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AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

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Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#81

Post by surgical_fire »

UncleMeat wrote: post #67
surgical_fire wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards. How are those things dissociated? I always saw history as a waht to explain "why things are the way they are". Whatever we are now, this amalgamation of good or bad things, is a consequence of what came before. Is "study…

The “explain how we got here” approach to history has some pretty big limitations. The historical actors had no idea where the future was going. When we examine their actions from the perspective of the single contingency that ended up happening we will almost necessarily miss meaningful understanding and make things seem inevitable when they really weren’t. There’s interesting writing to be done in this mode but it…

> The historical actors had no idea where the future was going.

Does it matter in order to explain how things came to be?

Understanding their motivations, the incentives that led them to do what they did, the sociopolitical context they were inserted into, the limitations of a historical perspective (quite often the accounts of past historical figures were written by people invested in portraying it in one way or another).

All those things would help, when looking at history critically, to make some sense of the present and where things might be going in the future.

In a sense, things that happened were inevitable because they came to pass. We are not talking about a possibility, we are talking about a certainty long after the fact. Understanding that it might have been avoided in some ways can be helpful, but also is an exercise in wishful thinking and guesswork.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#82

Post by poulpy123 »

mootothemax wrote: post #30
mantas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’d be bad if there was no alternative. But different people can get different assignments and that’s ok. Complaining about this is like me complaining about people drinking milk since I’m lactose intolerant.

> It’d be bad if there was no alternative. But different people can get different assignments and that’s ok. While there are possibly noble goals behind your suggestion, in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in the category of “other,” people to be managed separately. I’ll leave to your imagination how much work is often put into supporting these “other” assignments and how up-to-date they’re kept va th…

> in practise this puts anyone outside the mainstream in the category of “other,” people to be managed separately.

So what ? This is literally the case. The commenter has to be managed separately

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#83

Post by aniviacat »

rwmj wrote: post #78

I'm pretty sceptical about the entire use of computers in education. For myself, I seem to be incapable of learning anything unless I read it from paper and write down notes in the margin or in my (paper) notebook. Obviously I use screens every day (being a programmer ...) but for actual recall of new material, I need to use paper. Also if I'm in a physical meeting or conference, I never have a laptop open, and I tak…

> This makes me doubt that you learn anything if laptops or tablets are involved.

This may be true for you, but it certainly isn't generally true.

I haven't written anything substantial on paper in years, and I certainly have learned new things in that time.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#84

Post by JKCalhoun »

wisty wrote: post #50

A lazy physics teacher can make every question a math question in disguise. If a physics teacher is worried that a better calculator will make their test trivial, maybe they need to teach physics instead of testing math. A lazy humanities teacher can make every question a writing question in disguise. If a better spell checker will make a humanities assessment trivial, then maybe they need to teach humanities instead…

Yeah, I've been thinking about when the calculator came to bear. I was in high school physics when (rich) kids started bringing in "scientific" calculators. There was a flap then about whether they should be allowed at all.

I'm not sure they are analogous to LLMs, but a compelling argument at the time was that the students were going to use them in the field anyway. (That certainly seems to be the future for software engineering students.)

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#85

Post by JKCalhoun »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #60
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you removed the economic incentive to cheat then humanities wouldn't have the problem it does with LLMs

There's always an incentive to cheat: economic, reputational… people cheat in single-player video games . People cheat in sudoku puzzles . By removing all incentives, all you do is destroy the concept of "cheating", not prevent the behaviour.

You forgot laziness.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#86

Post by throwaway75 »

What is the general take on the ethics of using AI as a much more powerful search engine? For example, "Find all occurences in the text where Odysseus' will is overridden by the Gods." The question is not something that would be directly set by an instructor, but might be required to substantiate an interpretation that a student is aiming for.

Finding something like this is difficult and requires reading the text closely. But with AI, you could get away by reading around the passages returned by AI.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#87

Post by pasc1878 »

throwaway75 wrote: post #86

What is the general take on the ethics of using AI as a much more powerful search engine? For example, "Find all occurences in the text where Odysseus' will is overridden by the Gods." The question is not something that would be directly set by an instructor, but might be required to substantiate an interpretation that a student is aiming for. Finding something like this is difficult and requires reading the text clo…

Will the AI find ALL the occurrences. Finding hallucinated ones is OK here as the user can check each one.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#88

Post by ivape »

simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

“Cannot be done with chat gpt”

Is a military base the only place “no devices” can be enforced or something? How deep is this addiction? I’m scared to ask what the academic version of fizz-buzz would be at the end of a 4 year degree, “hey write one paragraph describing a simple paradox, an example of irony, or an example of a metaphor”.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#89

Post by kraftman »

rwmj wrote: post #78

I'm pretty sceptical about the entire use of computers in education. For myself, I seem to be incapable of learning anything unless I read it from paper and write down notes in the margin or in my (paper) notebook. Obviously I use screens every day (being a programmer ...) but for actual recall of new material, I need to use paper. Also if I'm in a physical meeting or conference, I never have a laptop open, and I tak…

I think this comes down to how you first learnt to learn. If I write notes in nodepad i dont remember them as well as if i write them by hand, but I think that's just a byproduct of years of school, and other people have learnt their own ways and are just as effective.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#90

Post by mapt »

lr4444lr wrote: post #75
UncleMeat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge. This is indeed true. But a challenge is that few professors are being given the time and training to help do this. When you are on a 4/4 and just keeping your head above water you don't tend to have enough time to adopt experimental pedagogies and completely replan your courses. And professors are largely being tasked…

How does making podcasts solve anything? Students can just read out what the AI writes into an audio recording. Why is this problem being fretted over? In-class written and oral tests should be fine to assess students. If AI helps them learn or even cram the material, great!

One of the skills that students are typically terrible at is convincingly recreating the flow of a conversation that is written down. Shakespeare, spoken in meter-less monotone with none of the prosody that indicates actual speech by a human being communicating something; Prosody you can often decode even in a language you have no knowledge of. If they manage to fake it convincingly for an hour-long podcast, they have taught themselves acting on a level that is commercially useful and honestly understand much of what is being said.

If they are just working from AI notes and improvising the conversation, arguably they are simply doing the work.

What I don't know is whether an instructor would be allowed to earnestly grade an hour-long podcast subjectively.

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