The other day i was trying to learn why there is no internal structure to electrons and other quarks, but it failed. I still dont know.
Good news: nobody does.
How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
451–460 of 572 posts
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#452What’s everyone’s opinion on learning new tech things in this day and age? My opinion swings between positive and depressing vision of the future. I still learn new stuff, but I’m afraid it won’t have any value in a year or so. For example, I’m pretty good at optimizing low level stuff, but right now you can just ask LLMs to do so and they are pretty good at it. They will profile the code and suggest reasonable optio…
If people don't learn, and write, and converse, about new tech, the LLMs will not have raw material to learn their slop from. And I am quite worried that this is the direction we're going in, with the lake of insight being sipped dry and a future of shallow cliches as LLM responses.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly what OP was doing, or does teaching kids not qualify somehow?
It's not the same thing. A language is a closed system, it just requires that the participants agree on the rules in order to be successful. Biology is not a language, it's a field of study of phenomena that exist independently of minds. If you read a biology textbook (or an LLM's output about biology) and then relate to someone else what you've read, you and the other person can discuss the topic, and be no closer t…
> Biology is not a language, it's a field of study of phenomena that exist independently of minds.
Your personal assertion is quite wrong at a fundamental level. Biology refers to the field or study, not individual specimens. The field is comprised of the understanding that people over time compiled on nature, along with arbitrary frameworks that help people organize and reason about the topic.
Take the concept of species, and species classification. A specimens exists regardless of being classified or not. However, the same specimen can be classified differently depending on the state of the body of knowledge at the time. In some cases you had species being reclassified due to new findings, such as genetic tests.
Once you understand this, you learn that you can't claim that a field of study is anything other than abstractions and partial and incomplete observations compiled form people throughout time.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you say in all honesty that a read of the Wikipedia article for DNA would have been less helpful? It's less convenient perhaps, but definitely more authoritative.
Just reading something is a fundamentally different experience that being actively involved in a conversation about the thing.
One thing you can do with the LLMs is ask them to make up quick quizzes for you one a subject.
That can help a bit.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it depends on what you want to learn and what your definition of "learnt" is. The other day I realised I had no idea how DNA and life works. I guess I studied it at high school (25 years ago), but maybe it didn't go into much detail or it just didn't click. So I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me, I came up with my own mental model from it's explanation, told it that, then it corrected me where I misunderstood…
Can you say in all honesty that a read of the Wikipedia article for DNA would have been less helpful? It's less convenient perhaps, but definitely more authoritative.
Wikipedia is completely non-interactive so of course the experience is different. Do you want to look up something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis and try and understand that from Wikipedia? If you don't understand it, you have to try and click elsewhere. With an LLM, I can be very specific, "I understand x, y, z about PCA but I don't understand why we have to do it? What happens if I don't apply it?" and the LLM most of the time will give very approachable explanations that can be refined further if I still don't get it.
I am studying for a Masters degree in Computer Science with AI and the lecture notes are like Wikipedia sometimes. Incomplete, perhaps assume pre-knowledge that lots of Masters students won't have. All of these I have taken to ChatGPT and got great explanations, diagrams, graphs etc.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it depends on what you want to learn and what your definition of "learnt" is. The other day I realised I had no idea how DNA and life works. I guess I studied it at high school (25 years ago), but maybe it didn't go into much detail or it just didn't click. So I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me, I came up with my own mental model from it's explanation, told it that, then it corrected me where I misunderstood…
Can you say in all honesty that a read of the Wikipedia article for DNA would have been less helpful? It's less convenient perhaps, but definitely more authoritative.
Wikipedia is a great _reference_ but not necessarily the best way to learn about a topic. Of course, this depends on the topic, on who has been writing the page, etc
A particularly bad example is higher maths - a wiki pages on a complex mathematics topic often reads like "A gruncheon is a worch in the brashation of plusters" and each of these words is a separate page or topic. Of course, you _can_ in theory 'just' click through all the tree of linked pages to understand a concept ...
For DNA the page (scanning it now) is well laid out, with images (including a spinning Rasmol? image) and lots of detail. However, the detail could be a drag on understanding for some : There are 'nucleotides' and 'nucleosides' and 'nucleobases'? There are non-canonical bases? Supercoiling? Z-DNA? While I know (most) of these things, it is because I've learned about them in other contexts, or by direct instruction.
I'm not saying it is impossible to understand DNA from that page, but it is likely to be harder (for some?) than a more conversational approach to learning.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
> don't really teach you anything Dunno, I've been learning a lot of Rust in the past few days. Just dove right into a project and asked AI to teach me stuff on a need to know basis. I'm actually getting used to Rust by now.
A programming language is a skill with an accessible source of irrefutable feedback. If the program doesn't work, then you did something wrong. What happens if you try to learn something less concrete or less testable, like quantum mechanics, as the GP suggested?
Yep. This is the key. You need some kind of knowledge of what the end result should look like to really learn something from LLMs. Otherwise it's a deep dark forest with no way out.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#458> What you get is a beautiful animation that is 100% accurate and free of hallucinations. I'm not sure I follow how this is actually guaranteed? The fact-checking process mentioned just seems to involve asking AI to review its own work.
I'm just looking at the rocker engine piece. The belt is running backwards. That's the first thing I'd expect it to get right or flag if it doesn't. Human in the loop is also the quality control. If that fails the rest might have similar issues.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#459This is, without exaggeration, probably the fiftieth blog post or long-form comment about how someone is using an LLM for "complex learning", and I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before. In my experience, LLMs are really good for taking up your time and making you feel like y…
I personally don't get this attitude. For one thing, nobody on earth can give you a 500-word summary of quantum physics in a way that lets you internalize even a tiny bit of it. That's not how you learn anything. Here's how I do it: I open Baby Rudin (3rd ed.), second chapter, and read the main text - absolute brutality. I unpack almost every sentence with Claude/GPT until I finally get what's going on. No ELI5 nonse…
Baby Rudin is a special textbook: it comes from a time when mathematics textbooks were not at all judged by their pedagogical value, but instead by their aesthetic appeal to mathematicians (a la Bourbaki).
If you actually want to learn analysis, there are a nearly infinite number of friendlier resources (e.g., Understanding Analysis by Abbott).
Learning to unpack difficult text on one’s own is a valuable skill. Research papers often require a similar amount of suffering, and at the frontier of knowledge, despite all the advances we’ve seen, LLMs seem to have absolutely no understanding or intuition. They are much better at things that have been expounded at length by humans before.
I would argue that if you’re going to use an LLM to make Rudin easier to understand, you are not learning how to absorb difficult material, nor are you learning analysis efficiently.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you say in all honesty that a read of the Wikipedia article for DNA would have been less helpful? It's less convenient perhaps, but definitely more authoritative.
Wikipedia is a great _reference_ but not necessarily the best way to learn about a topic. Of course, this depends on the topic, on who has been writing the page, etc A particularly bad example is higher maths - a wiki pages on a complex mathematics topic often reads like "A gruncheon is a worch in the brashation of plusters" and each of these words is a separate page or topic. Of course, you _can_ in theory 'just' cl…
If only Wikipedia contained like an easier-to-digest version of Wikipedia, using planer language: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA
I just asked Opus to "explain DNA to me in simple language" and the two are not even in the same league in terms of quality.