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Study mode

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Re: Study mode

#641

Post by johnnyanmac »

scarmig wrote: post #71
no_wizard wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all hours of the day This simply hasn't been my experience. Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This happens quick for me. Also, god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly controversial subject and you want it to find reputable sources or particularly academic ones.

I've found it excels at some things: 1) The broad overview of a topic 2) When I have a vague idea, it helps me narrow down the correct terminology for it 3) Providing examples of a particular category ("are there any examples of where v1 in the visual cortex develops in a disordered way?") 4) "Tell me the canonical textbooks in field X" 5) Posing math exercises 6) Free form branching--while talking about one topic, I…

outside of 5), I concur. It's good for discovery, as is Google for discovering topics while weighing on proper profesionally resources and articles for the learning.

It's too bad people are trying to substitute the latter with the chatGPT output itself. And I absolutely cannot trust any machine that is willing to lie to me rather than admit ignorance on a subject.

Re: Study mode

#642

Post by demarq »

romaniitedomum wrote: post #412
jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting…

To be honest I now see more hallucinations from humans on online forums than I do from LLMs.

A really great example of this is on twitter Grok constantly debunking human “hallucinations” all day.

Re: Study mode

#643

Post by johnnyanmac »

scarmig wrote: post #316
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When I have a vague idea, it helps me narrow down the correct terminology for it so the opposite of Stack Overflow really, where if you have a vague idea your question gets deleted and you get reprimanded. Maybe Stack Overflow could use AI for this, help you formulate a question in the way they want.

Maybe. But, it's been over a year since I used StackOverflow, primarily because of LLMs. Sure, I could use an LLM to formulate a question that passes SO's muster. But why bother, when the LLM can almost certainly answer the question as well; SO will be slower; and there's a decent chance that my question will be marked as a duplicate (because it pattern matches to a similar but distinct question).

>hen the LLM can almost certainly answer the question as well;

You say this in a thread specifically talking about how LLM's fall apart when digging deeper into the surface of questions.

Do people really want to learn and understand, or just feel like they are learning and understanding?

Re: Study mode

#644

Post by qingdao99 »

ethan_smith wrote: post #561
poemxo wrote: post #119

As a lifelong learner, experientially it feels like a big chunk of time spent studying is actually just searching. AI seems like a good tool to search through a large body of study material and make that part more efficient. The other chunk of time, to me anyway, seems to be creating a mental model of the subject matter, and when you study something well you have a strong grasp on the forces influencing cause and eff…

Spaced repetition systems would be the perfect complement to your approach - they're specifically designed to help build that "offline" mental model by systematically moving knowledge from AI-assisted lookup to permanent memory.

I think this account is a bot.

Re: Study mode

#645

Post by johnnyanmac »

fragmede wrote: post #501
maxsilver wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people don't just wake up and decide one day to be irrationally evil with no reason, if you believe that then you are a fool The problem with this, is that people sometimes really do , objectively, wake up and device to be irrationally evil. It’s not every day, and it’s not every single person — but it does happen routinely. If you haven’t experienced this wrath yourself, I envy you. But for millions of people, thi…

Do they see it as evil though? They wake up, decide to do what they perceive as good but things are so twisted that their version of good doesn't agree with mine or yours. Some people are evil, see themselves as bad, and continue down that path, absolutely. But that level of malevolence is rare. Far more common is for people to believe that what they're doing is in service of the greater good of their community.

Humans are not rational animals, they are rationalizing animals.

So in this regard, they probably do deep down see it as evil, but will try to reason a way (often in a hypocritical way) to make it appear good. The msot common method of using this to drive bigotry often comes in the reasons of 1) dehumanizing the subject of hate ("Group X is evil, so they had it coming!") or 2) reinforcing a superiority over the subject of hate ("I worked hard and deserve this. Group X did not but wants the same thing").

Your answer depends on how effective you think propaganda and authority is at shaping the mind to contradict itself. The Stanfor experiment seems to reinforce a notion that a "good" person can justify any evil to themself with a surprisingly little amount of nudging.

Re: Study mode

#646

Post by johnnyanmac »

epolanski wrote: post #261
no_wizard wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all hours of the day This simply hasn't been my experience. Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This happens quick for me. Also, god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly controversial subject and you want it to find reputable sources or particularly academic ones.

I really think that 90% of such comments come from a lack of knowledge on how to use LLMs for research. It's not a criticism, the landscape moves fast and it takes time to master and personalize a flow to use an LLM as a research assistant. Start with something such as NotebookLM.

And if we assume this is a knowledgable, technical community: how do you feel about the general populaces ability to use LLM's for research, without the skepticism needed to correct it?

Re: Study mode

#647

Post by flir »

ricardobeat wrote: post #590
ay wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favourite story of that involved attempting to use LLM to figure out whether it was true or my hallucination that the tidal waves were higher in Canary Islands than in Caribbean, and why; it spewed several paragraphs of plausibly sounding prose, and finished with “because Canary Islands are to the west of the equator”. This phrase is now an inner joke used as a reply to someone quoting LLMs info as “facts”.

This is meaningless without knowing which model, size, version and if they had access to search tools. Results and reliability vary wildly. In my case I can’t even remember last time Claude 3.7/4 has given me wrong info as it seems very intent on always doing a web search to verify.

There's something darkly funny about that - I remember when the web wasn't considered reliable either.

There's certainly echoes of that previous furore in this one.

Re: Study mode

#648

Post by IshKebab »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #282
IshKebab wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubtful. Unless you have very low standards of "learn".

What are your standards of learn?

I would say you have to be familiar with a large part of the standard library, de facto standard crates, and most language features, plus have the experience to write code and deal with compiler errors effectively. No way anyone is doing that in a couple of weeks by reading one book. At least for Rust.

Maybe for something a lot simpler like Go it's plausible, but even then I doubt it. You're not going to know about any of the common gotchas for example.

Re: Study mode

#649

Post by [deleted] »

QuantumGood wrote: post #416
romaniitedomum wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting…

I often ask first, "discuss what it is you think I am asking" after formulating my query. Very helpful for getting greater clarity and leads to fewer hallucinations.

[deleted]

Re: Study mode

#650

Post by puszczyk »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #602
zvmaz wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fear of asking stupid questions is real, especially if one has had a bad experience with humiliating teachers or professors. I just recently saw a video of a professor subtly shaming and humiliating his students for answering questions to his own online quiz. He teaches at a prestigious institution and has a book that has a very good reputation. I stopped watching his video lectures.

So instead of correcting the teachers with better training, we retreat from education and give it to technocrats? Why are we so afraid of punishing bad, unproductive, and even illegal behavior in 2025?

Looks like we were unable to correct them over the last 3k years. What has changes in 2025 that you think we will succeed in correcting that behavior?

Not US based, Central/Eastern Europe: the selection to the teacher profession is negative, due to low salary compared to private sector; this means that the unproductive behaviors are likely going to increase. I'm not saying the AI is the solution here for low teacher salaries, but training is def not the right answer either, and it is a super simplistic argument: "just train them better".

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