Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 308 posts

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#51

Post by cube2222 »

epolanski wrote: post #34
jcims wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my take as well. There was a story a couple days ago about a neural network built on a single photonic chip. I fed the paper to ChatGPT and was able to use it to develop a much more meaningful and comprehensive understanding of what the chip actually delivered, how it operated, the fundamental operating principles of core components and how it could be integrated into a system. The fact that I now have a tire…

On the other hand you might be getting worse at reading those papers yourself. The more youngsters skip the hassle of banging their heads on some topic the less able they will be to learn at later age. There's more to learning than getting information, it's also about processing it (which we are offloading to LLMs). In fact I'd say that the whole point of going through school is to learn how to process and absorb inf…

Sure, same as I'm probably pretty bad at going to the library and looking up information there, with the advent of the internet.

In practice, this lets you reasonably process the knowledge from a lot more papers than you otherwise would, which I think is a win. The way we learn is evolving, as it has in the past, and that's a good thing.

Though I agree that this will be another way for lazy children to avoid learning (by just letting AI do the exercises), and we'll need to find a good solution for that, whatever it may be.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#52

Post by setsewerd »

squigz wrote: post #22
jcims wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my take as well. There was a story a couple days ago about a neural network built on a single photonic chip. I fed the paper to ChatGPT and was able to use it to develop a much more meaningful and comprehensive understanding of what the chip actually delivered, how it operated, the fundamental operating principles of core components and how it could be integrated into a system. The fact that I now have a tire…

> (hallucination caveats notwithstanding) This is a pretty big caveat to the goal of > develop a much more meaningful and comprehensive understanding Which is still my biggest issue with LLMs. The little I use of them, the answers are still confidently wrong a lot of the time. Has this changed?

I use ChatGPT a lot each day for writing and organizing tasks, and summaries/explanations of articles etc.

When dealing with topics I'm familiar with, I've found the hallucinations have dropped substantially in the last few years from GPT2 to GPT3 to GPT4 to 4o, especially when web search is incorporated.

LLMs perform best in this regard when working with existing text that you've fed them (whether via web search or uploaded text/documents). So if you paste the text of a study to start the conversation, it's a pretty safe bet you'll be fine.

If you don't have web search turned on, I'd still avoid treating the chat as a search engine though, because 4o will still get little details wrong here and there, especially for newer or more niche topics that wouldn't be as well-represented in the training data.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#53

Post by miltonlost »

lr4444lr wrote: post #8

The abstract does not define, nor contextually suggest from the prior statements of the results what "metacognitive laziness" means. Personally speaking, I find being able to ask ChatGPT continually more nuanced questions about an initial answer the one clear benefit over a Google search, where I have diminishing marginal returns on my inquisitiveness for the time invested over subsequent searches. The more precisely…

>The abstract does not define, nor contextually suggest from the prior statements of the results what "metacognitive laziness" means.

Your comment seems like a good example of metacognitive laziness: not bothering to formulate your own definition from the examples in the abstract and the meaning of the words themselves. Slothful about the the process of thinking for yourself.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#54

Post by elpocko »

probably_wrong wrote: post #50
agentultra wrote: post #11

So humans are supposed to review all of the code that GenAI creates. We’re supposed to ensure that it doesn’t generate (obvious?) errors and that it’s building the “right thing” in a manner prescribed by our requirements. The anecdotes from practitioners using GenAI in this way suggest it’s a good tool for experienced developers because they know what to look out for. Now we admit folks who don’t know what they’re do…

> Do they know when the GenAI is bullshitting them? Anecdote from a friend who teaches CS: this year a large number of students started adding unnecessary `break` instructions to their C code, like so: while (condition) { do_stuff(); if (!condition) { break; } } They asked around and realized that the common thread was ChatGPT - everyone who asked how loops work got a variation of "use break() to exit the loop", so t…

>use break() to exit the loop

Well - they know that break is not a function and you don't. Thanks ChatGPT.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#55

Post by ankit219 »

There are two aspects to this from my pov. And I think it might be controversial.

