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Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

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Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#251

Post by Salgat »

SoftTalker wrote: post #116
klodolph wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They aren't considering the long term downside to this. This echoes sentiments from the 2010s centered around hiring. Companies generally don’t want to hire junior engineers and train them—this is an investment with risks of no return for the company doing the training. Basically, you take your senior engineers away from projects so they can train the juniors, and then the juniors now have the skills and credential…

Engineers partly did this to themselves. The career advice during that time period was to change jobs every few years, demanding higher and higher salaries. So now, employers don't want to pay to train entry-level people, as they know they are likely going to leave, and at the salaries demanded they don't want to hire junior folks.

This is merely the result of the incentive structure of corporations, which make it far more lucrative to switch jobs rather than stay at one company.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#252

Post by taeric »

matsemann wrote: post #224
taeric wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had thought I saw somewhere that learning is specifically better when you are wrong, if the feedback for that is rapid enough. That is, "guess and check" is the quickest path to learning. Specifically, asking a question and getting an answer is not a general path to learning. Being asked a question and you answering it is. Somewhat, this is regardless of if you are correct or not.

I hated when doing math homework and they didn't give me the answer sheet. If I could do an integral and verify if it's correct or not, I could either quickly learn from my mistake, or keep doing integrals with added confidence. Which is how I learned the best. Gatekeeping it because someone might use the answers wrong felt weird, you still had to show your work.

Yeah. I also felt it largely went at odds with the entire concept of flashcards. Which... are among the most effective tools that I did not take advantage of in grade school.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#253

Post by jazzyjackson »

65 wrote: post #250
engineer_22 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have accounts from the ancient Greeks of the old-school's attitude towards writing. In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's memory. We stand now at the edge of a new epoch, reading now being replaced by AI retrieval. There is concern that AI is a crutch, the youth will be weakened. My o…

Perhaps we're going technologically backwards. Oral tradition compared to writing is clearly less accurate. Speakers can easily misremember details. Going from writing/documentation/primary sources to AI to be seems like going back to oral tradition, where we must trust the "speaker" - in this case the AI, whether they're truthful with their interpretation of their sources.

Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy is an illuminating read.

One benefit of orality is that the speaker can defend or clarify their words, whereas once you've written something, your words are liable to be misinterpreted by readers without the benefit of your rebuttal.

Consider too that courts (in the US at least) prefer oral arguments than written, perhaps we consider it more difficult to lie in person than in writing. PhD defenses are another holdover of tradition, to be able to demonstrate your competence and not receive your credentials merely from your written materials.

AI, I disagree it's more like oral tradition, AI is not a speaker, it has no stake in defending its claims, I would call it hyperliterate, an emulation of everything that has been written.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#254

Post by svachalek »

mlyle wrote: post #114
agumonkey wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one to expect a S curve regarding progress and not an eternal exponential ? People moving away from prideful principle to leverage new tech in the past doesn't guarantee that the same idea in the current context will pan out. But as you say.. we'll see.

Even if progress stops: 1. Current reasoning models can do a -lot- more than skeptics give them credit for. Typical human performance even among people who do something for employment is not always that high. 2. In areas where AI has mediocre performance, it may not appear that way to a novice. It often looks more like expert level performance, which robs novices of the desire to practice associated skills. Lest you…

This is a good point, forums are full of junior developers bemoaning that LLMs are inhumanly good at writing code -- not that they will be, but that they are. I've yet to see even the best produce something that makes me worry I might lose my job today, they're still very mediocre without a lot of handholding. But for someone who's still learning and thinks writing a loop is a challenge, they seem magical and unstoppable already.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#255

Post by cj »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #131
agumonkey wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one to expect a S curve regarding progress and not an eternal exponential ? People moving away from prideful principle to leverage new tech in the past doesn't guarantee that the same idea in the current context will pan out. But as you say.. we'll see.

> Am I the only one to expect a S curve regarding progress and not an eternal exponential ? To LLMs specifically as they're now? Sure. To LLMs in general, or generative AI in general? Eventually , in some distant future, yes. Sure, progress can't ride the exponent forever - observable universe is finite, as far as we can tell right now, we're fundamentally limited by the size of our light cone. And while in any field…

I think the parent’s main point is that even if LLMs sustain exponential advancement, that doesn’t guarantee that humanity’s advancement will mimic technology’s growth curve.

