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Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

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

#141

Post by kridsdale1 »

Daishiman wrote: post #127
SoftTalker wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Capitalism and fiduciary duty prevents employers from paying people their market value when they are content enough to stay.

An employee who does not do the effort to re-peg their labor time to market rates for their skill level is implicitly consenting to a prior agreement (when they were hired).

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

#142

Post by btilly »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #131
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.

> Am I the only one to expect a S curve regarding progress and not an eternal exponential ? To LLMs specifically as they're now? Sure. To LLMs in general, or generative AI in general? Eventually , in some distant future, yes. Sure, progress can't ride the exponent forever - observable universe is finite, as far as we can tell right now, we're fundamentally limited by the size of our light cone. And while in any field…

If the constraint is computation in a light cone, the theoretical bound is time cubed, not exponential. With a major decrease in scaling as we hit the bounds of our galaxy.

Intergalactic travel is, of course, rather slow.

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

#143

Post by nottorp »

largbae wrote: post #123
parsimo2010 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> when was the last time you primed a well pump or filled an oil lamp? All of these tasks have been abstracted away

They have not been abstracted away, they have been made obsolete. Significant difference.

The danger with LLMs is people will never learn tasks that are still needed.

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

#144

Post by Der_Einzige »

agentultra wrote: post #124
probably_wrong wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 usefu…

Given that most binary searches have an overflow error built in, I think it’s harder than a first year problem to do binary searches without the classical overflow error…

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

#145

Post by kridsdale1 »

65 wrote: post #128
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.…

Regarding your mom’s clothes: she wasn’t asking the machine to give advice she couldn’t think of on her own, she was seeking external validation and permission to purge and override the hoarder urge of her personality.

This is like when CEOs hire outside consulting firms to do layoffs for them. Pinning the pain of loss on some scapegoat makes it more bearable.

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

#146

Post by hb-robo »

agumonkey wrote: post #63
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…

that's why I mostly use chatgpt with platonic questions like - given context c, i tried idea a, b and c. where there other options that I miss ? - based on this plan, do you see missing efficiency ? etc etc i'm not seeking answers, i'm trying to avoid costly dead ends

Same here. I never really consciously saw it as "defiance" against cognitive decline or anything. More to the point, the answers are much better on average

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

#147

Post by nottorp »

65 wrote: post #128
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.…

> One of my friends wanted a bio on a certain musician and asked ChatGPT.

I use ChatGPT (or Gemini) instead of web searches. You can blame the content and link farms that are top of the search results, and the search engines focusing on advertising instead of search, because we're the product.

Why your friend doesn't know about wikipedia is another matter, if i wanted a generic info page about some topic i'd go directly there. But if i wanted to know if Bob Geldof's hair is blue, I might ask a LLM instead of reading the whole wikipedia page.

I also ask LLMs for introductory info about programming topics i don't know about, because i don't want to go to google and end up on w3schools, geeksforgeeks and crap like that.

I don't really trust LLMs for advanced programming topics, you know, what people pay me for. But they're fine for giving me a function signature or even a small example.

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

#148

Post by twobitshifter »

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…

I was taught to not use calculators on exams and homework and that’s why I am able to do math in my head today.

I have recently seen GenZ perplexed by card games with addition and making change. For millennials, this is grade school stuff.

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

#149

Post by sanderjd »

alickz wrote: post #74
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…

> 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. Why not force everyone to start from first principles then? I think learning is tied to curiosity and curiosity is not tied to difficulty of research i.e. give a curious person a direct answer and they will go on to ask more questio…

Yes exactly. I think the concern here is totally valid. But for me personally, having LLMs unblock me more quickly on each question I have has allowed me to ask more questions, to research more things in the same amount of time. Which is great!

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

#150

Post by klodolph »

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.

“Engineers did this to themselves…”

Long, long ago, the compact was that employees worked hard for a company for a long time, and were rewarded with pensions and opportunities for career advancement. If you take away the pensions and take away the opportunities for career advancement, your employees will advance their careers by switching companies—and the reason that this works so well is because all of the other companies would rather pay more to hire a senior engineer rather than take a risk on a junior.

It’s a systemic problem and not something that you can blame on employees. Not without skipping over a long list of other contributing factors, at least.

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