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"the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

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Re: "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

#61

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

tgv wrote: post #60
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> we don't claim that undergrad education has been blown to bits > But it has been. Let me fix it: pen and paper. There you go, bada-bing bada-bum. In our uni the exam for Algorithms and Data Structures (one that most people struggle with) is done on paper in an exam room. You better know your binary search. People, especially wealthy, have been coasting through education paying someone to write their papers since G…

Live exam, perfectly fine. You can use an LLM as support while you study, no problem, as a glorified search engine. On steroids. From the future. Then you prove you understood it. Writing an essay, or a thesis, with LLM assist, is difficult to avoid in this scenario, though. It would require your prof, TA or examination committee to read the thing fully and understand the topic deeply. For 101 courses, that's doable,…

Montaigne originally used essay (from French essayer, to try, attempt) to test hos on knowledge and understanding, his own capability to create new knowledge. In plain English, you test yourself if you can use your brain. That’s why it is so powerful to write a blog post about a topic you have just learned. Obviously, if you just generate the thing with LLM, there’s no point.

Essay is a fairly recent invention and perhaps it was not very good for testing students un the first place, since it kinda was not meant for that originally? So maybe we should test knowledge and understanding in different ways? In STEM-subjects this is not very hard, since basically you either can do the thing or not (like my example of coding above), but I have no idea how one would do this in history or philosophy. Should we go back to having long walks in the garden of the academy, where the professor guide’s you towards knowledge like some 21st Century Socrates? That doesn’t seem doable at this level of university students.

And how would you test PhD -level knowledge? You have to build a nuclear reactor from scratch in front of live audience? Or perhaps the oral examination have to become a real exam, not just a pointless ritual? Anyway, I think my point on using essay as a testing structure still stands. Maybe the examination should be like BJJ belt exam, where you have to show what you actually can do in front of peers and your teachers. A lot more people are likely to fail, but so be it. Maybe having a PhD stop being a joke then.

Re: "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

#62

Post by Woodi »

Ukv wrote: post #13
Woodi wrote: post #2

> In the past, the path to a math Ph.D. cultivated resilience, resourcefulness, critical thinking, and a healthy skepticism (…) but suddenly you can produce a passable Ph.D. thesis with the push of a button But actually nothing changed. Or maybe a path to "resilience, resourcefulness and critical thinking". Because human brains still needs to be shaped by years of training on some quality "literature", of some form.…

> But in 1905 a paper was published... Too bad politicans do not get implications of that and still was pushing communism decades later... The photoelectric effect/quanta? I'm not sure I understand the supposed connection to communism.

Einstein - definitive end of XIX ilusion and way of thinking that "We know everything. We are the lords of things, we own all of it! And other peoples too! We can engineer societes as we like it!". With strict oposition to old and humbler "God" or natural ways. With aggresive "we" that do not pay attention to rights of other we's.

And, IMO, Einstein, Godel and more discoveries should be reason to not continue communism stupidity. Especially to not continue - after year 1905 - social engineering plans of "world-wide GENOCIDE until everybody is good citizen".

Of course I'm talking about best-wanting-for-humans but still naive communism and not about a way to destabilize other countries by any means necessary. Such move did almost insta-karma effect on Germany: sponsoring commies in Russia resulted in nazi being sponsored in Germany...

Don't think someone want to deny societes, philosophers and politicians are drived by overall science view on reality. And what else could drive atheistic minds ? Not judging here, logic is everyones duty.

Also my "too bad politicians..." was obviously expression of a wish. Not only science influents politicians. But discovered facts (counterarguments in this case) about reality could be taken for consideration, right ?

Re: "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

#63

Post by Woodi »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #6
Woodi wrote: post #2

> In the past, the path to a math Ph.D. cultivated resilience, resourcefulness, critical thinking, and a healthy skepticism (…) but suddenly you can produce a passable Ph.D. thesis with the push of a button But actually nothing changed. Or maybe a path to "resilience, resourcefulness and critical thinking". Because human brains still needs to be shaped by years of training on some quality "literature", of some form.…

> some quality "literature", of some form In my opinion, we will continue to need fully educated people who read books and peer-reviewed articles. We need literature, not "'literature', of some form."

Still, AI is a new form of a library. Or knowledge presentation. With a lot of usefulness for learning.

Sure, who know things do not need to consult talky chatbots.

But totaly dismising '"literature", of some form' is not an opion. It already works like simple "consulting manual".

Of course as long as texts used for LLMs training start to be outdated and noone will bother to update models.

And we always want as much as possible educated peoples but not always can afford everyone higher material expe^W^W^W^Wdemands.

Re: "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

#64

Post by OutOfHere »

Isn't it easy to adapt? Besides the usual assessment, also do:

1. Use AI to review a thesis for its validity and to obtain candidate concerns for further probing.

2. Require valid proofs for theorems and such.

3. Require open code for software claims. Assess it with AI.

4. Stop issuing PhDs for reviews. Original research must be required.

5. Encourage physical data gathering from the real world rather than just data analysis of existing data.

Re: "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

#65

Post by naishoya »

wanderer2323 wrote: post #15
this_user wrote: post #5

I am not sure what point the author is even trying to make here. On the one hand, he seems to complain about how AI has virtually made the traditionally PhD thesis obsolete, but on the other hand, he also states: > Consider that most PhD theses were never good. How often do you rush to read a PhD thesis? The vast majority of them are painful to read. You learn little if anything. So, it sounds like nothing of much va…

A good place to plug my favorite thesis to read: Okasaki’s “purely functional data structures” https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/okasaki.pdf . Very soothing and moves fast.

