41–50 of 168 posts
why is this surprising. all such tools hamper learning. if you want to learn, read books, read and write. don't use a spellchecker for ur language exam. no calculator for calculus. pen and paper. how is this going backwards :(
When I was young, and learning math, my father always forbade me from looking at the answer in the back of the textbook. “You don’t work backwards from the answer!”, and I think this is right. In life, we rarely have the answer in front of us, we have to work that out from the things we know. It’s this struggling that builds a muscle you can then apply to any problem. ChatGPT, I suspect, is akin to looking up the ans…
What if the test is irrelevant to the current times? “Those with ChatGPT solved 48 percent more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17 percent worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning.” So, in the real world, where people can use chatgpt in their jobs, the kids that use it will do better than the kids who don’t. Maybe a better test is: can you catch chatgpt when it is wr…
LLMs, for me, have been tremendously useful in learning new concepts. I frequently feed it my own notes and ask it to correct any misunderstandings, or to expand on things I don’t understand.
I use it like I would an on demand tutor, but I can totally understand how it could be used as a shortcut that wouldn’t be helpful.
In the same way, I can hire a tutor that will help me actually learn, or I can hire a “tutor” that just does the homework for me. I’ve worked as a tutor so I’ve seen people looking for both, and people that don’t want to learn are always going to find a way. People who do want to learn are also going to find a way.
What if the test is irrelevant to the current times? “Those with ChatGPT solved 48 percent more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17 percent worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning.” So, in the real world, where people can use chatgpt in their jobs, the kids that use it will do better than the kids who don’t. Maybe a better test is: can you catch chatgpt when it is wr…
Working with a customer/client? I don’t think you’ll take a minute to say “give me one second let me ask ChatGPT”
Did nobody read the article? It says right there that the students who used chatgpt right, as a tutor, did much better than their peers. If your human tutors just give you the answers when you ask for them, how do you think it'll ho?
No LLM processing required, just old fashioned critical reading and comprehension (my emphasis added):
>> The students who used it did spectacularly better on the practice problems, solving 127 percent more of them correctly compared with students who did their practice work without any high-tech aids. But on a test afterwards, these AI-tutored students did no better.
I was willing to entertain the idea they could do better. I guess the tests have to be written to leverage the skill. That said, all things being equal kids who write notes by hand out-perform kids who type them. Even touch type them. So maybe the old ways are better in this specific brain-knowledge-competency-understanding forming space?
I never was good at hand written notes, but I always outperformed my classmates on tests. Except for the one geometry class where the teacher gave me detention for not taking enough notes. Maybe I'm an exception.
That said.. "learning styles" has mostly been debunked. In truth we don't entirely know why some people do amazingly well in maths and some don't. It's an interesting field of research (and the related field of "does well in compsci")
From the abstract: “Consistent with prior work, our results show that access to GPT-4 significantly improves performance (48% improvement for GPT Base and 127% for GPT Tutor). However, we additionally find that when access is subsequently taken away, students actually perform worse than those who never had access (17% reduction for GPT Base).” Kids who use ChatGPT do actually “significantly” better according to the a…
They don't do better as far as learning is concerned. Isn't this concerning? > However, we additionally find that when access is subsequently taken away, students actually perform worse than those who never had access (17% reduction for GPT Base). The abstract continues: > That is, access to GPT-4 can harm educational outcomes. These negative learning effects are largely mitigated by the safeguards included in GPT Tu…
From the abstract: “Consistent with prior work, our results show that access to GPT-4 significantly improves performance (48% improvement for GPT Base and 127% for GPT Tutor). However, we additionally find that when access is subsequently taken away, students actually perform worse than those who never had access (17% reduction for GPT Base).” Kids who use ChatGPT do actually “significantly” better according to the a…
Someone educated by the News Feed algorithm (which is what RLHF amounts to: reward for getting human to click) is going to be the worst kind of wrong: /r/ConfidentlyIncorrect.
I have wondered if future generations will struggling with critical thinking / problem solving - without the aided technology assistance.
I think new tools are great, but it seems to me that the people who can utilize them the best are the ones who learned without them. Those are the people who understand the concepts behind them, so they can ask the right questions, with the right terminology, and they can recognize if an answer makes sense.
When learning is done with these tools, even just calculators, little is being learned. Memorize the button sequence to press leading up to the test. Once the test is over, forget the sequence… and even if the buttons are relented, it won’t matter, because while we all walk around with a calculator in our pockets now, it’s not a TI-83 (or whatever people use now), so without the conceptual knowledge, what good is the button sequence. That doesn’t even prepare a person to leverage ChatGPT well.