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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

#261

Post by aydyn »

awkward wrote: post #259
fallingknife wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Economic OR status gain is putting a lot of work on the or. We've put into place a context for intellectual achievement at scale. Why shouldn't status be apportioned to someone who is recognized by a panel of peers and teachers to have useful insight into their field?

> Why shouldn't status be apportioned to someone who is recognized by a panel of peers and teachers to have useful insight into their field

Because many "fields" in colleges are not useful.

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

#262

Post by aydyn »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #249
s1artibartfast wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Teach them "values" as determined by a central governing authority?

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

#263

Post by wizzwizz4 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #204
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does "every time I've challenged people about this on Hacker News" count as a benchmark? See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35531558.

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

#264

Post by teaearlgraycold »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #199
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the thinking that precedes writing that should be the bulk of your grade. Possessing what looks like an artifact of organized thought isn’t enough these days to evaluate a student.

The “thinking that precedes the writing” is not where the gold is. That kind of thinking is often confused, internally inconsistent, liable to miss critical details or nuance, and full of deductive leaps which may or may not pan out. Writing demands rigor of thought, it forces us to question premises, find evidence for a point of view, discern between the hypothetical and the factual, and try to organize these such t…

You misunderstand. I mean the thinking that you say “_is_ the writing”. But the final words aren’t the thoughts that you should be graded on (aka “this is not a pipe”, but your essay is not your thoughts). What a new assessment could look like is an open book debate with a human (or, hell, with a rubber duck LLM). If at the end your thoughts are organized and self consistent you’ve done well.

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

#265

Post by aydyn »

pixl97 wrote: post #189
cvwright wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but people do pay universities for (among other things) a meaningful credential that testifies to their knowledge and abilities. If taking away phones is what’s required to make that credential meaningful again, then the universities must do it. I think of it like a personal trainer. Do you pay them to make you sweaty and sore? Not really, but sweat and soreness are consequences of doing what it takes to build mus…

>meaningful credential that testifies to their knowledge and abilities. No they don't, or at least a significant percentage of them don't. They pay the university because it is a paywall between them and even getting an interview in the first place.

But that isnt a good long term strategy. If degrees hold no real signal, employers are going to start noticing and the value of a degree decreases.

So its in universities best interest to actually test for competence.

... In theory.

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

#266

Post by timewizard »

> Generative AI elevates the value of humanistic skills

No. It just steals them, whitewashes their copyright, then passes them off as a "machine creation." If there were no humans actively using language there would be no language models.

> Generative AI makes it harder to teach humanistic skills

Yea. That's what happens when you steal for a living.

> For this reason, it is vitally important that educators learn how to personally create and deploy AI-based assignments and tools that are tailored directly for the type of teaching they want to do.

All with zero evidence that this will improve outcomes for them. For this reason you should TEST YOUR HYPOTHESIS.

I hate AI hype.

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

#267

Post by mrguyorama »

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?

>and why should they?

Because modern life is radically more complicated than humans can naturally deal with.

Your average peasant for millenia didn't need to understand Information security to avoid getting phished, didn't need to understand compounding interest for things like loans and saving for retirement (they'd just have kids and pray enough of them survive), didn't need to have some kind of mental model for the hordes of algorithms deployed against us for the express purpose of taking all of our available attention (a resource that people before a couple decades ago had so much excess of that boredom was a serious concern) for the express purpose of selling it to people who want to extract any dollar you may have access to, did not need to understand spreadsheets(!), etc etc etc etc

Like, being productive in modern society is complicated. That's what education is for.

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

#268

Post by realitybit3z »

stanford_labrat wrote: post #170
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…

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…

IN RESPONSE TO: Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP

there are like 4 factors besides ZIRP i've witnessed as a hiring manager

- Layoff or dont hire locals in favor of H1b/H4

- Layoff or dont hire locals in favor of Nearshore and Offshore

- Section 174 Tax code on software: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

- More productivity via LLMs, Code Assist

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

#269

Post by realitybit3z »

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…

IN RESPONSE TO: 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'.

This one is really bad. I have waves of local grads begging for unpaid internships or work now. They all were AP students, good GPAs, good schools, "learned to code", took on 200k of college debt -- only to find the promised job is just not frigging there at the end of the line. Meanwhile, they are told there is a "massive shortage of coders" and see overseas workers hired into those same jobs. How do younger people trust the system anymore? Further, in light of this, why would any steel-worker (metaphorically speaking) want to retrain and learn to code if even the geeks learning to code face dismal outcomes?

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

#270

Post by goatlover »

aydyn wrote: post #262
Pet_Ant wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Teach them "values" as determined by a central governing authority?

Yes, within a reason. Not in an authoritarian or dismissive manner. But the ideals of our western liberal societies.
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