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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

#161

Post by idiotsecant »

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.

I think you've got cause and effect backwards. Employers used to offer incentives to stay in a company and grow organically. They decided that was no longer going to be the deal. So they got the current system. There was never some sudden eureka moment when the secret engineers club decided they wanted to have a super stressful life event every few years just to keep up with inflation.

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

#162

Post by klodolph »

SoftTalker wrote: post #159
Daishiman wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes that's why I said "partly." When I started work (this was in the pre-consumer-internet era), job hopping was already starting to be a thing but there was defintely still a large "old school" view that there should be some loyalty between employer and employee. One of my first jobs was a place where they hired for potential. They hired smart, personable people and taught them how to program. They paid them fairly…

Cheap money seems to have dried up, so maybe more old-school approaches wouldn’t get sniped by VC-funded startups.

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

#163

Post by scarface_74 »

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.

Or the company could recognize the dangers of salary compression and inversion and pay developers at market rates

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

#164

Post by idiotsecant »

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…

I don't know if I agree here. When I ask an LLM a question it always leads to a whole lot of other questions with responses tailored to my current level of understanding. This usually results in a much more effective learning session than reading a bunch of material that I might not retain anyway because I'm scanning it looking for my answers.

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

#165

Post by scarface_74 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #20
lr4444lr wrote: post #8

The abstract does not define, nor contextually suggest from the prior statements of the results what "metacognitive laziness" means. Personally speaking, I find being able to ask ChatGPT continually more nuanced questions about an initial answer the one clear benefit over a Google search, where I have diminishing marginal returns on my inquisitiveness for the time invested over subsequent searches. The more precisely…

> 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…

> It is interesting that you describe this as "the answers you want" and not "the correct answer to the question I have"

“Verify that” and then ChatGPT will do a real time search and I can read web pages. Occasionally, it will “correct itself” once it does a web search

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

#166

Post by scarface_74 »

apercu wrote: post #35
lr4444lr wrote: post #8

The abstract does not define, nor contextually suggest from the prior statements of the results what "metacognitive laziness" means. Personally speaking, I find being able to ask ChatGPT continually more nuanced questions about an initial answer the one clear benefit over a Google search, where I have diminishing marginal returns on my inquisitiveness for the time invested over subsequent searches. The more precisely…

Even though ChatGPT "invents" its own reality sometimes, I also find it superior to Google search results (or Duck Duck Go). In some cases LLM results even provide specific strings to search for in the search engines to verify the content. Search is terribly broken and has been since around 2014 (arbitrary date) where Google search results pages started displaying more ads than results.

Paid ChatGPT has had web search capabilities for two years at least

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

#167

Post by satisfice »

bradarner wrote: post #155
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…

Writing seems to have worked out pretty well.

That's partly because writing enables time-binding (improvement across the lifetimes of men). Writing does not wither thinking, as such, although it may hurt our memory.

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

#168

Post by freediver »

bloopernova wrote: post #77
squigz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (hallucination caveats notwithstanding) This is a pretty big caveat to the goal of > develop a much more meaningful and comprehensive understanding Which is still my biggest issue with LLMs. The little I use of them, the answers are still confidently wrong a lot of the time. Has this changed?

I've found that whatever powers Kagi.com's answer seems to be pretty accurate. It cites articles and other sources. Trying a share link, hope it works: https://kagi.com/search?q=what+factors+affect+the+freezing+p...

What powers it is Kagi Search :) All chatbots have access to similar models, what distinguishes the answer quality is/will be the quality of search results fed to them.

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

#169

Post by 65 »

nottorp wrote: post #147
65 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 direc…

You can use source material instead of LLMs for all of this.

"Is Bob Geldof's hair blue?" -> Search for Bob Geldof -> Look at images of Bob Geldof.

Intro programming topics can be found at the documentation of the website. Your searching query might be "[programming topic] getting started" and usually if it's a package or a tool there will be documentation. If you want good documentation on web dev stuff that isn't w3schools or geeksforgeeks you can use MDN documentation.

Or, if you really want a general overview there's probably a YouTube video about the topic.

Additionally appending "reddit" to a search will give better results than SEO junk. There are always ways to find quality information via search engines.

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

#170

Post by SoftTalker »

idiotsecant wrote: post #161
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.

I think you've got cause and effect backwards. Employers used to offer incentives to stay in a company and grow organically. They decided that was no longer going to be the deal. So they got the current system. There was never some sudden eureka moment when the secret engineers club decided they wanted to have a super stressful life event every few years just to keep up with inflation.

As I said in another response, I think (at least partly) a contributing factor was the essentially limitless salary budget that VC funded startups and the FAANG companies had. You had software developers who could suddenly make more than doctors and lawyers and of course many of them sensibly acted in their own best interest but that left other employers saying "we're not going to invest in employees who are only going to turn around and leave for salaries we can't pay" and "if we have to pay those kind of salaries, we're not going to hire junior people we want experience."
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