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I'd rather read the prompt
651–660 of 880 posts
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving. No. It has value, because companies value it. It sets the starting point for your first salary and then for every salary negotiation moving forward. As someone who did not go to university, but has the same knowledge self-taught I can tell you that this piece of paper would have opened so many doors and made life so much easier. It took…
You forgot one big reward with your approach. You are not 200k in debt which will take that kid with diploma to get that piece of paper. You are debt free. I am not arguing on the merit of having a diploma is a bad thing - the colleges these days have turned their backs on the people as well. Average $100k to get a piece of paper (LLMs are not the issue here the useless degrees that the colleges offer). Invest that $…
That’s a very American point of view though. In many European countries people don’t build up such big debts. I’m from NL and the upper bound among my friends was something like 50,000, but most people had much lower debts between 0 and 20,000. (Yay for lower enrollment fees + part of the money is given as a gift).
And even if you ramped up a 50k debt, it’s a government loan where the interest rates are low, your monthly pay off is based on your salary, and if you are not able to pay the debt within a certain period, it’s wiped away.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to not make the difference between maths and, say, literature or history . Do you actually think that an LLM can take, say, a Harry Potter book as an input, and give it a grade in such a way that everybody will always agree on ? And to go further, do you actually use LLMs to generate graphs and statistics from spreadsheet? Because that is probably a bad idea given that there are tools that actually do it rig…
> Do you actually think that an LLM can take, say, a Harry Potter book as an input, and give it a grade in such a way that everybody will always agree on? No, but I also don't think a human can do that either. Subjective things are subjective. I'm not sure I understand how this connects to the idea you expressed that doing various tasks with automation tools like LLMs prevent you from "internalizing" the data, or why…
Yeah I think you don't understand my point.
Many of the posts I find here defending the use of LLMs focus on "profitability". "You ask me to give you 3 pages about X? I'll give you 3 pages about X and you may not even realise that I did not write them". I completely agree that it can happen and that LLMs, right now, are useful to hack the system. But if you specialise in being efficient at getting an LLM to generate 3 pages, you may become useless faster than you think. Still, I don't think that this is the point of the article, and it is most definitely not my point.
My point is that while you specialise in hacking the system with an LLM, you don't learn about the material that goes into those 3 pages.
* If you are a student, it means that you are losing your time. Your role as a student is to learn, not to hack.
* More generally as a person, "I am a professional in summarising stuff I don't understand in a way that convinces me and other people who don't understand it either" is not exactly very sexy to me.
If you want to get actual knowledge about something, you have to actually work on getting that knowledge. Moving it from an LLM to a word document is not it. Being knowledgeable requires "internalising" it. Such that you can talk about it at dinner. And have an opinion about it that is worth something to others. If your opinion is "ChatGPT says this, but with my expertise in prompting I can get it to say that", it's pretty much worthless IMHO. Except for tricking the system, in a way similar to "oh my salary depends on the number of bugs I fix? Let me introduce tons of easy-to-fix bugs then".
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve come across this analogy that I think works well: Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym. If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. But we’re doing this work for the effect it will have on you . The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.
> The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer. A decent amount of my professors don't know the answers because they bought the course, test questions, and lectures from Cengage. During exam review, they just regurgitate the answer justification that Cengage provided. During the lectures, they struggle to explain certain concepts since they didn't make the slides. Professors auto…
There are many issues here. The lack of incentives is probably the most important one. For new professors (in research universities), good teaching is usually just a good thing to have, but it is not a deciding factor for their tenure. When they get their tenure, they probably have enough students, and they need to work hard to apply for funding and keep the students paid. Administrators care most about ranking, and teaching isn't really evaluated in the ranking. They just push the professors to do more research and apply for more funding.
It is also hard to evaluate university teaching because there are no benchmarks for that (compared with high school, for example), and it is hard to judge if teaching is good from student feedback. You can only know if someone fucked up or did really well, which are outliers.
