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Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

291–300 of 308 posts

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

#291

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…

SOCRATES: Do you know how you can speak or act about rhetoric in a manner which will be acceptable to God? PHAEDRUS: No, indeed. Do you? SOCRATES: I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men? PHAEDRUS: Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you…

>> The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

That's perfectly true and the internet has made it even worse.

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

#292

There are two aspects to this from my pov. And I think it might be controversial. When i have a question about any topic, and I ask Chatgpt, i usually chat about more things, coming up with questions based on the answer, and mostly stupid questions. I feel like I am taking in the information, analyzing, and then diving deeper because I am curious. This is based on how I learn about stuff. I know i need to check a few…

Remember that ChatGPT can only give you information that a) it has found on the web and b) that it has made up itself on the spot. It certainly can't get up and go to the library to read a forgotten source not cited on Wikipedia, say.

So when you have a "curious" debate with ChatGPT what you're really doing is searching the internet through a filter, guided by your own and ChatGPT's biases about the subject, but still and always based on whatever you would have found by researching stuff on the internet.

You're still on the internet. It may feel like you've finally escaped but you haven't. The internet can now speak to you when you ask it, but it's still the internet.

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

#293

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.

There's stuff horses can do better than even the best of our current technology. Where that stuff matters, horses are still employed.

Where cars displaced horses, it's because they're strictly better in a larger sense. On the city streets, maybe a car is louder than a horse, but it's also cheaper to make, easier to feed, and doesn't shit all over the place (which was a real problem with scaling up horse use in the 19th century!). Sure, cars shit into the air, but it's a more manageable problem (even if mostly by ignoring it - gaseous emissions can be ignored, literal horse shit on the streets can't).

And then, car as a platform expands to cover use cases horses never could. They can be made faster, safer, bigger, adapted to all kinds of terrain. The heart of the car - its engine - can be routed to power tool attachments, giving you everything from garbage trucks to earth movers, cranes, diggers, to tanks; it can be also taken outside and used as a generator to power equipment or buildings. That same engine can be put in a different frame to give you flying machines, or scaled up to give you ships that can carry people, cars, tanks, planes or containers by the thousands, across oceans. Or scaled up even more to create power plants supplying electricity to millions of people.

And then, building all that up was intertwined with larger developments in physics, material engineering, and chemistry - the latter of which effectively transformed how our daily lives look like in the span of 50 years. Look at everything around you. All the colors. All the containers. All the stuff you use to keep your house, clothes, and yourself clean. All that is a product of chemical industry, and was invented pretty much within the last 100 years, with no direct equivalent exiting ever before.

This is what it means for evolution accelerating when it moved from genes to information. So sure, horses are still better than stuff we make. The best measure of that advantage is the size of horse population, and how it changed over the years.

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

#294
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why not force everyone to start from first principles then? I think learning is tied to curiosity and curiosity is not tied to difficulty of research i.e. give a curious person a direct answer and they will go on to ask more questio…

One of the values of doing your own research is it forces you to speak the "language" of what you're trying to do. It's like the struggle that we've all had when learning our first programming language. If we weren't forced to wrestle with compilation errors, our brains wouldn't have adapted to the mindset that the computer will do whatever you tell it to do and only that. There's a place for LLMs in learning, and I…

This seems like a difference between learning styles. You seem to champion learning by reading. I’d argue using an LLM to build a toy or tool and learning that way is just as valid.

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

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal, but I for one despise the youtube/instagram etc. rabbidholes. When I'm in the mood for a good one I scroll wikipedia. I had the best random conversations about what I read there and it feels like I remember this forever

It's because Wikipedia is non-profit, and has very strict editorial control. YouTube and Instagram is the opposite in both.

The editorial fairness of Wikipedia is currently hotly debated.

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

#296

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?

I hope they're literate to understand we're only reading about that alleged exchange because Plato wrote it down. Median literacy in the US is famously somewhere around the 6th grade level, so it's unlikely most of the population is much troubled by the thoughts of Plato.

I’d be really curious to see metrics on literacy broken down by other criteria. What’s the median literacy of people who are “like me”?

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

#297
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It feels like maybe you didn’t read what I said, or understand it.

A car was never an example of its own intelligence.

It was an example of our natural human intelligence’s & our growing cultural knowledge’s impact on horses.

How much have horses progressed. Math yet?

More computation doesn’t necessarily mean more intelligence. Horses are smart creatures, I ride one. He is my friend.

But they are not us, not our joint culture, and not any competition for today’s machines in terms of adapting and growing in capabilities.

The fact that machines are far simpler than us or a horse, but advancing faster is much like we were weaker but used our minds better than other apes.

Simpler in the right way is smarter. As many major advances in mathematics have demonstrated.

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

#298
post #233

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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 whe…

You could of course exclude biological computation and say computational power started with mechanical computers very recently, but that’s not what they are trying to argue. As soon as they add biological life as data on the chart then the actual numbers become relevant to their argument.

IE: As soon as you pick definition X, you need to stick with that definition.

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

#299
post #67

I'm certainly of two minds on this. On one hand, this reminds me of how all of the kids were going to be completely helpless in the real world because "no one carries a calculator in their pocket". Then calculators became something ~everyone has in their pocket (and the kids ended up just fine). On the other hand, I believe in the value of "learning to learn", developing media literacy, and all of the other positives…

I think it's closer to the library example. My parents have mentioned how they had to go to a library and look for books whereas my generation can just use the internet.

Realistically my guess is that the bar for broad knowledge and ability to get to details quickly will increase. There's a lot of value in understanding multiple disciplines at a mediocre level if you can very quickly access the details when needed. Especially since learning speed tends to get slower and slower the deeper you go.

Also since every time I've needed to do something complicated, even if I knew the details it was important enough to double check my knowledge anyway.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of us still have to do these things? You either eed to do them or you don’t. If you do, you will learn how or find someone that do. We still need to calculate numbers and I can say it’s silly if I find someone need to get a calculator to do 5x20. Same if you’re taking hours and multiple sheets of paper for something that will take you a few minutes with a calculator. There’s a question of scale and basic und…

> How many of us still have to do these things? Yep, we agree. That's the whole point of what I said in the first half of my original comment. At one time, they were common skills. Things changed, they aren't common, they aren't really needed (for most people), and everyone is doing just fine without them. We've freed up time and mental capacity for other (hopefully more beneficial) tasks. (I'm confused why this repl…

There are things that aren't needed because we have found easier ways to solve the problem they were solving. In contrast, there are things that exists that are only to make the job easier, no to make it go away. You don't need to light a fire because of how house are heated or food are made. But you still need to learn arithmetic to use a calculator. There's a difference between the two.

If the goal is to learn, the means don't matter much as long as the right attitude is there. But if one only wish to appear knowledgeable, LLM has indeed make it way easier.

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