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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

#231

Post by mantas »

fallingknife wrote: post #202
imawakegnxoxo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. But there will always be an obscure case you can’t cover. Let’s say a test is written. Someone can’t write, but can dictate answers. Is it still the same test or not?

On the other hand, how far can society tip-tap around such alternative takes? Could he go study in a field where hand writing is expected and society would still be forced to adapt?

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

#232

Post by NoOn3 »

pjc50 wrote: post #195
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…

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)

At least in the Soviet Union, they were free...

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

#233

Post by kenjackson »

bongodongobob wrote: post #215
Workaccount2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plumbers never realized that they should be selling service plans and leasing toilets to people. Software's golden goose is not letting people own things.

Service for what? I'm in my 40s and now that I think about it, I've never had to call a plumber in my entire life. The only time I can think of is my parents calling one when they got a new dishwasher 25 years ago.

I've had the plumber out twice this year. Probably depends on how handy you are with plumbing issues. Me not so much.

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

#234

Post by Tycho »

nluken wrote: post #172
Tycho wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve listened plenty of audiobooks while driving or walking, why would I not be able to do the same while playing GTA? The reason to do this is that just sitting in a chair ploughing through books gets very unappealing after a while. And there’s a lot of books to get through.

If you're getting what you want out of your reading then more power to you, but I think you'll find that devoting your full attention to what you're doing fundamentally differs from doing it in the background. Why play GTA when you could just listen and enjoy the book? What is GTA adding to that experience? I think a lot of people, including, I presume, most who willingly choose to study literature, enjoy reading as…

A serious literature degree might prescribe a reading list of ~10 books per week. Some of it stuff you don’t even like but is “important context” or whatever. At a certain point it becomes a chore for anyone. You need to find ways to help you get through more.

The reading (listening) of course is not “in the background”. Maybe sometimes you’re distracted and have to skip back 30s and re-listen. Fine. If the game is too distracting, fine, play something simpler, or watch soccer, do chores, anything where the moment to moment continuity does not require effort to track, but still gives you some benefit.

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

#235

Post by kenjackson »

LurkandComment wrote: post #169

1. PhD Defenses in the humanities have both a written thesis and an oral on the spot defense. You can't ChatGPT that easily because a professor will know how to curve ball to things that are seemingly unrelated but comparable to a human. 2. As an MA student I was solving semantic problems for engineers for analysis that they couldn't fathom. They were very smart at technical things (and great writers), but when langu…

I think all PhDs have an oral defense. Not only that its common to have Quals where you have to present the state of the art research in your field and answer oral questions about it. Even if you had ChatGPT it would be tough because a lot of questions are like, "Why did XYZ do ABC after seeing result 123?" The problem is that often its an untrue statement they are trying to get you to justify -- XYZ didn't do ABC or didn't do it after seeing 123. This is something I imagine most LLMs to struggle with today and say, "No, that didn't happen -- here's actually what happened" when its in a nuanced field.

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

#236

Post by ModernMech »

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…

As a professor of Computer Science, I'm about ready to allow my students to use AI -- if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. But they're not going to like it, because what I'm going to do is significantly raise the bar.

For the last several years I've been allowing students (college sophomores) to do take home exams where they essentially have to build a networked system in C++. I tell them not to use AI but I have to assume they are.

Even still, the solutions are not all that great, despite unlimited time and resources, they still submit work that falls into a roughly B average. Which, if they didn't have AI, maybe that would be a C average, so perhaps the standards just need to go up. Still, it's not like they're all getting 100%.

AI is still really only as good as the person driving it, and it still, despite all the hype, hallucinates like crazy, such that if they don't pay close attention and constantly course correct, they can't expect the project to actually work.

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

#237

Post by panzagl »

zaphar wrote: post #209
panzagl wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess it depends on what you consider deep expertise- I assumed a 10000 hours/PhD level of expertise, which would be hard to achieve in a couple years while working.

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

#238

Post by fallingknife »

tehjoker wrote: post #227
fallingknife wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

alternative strategies will have them doing work and learning

And then forgetting. If you're not interested, you cram for the test and then forget. I see little point in forcing people who don't want to learn into classrooms. Worth a read https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-...

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

#239

Post by vkou »

jhanschoo wrote: post #125
sdoering wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Came here to say that. Having studied history - esp. in a time where Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was strongly (and sometimes emotionally) discussed in between students and professors alike, taught me, that - while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. I also learned to appreciate history on a fundamentally different level than I did, when I loved his…

> Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" Your comment made me dig up "Historical text as literary artifact". I have several thoughts on that, but one very important analogy stood out to me and is succinct enough to comment here. In statistics, one talks about the population, collecting data (sampling from the popluation), and building a model from the collected data. You may have guessed that the collecte…

The thing is, this statistics data-to-model only works on large datasets.

History deals with very small, very heterogeneous datasets. Finding patterns in them (if they even exist) is very difficult, and it's why historical models and grand unified theories are so often bunk.

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

#240

Post by nathan_compton »

fallingknife wrote: post #198
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…

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?

Learning stuff is cool?
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