In other words, it’s possible to have rapid technological advancement without significant improvement/benefit to society.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#256

Post by MichaelZuo »

wolfram74 wrote: post #238
MichaelZuo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a pretty interesting point. If a large fraction of the population can’t even hold five complex ideas in their head simultaneously, without confusing them after a few seconds, are they literate in the sense of e.g. reading Plato?

What makes an "idea" atomic/discrete/cardinal? What makes an idea "complex" vs simple or merely true? Over what finite duration of time does it count as "simultaneously" being held?

Whatever you want them to be?

I don’t care about enforcing any specific interpretation on passing readers…

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#257

Post by TeMPOraL »

cj wrote: post #255
TeMPOraL wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I the only one to expect a S curve regarding progress and not an eternal exponential ? To LLMs specifically as they're now? Sure. To LLMs in general, or generative AI in general? Eventually , in some distant future, yes. Sure, progress can't ride the exponent forever - observable universe is finite, as far as we can tell right now, we're fundamentally limited by the size of our light cone. And while in any field…

I think the parent’s main point is that even if LLMs sustain exponential advancement, that doesn’t guarantee that humanity’s advancement will mimic technology’s growth curve. In other words, it’s possible to have rapid technological advancement without significant improvement/benefit to society.

> In other words, it’s possible to have rapid technological advancement without significant improvement/benefit to society.

This is certainly true in many ways already.

On the other hand, it's also complicated, because society/culture seems to be downstream of technology; we might not be able to advance humanity in lock step or ahead of technology, simply because advancing humanity is a consequence of advancing technology.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#258

Post by Terr_ »

reaperman wrote: post #210
Nevermark wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't disprove global warming by pointing out an extra cool evening. But I don't understand your point even as stated. Cars took over from horses as technology provided transport with greater efficiencies and higher capabilities than "horse technology". Subsequently transport technology continued improving. And continues, into new forms and scales. How do you see the alternative, where somehow horses were ... bre…

Cars do not strictly have higher capabilities than horses. GP was pointing out that horses can think. On a particularly well-trained horse, you could fall asleep on it and wake up back at your house. You can find viral videos of Amish people still doing this today.

> Cars do not strictly have higher capabilities than horses.

Another way to see it: A horse (or any animal) is a goddamn nanobot-swarm with a functioning hivemind that is literally beyond human science in many important ways. Unlike a horse:

* Your car (nor even half of them) does not possess a manufacturing bay capable of creating additional cars.

* Your car does not have a robust self-repair system.

* Your car does not detect strain its structure and then rebuild stronger.

* Your car does not synthesize its fuel from a wide variety of potential local resources.

* Your car does not defend itself by hacking and counter-hacking attacks other nanobots, or even just by rust.

* Your car does not manufacture and deploy its own replacement lubricants, cooling fluid, or ground-surface grip/padding material.

* Your car is not designed to survive intermittent immersion in water.

In both a feature-list and raw-computation sense, we've discarded huge amounts in order to get a much much smaller set that we care more about.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#259

Post by dumbfounder »

roydivision wrote: post #45

This stands to reason. If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former. You may be disciplined enough to do more research if the answer is directly presented to you, but most people will not do that, and most companies are not interested in that, they want quick 'efficient', 'compet…

Sure, if I spend one hour researching a problem vs asking AI in 10 seconds, yes I will almost always learn more in the one hour. But if I spend an hour asking AI questions on the same subject I believe I can learn way more than by reading for one hour. I think the analogy could be comparing a lecture to a one-on-one tutoring session. Education needs to evolve to keep up with the tools that students have at their disposal.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#260

Post by Terr_ »

klodolph wrote: post #160
kridsdale1 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism and fiduciary duty prevents employers from paying people their market value when they are content enough to stay. An employee who does not do the effort to re-peg their labor time to market rates for their skill level is implicitly consenting to a prior agreement (when they were hired).

Funny how fiduciary duty in these contexts is overwhelmingly short-sighted.

Sometimes because the company investors are overwhelmingly short-sighted, which IMO ties back to the whole "financialization" of our economy into a quasi-casino.

I wonder how things might change if short-term capital gains tax (<5 years) went way up.

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