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Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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

#101

Post by MomsAVoxell »

diggan wrote: post #29
llm_trw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the fath…

That's a interesting and very fitting quote. Basically saying that since we can now write down information, people will get lazier about remembering things. Basically the exact same claim as the submission article.

I think there is some validity to the nature of generational knowledge loss through differing information systems. At one end of the scale, you’ve got 80,000 year old stories, still being told - at the other end of the scale, you’ve got App Of The Day™ style social media, and kids who can’t write an email, use a dictionary, or read a book.

This is no hyperbole - humans have to constantly fight the degeneracy of our knowledge systems, which is to say that knowledge has to be generated and communicated - it can’t just “exist” and be useful, it has to be applied to be useful. Technology of knowledge which doesn’t get applied, does not persist, or if it does (COBOL), what once was common becomes arcane.

So, if there is hope, it lays with the proles: the way every-day people use ML, is probably the key to all of this. It’s one thing to know how to prompt an LLM to give you a buildable source tree; its another thing entirely to use it somehow to figure out what to make out of the leftover ingredients in the fridge.

Those recipes and indeed the applications of the ingredients, are based on human input and mores.

So the question for me, still really unanswered, is: How long will it take until those fridge-ingredient recipes become bland, tasteless and grey?

I think this belies the imperative that AL and ML must never become so pervasive that we don’t, also, write things down for ourselves. Oh, and read a lot, of course.

It seems, we need to stop throwing books away. Oh, and encourage kids to cook, and create their own recipes... hopefully they’ll have time and resources for that kind of lifestyle…

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

#102

Post by parpfish »

amrocha wrote: post #85
parpfish wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If that was the case every scientific paper would be written as socratic dialogue. But it’s not. Because that’s a good format for beginners, but not for science.

the reason the current format exists and is used is because it's very information dense. i think scientific papers would be better if they were socratic dialogues.

but the limitation in publishing a dialogue is that you'd just get to publish one of them and each reader is going to come in with different questions and goals for what they want out of the paper.

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

#103

Post by sitkack »

felideon wrote: post #37
sitkack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link, but clearly no one is reading it. Which is super ironic, they aren't even summarizing it with AI and using that information. Most folks are projecting what the title says into their own emotion space and then riffing on that. The authors even went so far as to boil the entire paper down into bullet points, you don't even need the pdf.

> Most folks are projecting what the title says into their own emotion space and then riffing on that. Yeah, or the abstract which is a bit vague.

The bullet points below the abstract is basically the paper w/o reading it.

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

#104

Post by diggan »

floppiplopp wrote: post #83

I'm at this very moment testing deepseek-r1, a so called "reasoning" llm, on the excellent "rustlings" tutorial. It is well documented and its solutions are readily available online. It is my lazy go-to-testing for coding tasks to assess for me if and when I have to start looking for a new job and take up software engineering as a hobby. The reason I test with rustlings is to also assess the value as a learning tool…

> And well, let me put it this way: deepseek-r1 won't be replacing anyone anytime soon. It generates a massive amount of texts, mostly nonsensical and almost always terribly, horribly wrong. But inexperienced devs or beginners, especially beginners, will be confused and will be led down the wrong path, potentially outsourcing rational thought to something that just sounds good, but actually isn't.

Are you considering the full "reasoning" it does when you're saying this? AFAIK, they're meant to be "rambling" like that, exploring all sorts of avenues and paths before reaching a final conclusive answer that is still "ramble-like". I think the purpose seems to be to layer something on top that can finalize the answer, rather than just taking whatever you get from that and use it as-is.

> Currently, over-reliance on the ramblings of a statistical model seems detrimental to education and ultimately the performance of future devs. As the probably last generation of old school software engineers, who were trained on coffee and tears of frustration, who had to really work code and architecture themselves, golden times might lie ahead, because someone will have to fix the garbage produced en masse by llms.

I started coding just before Stack Overflow got popular, and remember the craze when it did get popular. Blogposts about how Stack Overflow will create lazy devs was all over the place, people saying it was the end of the real developer. Not arguing against you or anything, I just find it interesting how sentiments like these keeps repeating over time, just minor details that change.

