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How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

laurentiugabriel.github.io

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Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#271

Post by xfq »

8bitsout wrote: post #48

I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…

I think one problem is that books are not customizable, and many books are aimed at people with some certain knowledge. With LLMs, you can tell it what your knowledge level is and ask it to customize the answer for you. This is difficult to achieve with books.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#272

Post by blackqueeriroh »

For everyone who thinks you can’t learn with LLMs, Dr. Cat Hicks, psychological scientist and author of the recent book “The Psychology of Software Teams[1],” who worked at Google and founded the Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight, has written two skills called learning-opportunities[2] and learning-goal[3] that use validated learning science to help you learn while using LLMs.

Cat also has an awesome podcast with her wife, Ashley Juavinett, Phd, called Change, Technically.[4]

I encourage everyone to check out her work! She’s dedicated her life to helping software developers get the support they need inside organizations to be seen as humans, not just robots.

1: https://www.drcathicks.com#book 2: https://github.com/DrCatHicks/learning-opportunities 3: https://github.com/DrCatHicks/learning-goal 4: https://www.changetechnically.fyi

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#273

Post by Duanemclemore »

Buildings are a fantastically complicated and interesting complex problem space. I found my architecture studio students using it to ask technical and code questions about the buildings they were tasked with designing. I observed that the inaccurate information it was returning was compounding...

To be clear, I say "inaccurate" rather than "wrong" in this case because even if the information it returns is factually correct to the question being asked, students don't have an understanding of the complexity of the interdependent tectonic, regulatory, and spatial / experiential factors of a building sophisticated enough to ask their questions of the specificity and nuance necessary to get a good output that addresses the entire problem.

Anyway - with the students still learning to ask questions the right way, and the conditionally-incorrect facts making their learning more complicated rather than less, I hit on a strategy for them to use LLM's that seemed to help much better.

I suggested that instead of ask the LLM for the factual answer, or even better for the facts and an explanation, that they ask it to direct them to the proper place in the source material to find the answer themselves. Then, to treat it like a lab partner. IE:

Hey Claude I'm looking for "x."

Claude: "look at foo, bar."

Thank you - chapter (foo) part (bar) table (goo) says "car." However I notice that footnote (hoo) says there's an exception if "dar." Which is what I have. Walk me through this exception...

It seemed to have good results as a guide to understanding the disparate bodies of knowledge that they will eventually have to keep together in their heads and work synthetically and non-linearly through, rather than just as an external source of blindly trusted authority.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#274

Post by champagnepapi »

intrasight wrote: post #253
PsylentKnight wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's long been the case that the best way to learn something is to teach something Which is pretty unfortunate for those that want to learn. I used to enjoy writing documentation at work, it was my favorite part of the job. And it did feel like it benefited me more than it benefited all the people that were (or weren't) reading my documentation. Now I can't really justify spending much time on docmentation when LLM…

I got started as a software engineer working in the nuclear industry in the 80s. We measured our documentation in inches not pages, and it was all written by hand. And I'll bet you the documentation in the nuclear industry is still written by hand and not by LLMs.

I sure hope those docs aren’t written by LLMs for many reasons!

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#275

Post by broast »

copperx wrote: post #53
8bitsout wrote: post #48

I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…

It's much better to feed the book to the LLM and ask questions as you read along, instead of asking the LLM to basically write a custom book for you from scratch.

I prefer to have the LLM ask me the questions

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#276

Post by lambda »

voidhorse wrote: post #202
gb2d_hn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came across the socratic method recently, and have used it to learn a couple of topics that I was having trouble getting to stick. There are some SKILL.md's available for it. It works for concepts as opposed to facts, and causes the model to guide you to answers through your own reasoning, which is both much more engaging than reading a wall of LLM text and helps the information stick.

The "Socratic Method" (aka maieutic) skills annoy me, precisely because when you read them they are the kind of low-effort, low-expertise crap someone who over relies on AI would naively come up with when tasked with the problem of coming up with skills for learning. "Hey the Platonic dialogues are pretty cool and smart, let's do that". The body of literature on learning theory, and beyond that on specific types of l…

Can you provide some references to the research you're referring to? Sounds interesting but you haven't really provided enough information to find it.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#277

Post by champagnepapi »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #197
SchemaLoad wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with the latest models today, the hallucination rate is absurdly high on anything deeper than surface level knowledge or something that can be directly scraped from reddit. And you notice when it's a topic you know well or something like software where you can immediately tell the options it's giving you don't exist on the page. Leading to the amusing statement "LLMs are bad at what I do but great at everything…

I've (elsewhere) written about this diminishing return effect on LLM utility in relation to increasing expertise. The question: what's the net positive gain of turning people who know nothing in a given field into sub-novices, while weighing actual experts down with work slop and marginal returns? And I wonder what the true cost is of arming so many novices with that level of dangerous knowledge.

I think the true cost will be some catastrophic failures.

Just hoping folks don’t get hurt due to people not understanding what they’re doing with these things but believing they’re competent.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#278

Post by chadcmulligan »

killingtime74 wrote: post #269
chadcmulligan wrote: post #268

These animations are great. I have learnt so many things from LLM's, cross checking things is easy enough, but the hallucinations are really not much of a thing any more (in my experience). When you deep dive on things it does seem to get very wordy sometimes (this is claude anyway). Its taught me flutter and dart without opening a book (with the occasional reference page), set me straight on monads finally, refined…

It's not close to zero. https://artificialanalysis.ai/?omniscience=omniscience-hallu... . Hallucinations bring to question what you think you've learned. That's going to cost long-term if you labor under mis-apprehensions until you maybe figure out you learned something wrong.

where's it mentioned on that link? I can't seem to find hallucinations (don't worry found it).

Yes, sometimes its wrong, most times its right, cross checking is fairly easy, not using it because of the possibility its wrong seems a baby with the bath water thing.

I learnt a lot of functional programming from it, stuff I've always wanted to learn, but just didn't have the time and really the sources can be difficult, it really explained things well, and as someone else said in this thread, you can ask questions over and over until you understand, asking a person that (if you can get an expert) would drive them nuts. Maybe my experience isn't typical, its hard to tell, everyone reports something different.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#280

Post by bumby »

rDr4g0n wrote: post #270
8bitsout wrote: post #48

I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…

LLMs can't "read the room" and infer how much context the audience already has, so they try include everything. human conceptual thinking is very much a multi-dimensional graph, which relies on light "approximate" concepts that are "good enough". LLM AR token generation is extremely one dimensional and doesnt care about the "weight" of the concept behind a token. LLMs hold billions of parameters in "mind" at once. hu…

I’m curious where you get the estimate that humans hold “like four” parameters in their mind at once?
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