Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

resobscura.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 322 posts

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

#201

Post by lapcat »

pjc50 wrote: post #193
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 alw…

It's unclear why you think the educational system needs to be part of the social ladder.

I'm imagining for example that all citizens are required to receive an education, and demonstrate the same level of mastery in the subjects taught as everyone else, without grades or rankings. You might call it "pass-fail", but I resist that idea, because I don't consider failure to be an option, except in rare cases of learning disability.

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

#202

Post by fallingknife »

imawakegnxoxo wrote: post #77
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…

I think "everyone gets the exact same test" is a whole level of hell worse than "everyone gets a test that makes sense for their abilities and goals" Are you just concerned about the administration side of things? I think the GP here has a pretty reasonable outlook here "Some people can't do some things the same way as others and that's ok, people are different" Is the vibe I got from that post

Either the test must be the same for everybody or it is not a meaningful signal.

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

#203

Post by fallingknife »

UncleMeat wrote: post #45
simonw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suggestion here isn't to have the professors do this: it's for the professors to challenge their students to do this.

I am friends with an unusually large number of professors, many of which are at very top institutions. The "make your own pedagogy" approach for students leaves huge portions of the classroom doing zero work whatsoever.

What was the point of having those students in the classroom in the first place?

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

#204

Post by bonoboTP »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #68
dr_dshiv wrote: post #53

What most people don’t know about history & humanities is how much work there is to do. People get (rightly!) excited about decoding burnt scrolls in Herculaneum. But most don’t realize that less than 10% of Neo-Latin texts from the renaissance to the early modern period have been translated to English. One example: Marsilio Ficino was a brilliant philosopher who was hired by Cosimo Medici to translate Greek texts (P…

The transformer architecture was originally developed for translation tasks, but massive, overfit generative models are awful at translation. (Seriously, part-of-speech classification + dictionary lookup + grammar mapping – an incredibly simplistic system with performance measurable in chapters per second – does a better job , and you even get confidence intervals.) If you want a translation tool, use something like…

That's an absurd claim. Show me the translation benchmark where you saw such a result.

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

#205

Post by pixl97 »

HPsquared wrote: post #22
dotancohen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of learning has not changed. One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies. Education will adapt.

The solution has been around a very long time: closed-book tests (verbal or written). Works against LLMs too!

"""Solution"""

The particular problem here is the number of staff needed to actually administer and grade these kinds of tests. We're already talking about how expensive education is, just wait till this happens.

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

#206

Post by tstenner »

oceanplexian wrote: post #194
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

Of course, the next European neighbor country where you can continue your studies (even taking most of your credits with you) is often only a few hundred kilometres away.

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

#207

Post by SoftTalker »

pjc50 wrote: post #163
bluGill wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody ever could say with confidence what jobs will pe available. those who know the basics and flexible can find something.

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.

I think the profession of "laywer" may come to an end sooner rather than later for many, unless they are able to get legislators to ban AI from practicing law. A lot of lawyering is writing in a particular legal vocabulary and style, and forming arguments based on precident, things that an LLM AI should be able to get very good at.

It won't be long before an impoverished criminal defendant will be able to chose between an AI that can spend practically unlimited time on his case and have perfect recall of any precident that might be relevant, or an overworked public defender who has 2 hours a week to spare in his schedule.

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

#208

Post by triceratops »

tsunamifury wrote: post #150
gdubs wrote: post #141

There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'. Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. Except maybe the trades – and we mostly cut those programs out of schools a long time ago. If college stu…

Trades would collapse if even 10% of the population switched to them. What does no one get about this?

But I wonder if lower labor costs would change the repair vs replace calculus by a lot.

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

#209

Post by zaphar »

panzagl wrote: post #179
bluGill wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can move between groups. If your expertise turns out not needed get a cheap job while learning something else.

The only way to develop deep expertise is to do it as your job.

I got my job/career precisely because I developed deep expertise on my own time. So no, that is not the only way to develop that expertise.

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

#210

Post by bigbacaloa »

gdubs wrote: post #141

There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'. Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. Except maybe the trades – and we mostly cut those programs out of schools a long time ago. If college stu…

Most students see education as a video game - the goal is to score as many points as possible in a framework controlled by some apparently arbitrary rules. That educators fail to distinguish school from video games is mostly the fault of educators. And video games are more fun.
Post reply on HN