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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

#271

Post by realitybit3z »

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)

IN RESPONSE TO Even the Soviet Union made people go to school, and getting a degree was a route to higher status.

Also people did that to avoid Dedovshchina

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina

https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/russia1004/2.htm

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

#272

Post by fc417fc802 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #194
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

I want to agree with you. In fact I do agree with the point you're making about how policies, cultural values, and outcomes are intertwined.

However you need to realize that the country you're holding up as a counterexample brands people as felons over some fairly absurd things and more generally has a remarkably dysfunctional justice system that exhibits precisely the same cultural failures that you're objecting to here.

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

#273

Post by fc417fc802 »

Balgair wrote: post #223
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Universiti…

It's not clever, it's pointless red tape. I don't know if it's different in Germany but at least at US universities most higher level courses are part of a sequence and are thus only offered at a specific time of year. Thus failing delays your degree by a year and creates all sorts of logistical issues for the student.

Doing that more than 3 times would be absurd, and anyway the sort of student who has 3 F's on his transcript within his chosen major is unlikely to be maintaining a GPA above the minimum for his program (or any program for that matter). Rather than transferring to another degree such a student is likely to be forced out of the university entirely in short order.

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

#274

Post by const_cast »

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.

For most people, if your expertise isn't guided by boards of already experienced people then it's probably not really worth it. Most people are shockingly bad at learning on their own. They're gonna go home and watch TV, go to the gym, and spend time with their loved ones.

Look, I would not want a doctor to perform my surgery who did not do a residency. I don't care if they carved up 1,000 cadavers in their free time. I want somebody where the board of their specialty has said "yup, this guys good". I'm not gonna spend the time to try to trust the doctor, because that's really really hard. I'm not a doctor, I don't know shit. I have to rely on institutions of trust to do that work for me.

And that's really what universities are at their core - institutions of trust. When you get a degree, there's trust you understand the material to an appropriate degree. When you pass a residency, there's trust you understand the material to an appropriate degree. If we lose that trust, such as by letting students cheat by AI, that is a big problem.

Could I hire someone who says they're an expert, with no degree, and just give them a leetcode problem? Sure. But if I hire someone with a degree, I have a much greater level of certainty they can actually code. Same goes for work experience.

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

#275

Post by aydyn »

goatlover wrote: post #270
aydyn wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happens if that centeal authority becoms subverted (as many people here would argue is the case right now)?

Doesnt that single point of failure indicate a weakness?

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

#276

Post by Pet_Ant »

aydyn wrote: post #275
goatlover wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What happens if that centeal authority becoms subverted (as many people here would argue is the case right now)? Doesnt that single point of failure indicate a weakness?

Values are your culture. The Nazis were elected and supported (at least initially) so you are right some what, but the answer is multiple countries.

But a country without a culture and without shared values is a sled being pulled by dogs in different directions and not a real team (as many people would argue has been the case for quite some time).

You need common values to work together to achieve goals. That's what a country is, people working together. When you don't, you just become tenants with passports.

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

#277

Post by fc417fc802 »

fallingknife wrote: post #238
tehjoker wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Interesting essay. Makes some very good points, however I have to disagree with this one.

> ... they keep some sort of overall concept of learning. This is a pretty god-of-the-gaps-ish hypothesis, and counterbalanced by ...

The author is really missing the obvious here. Learning difficult subjects fundamentally changes how you think about and approach things. People aren't born able to engage in critical thinking or being able to reason algebraically or with an ability to navigate formal logic. That doesn't mean school is the only way to impart such skills, but it is certainly one of the ways.

Of course if the metric you use is "ability to answer trivia" then you are going to fail to capture that aspect.

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

#278

Post by fc417fc802 »

ivape wrote: post #88
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…

“Cannot be done with chat gpt” Is a military base the only place “no devices” can be enforced or something? How deep is this addiction? I’m scared to ask what the academic version of fizz-buzz would be at the end of a 4 year degree, “hey write one paragraph describing a simple paradox, an example of irony, or an example of a metaphor”.

How broadly do you propose to enforce such a ban? Most students do their homework at home so I'm not sure how you're imagining this would work.

Even for exams I had my cellphone and backpack on me. You just weren't allowed into them. The only exception to that in my experience was exams proctored in a dedicated testing center where there are lockers, multiple human observers, and lots of cameras.

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

#279

Post by dr_dshiv »

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.

https://lokalise.com/blog/what-is-the-best-llm-for-translati...

Claims Sonnet 3.5 wins

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

#280

Post by gitfan86 »

shermantanktop wrote: post #158
gitfan86 wrote: post #147

For every Quinton Tarantino there are dozens of people who could make amazing films but never had the opportunity for a wide variety of reasons that now mostly go away.

And for each of those dozens, there are now millions of untalented people who can generate terrible films with a few clicks. How does a Tarantino, or even one of your new talents, ever get discovered? The friction is a feature, not a bug.

Quality rises to the top organically.
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