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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

#41

Post by galaxyLogic »

quanto wrote: post #36
sdoering wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Came here to say that. Having studied history - esp. in a time where Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was strongly (and sometimes emotionally) discussed in between students and professors alike, taught me, that - while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. I also learned to appreciate history on a fundamentally different level than I did, when I loved his…

> while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. If we don't learn from history, why do we do history? Is it a form of pure entertainment, i.e. of arts? If so, does that give more credence to White's argument? I have had a PhD colleague who genuinely believed that history ought to be (in the philosophical normative sense) contributing to national propaganda, thus of national interest…

I agree that goal should be to "learn from history" but not in the narrow sense of how could a specific historical catastrophe could have been avoided. We need a general understanding of histopry because it helps us understand human behavior in general. It helps us understand ourselves.

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

#42

Post by WhyIsItAlwaysHN »

lynx97 wrote: post #21
simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

> where all you got was the outline of the island As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.

What would you need to tackle this assignment?

I think you're right to complain about the design of the question. It used Google's disadvantage in that it couldn't process visual information to add difficulty to the task.

However I'm pretty sure there's many of these challenges in an average stem subject. An example would be information dense diagrams which describe some chemical process.

I'm genuinely curious to understand how someone manages to understand these without sight. On my side, I can barely visualize so it was always extremely hard to decipher them and even worse remember them.

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

#43

Post by aaron695 »

lynx97 wrote: post #34
mantas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’d be bad if there was no alternative. But different people can get different assignments and that’s ok. Complaining about this is like me complaining about people drinking milk since I’m lactose intolerant.

[flagged]

[dead]

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

#44

Post by Zorass »

carbonguy wrote: post #9

I spent some years as a teacher and so have some first-hand experience here; my take, for what it's worth, is that LLMs have indeed blown a gaping hole in the structure of education as actually practiced in the USA. That hole is: much of education is based on the assumption that the unsupervised production of written artifacts is proof of progress in learning. LLMs can produce those artifacts now, incidentally disrup…

For a long time, schools assumed that if a student turned in a written essay, it meant they had learned something. But now AI can write those essays too ,so that assumption doesn’t hold up anymore.

The real question is: if writing alone doesn’t prove learning, then what does?

Maybe we’ll see a return to oral exams or live discussions. Not because they’re perfect, but because they’re harder to fake.

In a way, AI didn’t ruin education it just exposed problems that were already there.

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

#45

Post by UncleMeat »

simonw wrote: post #29
UncleMeat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge. This is indeed true. But a challenge is that few professors are being given the time and training to help do this. When you are on a 4/4 and just keeping your head above water you don't tend to have enough time to adopt experimental pedagogies and completely replan your courses. And professors are largely being tasked…

My suggestion here isn't to have the professors do this: it's for the professors to challenge their students to do this.

I am friends with an unusually large number of professors, many of which are at very top institutions. The "make your own pedagogy" approach for students leaves huge portions of the classroom doing zero work whatsoever.

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

#46

Post by roenxi »

quanto wrote: post #36
sdoering wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Came here to say that. Having studied history - esp. in a time where Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was strongly (and sometimes emotionally) discussed in between students and professors alike, taught me, that - while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. I also learned to appreciate history on a fundamentally different level than I did, when I loved his…

> while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. If we don't learn from history, why do we do history? Is it a form of pure entertainment, i.e. of arts? If so, does that give more credence to White's argument? I have had a PhD colleague who genuinely believed that history ought to be (in the philosophical normative sense) contributing to national propaganda, thus of national interest…

A fun party game is to get some pure mathematicians together, speculate loudly that they must be motivated in their work by the numerous practical applications of maths and watch cheekily to see which of their faces fail to conceal the spasm of fury. 1 point per asymmetric eye twitch.

They're academics, their job is to make true statements and maintain a culture that cares a lot about whether their colleagues can prove them false. Beyond that, it is hard to figure out what purpose they might be fulfilling.

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

#47

Post by UncleMeat »

quanto wrote: post #36
sdoering wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Came here to say that. Having studied history - esp. in a time where Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was strongly (and sometimes emotionally) discussed in between students and professors alike, taught me, that - while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. I also learned to appreciate history on a fundamentally different level than I did, when I loved his…

> while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. If we don't learn from history, why do we do history? Is it a form of pure entertainment, i.e. of arts? If so, does that give more credence to White's argument? I have had a PhD colleague who genuinely believed that history ought to be (in the philosophical normative sense) contributing to national propaganda, thus of national interest…

> If we don't learn from history, why do we do history?

Historians uncover and communicate the story of humanity in as rich and diverse of a way as possible. This is, in my mind, somewhat comparable to the process of doing pure math research or fundamental physics research. While there may be practical outcomes for today (either unexpected or intended as a goal of a particular research direction), we also understand that doing math for its own purposes is valuable.

The process of doing archival research, putting sources in dialog with other research, and even simply reading secondary source writing achieves some positive outcomes. It widens and deepens empathy for the rich diversity of human behavior. It builds skills for critical analysis of media and communication. It can provide narrative and argument for people advocating for change today (both good and bad). But these do not need to be the reasons why we embark on history research. They are side outcomes of undirected analysis.

I'll also add that concern about "history departments funded by tax dollars" is just factually unfounded. My wife is a history and the size of grants is hilarious coming from my background in CS. Like, a grant for $2,000-$5,000 would be considered chunky. And grants are often coming from weird places like random corporations or donor funding rather than from the government. The NEH was already basically dead before Trump 2.0 and now is dead and buried. People upset about academic history can rest easy knowing that there aren't historians living large on your tax dollars.

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

#48

Post by HexPhantom »

When effort becomes optional, so does growth. And the quote from the student who sees college as networking with a side of AI-cheating? Painfully on the nose. There's a real risk of LLMs flattening the educational journey into a kind of performance optimization game

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

#49

Post by HexPhantom »

Animats wrote: post #18

The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards. Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular…

When history is approached as a pattern of decisions, risks, and consequences (not just narratives) it starts to feel a lot more relevant to other complex domains, including AI itself. And yeah, studying the losers (or the overlooked) often yields more insight than lionizing the winners.

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

#50

Post by wisty »

A lazy physics teacher can make every question a math question in disguise. If a physics teacher is worried that a better calculator will make their test trivial, maybe they need to teach physics instead of testing math.

A lazy humanities teacher can make every question a writing question in disguise. If a better spell checker will make a humanities assessment trivial, then maybe they need to teach humanities instead of testing essay writing.

I'm saying this in a kinda inflammatory way, but does the quality of ones ideas really correlate well with a well written essay?

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