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

#105

Post by doitLP »

delusional wrote: post #94
engineer_22 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have accounts from the ancient Greeks of the old-school's attitude towards writing. In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's memory. We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being replaced by AI retrieval. There is concern that AI is a crutch, the youth will be weakened. My o…

> No indication yet that use of AI is harming business outcome What a sad sentence to read in a discussion about cognitive lazyness. I think people should think, not because it improves business outcomes, but because it's a beautiful activity.

A well made buggy whip was probably beautiful too. But if economic forces incentivize something else, the skill goes away

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

#106

Post by immibis »

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…

An example (over 1 year old): https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/17dmev...

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

#107

Post by agumonkey »

engineer_22 wrote: post #68
roydivision wrote: post #45

This stands to reason. If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former. You may be disciplined enough to do more research if the answer is directly presented to you, but most people will not do that, and most companies are not interested in that, they want quick 'efficient', 'compet…

We have accounts from the ancient Greeks of the old-school's attitude towards writing. In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's memory. We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being replaced by AI retrieval. There is concern that AI is a crutch, the youth will be weakened. My o…

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.

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

#108

Post by engineer_22 »

delusional wrote: post #94
engineer_22 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have accounts from the ancient Greeks of the old-school's attitude towards writing. In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's memory. We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being replaced by AI retrieval. There is concern that AI is a crutch, the youth will be weakened. My o…

> No indication yet that use of AI is harming business outcome What a sad sentence to read in a discussion about cognitive lazyness. I think people should think, not because it improves business outcomes, but because it's a beautiful activity.

What's sad about it? Parent made claim that businesses will experience long term downsides.

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

#109

Post by marcosdumay »

agumonkey wrote: post #107
engineer_22 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have accounts from the ancient Greeks of the old-school's attitude towards writing. In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's memory. We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being replaced by AI retrieval. There is concern that AI is a crutch, the youth will be weakened. My o…

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.

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

#110

Post by helboi4 »

iambateman wrote: post #10

“The kids these days are too lazy to be bothered to learn” is a psychological trap that people often fall into. It’s not to say we shouldn’t do our best to understand and provide guardrails, but the kids will be fine.

I mean sometimes it's true. Like even in the past. I could very clearly see amongst my generation (older gen z) that there were plenty of people literally at university who were barely willing or able to learn. Comparing that to the generation of my much older half siblings (genx, older millennial), they don't even seem to grasp the concept of not being quite involved in your university degree.

Most people my age will tell you that they stopped reading as a teenager because of the effect of smartphones. I was a veracious reader and only relearnt to read last year after 10 years since I got my first smartphone as an older teenager. These things are impactful and have affected a lot of people's potential. And also made our generation very prone to mental health issues - something that is really incredibly palpable if you are within gen z social circles like I am. It's disastrous and cannot be overstated. I can be very sure I would be smarter and happier if technology had stagnated at the level it was at when I was a younger child/teen. The old internet and personal computers, for example, only helped me explore my curiosity. Social media and smartphones have only destroyed it. There are qualitative differences between some technological advancements.

Not to mention the fact that gen alpha are shown to have terrible computer literacy because of the ease of use, discouragement of customisation and corporate monopoly over smartphones. This bucks the trend that happened from gen x to gen z of generations become more and more computer native. Clearly, upwards trends in learning due to advancements in technology can be reversed. They do not always go up.

If kids do not learn independent reasoning because of reliance on LLMs, yes, that will make people stupider. Not all technology improves things. I watched a really great video recently where someone explained the change in the nature of presidential debates through the ages. In the Victorian times, they consisted of hours-long oratory on each side, with listeners following attentively. In the 20th century the speeches gradually became a little shorter and more questions were added to break things up. In most recent times, every question has started to come with a less than a minute answer, simpler vocabulary, little hard facts or statistics etc. These changes map very well to changes in the depth at which people were able to think due to the primary information source they were using. There is a good reason why reading is still seen as the most effective form of deep learning despite technological advancement. Because it is.

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