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AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

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Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#191

Post by simonw »

lynx97 wrote: post #21
simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

> where all you got was the outline of the island As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.

Yes, it's true that the one example I presented from a quiz game I played at a conference 10+ years ago was not accessible to some people. If I could remember the other questions they used in that quiz I would share them here, but that's the only one that stuck in my brain.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#192

Post by Pet_Ant »

poulpy123 wrote: post #82
mootothemax wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’d be bad if there was no alternative. But different people can get different assignments and that’s ok. While there are possibly noble goals behind your suggestion, in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in the category of “other,” people to be managed separately. I’ll leave to your imagination how much work is often put into supporting these “other” assignments and how up-to-date they’re kept va th…

> in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in the category of “other,” people to be managed separately. So what ? This is literally the case. The commenter has to be managed separately

The commenter (rightly or wrongly) is -I think- suggesting that assignments etc should be from the outset be designed to be accessible in their original form for everyone, and not just "okay, this works for 90% of people, lets worry about the rest separately".

An example I have personally is when designing board games I now have internalised to never just use colour to communicate anything. Never solid colour which can be difficult to determine by the colour-blind, but different colours have different stripes or patterns embedded in them. So if you can't see the colour, you can recognise the stripe spacing, if you can't see the stripe spacing due to low visual-acuity, you can see the colour... and ideally different textures for the blind. (not pratical as it would wear off in the shuffling, but the idea is there).

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#193

Post by pjc50 »

lapcat wrote: post #187

> When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” On the one hand, this guy is not wrong, from a personal perspective. On the other hand, guys like this are a total waste of time and space in the classroom. Schools have always faced a fundamental internal c…

> Can we make a place for the social ladder climber that's separate from a place where real learning happens, where nobody is tempted to cheat because there's nothing to be gained from cheating?

I don't think so. Let me suggest a set of hypotheses:

- the social ladder always exists; it's basically fundamental to human existence, especially when trying to do anything (see tyranny of structurelessness)

- people are always trying to climb the hierarchy

- the examocracy(+) was introduced by ancient Chinese and/or Prussia in an attempt to bring actual competence into the social hierachy, in large part to help the leader fight wars

- if there isn't a "fair" route to the top, competent outsiders will resort to unfair ones, which can be remarkably lethal and destructive

- the university provides its own small academic and intellectual hierarchy, but this exists in dialogue with the needs of a wider society and its demand for non-academic intellectually specialized work. Whether that's priests, lawyers, doctors, army officers, weapons designers, civil servants, or programmers

- this comes down to: does the wider society demand human competence in intellectual operations still, or does ALL of that get AI-automated away? Do we get "humans, but with a smarter Clippy" or do we get "AI runs the world for billionaires and everyone else is surplus peasantry".

- the secret third, worse, case is that AI destroys the concept of competence and things stop working on a large scale.

(+) I do not want to have a huge fight over the word "meritocracy"

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#194

Post by oceanplexian »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #184
simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

> Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge. Designing a "mostly ChatGPT-proof class" is in my opinion actually rather simple: just be inspired by the German university system: Each week you have to complete exercise sheets which are often hard. But being capable of solving a certain quota of the exercises is just the beginning: this only qualifies you for being…

> I didn't mention yet that if you flunked the same exam typically 3 times (depending on the university), you have "finally failed" (endgültig nicht bestanden), and are not allowed anymore to study the same degree course at every German university.

When Europeans wonder why they are falling behind the United States both economically and technologically (Especially in the AI race), here's a perfect example of why. A culture that turns you into a some kind of a permanent failure because you failed to check a box some arbitrary number of times isn't one that produces innovation.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#195

Post by pjc50 »

throwawaybob420 wrote: post #190
stanford_labrat wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP, now we see it also being used to blame for the failures of our modern education system. Mostly which are that our system only rewards one thing in education: the grade. Not understanding, knowledge, intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily gamified than anything. And this sing…

Our modern education system in the US is broken, but acting as if AI is a scapegoat is comical. Capitalism is what has destroyed higher education in this country. The concept of going to school to get a job isn’t a failure of education but of economics. AI is just another capitalist tool made to not only extract wealth out of you but something that they want you to rely on more and more so they can charge you even mo…

Even the Soviet Union made people go to school, and getting a degree was a route to higher status.

(there have been a few Communist revolutions against the concept of "university", for various political reasons, but China rebuilt theirs after the purges and Cambodia is a sad historical footnote)

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#196

Post by bluefirebrand »

bluGill wrote: post #173
pjc50 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is at odds with professional specialisms which take years to learn. I don't think it's likely that AI will obliterate the job category of "lawyer", but that's what its boosters are claiming, and people need to make a car to house sized investment at age 18 depending on how true that is.

it always has been. You make what looks like a good bet and if you are wrong adjust-

How this works for most people in reality is "if you are wrong, you're screwed"

Most people do not have the ability to adjust like that, for one reason or another

And even if you do, it still means your life is likely to hit an extremely rough patch while your adjusting catches up to where you were before

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#197

Post by thomastjeffery »

carbonguy wrote: post #9

I spent some years as a teacher and so have some first-hand experience here; my take, for what it's worth, is that LLMs have indeed blown a gaping hole in the structure of education as actually practiced in the USA. That hole is: much of education is based on the assumption that the unsupervised production of written artifacts is proof of progress in learning. LLMs can produce those artifacts now, incidentally disrup…

I think the main subject of that hole is objectivity, and it affects much more than education.