Man, I had forgotten about this one.

Thanks for the highlight, I read Okazaki's the first time about 2014/15 IIRC.

Another great read is "A Theory of Regularity Structures" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1303.5113. by Martin Hairer.

It builds on his thesis, Comportement Asymptotique d’ ´Equations `a D´eriv´ees Partielles Stochastiques. - https://www.hairer.org/papers/these.pdf

The English language preprint from just prior to the French is at https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0109115 "Exponential Mixing Properties of Stochastic PDEs Through Asymptotic Coupling" great, but I read them in revers order from publication and kind of prefer them in that order.

I cant disagree with the premise of the OC, however, there's a feel to Hairer's and Okasaki's insights and presentation that simply is not going to be reached via the lossy compression that is at the heart of LLM.

If that sets a high bar for who gets a PhD going forward, this would be a good thing.

Re: "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

#66

Post by acdha »

DrScientist wrote: post #10
this_user wrote: post #5

I am not sure what point the author is even trying to make here. On the one hand, he seems to complain about how AI has virtually made the traditionally PhD thesis obsolete, but on the other hand, he also states: > Consider that most PhD theses were never good. How often do you rush to read a PhD thesis? The vast majority of them are painful to read. You learn little if anything. So, it sounds like nothing of much va…

Most thesis are never read because anything worth sharing with the wider world ( and some that isn't ) is highly likely to have been published as a paper - not because the work in thesis has no value. The whole point of a PhD is not to create a thesis - that's just a mechanism to measure - it's to be trained as a scientist or researcher. Doing a degree in chemistry for example, is largely a knowledge building phase -…

> Most thesis are never read because anything worth sharing with the wider world ( and some that isn't ) is highly likely to have been published as a paper - not because the work in thesis has no value.

Yes - my wife’s advisor literally told her that the goal should be getting as close as you could to stapling your published papers together with an introduction. They saw this as recognizing that you had learned how to ask good questions, run experiments, and iterate on the results — and since their field had fairly expensive overhead requirements everyone was mindful of the need to repeatedly get grants to keep the experiments running.

Re: "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

#67

Post by speak_plainly »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #58
speak_plainly wrote: post #41

PhDs only were adopted universally in 1917 with some resistance and apprehension. The issue here is that academia forgot what it was about a long time ago and is now having to face the consequences for a hundred years of bad decisions.

> PhDs only were adopted universally in 1917 In Oxford. That hardly counts as universal.

You’re right, maybe roughly circa 1930 across internationally recognized research universities? For some reason I thought Oxford was the holdout.

Re: "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

#68

Post by DrScientist »

acdha wrote: post #66
DrScientist wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most thesis are never read because anything worth sharing with the wider world ( and some that isn't ) is highly likely to have been published as a paper - not because the work in thesis has no value. The whole point of a PhD is not to create a thesis - that's just a mechanism to measure - it's to be trained as a scientist or researcher. Doing a degree in chemistry for example, is largely a knowledge building phase -…

> Most thesis are never read because anything worth sharing with the wider world ( and some that isn't ) is highly likely to have been published as a paper - not because the work in thesis has no value. Yes - my wife’s advisor literally told her that the goal should be getting as close as you could to stapling your published papers together with an introduction. They saw this as recognizing that you had learned how t…

> Yes - my wife’s advisor literally told her that the goal should be getting as close as you could to stapling your published papers together with an introduction.

Indeed - in fact some countries ( I think Scandinavian ) do exactly this - the equivalent to a thesis is simply your publications.

Has it's Pro's and cons - you can learn a lot as a scientist but be unlucky in not having an publishable results ( as the answers to your scientific questions were either 'no' [1] or somebody scooped you ).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Re: "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

#69

Post by danaris »

Chance-Device wrote: post #34
thom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re probably right, but I’d also bet some things that we’re about to sweep aside will turn out to have been necessities and we’ll find it very difficult to bring them back.

To be pedantic about it, if something is a necessity it can’t be done without by definition. So if you’re in that position whatever you’re talking about wasn’t a necessity. Is this like Socrates thinking that reading will make people lazy and forgetful?

Necessities aren't always immediate necessities.

Air is a necessity. If you don't have it, you'll die within a few minutes.

Water is a necessity. If you don't have it, you'll die within a day or two.

Food is a necessity, too, but if you don't have it, you'll live much longer than you would without water!

Vitamin C is a necessity. If you don't have it, but you have other food, you'll live much longer than you would with no food!

So, yeah, you fail at being pedantic in any remotely useful fashion. All you're doing is a quick, dirty, "um, actually" type gotcha, and you're not even correct about it.

Re: "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

#70

Post by thom »

Chance-Device wrote: post #34
thom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re probably right, but I’d also bet some things that we’re about to sweep aside will turn out to have been necessities and we’ll find it very difficult to bring them back.

To be pedantic about it, if something is a necessity it can’t be done without by definition. So if you’re in that position whatever you’re talking about wasn’t a necessity. Is this like Socrates thinking that reading will make people lazy and forgetful?

Imagine, if you will, that it's a necessity for a healthy internet forum that people not be performatively obtuse in order to score points. That forum might continue to exist, but it would stop being a fun place to hang out.
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