good thing. Everything that we have made is built on what we had before, and abstracts away what we had before. 99% of us don't remember how to make even the simplest Assembly program, and yet we unleash billions of instructions per second on the world.

Even outside of math and computers, when was the last time you primed a well pump or filled an oil lamp? All of these tasks have been abstracted away, freeing us to focus on ever-more-specialized pursuits. Those that are useful will too be abstracted away, and for the better.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#124

Post by agentultra » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

probably_wrong wrote: post #50

agentultra wrote: post #11

So humans are supposed to review all of the code that GenAI creates. We’re supposed to ensure that it doesn’t generate (obvious?) errors and that it’s building the “right thing” in a manner prescribed by our requirements. The anecdotes from practitioners using GenAI in this way suggest it’s a good tool for experienced developers because they know what to look out for. Now we admit folks who don’t know what they’re do…

> Do they know when the GenAI is bullshitting them? Anecdote from a friend who teaches CS: this year a large number of students started adding unnecessary `break` instructions to their C code, like so: while (condition) { do_stuff(); if (!condition) { break; } } They asked around and realized that the common thread was ChatGPT - everyone who asked how loops work got a variation of "use break() to exit the loop", so t…

A colleague of mine once taught a formal methods course for students working on their masters -- not beginners by any stretch.

The exercise was to implement binary search given the textbook specification without any errors. An algorithm they had probably implemented in their first-year algorithms course at the very least. The students could write any tests they liked and add any assertions they thought would be useful. My colleague verified each submission against a formal specification. The majority of submission contained errors.

For a simple algorithm that a student at that level could be reasonably expected to know well!

Now... ChatGPT and other LLM-based systems, as far as I understand, cannot do formal reasoning on their own. It cannot tell you, with certainty, that your code is correct with regards to a specification. And it can't tell you if your specification contains errors. So what are students learning using these tools?

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#125

Post by TeamDman » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #116

klodolph wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They aren't considering the long term downside to this. This echoes sentiments from the 2010s centered around hiring. Companies generally don’t want to hire junior engineers and train them—this is an investment with risks of no return for the company doing the training. Basically, you take your senior engineers away from projects so they can train the juniors, and then the juniors now have the skills and credential…

Engineers partly did this to themselves. The career advice during that time period was to change jobs every few years, demanding higher and higher salaries. So now, employers don't want to pay to train entry-level people, as they know they are likely going to leave, and at the salaries demanded they don't want to hire junior folks.

If incentives to stay outweighed leaving, people would stay.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#126

Post by bluefirebrand » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

lr4444lr wrote: post #69

bluefirebrand wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs really build that bridge to precisely the answers I want. It is interesting that you describe this as "the answers you want" and not "the correct answer to the question I have" Not criticising you in particular, but this does sound to me like this approach has a good possibility of just reinforcing existing biases In fact the approach sounds very similar to "find a wikipedia article and then go dig through the…

Though I think you're reading more into my phrasing than I meant, the overall skepticism is fair. One thing I do have to be mindful of is asking the AI to check for alternatives, for dissenting or hypothetical answers, and sometimes I just ask it to rephrase to check for consistency. But doing all of that still takes way less time than searching for needles buried by SEO optimized garbage and well meaning but repetit…

> Though I think you're reading more into my phrasing than I meant, the overall skepticism is fair

I do want to re-iterate that I didn't intend to accuse you of only seeking to reinforce your biases

I read into your phrasing not to needle you, but because it set off some thoughts in my head, that's all

Thanks for being charitable with your reply, and I appreciate your thoughts

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#127

Post by Daishiman » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #116

klodolph wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They aren't considering the long term downside to this. This echoes sentiments from the 2010s centered around hiring. Companies generally don’t want to hire junior engineers and train them—this is an investment with risks of no return for the company doing the training. Basically, you take your senior engineers away from projects so they can train the juniors, and then the juniors now have the skills and credential…

Engineers partly did this to themselves. The career advice during that time period was to change jobs every few years, demanding higher and higher salaries. So now, employers don't want to pay to train entry-level people, as they know they are likely going to leave, and at the salaries demanded they don't want to hire junior folks.

This is only because companies don't want to raise salaries as engineers' skill levels increase. If companies put junior employees in higher salary bands as their skill levels increase there wouldn't be a problem.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#128

Post by 65 » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

ziddoap wrote: post #67

I'm certainly of two minds on this. On one hand, this reminds me of how all of the kids were going to be completely helpless in the real world because "no one carries a calculator in their pocket". Then calculators became something ~everyone has in their pocket (and the kids ended up just fine). On the other hand, I believe in the value of "learning to learn", developing media literacy, and all of the other positives…

It's astounding to me that people just like... always trust whatever the LLM says.

I have some friends who use ChatGPT for everything. From doing work to asking simple questions. One of my friends wanted a bio on a certain musician and asked ChatGPT. It's a little frightening he couldn't, you know, read the Wikipedia page of this musician, where all of the same information is and there are sources for this material.

My mom said she used ChatGPT to make a "capsule wardrobe" for her. I'm thinking to myself (I did not say this to her)... you can't just like look at your clothes and get rid of ones you don't wear? Why does a computer need to make this simple decision?

I'm really not sure LLMs should ever be used as a learning aid. I have never seen a reason to use them over, you know, searching something online. Or thinking of your own creative story. If someone can make a solid use case as to why LLMs are useful I would like to hear.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#129

Post by lazybreather » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

regentbowerbird wrote: post #84

ankit219 wrote: post #55

There are two aspects to this from my pov. And I think it might be controversial. When i have a question about any topic, and I ask Chatgpt, i usually chat about more things, coming up with questions based on the answer, and mostly stupid questions. I feel like I am taking in the information, analyzing, and then diving deeper because I am curious. This is based on how I learn about stuff. I know i need to check a few…

> compared this to researching on the internet, there are some good aspects, but more often than not, I end up reading an opinionated post by someone (no matter the topic, if you go deep enough, you will land on an opinionated factual telling). ChatGPT is in fact opinionated, it has numerous political positions ("biases") and holds some subjects taboo. The difference is that a single actor chooses the political opini…

Political searches I assume would be very very minor percentage of real learning. Even in such cases, I would rather rely on a good LLMs response than scrounging websites of mainstream media or blogs etc. For an objective response, reading through opinionated articles and forming my opinion is an absolute waste of time. I'd want the truth as accurately as possible. Plus people don't generally change political opinions based what they read. They read stuff aligning with their side.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#130

Post by epolanski » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

parpfish wrote: post #39

epolanski wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand you might be getting worse at reading those papers yourself. The more youngsters skip the hassle of banging their heads on some topic the less able they will be to learn at later age. There's more to learning than getting information, it's also about processing it (which we are offloading to LLMs). In fact I'd say that the whole point of going through school is to learn how to process and absorb inf…

What if the LLMs are teaching us that long form prose/technical writing is just a really bad, unnatural format for communication but natural dialogues are a good format?

The way I see it it is sort of like debugging code you're not well accustomed with.

While you're still going to learn whether you go through the hassle of understanding the system, develop a method for debugging it and learning about it along the way...

Of course a senior could point you to the issue right away, probably an llm too, and even provide a learning opportunity, but does it hold the same lasting impact of being able to overcome the burden yourself?

Which one makes a more lasting effect on your abilities and skills?

Again, LLMs are a tool, but if people in school/college start using it to offload the reasoning part they are not developing it themselves.