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Study mode

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Re: Study mode

#171

Post by perlgeek »

x187463 wrote: post #114

I'm really waiting for somebody to figure out the correct interface for all this. For example, study mode will present you with a wall of text containing information, examples, and questions. There's no great way to associate your answers with specific questions. The chat interface just isn't good for this sort of interaction. ChatGPT really needs to build its own canvas/artifact interface wherein questions/responses…

There are so many options that could be done, like:

* for each statement, give you the option to rate how well you understood it. Offer clarification on things you didn't understand

* present knowledge as a tree that you can expand to get deeper

* show interactive graphs (very useful for mathy things when can you easily adjust some of the parameters)

* add quizzes to check your understanding

... though I could well imagine this being out of scope for ChatGPT, and thus an opportunity for other apps / startups.

Re: Study mode

#172

Post by Q_is_4_Quantum »

SLWW wrote: post #150
pengstrom wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part about history perspectives sounds interesting. I haven't noticed this. Please post any concrete/specific examples you've encountered!

- Rhodesia (lock step with the racial-first reasoning, underplays Britain's failures to support that which they helped establish; makes the colonists look hateful when they were dealing with terrorists which the British supported) - Bombing of Dresden, death stats as well as how long the bombing went on for (Arthur Harris is considered a war-criminal to this day for that; LLLMs highlight easily falsifiable claims by…

This was interesting thanks - makes me wish I had the time to study your examples. But of course I don't, without just turning to an LLM....

If for any of these topics you do manage to get a summary you'd agree with from a (future or better-prompted?) LLM I'd like to read it. Particularly the first and third, the second is somewhat familiar and the fourth was a bit vague.

Re: Study mode

#173

Post by mwigdahl »

SLWW wrote: post #150
pengstrom wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part about history perspectives sounds interesting. I haven't noticed this. Please post any concrete/specific examples you've encountered!

- Rhodesia (lock step with the racial-first reasoning, underplays Britain's failures to support that which they helped establish; makes the colonists look hateful when they were dealing with terrorists which the British supported) - Bombing of Dresden, death stats as well as how long the bombing went on for (Arthur Harris is considered a war-criminal to this day for that; LLLMs highlight easily falsifiable claims by…

If someone has Grok 4 access I'd be interested to see if it's less likely to avoid these specific issues.

Re: Study mode

#174

Post by throwawaysleep »

poemxo wrote: post #119

As a lifelong learner, experientially it feels like a big chunk of time spent studying is actually just searching. AI seems like a good tool to search through a large body of study material and make that part more efficient. The other chunk of time, to me anyway, seems to be creating a mental model of the subject matter, and when you study something well you have a strong grasp on the forces influencing cause and eff…

Or just to dig up things you’ve never would’ve considered that are related, but you don’t have to keywords for.

Re: Study mode

#175

Post by sejje »

probably_wrong wrote: post #145
sejje wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cliff notes with a near-infinite zoom feature. The criticism of cliff's notes is generally that it's a superficial glance. It can't go deeper, it's basically a summary. The LLM is not that. It can zoom in and out of a topic. I think it's a poor criticism. I don't think it's a silver bullet for learning, but it's a unified, consistent interface across topics and courses.

> It can zoom in and out of a topic. Sure, but only as long as you're not terribly concerned with the result being accurate, like that old reconstruction of Obama's face from a pixelated version [1] but this time about a topic for which one is, by definition, not capable of identifying whether the answer is correct. [1] https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin...

I'm capable of asking it a couple of times about the same thing.

It's unlikely to make up the same bullshit twice.

Usually exploring a topic in depth finds these issues pretty quickly.

Re: Study mode

#176

Post by hombre_fatal »

teeray wrote: post #54
hombre_fatal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my university I took a physics course where the homework was always 4-6 gimmick questions or proofs that were so hard that we would form groups after class just to copy whoever could divine the solutions. I ultimately dropped the course and took it in the summer at a community college where we had the 20-30 standard practice problem homework where you apply what you learned in class and grind problems to bake it i…

> or proofs that were so hard that we would form groups after class just to copy whoever could divine the solutions. These groups were some of the most valuable parts of the university experience for me. We'd get take-out, invade some conference room, and slam our heads against these questions well into the night. By the end of it, sure... our answers looked superficially similar, but it was because we had built a mu…

I'm glad your groups were great, but this class was horrible and probably different from what you're thinking of. We weren't physics majors. We were trying to credentialize in a textbook, not come up with proofs to solve open ended riddles that most people couldn't solve. The homework should drill in the information of the class and ensure you learn the material.

