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How University Students Use Claude

anthropic.com

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Re: How University Students Use Claude

#541

Post by jplusequalt »

dankwizard wrote: post #326
jplusequalt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright." And what happens to those coders? For that matter--what happens to all the other jobs at risk of being replaced by AI? Where are all the high paying jobs these disenfranchised laborers will flock to when their previous careers are made obsolete? We live in a highly specialized society t…

Your opinion is wild. Hmm, millions of humans are spending a bulk of their lives plugging away at numbers on a screen. We can replace this with an AI and free them up to do literally anything else. No, let's not do that. Keep being slow ineffective calculators and lay on your death bed feeling FULFILLED!

>We can replace this with an AI and free them up to do literally anything else.

I would happily support automation to free myself, and others, from having to work full-time. But we live in a capitalist society, not StarTrek. Automation doesn't free up people from having to work, it only places people in financial crisis.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#542

Post by jplusequalt »

Ray20 wrote: post #509
hackyhacky wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're skipping over a critical step, which is that our society allocated resources based on the labor value that an individual provides. If we free up everyone to do anything, they're not providing labor any more, so they get no resources. In other words, society needs to change in big ways, and I don't know how or if it will do that.

>If we free up everyone to do anything Not anything, but something useful. And in exchange for that useful they'll get resources (which will become more abundant).

>something useful

Where is the existing work these people would take up? If it doesn't exist yet, then how do you suppose people will support themselves in the meantime?

What if the new work that is created pays less? Do you think people should just accept being made obsolete to take up lower paying jobs?

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#543

Post by jplusequalt »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #266
jplusequalt wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We are doomed imho. I encourage you to take action to prove to yourself that real change is possible. What you can do in your own life to enact change is hard to say, given I know nothing about your situation. But say you are a parent, you have control over how often your children use their phones, whether they are on social media, whether they are using ChatGPT to get around doing their homework. How we raise the n…

So your plan is to encourage people to "get off the Internet" by posting on the Internet, and to stave off automation by encouraging workers to gang up on their employers and make themselves a collective critical point of failure. Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world...

>Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world

The social contract lives and dies by what the populace is willing to accept. If you push people into a corner by threatening their quality of life, don't be surprised if they push back.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#544

Post by deepsun »

miningape wrote: post #375
vmilner wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly with maths you’re marked almost totally on written exams, but even if that weren’t true you’re also required to go over example sheets (hard homework questions that don’t form part of the final mark) with a tutor in two-student sessions so it’d be completely obvious if you were relying on AI.

I really like oral exams on top of regular exams. The teacher can ask questions and dive into specific areas - it'll be obvious who is just using LLMs to answer the questions vs those who use LLMs to tutor them.

Of course, the reasons they do quizes is to optimize the process (need less tutors/examiners), and to remove bias (any tutor holds biases one way or the other).

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#545

Post by Suppafly »

dodslaser wrote: post #537
Suppafly wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How many people are "good drivers" outside their home town? My wife is surprisingly good at remembering routes, she'll use the GPS the first time, but generally remembers the route after that. She still isn't good at knowing which direction is east vs west or north/south, but neither am I.

I'm like that too, but I don't think it transfers particularly well to LLMs. The problem is that you can just skip straight to the answer and ignore the explanation (if it even produces one). It would be pretty neat if there was an LLM that guides you towards the right answer without giving it to you. Asking questions and possibly giving small hints along the way.

>It would be pretty neat if there was an LLM that guides you towards the right answer without giving it to you. Asking questions and possibly giving small hints along the way.

I think you can prompt them to do that, but that doesn't solve the issue of people not being willing to learn vs just jump to the answer, unless they made a school approved one that forced it to do that.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#546

Post by [deleted] »

jplusequalt wrote: post #543
CamperBob2 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your plan is to encourage people to "get off the Internet" by posting on the Internet, and to stave off automation by encouraging workers to gang up on their employers and make themselves a collective critical point of failure. Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world...

>Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world The social contract lives and dies by what the populace is willing to accept. If you push people into a corner by threatening their quality of life, don't be surprised if they push back.

[deleted]

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#547

Post by CamperBob2 »

jplusequalt wrote: post #543
CamperBob2 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your plan is to encourage people to "get off the Internet" by posting on the Internet, and to stave off automation by encouraging workers to gang up on their employers and make themselves a collective critical point of failure. Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world...

>Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world The social contract lives and dies by what the populace is willing to accept. If you push people into a corner by threatening their quality of life, don't be surprised if they push back.

Exactly, so don't be surprised if you receive some pushback as well. AI may threaten you, but it empowers me.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#548

Post by fransje26 »

lupusreal wrote: post #425
fransje26 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc That sounds like setting-up your child for failure, to put it bluntly. How do you want to express a thought clearly if you already fail at the stage of thinking about words clearly? You start with a fuzzy u…

I agree with your point, but I just want to say that understanding a word and knowing how to spell it are orthogonal.

This is a good point, and part of the unwritten rationale of the argument I was trying to make.

At first glance, knowing how to spell a word and understanding a word should be perfectly orthogonal. How could it not be? Saying that it is not so would imply that civilizations without writing would have no thought or could not communicate through words, which is preposterous.

And yet, once we start delegating our thinking, our spelling and our writing to external black boxes, our grasp on those words and our grasp of those words becomes weaker. To the point that knowing how to spell a word might become a much bigger part, relatively, of our encounter with those words, as we are doing less conceptual thinking about those words and their meaning.

And therefore, I argue that, in a not too far-fetched extremum, understanding a word and knowing how to spell a word might not be fully orthogonal.

Re: How University Students Use Claude

#549

Post by nixpulvis »

sally_glance wrote: post #480
nixpulvis wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claim using AI tools doesn't dumb you down, but it very well could and is. Take the calculator for example, I'm overly dependent on it. I'm slower to perform arithmetic than I would have been without it. But knowing how to use one allows me to do more complex math more quickly. So I'm "dumber" in one way and "smarter" in others. AI could be the same... except our education system doesn't seem ready for it. We sti…

I agree that you should learn the fundamentals before taking shortcuts. I just don't view it as the universities' job to repeatedly remind their students of this, that's elementary/high school style. In universitiy, just give them hard problems requiring fundamental knowledge and cross-checking capabilities but don't restrict their tools.

I TA'd for the fundamentals of computer science I in college. In addition to being a great class for freshman, teaching it every year really did help keep me sharp.

High schools are a long way off from that level of education. I took AP CS in highschool and it was a joke by comparison. Of course YMMV. The best highschool CS course might be better than the worst university level offerings. We would always have know it all students who learned Java in high school. They either appreciated the new perspective on the fundamentals and did well, or they blew off the class and failed when it got harder.

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