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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

#281

Post by HappMacDonald »

SoftTalker wrote: post #170
idiotsecant wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got cause and effect backwards. Employers used to offer incentives to stay in a company and grow organically. They decided that was no longer going to be the deal. So they got the current system. There was never some sudden eureka moment when the secret engineers club decided they wanted to have a super stressful life event every few years just to keep up with inflation.

As I said in another response, I think (at least partly) a contributing factor was the essentially limitless salary budget that VC funded startups and the FAANG companies had. You had software developers who could suddenly make more than doctors and lawyers and of course many of them sensibly acted in their own best interest but that left other employers saying "we're not going to invest in employees who are only goi…

Once a company hires and trains a junior, then they have a senior.. and they don't want to pay them a senior salary, but apparently other companies do.

The math remains simple: if you already have an employee on your payroll, how in the world are you not willing to pay them what they can get by switching at that point? That's literally just starving one's own investment.

The real issue is that the companies who were "training" the juniors were doing so only because they saw the juniors as a bargain given that they were initially willing to work for the lower wage. They just don't stay that way as they grow into the craft.

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

#282

Post by HappMacDonald »

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.

I imagine the thought process is that even when one must show their work, having a sneak peak at the answer allows a lazier student to work the problem forwards and backwards hoping to fudge through the middle plausibly well.

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

#283

Post by llelouch »

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…

Actually, for most things (not PHD research level) you will learn more from the first approach. Getting answer directly means you can use the rest of the "free" time to integrate new knowledge into prior knowledge and review the information into long term memory.

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

#285

Post by Nevermark »

Retric wrote: post #233
Nevermark wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, good point. Then the global warming point applies, but in a much less trivial way. There is turbulence in any big directed change. Better overall new tech often creates inconveniences, performs less well, than some of the tech it replaces. Sometimes only initially, but sometimes for longer periods of time. A net gain, but we all remember simpler things whose reliability and convenience we miss. And some old tech…

The issue is more than just a local cold snap. When the fundamental graph you’re basing a theory on is wrong it’s worth rejecting the theory. The total computing power of life on earth the fact it’s fallen over the last 1,000 years. Ants alone represent something like 50x the computing power of all humans and all computers on the planet and we’ve reduced the number of insects on earth more than we’ve added humans or…

You could just as well talk about the computing power of every microbe.

Or all the quarks that make up the Earth.

Ants don’t even appear on either graph.

But the flexibility, coordination & leverage of information used to increase its flexibility, coordination & leverage further is what I am talking about.

I.e. intelligence.

A trillion trillion trillion transistors wouldn’t mean anything, acting individually.

But when that many work together with one purpose without redundancy we can’t imagine the problems it will see & solve.

Quarks, microbes, and your ants are not progressing like that. What was there most recent advance? How long did that take? Is it a compounding advance?

Growing intelligence doesn’t mean lesser intelligences don’t still exist.

We happen to compete based on intelligence, so the impacts of smarter machines have a particularly low latency for us.

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

#286

Post by Nevermark »

Terr_ wrote: post #258
reaperman wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The car isn’t intelligence.

Not sure why you are implying cars outdid horses intelligence.

Cars are a product of our minds. We have all those self-repair abilities, and we have more intelligence than a horse.

But horses intelligence didn’t let them keep up with what the changing environment, changed by us, needed. So there are less horses.

The rate that horse or human bodies are improving, or our minds, despite human knowledge still advancing, is very slow compared to advances in machines designed specifically for advancement. Initially to accelerate our own advancement.

Now the tech, that was designed to accelerate tech, is taking on a life of its own.

That is how foundational advances happen. They don’t start ahead, but they move ahead because of new advantages.

It is often initially much simpler. But in ways that unlock greater potential.

Machines are certainly much simpler than us. But, much easier to improve and scale.

You recognize the new thing even before it dominates, because in a tiny fraction of the time the old system got to where it is, the new system is already moving much much faster.

If general AI appears before 2047, it will have taken less than 100 years to grow from the first transistor.

People will see it who are older than the first transistor!

Nothing on the planet has ever come close to that speed of progress. From nothing to front runner. By many many many orders of magnitude.

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

#287

Post by Nevermark »

pdfernhout wrote: post #265
Nevermark wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our best bets are the following I think: First, and above all, Ethics. Ethics of humans, matters more than anything. We need to straighten out the ethics of the technology industry. That sounds formidable, but business models based on extraction, or externalizing damage, are creating a species of "corporate life forms" and ethically challenged oligarchs that are already driving the first wave of damage coming out of…

On the ethics point as a "best bet", consider also the importance of a sense of humor that recognizes irony. As I wrote in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competi…

Yes, absolutely prescient! Quite the irony.

Just as our abilities to solve problems accelerated without bounds, it will be our paranoia that screws things up.

Even before machines have any incentive or desire to turn on us, the fearful & greedy will turn them on all of us and each other.

I hope things don’t go that way. But it’s the default, and I think the greatest risk.

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

#288

Post by Terr_ »

Nevermark wrote: post #286
Terr_ wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The car isn’t intelligence. Not sure why you are implying cars outdid horses intelligence. Cars are a product of our minds. We have all those self-repair abilities, and we have more intelligence than a horse. But horses intelligence didn’t let them keep up with what the changing environment, changed by us, needed. So there are less horses. The rate that horse or human bodies are improving, or our minds, despite human…

Retric referred to "total computing power".

A horse has trillions of cells, and even one of those cells is doing more biochemical day-to-day computation than your car's automatic transmission does electronically or mechanically.

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

#289

Post by bibelo »

gcanyon wrote: post #280

1. Socrates criticized writing itself: in Plato's Phaedrus he said it would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories" (274e-275b) 2. Leonard Euler criticized the use of logarithm tables in calculating: in his 1748 "Introductio in analysin infinitorum" he insisted on deriving logarithms from first principles 3. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) initially dismissed mechanical c…

what was your prompt?

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

#290

Post by eimrine »

gcanyon wrote: post #280

1. Socrates criticized writing itself: in Plato's Phaedrus he said it would "create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories" (274e-275b) 2. Leonard Euler criticized the use of logarithm tables in calculating: in his 1748 "Introductio in analysin infinitorum" he insisted on deriving logarithms from first principles 3. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) initially dismissed mechanical c…

I do not consider any of 8 wrong, if I want to understand each of their ideas. The time was slower at their times and painting with eraser is kind of a different genre.
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