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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

#241

Post by lostphilosopher »

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?

Related - there needs to be individuals and businesses that want/need and can afford upgrades and repairs. If office workers are getting replaced with AI we don't need to build and maintain offices and the ecosystems that support them (see also WFH/Covid) and those workers won't have income to pay for plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc. for their personal property. A worst case scenario AI workforce revolution would attack trades from both supply and demand.

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

#242

Post by BeFlatXIII »

Animats wrote: post #18

The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards. Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular…

Studying the winners is also a surefire way to learn only survivorship bias.

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

#243

Post by belorn »

the-mitr wrote: post #217
guappa wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well in sweden it's forbidden to fix anything electrical on your own. You're allowed to change your lamps and little else.

Is it so? Is it true for other work also? Genuinely asking.

There is a concept called regulated professions. The US equivalent would likely be accredited or certified. Typically, anything in health, security, and education, but also things like accounting or commercial diving. EU has Directive 2005/36/EC that specify how this kind of laws may operate in EU.

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

#244

Post by freeone3000 »

jjmarr wrote: post #229
SoftTalker wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

It costs money but KeyCite is real.

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

#245

Post by renewiltord »

Everyone's always claiming the humanities are important the humanities are important but everyone I know in STEM is more learned than everyone in humanities. More philosophy, more history, more classical literature. This means that humanities education is relatively bogus.

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

#246

Post by mebizzle »

xquce wrote: post #211
oceanplexian wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

And when Muricans wonder why the rest of the world laughs at your simplestic greed based view of "winning", this comment is a perfect example of why. What a weird way to try and connect inter continental economics and private company valuation as a sole metric for success or achievement with test taking at a university level in Germany...

It's weird to correlate how the idiosyncracies of a deeply-rooted developmental system might affect the sensibilities or perspectives of the adults that said systems develop?

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

#247

Post by SkyBelow »

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…

A complete ban feels like overkill. A cooldown period of X years would give someone time to reconsider and grow as a person.

Granted, this is without consider the financial side of things.

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

#248

Post by School-Cotton »

lapcat wrote: post #226
School-Cotton wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

How do you decide who to filter into the more difficult and faster-paced classes that will prepare someone to be a pure mathematician, other than grades?

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

#249

Post by Pet_Ant »

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.

> There is nothing wrong with going to school to obtain knowledge and skills to secure a job.

That can't be the only goal. We also need to transmit culture, values, and teach them to become citizens.

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

#250

Post by renewiltord »

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?

It's just viral memes. Most people are inferior to the average LLM in reasoning and repeat phrases wholesale without comprehension of what it means. Few, if any, have even approached understanding what they are saying. Among those, fewer still have validated their assumptions.

Many years ago we had to deploy an HFT trading strategy on a specific hardware platform because that was the one that was (in this field) closest in network topology to the exchange. I just read the released docs for the platform, and watched a couple of videos where they hinted at certain architectural decisions and then you could work something out from there. Latency was reliable and our strats made money.

But this was public information and we were actually late to it. It had been released for 3 years at the time. And many people I talked to had told me that what they had was as good as it gets. But they were each just repeating what the other guy said.

Many of the things you see on Hacker News are just that: it's deterministic parrotry.

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