There are other issues as well. Professor IMO is a ridiculous job, you are supposed to be an expert in the field, be a researcher, be a manager, be a teacher, be a salesman, all at the same time. There are people who can excel in all these, but these are probably just outliers. It doesn't help when PhD training doesn't train you to be a proper manager and teacher. While there are some teaching training, I think we are not really held to a high enough standard. E.g. One can pass the teaching course if they just show up and spend some time, even though their teaching is horrible.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chatgpt very useful for adding softness and politeness to my sentences. Would you like more straight forward text which probably will be rude for regular american?
If we can detach content and presentation, then the reader can choose tone and length. At some point we will stop making decisions about what future readers want. We will just capture the concrete inputs and the reader's LLM will explain it.
I don't think form and function can be separated so cleanly in natural language. However you encode what's between your ears into text, you've made (re)presentational choices.
A piece of text does not have a single inherently correct interpretation. Its meaning is a relation constructed at run- (i.e. read-)time between the reader, the writer, and (possibly) the things the text refers to, that is if both sides are well enough aligned to agree on what those are.
Words don't speak, they only gesture.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#656> A typical belief among students is that classes are a series of hurdles to be overcome; at the end of this obstacle course, they shall receive a degree as testament to their completion of these assignments.
IMO the core problem is that in many cases this typical belief holds true.
I went to university to get a degree for a particular field of jobs. I'd generously estimate that about half of my classes actually applied to that field or jobs. The other half were required to make me a more "well rounded student" or something like that. But of course they were just fluff to maximize my tuition fees.
There was no university that offered a more affordable program without the fluff. After all, the fluff is a core part of the business model. But there isn't much economic opportunity without a diploma so students optimize around the fluff.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you (and upvoted) but consider this: why don’t fancy schools offer the same credentials for MOOCs if the information and assessment is on-par? I believe it is because they recognize the value of the credential and guard it closely.
I think you missed the parent's point. Maybe consider this: Why don't employers recognize the credentials of a MOOC to the same degree that they would a university degree? We could similarly ask why employers value the degrees of some universities more than others. I think it's important to realize that ultimately the decisions come from the employers, not the universities. No one is making the employers do anything.…
I brought up that I think the root problem is employers in a different comment, so I’m not missing that point.[1] The distinction is that I don’t think it’s a dichotomous problem. While colleges may not be the root problem, they can still be a contributor to the problem. (Besides, if an employer is to recognize a MOOC, that course completion has to be documented, which means it’s just another version of credential)
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#658While I agree with the thrust of the article being that students are cheating themselves by relying on LLMs, it's important to reflect on ways in which educators have encouraged this behavior. Anyone who has been to college in the age of the internet knows that many professors, particularly in the humanities, lazily pad out their class work with short menial writing assignments, often in the form of a "discussion board", that are rarely even graded on content. For students already swamped with work, or having to complete these assignments for general ed courses unrelated to their major/actual interests, it is totally understandable why they would outsource this work to a machine. This is a totally fixable issue: in-person discussions and longer writing assignments with well structured progress reports/check-ins and rounds of peer review are a couple ways that I can think of off the top of my head. Professors need to be held accountable for creating course loads that are actually intellectually interesting and are at least somewhat challenging to use LLMs to complete. When professors are constantly handing out an excess of low-effort assignments, using shortcuts becomes a learned behavior of students.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
Academia clearly lost their monopoly on information. Since their last moat is a monopoly on credentials, I expect them to defend it intensely. We could make it less meaningful if employers weren’t so keen on using credentials as their own gateway. That may have more of a chance of happening if the OPs perspective becomes more prevalent and the credential becomes an increasingly worse signal for meaningful skills.
In what way does academia have monopoly on credentials? You can start issuing your own credentials tomorrow.
There are accreditation bodies. So I don’t think your self-proclaimed engineering degree is going to help you get a job or a professional engineering license like one from an ABET accredited school.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This kind of "perf review" hacking works ~everywhere I don't have tons of examples, but in my experience: * This worked in toxic environments. They deserve it. * This doesn't work in a functional environment, because they don't have those bullshit metrics. If you have to rely on those tricks, it's time to look for another job.
Which big, well-paying companies do not have "those bullshit metrics"? I know for a fact that Meta, Google, Stripe, Airbnb, and Oracle all lean heavily on performance review cycles based entirely on ridiculous metrics. Getting ahead there requires you to play the stupid games GP is suggesting.
If you work there, as OP said, it's time to look for another job.