When i have a question about any topic, and I ask Chatgpt, i usually chat about more things, coming up with questions based on the answer, and mostly stupid questions. I feel like I am taking in the information, analyzing, and then diving deeper because I am curious. This is based on how I learn about stuff. I know i need to check a few things, and that it's not fully accurate, but the conversation flows in a direction I like.

compared this to researching on the internet, there are some good aspects, but more often than not, I end up reading an opinionated post by someone (no matter the topic, if you go deep enough, you will land on an opinionated factual telling). That feels like someone decided what questions are important, what angles we need to look at, and what the conclusion should be. Yes, it is educational, but I am always left with lingering questions.

The difference is curiosity. If people are curious about a topic, they will learn. If not, they are happy with the answer. And that is not laziness. You cannot be curious about everything.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#56

Post by _aavaa_ »

A preprint is available on arxiv [0], see the top of page 18 for what metacognitive laziness is:

"In the context of human-AI interaction, we define metacognitive laziness as learners’ dependence on AI assistance, offloading metacognitive load, and less effectively associating responsible metacognitive processes with learning tasks."

And they seem to define, implicitly, “metacognitive load” as the cognitive and metacognitive effort required for learners to regulate their learning processes effectively, particularly when engaging in tasks that demand active self-monitoring, planning, and evaluation.

The analogize metacognitive laziness to cognitive offloading, where we have our tools do the difficult congnitive tasks for us, which robs us of opportunities to develop and ultimately dependent on those tools.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09315

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#57

Post by pragmar »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #20
lr4444lr wrote: post #8

The abstract does not define, nor contextually suggest from the prior statements of the results what "metacognitive laziness" means. Personally speaking, I find being able to ask ChatGPT continually more nuanced questions about an initial answer the one clear benefit over a Google search, where I have diminishing marginal returns on my inquisitiveness for the time invested over subsequent searches. The more precisely…

> LLMs really build that bridge to precisely the answers I want. It is interesting that you describe this as "the answers you want" and not "the correct answer to the question I have" Not criticising you in particular, but this does sound to me like this approach has a good possibility of just reinforcing existing biases In fact the approach sounds very similar to "find a wikipedia article and then go dig through the…

Agreeable LLMs and embedded bias are surely a risk, but I don't think this a helpful frame. Most questions don't have correct answers, so it would follow that you'd want practical answers for those, and correct answers for the remainder.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#58

Post by miltonlost »

cube2222 wrote: post #51
epolanski wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand you might be getting worse at reading those papers yourself. The more youngsters skip the hassle of banging their heads on some topic the less able they will be to learn at later age. There's more to learning than getting information, it's also about processing it (which we are offloading to LLMs). In fact I'd say that the whole point of going through school is to learn how to process and absorb inf…

Sure, same as I'm probably pretty bad at going to the library and looking up information there, with the advent of the internet. In practice, this lets you reasonably process the knowledge from a lot more papers than you otherwise would, which I think is a win. The way we learn is evolving, as it has in the past, and that's a good thing. Though I agree that this will be another way for lazy children to avoid learning…

Not being able to glean information from a paper is wildly different than being unable to use a card catalog. The former is basic reading comprehension; the latter is a technology.

You AREN'T learning what that paper is saying; you're learning parts of what the LLM says is useful.

If you read just theorems, you aren't learning math. You need to read the proof too, and not just a summary of the proof.

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#59

Post by dwater »

jprete wrote: post #42
empathy_m wrote: post #38

Cell phones and laptops in general have changed a couple of things for me, as someone who grew up without them: - I realized about 20y-25y ago that I could run a Web search and find out nearly any fact, probably one-shot but maybe with 2-3 searches' worth of research - About 10-15y ago I began to have a connected device in my pocket that could do this on request at any time - About 5y ago I explicitly *stopped* doing…

A long time ago I had the idea that maybe Guinness started a "book of world records" precisely because it answers exactly the kind of question that will routinely pop up at the pub.

Yes.

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/about-us/our-story

Re: Metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative AI on learning motivation

#60

Post by portaouflop »

roydivision wrote: post #45

This stands to reason. If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former. You may be disciplined enough to do more research if the answer is directly presented to you, but most people will not do that, and most companies are not interested in that, they want quick 'efficient', 'compet…

What is the long term downside in your opinion?
Post reply on HN