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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#411

Post by godelski »

chongli wrote: post #353
palata wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your education system and the recruitment in those companies that require this degree are broken. It's not the case in all countries though. Not that it is your fault, just stating the obvious.

It is broken. For every coveted job there are thousands of applicants. Employers will accept any signal that reliably predicts a modicum of intelligence, conscientiousness, and agreeability. University degrees cover all three. But that's just the job market. The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market. People who don't have top-notch jobs (that require degrees) can't afford to buy a house. Th…

  > We are a society of ladder-pullers.
I don't disagree, but often we complain about people pulling up ladders and when faced with the same decision we follow suit. Ultimately we can't change this behavior if no one is willing to defect from "conventional wisdom"

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#412

Post by [deleted] »

sgustard wrote: post #410
MengerSponge wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We (America) made university educations super expensive. Causality is complicated, but it probably started as an effort to destroy the anti-war movement in the 70's.

"Most financial experts attribute he sudden increases that started in the 1970s with an influx of federal funding designed to make college more affordable." https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year

[deleted]

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#413

Post by sgustard »

jameshart wrote: post #329
sn9 wrote: post #221

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

I’ve come across this analogy that I think works well: Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym. If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. But we’re doing this work for the effect it will have on you . The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.

Why do some countries cheat in the Olympics? Because it is no longer a contest of human achievement, it's just about the medals as a symbol of national glory. Of course: once all countries are doping, the medals will become meaningless. College degrees will suffer the same fate if everyone cheats to get them.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#414

Post by ineptech »

jddj wrote: post #104
ineptech wrote: post #86

Relatedly, there was a major controversy at work recently over the propriety of adding something like this to a lengthy email discussion: > Since this is a long thread and we're including a wider audience, I thought I'd add Copilot's summary... Someone called them out for it, several others defended it. It was brought up in one team's retro and the opinions were divided and very contentious, ranging from, "the summar…

I checked your website after this and wasn't disappointed. Funny stuff.

Hah, thanks! Haven't touched it in a long time, almost forgot about the username.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#415

Post by tcmart14 »

bumby wrote: post #356
mlsu wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of education isn't to actually learn though. It's to receive the credential. This is much larger than a cultural problem with the students of today. They believe, rightfully and accurately, that the university degree is yet another part of the machine that they will become a cog in. What should be alarming to everyone is that these students will graduate without having learned anything and then go into the…

This attitude is part of a more general cultural shift. Back in the 1960s, the majority of students said the primary motivation for going to college was to develop a philosophy of life, and a minority said the main goal was to be very financially successful. Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted. * according to the UCLA CIRP freshman survey

I would also say some of the attitude shift is also contradictory. The amount of people I interact with who have a lot of bad things to say about the education who tell me universities should focus on education in a general meanwhile also say that schools to should focus on student getting jobs. Probably one that has been heard before, something along the lines of, "why don't high schools teach plumbers courses." I mean they can. While also, "colleges are too focused on checking the boxes so students can get jobs."

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#416

Post by Zebfross »

I am personally proud of my use of AI because for anything non-trivial it is generally a conversation where each recommendation needs to be altered by an imaginative suggestion. So ultimately it’s the entire conversation that needs to be considered, not just the “final” prompt.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#417

Post by tcmart14 »

bumby wrote: post #357
lurking_swe wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a disingenuous argument. You don’t know what you don’t know. Literally. A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own. Or they will go down rabbit holes and waste countless hours, and not having an expert unblock you or guide you down the right path would waste a lot of time. Further, some high school graduates (like myself at the tim…

> The other aspect of college you ignore is, it is a way to build a network prior to entering the workforce. I don’t know how generalizable this is. I remember reading a few studies trying to assess if Ivy League education was really more valuable that a state school. The result (IIRC) was that it only matters for students who came from the lowest economic strata; the authors presumed it was due to the network effect…

I used to work for a guy who had his engineering degree from Harvard. I was out of the Navy, got a job but also had a GI bill and was looking to go to school for engineering while working full time. I asked him his advise. Pretty much he said is to go to a state school. The only real benefit, at least for engineering from Ivy League, is the network, which can make getting the first job easier. Otherwise the course work is the pretty much the same.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#418

Post by godelski »

bumby wrote: post #359
alpinisme wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Academia put itself as a gateway How did academia do that? It doesn’t seem like universities would have the power to do that. More likely, either employers put academia as a gateway. Or even: the culture at large misunderstood what pathways existed to middle class life. Or even: pathways to middle class life became scarcer and more insecure, and the real gatekeepers (hiring managers) had no good ways to select whic…

I agree with you (and upvoted) but consider this: why don’t fancy schools offer the same credentials for MOOCs if the information and assessment is on-par? I believe it is because they recognize the value of the credential and guard it closely.

I think you missed the parent's point. Maybe consider this:

Why don't employers recognize the credentials of a MOOC to the same degree that they would a university degree?

We could similarly ask why employers value the degrees of some universities more than others.

I think it's important to realize that ultimately the decisions come from the employers, not the universities. No one is making the employers do anything. But at least the second question might have a clearer partial answer. In part, there is a selection of a tribe, an implicit "culture fit" that's happening. It isn't uncommon to see employer bias towards specific universities. This is especially true with prestigious universities.

But it's not the universities that are making anyone do anything and that's an important distinction.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#419

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

rohansood15 wrote: post #400
ChadNauseam wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't bother giving diplomas. Compare: My piano teacher doesn't give diplomas because none of her students would care, her students actually want to learn. When my piano teacher cancels class, I am disappointed because I wanted to learn. My piano teacher doesn't need to threaten me with bad grades to get me to practice outside of class (analogous to homework), be…

Students want the diploma because it has value. It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving. If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.

Soon?

I hire people now and where they went to school means little to me. The first priority is “can they do the work?” which is a niche programming. After that is established, I barely take note of school.

I don’t personally count a CS degree as an indication the person is a good programmer, or thinks logically, or has good work ethic.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#420

Post by roland35 »

fallinditch wrote: post #334
EvgeniyZh wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they would be stupid not to if their classmates are using it. Why would they be stupid? Were people before LLMs stupid for not asking smarter classmate/parent/paid contractor to solve the homework for them? Large part of education is learning about things that can be easily automated, because you can't learn hard things without learning easy things. Nothing conceptually changed in this regard, like Wolfram Alpha di…

Agreed, my bad choice of words. I really meant 'stupid' from a slightly ironic, competitive point of view. It's like the pressure to cheat in professional sport is obviously so intense, I'm sure a lot of a cheat's motivation is to remain competitive because their colleagues are cheating so they feel they have to as well, otherwise they lose.

What's funny about this is if you are an athlete who cheats constantly while growing up - you'll never develop the skills to be able to make it as a pro. Interesting how students don't see this same situation with their homework
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