By obsessively structuring education around measurement, we have implied that what is taught is objective fact. That's always been bullshit, but - for the most part - it's been consistent enough with itself to function. The more strict your presentation of knowledge is, the more it can pretend to be truly objective. Because a teacher has total authority over the methodology of learning, this consistency can be preserved.

The reality has always been that anything written is subjective. The only way to learn objective fact is to explore it through many subjective representations. This is obvious to anyone who learns mathematics: you don't just see x^2+y^2=z^2, and suddenly understand the implications of the Pythagorean theorem.

Because objectivity can't be written, objectivity is not computable. We can't give a computer several subjective representations of a concept, and have it figure it out. This is the same problem as ambiguity: there is no objectively correct way to compute an ambiguous statement. This is why we write in programming languages: each programming language grammar is "context-free", which means that everything must be completely and explicitly defined. To write a computable statement, we must subject the abstract concept in mind to the language (grammar and environment) we write it in.

Most of the writing in our society is done with software. Because of this, we are implicitly encouraged to establish shared context. If what we write is consistent with the context of others' writing, it can pretend to be objective, and be more computable. Social interactions that are facilitated by software are also implicitly structured by that software's structure. There can be no true free-form dialogue in social media.

The exciting thing about LLMs is that they don't have this problem. They conveniently dodge it, by not doing any logic at all! Now instead of the software subjecting you to a strict environment, it subjects you to a familiar one. There is no truth, only vibes. There is no calculation, only guesses. This feels a lot like objectivity, but it's just a new facade. The difference is that the boundary is somewhere new and unfamiliar.

---

I think the death of objectivity is good progress overall. It's been a long time coming. Strict structure has always been overrated. The best way to learn is to explore as many perspectives as you can find. We humans can work with vibes and logic, together.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#198

Post by fallingknife »

throwawaybob420 wrote: post #190
stanford_labrat wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP, now we see it also being used to blame for the failures of our modern education system. Mostly which are that our system only rewards one thing in education: the grade. Not understanding, knowledge, intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily gamified than anything. And this sing…

Our modern education system in the US is broken, but acting as if AI is a scapegoat is comical. Capitalism is what has destroyed higher education in this country. The concept of going to school to get a job isn’t a failure of education but of economics. AI is just another capitalist tool made to not only extract wealth out of you but something that they want you to rely on more and more so they can charge you even mo…

Before college was a means to get a job, it was status signalling for the upper class by showing they could spend 4 years not working and learning things with no economic value that few could afford. There was never a time when a large portion of society went to school past 18 for any reason other than economic or status gain, and why should they?

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#199

Post by ordinaryradical »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #64
this15testingg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

equating chatgpt to "a better spell checker" is wild; how is writing not also a skill that should be taught?

It’s the thinking that precedes writing that should be the bulk of your grade. Possessing what looks like an artifact of organized thought isn’t enough these days to evaluate a student.

The “thinking that precedes the writing” is not where the gold is. That kind of thinking is often confused, internally inconsistent, liable to miss critical details or nuance, and full of deductive leaps which may or may not pan out. Writing demands rigor of thought, it forces us to question premises, find evidence for a point of view, discern between the hypothetical and the factual, and try to organize these such that they cohere.

The thinking _is_ the writing. To be able to write is to be able to think, and if you are surrendering the writing to a machine that’s not ultimately what you’re surrendering—you’re giving up independent thought itself.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#200

Post by bonoboTP »

ReptileMan wrote: post #12
quanto wrote: post #4

> Today, engineers working on AI systems also need to think deeply and critically about the relationship between language and culture and the history and philosophy of technology. When they fail to do so, their systems literally start to break down. Perhaps so. But not in the (quasi-)academic sense that the author is thinking. It's not the lack of an engineer's academic knowledge in history and philosophy that makes…

>The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for granted that they can create their own custom research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free. And they will spend 12 hours trying to figure out which is the fake python library and the citation that the LLM has hallucinated from the real one. Vibe coding is just WYSIWYG on steroids in good and bad. WYSIWYG didn't go anywhere.

It's really embarrassing to put a stake in these. It's like when Gary Marcus said that an image generator won't be able to draw a horse riding an astronaut and will make the astronaut ride the horse because that is a more frequent pattern in the training set. Or when an urban legend (academic legend?) started that state of the art classifiers misclassify cows when they are on sandy beaches and it only works on grass (it happened in some cases with small datasets and shortcut learning but there was no sota image classifier with such glaring and straightforward errors, but it trickled down to popular consciousness and grade school teaching materials on AI limitations.) Now it's about hallucinating nonexistent libraries. But reasoning models and RAG and large contexts and web search make this much less of an issue. The limitations everyone point at that trickle down to a soundbite that everyone repeats usually don't turn out to be fundamental limitations at all.
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