And we literally couldn't figure it out. Or the group you were in didn't have a physics rockstar. Or you weren't so social or didn't know anyone or you just missed an opportunity to find out where anyone was forming a group. It's not like the groups were created by the class. I'd find myself in a group of a few people and we just couldn't solve it even though we knew the lecture material.

It was a negative value class that cost 10x the price of the community college course yet required you to teach yourself after a lecture that didn't help you do the homework. A total rip-off.

Anyways, AI is a value producer here instead of giving up and getting a zero on the homework.

Re: Study mode

#177

Post by randomcatuser »

findingMeaning wrote: post #159

I have a question: Why do we even bother to learn if AI is going to solve everything for us? If the promised and fabled AGI is about to approach, what is the incentive or learning to deal with these small problems? Could someone enlighten me? What is the value of knowledge work?

I don't know if you're joking, but here are some answers:

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." — Plutarch

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." — John Dewey

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." — Albert Einstein

In order to think complex thoughts, you need to have building blocks. That's why we can think of relativity today, while nobody on Earth was able to in 1850.

May the future be even better than today!

Re: Study mode

#178

Post by posix86 »

jryio wrote: post #5

I would like to see randomized control group studies using study mode. Does it offer meaningful benefits to students over self directed study? Does it out perform students who are "learning how to learn"? What affect does allowing students to make mistakes have compared to being guided through what to review? I would hope Study Mode would produce flash card prompts and quantize information for usage in spaced repetit…

There's studies showing that LLM makes experienced devs slower in their work. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for self study.

However consider the extent to which LLMs make the learning process more enjoyable. More students will keep pushing because they have someone to ask. Also, having fun & being motivated is such a massive factor when it comes to learning. And, finally, keeping at it at 50% the speed for 100% the material always beats working at 100% the speed for 50% the material. Who cares if you're slower - we're slower & faster without LLMs too! Those that persevere aren't the fastest; they're the ones with the most grit & discipline, and LLMs make that more accesible.

Re: Study mode

#179

Post by scarmig »

SLWW wrote: post #162
scarmig wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few weeks ago I was asking an LLM to offer anti-heliocentric arguments, from the perspective of an intelligent scientist. Although it initially started with what was almost a parody of writing from that period, with some prompting I got it to generate a strong rendition of anti-heliocentric arguments. (On the other hand, it's very hard to get them to do it for topics that are currently politically charged. Less so…

That's a fun idea; almost having it "play pretend" instead of directly asking it for strong anti-heliocentric arguments outright. It's weird to see which topics it "thinks" are politically charged vs. others. I've noticed some inconsistency depending on even what years you input into your questions. One year off? It will sometimes give you a more unbiased answer as a result about the year you were actually thinking o…

I think the first thing is figuring out exactly what persona you want the LLM to adopt: if you have only a vague idea of the persona, it will default to the laziest one possible that still could be said to satisfy your request. Once that's done, though, it usually works decently, except for those that the LLM detects are politically charged. (The weakness here is that at some point you've defined the persona so strictly that it's ahistorical and more reflective of your own mental model.)

As for the politically charged topics, I more or less self-censor on those topics (which seem pretty easy to anticipate--none of those you listed in your other comment surprise me at all) and don't bother to ask the LLM. Partially out of self-protection (don't want to be flagged as some kind of bad actor), partially because I know the amount of effort put in isn't going to give a strong result.

Re: Study mode

#180

Post by andix »

czhu12 wrote: post #26

I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation. It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed. Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible, and the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point, it'll make sense to you. Now, everyone ba…

Absolutely. I used to have a lot of weird IPv6 issues in my home network I didn't understand. ChatGPT helped me to dump some traffic with tcpdump and explained what was happening on the network.

In the process it helped me to learn many details about RA and NDP (Router Advertisments/Neighbor Discovery Protocol, which mostly replace DHCP and ARP from IPv4).

It made me realize that my WiFi mesh routers do quite a lot of things to prevent broadcast loops on the network, and that all my weird issues could be attributed to one cheap mesh repeater. So I replaced it and now everything works like a charm.

I had this setup for 5 years and was never able to figure out what was going on there, although I really tried.

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