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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#431

Post by Mengkudulangsat »

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.

> 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.

Amen.

I look forward to the era where we train professionals the old fashion way: apprenticeships. It sure worked for blacksmiths and artisans for hundreds of years.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#432

Post by bruce511 »

cwalv wrote: post #250
bruce511 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get what you measure, and you should expect people to game your metric. Once upon a time only the brightest (and / or richest) went to college. So a college degree becomes a proxy for clever. Now since college graduates get the good jobs, the way to give everyone a good job is to give everyone a degree. And since most people are only interested in the job, not the learning that underpins the degree, well, you get…

> However, while 90% will miss the opportunity right there in front of them, 10% will grab it and suck the marrow. Learning is not just a function of aptitude and/or effort. Interest is a huge factor as well, and even for a single person, what they find interesting changes over time. I don't think it's really possible to have a large cohort of people pass thru a liberal arts education, with everyone learning the same…

I did a comp science degree, so I can't speak for the liberal arts. However I imagine the same experience could apply.

For us the curriculum was the start of the learning, not the end. We'd get a weekly assignment that could be done in an afternoon. Most of the class did the assignments, and that was enough.

There was a small group of us that lived (pretty much) in the lab. We'd take the assignment and run with it, for days, nights, spare periods, whatever. That 10 line assignment? We turned it into 1000 lines every week.

For example the class on sorting might specify a specific algorithm. We'd do all of them. Compete against each other to make the fastest one. Compare one dataset to another. Investigate data distributions. You know, suck the marrow.

(Our professors would also swing by the lab from time to time to see how things were going, drop the odd hint, or prod the bear in a direction and so on. And this is all still undergrad.

I can imagine a History major doing the same. Researching beyond the curriculum. Going down rabbit holes.

My point is though is that you're right. You need to be interested. You need to have this compulsion. You can't tell a person "go, learn". All you can do is offer the environment, sit back, and see who grabs the opportunity.

I get that you cant imagine this playing out. To those interested only in the degree, it's unimaginable. And no, as long as burning-desire is not on the entry requirements, it most certainly will not be the majority.

In truth the lab resources eoild never have coped if the majority did what we did.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#433

Post by zahlman »

> [Not a student’s real answer, but my handmade synthesis of the style and content of many answers]

> You only have to read one or two of these answers to know exactly what’s up: the students just copy-pasted the output from a large language model, most likely ChatGPT. They are invariably

This is validating. Your imitation completely fooled me (I thought it really was ChatGPT and expected to be told as much in an entirely unsurprising "reveal") and the subsequent description of the style is very much in agreement with how I'd characterize it.

In previous discussions here, people have tried to convince me that I can't actually notice these obvious signs, or that I'm not justified in detecting LLM output this way. Well, it may be the case that all these quirks derive from the definitely-human training data in some way, but that really doesn't make them Turing-test-passing. I can remember a few times that other people showed me LLM prose they thought was very impressive and I was... very much not impressed.

> When someone comments under a Reddit post with a computer-generated summary of the original text, I honestly believe that everyone in the world would be better off had they not done so. Either the article is so vapid that a summary provides all of its value, in which case, it does not merit the engagement of a comment, or it demands a real reading by a real human for comprehension, in which case the summary is pointless. In essence, writing such a comment wastes everyone’s time.

I think you've overlooked some meta-level value here. By supplying such a comment, one signals that the article is vapid to other readers who might otherwise have to waste time reading a considerable part of the article to come to that conclusion. But while it isn't as direct as saying "this article is utterly vapid", it's more socially acceptable, and also more credible than a bald assertion.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#434

Post by PKop »

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.

And that won't be their problem, they'll be long gone having achieved what they wanted when they were cheating. It is a societal problem or institutional and industry problem. If the market and these universities want these degrees to mean anything as signaling mechanism they must stop these students from cheating some way somehow...the students are never going to stop themselves.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#435

Post by geysersam »

bumby wrote: post #303
ebiester wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the general feeling of students right now. Academia put itself as a gateway and barrier to the middle class. Why would we be surprised when people with no interest in anything but the goal are not enthralled by the process?

Academia clearly lost their monopoly on information. Since their last moat is a monopoly on credentials, I expect them to defend it intensely. We could make it less meaningful if employers weren’t so keen on using credentials as their own gateway. That may have more of a chance of happening if the OPs perspective becomes more prevalent and the credential becomes an increasingly worse signal for meaningful skills.

In what way does academia have monopoly on credentials?

You can start issuing your own credentials tomorrow.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#436

Post by nine_k »

animal_spirits wrote: post #424
rohansood15 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Further, if a student can get a diploma without work, then the diploma does not have value anymore. If diplomas are no longer valuable, the signal they provide in the labor market will turn into noise. If employers no longer look for the diploma-signal in an employee, what will be the reason an employer will hire an employee? I think this story will become true, and society will radically shift into one where critica…

In a medieval guild, to be admitted as a master, an apprentice had to create a chef d'oevre, or masterpiece, so called for this reason.

In the computer engineering industry, you increasingly have to demonstrate the same: either as a part of your prior work for hire, or a side project, or a contribution to something open-source.

A diploma is still a useful signal, but not sufficient, except maybe for very junior positions straight from college. These are exactly the positions most under pressure by the automation.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#437

Post by Mbwagava »

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.

> If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you.

Does the use of a quantifiable metric like a GPA not exacerbate this? In a world where people take a GPA seriously, you'd have to be irrational to not consider cheating a viable option.

You could say the same about credit score and dating apps. These institutions assist the most predatory and harm the most vulnerable.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#438

Post by bluefirebrand »

lesuorac wrote: post #426
bluefirebrand wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies will have to provide the LLM just like retail stores have to provide cash registers for cashiers to use

Eh, I think this is going to be an outdated take. Employees are increasingly expected to use personal devices in work settings.

You are probably in a bubble

The vast majority of companies still issue laptops and other hardware

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#439

Post by sublinear »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #358
jameshart wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Yes, but piano lessons are not a music degree. Similarly, vocational programs or apprenticeships are not a formal education either.

I find a lot of these comments more disturbing than the concerns about AI.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#440

Post by PKop »

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

And there were fewer students going to university and so you had a higher proportion of people doing it for the love of learning. It was easier to get a job without a degree. It's not just a cultural shift, it's a change of supply and demand.
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