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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#441

Post by smcg »

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.

But it will always be worth more than not having it, so companies will still require it.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#442

Post by smcg »

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #431
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.

> 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.

Companies don't want to retain anyone longer than 2 years. They would never go for this unless forced to. By collective action.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#443

Post by WatchDog »

vunderba wrote: post #31
bost-ty wrote: post #4

I like the author's take: it isn't a value judgement on the individual using ChatGPT (or Gemini or whichever LLM you like this week), it's that the thought that went into making the prompt is, inevitably, more interesting/original/human than the output the LLM generates afterwards. In my experiments with LLMs for writing code, I find that the code is objectively garbage if my prompt is garbage. If I don't know what I…

This is the CRUX of the issue. Even with SOTA models (Sonnet 3.5, etc) - the more open-ended your prompt - the more banal and generic the response. It's GIGO turtles all the way down. I pointed this out a few weeks ago with respect to why the current state of LLMs will never make great campaign creators in Dungeons and Dragons. We as humans don't need to be "constrained" - ask any competent writer to sit quietly and…

When using Claude Sonnet 3.7 for coding, I often find that constraints I add to the prompt, end up producing unintended side effects.

Some examples:

- "Don't include pointless comments." - The model doesn't keep track of what it's doing as well, I generally just do another pass after it writes the code to simplify things.

- "Keep things simple" - The model cuts corners(often unnecessarily) on things like type safety.

- "Allow exceptions to bubble up" - Claude deletes existing error handling logic. I found that Claude seems to prefer just swallowing errors and adding some logging, instead of fixing the underlying cause of the error, but adding this to the prompt just caused it to remove the error handling that I had added myself.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#444

Post by bruce511 »

squigz wrote: post #116
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…

> you get a bunch of students that care only for the pass mark and the certificate at the end. This is because that is what companies care about. It's not a proxy for cleverness or intelligence - it's a box to check.

That's entirely the point. If you see the degree only as a stepping stone to the company job, then that's all you see and that's all you get.

If you accept that the degree/job relationship is the start, not end, of the reason for being there, then you see other things too.

There are opportunities around the student which are for them, not for their degree, not for their job. There are things you can learn, and never be graded. There are toys to play with you'll never see again. There are whole departments of living experts happy to answer questions.

For example, (this is pre google) I wrote a program and so needed to understand international copyright. I could have gone to the library and read about it. Instead I went to the law faculty, knocked on the door, and found their professor who specialized in intellectual property.

Since the program I wrote was in the medical space, I went to the medical campus, to the medical research library, and found tomes that listed researchers who might benefit. I basically learned about marketing.

If all you care about is the company job, then all you'll see is the degree.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#445

Post by EigenLord »

I think the answer to the professor's dismay is quite simple. Many people are in university to survive a brutal social darwinist economic system, not to learn and cultivate their minds. Only a very small handful of them were ever there to study Euler angles earnestly. The rest view it as a hoop they have to jump through to hopefully get a job that might as well be automated away by AI anyway. Also viewed from a conditional reinforcement perspective, all the professor has to do is start docking grade points from students who are obviously cheating. Theory predicts they will either stop doing it, or get so good at it that it becomes undetectable-possibly an in-demand skill for the future.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#446

Post by karpierz »

code_biologist wrote: post #369
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.

Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to a gym where you're told the goal is to be healthy and strong, but they can't really stop you from using a forklift, and jobs and compensation are given out according to how much you lifted irrespective of forklift use.

Except part of the job involves lifting things in places where forklifts can't fit.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#447

Post by dmazzoni »

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…

Consider that there is some in-between.

Some college students may be genuinely interested in one particular subject, but they're required to take a bunch of other courses, and consider those to just be hurdles.

I still think they're better off at least making an effort and trying to learn something, but I do think it's important to note that just because a student has no interest in one particular class, doesn't mean they have no interest in any class.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#448

Post by dmazzoni »

sublinear wrote: post #439
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…

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.

But if your goal is to be a musician, a music degree is basically useless. Whether you want to play in an orchestra, perform in a rock band, or compose video game soundtracks, nobody cares whether you have a degree or not - they want to hear you perform.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#449

Post by hnfong »

tcmart14 wrote: post #415
bumby wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

[flagged]

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#450

Post by sigmaisaletter »

lurking_swe wrote: post #301
soerxpso wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently. The purpose of a class writing exercise is to get the university to give me the degree, which I cannot do by actually learning the material (…

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…

"A completely self guided high school graduate following random online materials will not learn nearly as much on their own."

I think you underestimate how bad some high schools really are.

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