311–320 of 322 posts
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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.
AI hasn’t destroyed the humanities, but it definitely made things more complicated and harder to teach. I’ve seen students rely entirely on chatbots to write essays, and it really does make teaching harder. As the article says, we need to find ways to make AI and the humanities work together, not just hold on to the old way of doing things.
A lot of my engineering exams didn't allow certain calculators, so I guess that's what will happen for humanities, supervised and timed essay writing. I remember going to museums and seeing all the modern art, and wondering why art went to such weird places compared to the realism of the 1600's, and my conclusion was that invention of photography made realism obsolete. I wonder if something similar will happen to the…
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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 thos…
The problem with such assignment is it's very hard to balance the alternatives to be equal. Reading a book takes quite a bit longer than watching a film or even mini-series. IMO it's perfectly fine for someone blind to watch a film and then make a report on it. But how many healthy people would just go for a film since it's quicker? And reading a book is quite a bit different experience than a film due to much more space for imagination and interpretation in a book.
P.S. calling people with no disabilities „privileged“ is just... wrong. It's not a privilege to have a set of eyes/hands/etc.
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No but people do pay universities for (among other things) a meaningful credential that testifies to their knowledge and abilities. If taking away phones is what’s required to make that credential meaningful again, then the universities must do it. I think of it like a personal trainer. Do you pay them to make you sweaty and sore? Not really, but sweat and soreness are consequences of doing what it takes to build mus…
>meaningful credential that testifies to their knowledge and abilities. No they don't, or at least a significant percentage of them don't. They pay the university because it is a paywall between them and even getting an interview in the first place.
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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
That GPT models are bad at translation, and will always be bad at translation (while, perhaps, "improving" where they're overfit on specific benchmarks), is obvious to anyone with even a cursory understanding of how they work.
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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…
When considering these failure modes, which have come up every single time I've seen ChatGPT used for translation, it's clear that the simplistic system I described would work better. It'll output gibberish often (just as LibreTranslate does when given decontextualised Chinese and asked to translate to English), but that's better than a GPT model, which will just confabulate something in the same circumstance. The goal isn't "maximise the amount of successful translatedness": it's "reduce the language barrier as much as possible", something the benchmarks don't test.
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> 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.
Like with everything one can see the positives or focus on the negatives. The Internet today has great, good, medium and bad content, just as before, what's different is the effort and excitement we used to have back then.
Everyone's always claiming the humanities are important the humanities are important but everyone I know in STEM is more learned than everyone in humanities. More philosophy, more history, more classical literature. This means that humanities education is relatively bogus.
Everyone's always claiming the humanities are important the humanities are important but everyone I know in STEM is more learned than everyone in humanities. More philosophy, more history, more classical literature. This means that humanities education is relatively bogus.
Breadth vs depth.