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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

#301

Post by poulpy123 »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #192
poulpy123 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in the category of “other,” people to be managed separately. So what ? This is literally the case. The commenter has to be managed separately

The commenter (rightly or wrongly) is -I think- suggesting that assignments etc should be from the outset be designed to be accessible in their original form for everyone, and not just "okay, this works for 90% of people, lets worry about the rest separately". An example I have personally is when designing board games I now have internalised to never just use colour to communicate anything. Never solid colour which c…

But an assigment cannot be accessible to everyone by definition. You can't have a vision-based test accessible to a blind person as you can't have a sound-based test accessible to a deaf person.

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

#302

Post by physicsguy »

shermantanktop wrote: post #284
physicsguy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The friction is a feature, not a bug. The friction means only wealthy people can do anything in a sphere.

We've seen unprecedented democratization of media over the last 30 years, primarily due to the internet. I'm personally not seeing a corresponding positive impact on cultural creativity. I see a lot of tweets and a lot of Etsy stores, and the audience for long novels (for example) is aging out.

Can't say I agree? There's tons of self-published novels that likely never would have made it to publication.

Just to give some examples...

The Martian - Andy Weir

Wool (Silo TV series based on this) - Hugh Howey

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers

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

#303

Post by Pet_Ant »

poulpy123 wrote: post #301
Pet_Ant wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commenter (rightly or wrongly) is -I think- suggesting that assignments etc should be from the outset be designed to be accessible in their original form for everyone, and not just "okay, this works for 90% of people, lets worry about the rest separately". An example I have personally is when designing board games I now have internalised to never just use colour to communicate anything. Never solid colour which c…

But an assigment cannot be accessible to everyone by definition. You can't have a vision-based test accessible to a blind person as you can't have a sound-based test accessible to a deaf person.

So I'm not a disability advocate, but I did date someone who was so I was immersed in it, but never having studied it so take my answer as a best effort trying to piece together from memories.

I think the answer would be to make assignments multi-faceted that can be approached differently. Like instead of having students write a report on book they read, which priveledges the those with sight, non-dyselxics, and those that can type let them perhaps record a podcast, film a YouTube video, draw a webcomic etc that lets students show what they know. And then reflect on why does it have to be a book that's read? It could be a film, a mini-series, a radio-play, a graphic novel, a play. That allows people to approach it using their abilities instead of being hampered by disabilities such as blindness, deafness, ADHD, dyslexia, being non-verbal, etc.

It means you've distilled the assignment to it's core: can you summarise the plot, identify key moments, recognise themes and metaphors, and place the work within the historical context in which it was produced.

There you have an assignment that is much more accessible.

The tricky part is that marking them objectively is much more difficult because the criteria of evaluation are not necessarily monolithic but need to take into account the student and the mediums chosen.

...but it's still a single accessible assignment.

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

#304

Post by kenjackson »

UncleMeat wrote: post #254
kenjackson wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all PhDs have an oral defense. Not only that its common to have Quals where you have to present the state of the art research in your field and answer oral questions about it. Even if you had ChatGPT it would be tough because a lot of questions are like, "Why did XYZ do ABC after seeing result 123?" The problem is that often its an untrue statement they are trying to get you to justify -- XYZ didn't do ABC or…

I have never even heard of a trick or misleading question for quals or for a defense. That’d be ridiculous. You don’t need to do that.

Maybe it was just legacy from my department (and this was 20+ years ago -- I think things like these are probably less accepted now).

Funny story, a year or so after my quals I was at a conference and talking about it (at a lunch table, not a presentation). I was saying with one of these questions I answered it correctly and explained why what they were asking wouldn't work. One of the senior professors at the table chuckled and said that he was one of the committee members for one of the members of my committee and how my committee member fell hook, line, and sinker for one of these questions and wrapped himself in circles during quals.

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

#305

Post by clown_strike »

fallingknife wrote: post #292
mrguyorama wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 th…

You don't have to understand infosec to not get phished. And education doesn't do a damn thing to help you resist those algorithms.

Philosophy has proven invaluable in identifying the sophistry behind every recent progressive movement.

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

#306

Post by fallingknife »

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?

Because a college degree isn't an intellectual achievement. It's 4 years of school when you've already done 13. I went to one of those schools where people go "oh, you went to $SCHOOL" when they find out, and I always want to roll my eyes because I didn't do shit to get that degree.

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

#307

Post by fallingknife »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #277
fallingknife wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Learning difficult subjects fundamentally changes how you think about and approach things.

Citation needed on this. But even if I accept the premise, what percentage of school is leaning difficult subjects? For me it was <5% and the other 95+% was stuff that could be beaten easily with rote memorization. The only classes in that 5% were upper level courses that only students who want to be there take anyway.

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

#308

Post by fc417fc802 »

fallingknife wrote: post #307
fc417fc802 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Learning difficult subjects fundamentally changes how you think about and approach things. Citation needed on this. But even if I accept the premise, what percentage of school is leaning difficult subjects? For me it was <5% and the other 95+% was stuff that could be beaten easily with rote memorization. The only classes in that 5% were upper level courses that only students who want to be there take anyway.

Is it not self evident? A subject doesn't have to be particularly difficult to impact how you think. Being exposed to algebra provides you with new ways of looking at the relations between things. Being exposed to even basic world history gives you perspective that you wouldn't otherwise have had about society at large. I've observed the effect in both myself and those around me to the extent that it appears self evident to me.

Unfortunately any of the obvious metrics you might use to quantify this would seem to be hopelessly biased. The more advanced the degree someone holds the farther above average that individual tends to be in various ways. I doubt it would be possible to control for such large cross correlations.

Perhaps asking people who learn multiple languages could provide subjective evidence since that doesn't have nearly as much of a correlation with other abilities.

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

#309

Post by fc417fc802 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #300
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure whether you're missing the point by a mile, or whether I am. The transformer architecture, later modified to create GPT models, was originally designed for translation. The modifications to make it do predictive text in a chatbot style make it much, much worse at translating: one of the biggest issues is that generative systems fail silently . Using the tech appropriately gives you things like Project Be…

I get your point about the surprising news that gpt4 does so poorly at translation. I didn’t know that! However, I think the idea is that LLM technologies have improved considerably since then. Do you still feel that Claude or ChatGPT perform worse than DeepL? It would be really nice to have an objective benchmark for comparison

Well there's this[0] but unfortunately I don't see any results and I'm not about to put in the time to run it myself.

Responding to GP, I won't object that LLMs aren't optimized for translation but I would generally expect them to perform quite well at it given that it seems to come with the territory of being able to respond to natural language prompts in multiple languages.

> massive, overfit generative models are awful at translation

> part-of-speech classification + dictionary lookup + grammar mapping – an incredibly simplistic system with performance measurable in chapters per second – does a better job

Those are two distinct claims you made and I'm not inclined to accept either of them without evidence given how unexpected both of them would be from my perspective.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models/tree/...

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

#310

Post by zaphar »

const_cast wrote: post #274
zaphar wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why depend on a degree or a leetcode problem when neither is a good proxy for ability to code? Ask to see code that they've made public somewhere, Offer a take home exercise, Hire them on contract to hire.

There are so many better options than leetcode or degree.

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