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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

#221

Post by lapcat »

pjc50 wrote: post #212
lapcat wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> why you think the educational system needs to be part of the social ladder. Depends if you want the people running the country to be competent or not.

> Depends if you want the people running the country to be competent or not.

In some sense, the goal of the educational system should be to make everyone competent. In any case, it's unclear what you mean by "running the country". Politically speaking, the people currently running the US are not competent, despite the fact that the educational system and the social hierarchy are inextricably entangled.

Whatever kind of -ocracy you're proposing (I'm personally not proposing here that we abolish democracy), I don't see any inherent reason why a social ranking system and the educational system can't be separate rather than combined into one.

When employers start looking the alma mater of applicants, their grades in school, and such (reportedly Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical is obsessed with high school!), that's when the entire educational system gets warped. Learning gets cast aside in favor of credentialism, and consequently, cheating to get ahead.

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

#222

Post by School-Cotton »

lapcat wrote: post #201
pjc50 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Do you reject the idea that some people are better at things than others? 99% of people simply can’t learn the same level of mathematics that a pure mathematician does, no matter how hard they try or how competently they’re taught, and then what happens in your system to people who would have been pure mathematicians?

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

#223

Post by Balgair »

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…

> Designing a "mostly ChatGPT-proof class" is in my opinion actually rather simple: just be inspired by the German university system:

Now the real question is the costs. In that, can you somehow make this system work at scale with the same profit as before? I know that the German system is a lot different than in the US, including things like tracking in 9th grade and below. But the real question is if the Universities make as much, if not more, cash. Because if the answer is 'no', then it's unlikely to be adopted.

> Oh yeah, 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.

That is an insanely awesome and clever idea. I love it. It puts real stakes there, if only perceived ones. I imagine that in the US if you flunk out of a major's classes twice or more, the number of students that continue on in that major is probably pretty low already though.

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

#224

Post by photochemsyn »

Let's be honest: majoring in the humanities is the easy way to a college degree and thus attracts people put off by the hard sciences and all the mathematical rigor which can't be offloaded onto an LLM as you do have to solve problems in real time on exams without any external assistance.

If the student's goal at any Ivy League college is to 'meet their partner and their co-founder' then attending social functions where they can expand their networks and meet new candidates for those roles will take precedence over spending three hours diligently studying difficult material for every hour spent in lecture.

Of course, computer science students and others in hard sciences have been gaming the system for decades, with many solutions to take-home programming exercises found in online forums, and there's always the option of paying a tutor to ease the way forward - and LLMs are essentially inexpensive tutors that vastly help motivated students learn material - a key aide when many university-level professors view teaching as an unpleasant burden and devote minimal time and effort to it, with little material preparation and recycling tests from a decade ago that are all archived in fraternity and sorority collections.

The solution to students using LLMs to cheat is obvious - more in-class work, more supervised in-section work, and devaluing take-home assignments - but this means more time and toil for the instructors, who are often just as lazy and unmotivated as the students.

[note the in-person coding interview seems to have been invented by employers who realized anyone could get a CS degree and good grades without being a good programmer via cheating on assignments, and this happened well before LLMs hit the scene]

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

#225

Post by kenjackson »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #218
throwawaybob420 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is nothing wrong with going to school to obtain knowledge and skills to secure a job. The problem with the modern educational system is that it isnt very efficient at this task. Instead, most of the value relies on the screening that took place before the students even entered the institution, not the knowledge obtained while there.

Yep, this is a huge problem. I've long argued that we need value add metrics for colleges, and it probably won't be a single number, but rather a set of values depending on input values, e.g., some schools may deliver a lot of value for kids with 1550 SATs, but other schools may do better for kids with 1200.

Today we simply use college as a proxy for intelligence, so people just like to go to the highest rated college they can to be viewed as intelligent. What happens in the four years at the college is secondary.

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

#226

Post by lapcat »

School-Cotton wrote: post #222
lapcat wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you reject the idea that some people are better at things than others? 99% of people simply can’t learn the same level of mathematics that a pure mathematician does, no matter how hard they try or how competently they’re taught, and then what happens in your system to people who would have been pure mathematicians?

> Do you reject the idea that some people are better at things than others?

No. Of course not.

> 99% of people simply can’t learn the same level of mathematics that a pure mathematician does

Why would this be a requirement for all citizens? Perhaps you misunderstood "demonstrate the same level of mastery". I meant that there would be a specified minimum requirement, though we definitely shouldn't set the bar too low. What I would reject is social promotion, where students get to move along to the next level as long as they have a D grade or higher. This does not demonstrate sufficient understanding of the material taught.

Grades are for ranking. I'm suggesting that we ditch grades and simply demand that everyone learn what we expect them to learn. If students learn more than what's expected, good for them, that's not a problem.

> what happens in your system to people who would have been pure mathematicians

I'm not sure what you mean. How am I preventing people from becoming pure mathematicians?

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

#227

Post by tehjoker »

fallingknife wrote: post #203
UncleMeat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

alternative strategies will have them doing work and learning

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

#228

Post by ReptileMan »

bonoboTP wrote: post #200
ReptileMan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 is not about fundamental limitations. It is about black boxes and magic. If you don't understand a system then you know not what lurks within and how it can bite you in the ass. Black boxes break - and when they break, you are helpless.

If you already know how to build software LLM are a godsend. I have actually had a quite a nice case recently when LLM invented some quite nice imaginary graphql mutators. I had enough experience in the field to not waste time debugging, a historian that hadn't shipped software before won't.

There were WYSIWYG before, before them was visual programming - we have tried to abstract that pesky complexity since forever. So far with no success. I don't see anything in LLM/Gen AI whatever that will change it. It will make good people more productive, it would make sloppy sloppier, it won't make people bad at solving problems good at it.

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

#229

Post by jjmarr »

SoftTalker wrote: post #207
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.

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 betwe…

Go read lawyers complaining on reddit about pro se litigants using AI. They hallucinate precedents like APIs or get confused about what is supported.

If you think SWEs that build the same CRUD apps every day are vulnerable but SWEs that do "real work" aren't, apply that logic to lawyers.

Except lawyers don't have an automated compiler to check for fabricated precedents as case law databases are monopolized by one company.

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

#230

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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