if only we had a longstanding social practice and institution specifically designed for corroborating people having different views of reality… a place where people could learn about everything that’s already been argued about so they don’t waste time on things we’ve either already considered or decided aren’t worth considering… perhaps we’d call it learnification…
nah i jest. i appreciate you bringing up the fact that the issue now is not necessarily an education issue as people classically think of it. people aren’t stupid. we’ve lost our agreed upon meanings for what the signs and symbols we share are.
the problem is that we need to rebuild reason itself to function again in the modern world. with all that said, this becomes an education problem when you attempt to apply any of it in practice.
you see hoards of people decrying tools like ChatGPT for ruining education and rotting kids’ brains, when really all they’ve done is shone a bright spotlight on exactly how worthless what most of the standard Western curricula have developed into. the weird focus on memorization, essay writing, and other such skills and the neglect of more important skills like teaching actual rationalism, along with logic and reasoning abilities is what has caused this boiling frog of a situation to come to pass. the students complained for decades that the quality of their education was slipping and nobody listened. kids complained they “hated” or didn’t understand math for decades, and again nobody fucking listened. now we’re here and it’s somehow their fault again for merely doing what anyone does and following the path of least resistance. if you design a course and you can easily pass it by use of an LLM, it wasn’t fucking testing anything of value in the first place. LLMs cannot think the way we can. AI can either be this scary, capable boogeyman capable of undermining all of established pedagogy or not but it can’t be both at the same time like universities have been fearmongering lately. if current AI technologies are not capable agents yet (they’re not), but they still present a threat to teachers and professors… then that is 101% a fault of the course design and the professors responsible for it. why should students be held accountable for anything here when they’re the ones forking over years of capital only to get presented with an “education” that can be easily aced by a fucking bot?
when will those who actually pull the levers of power here be held responsible? how many people need to have their careers needlessly ruined due to byzantine policies in academia before enough is enough?? it’s all just fucking smoke and mirrors, none of it is real anymore. maybe it never was…
people will act like you’re being a petulant child if you even bring this up in virtually any context but i think it’s time we start seriously discussing how traditional academia can either be reformed or retired for something that actually works for the modern individual.
I don’t disagree that traditional academia should be reformed, but wanted to nitpick the assertion that assignments shouldn’t be easily completed by LLMs to be of value. Isn’t that analogous to the “I can just do this on a calculator” argument? Learning those tasks from first principles and going through the mechanics of it has value in education (albeit this can be overdone).
if only we had a longstanding social practice and institution specifically designed for corroborating people having different views of reality… a place where people could learn about everything that’s already been argued about so they don’t waste time on things we’ve either already considered or decided aren’t worth considering… perhaps we’d call it learnification…
nah i jest. i appreciate you bringing up the fact that the issue now is not necessarily an education issue as people classically think of it. people aren’t stupid. we’ve lost our agreed upon meanings for what the signs and symbols we share are.
the problem is that we need to rebuild reason itself to function again in the modern world. with all that said, this becomes an education problem when you attempt to apply any of it in practice.
you see hoards of people decrying tools like ChatGPT for ruining education and rotting kids’ brains, when really all they’ve done is shone a bright spotlight on exactly how worthless what most of the standard Western curricula have developed into. the weird focus on memorization, essay writing, and other such skills and the neglect of more important skills like teaching actual rationalism, along with logic and reasoning abilities is what has caused this boiling frog of a situation to come to pass. the students complained for decades that the quality of their education was slipping and nobody listened. kids complained they “hated” or didn’t understand math for decades, and again nobody fucking listened. now we’re here and it’s somehow their fault again for merely doing what anyone does and following the path of least resistance. if you design a course and you can easily pass it by use of an LLM, it wasn’t fucking testing anything of value in the first place. LLMs cannot think the way we can. AI can either be this scary, capable boogeyman capable of undermining all of established pedagogy or not but it can’t be both at the same time like universities have been fearmongering lately. if current AI technologies are not capable agents yet (they’re not), but they still present a threat to teachers and professors… then that is 101% a fault of the course design and the professors responsible for it. why should students be held accountable for anything here when they’re the ones forking over years of capital only to get presented with an “education” that can be easily aced by a fucking bot?
when will those who actually pull the levers of power here be held responsible? how many people need to have their careers needlessly ruined due to byzantine policies in academia before enough is enough?? it’s all just fucking smoke and mirrors, none of it is real anymore. maybe it never was…
people will act like you’re being a petulant child if you even bring this up in virtually any context but i think it’s time we start seriously discussing how traditional academia can either be reformed or retired for something that actually works for the modern individual.
I don’t disagree that traditional academia should be reformed, but wanted to nitpick the assertion that assignments shouldn’t be easily completed by LLMs to be of value. Isn’t that analogous to the “I can just do this on a calculator” argument? Learning those tasks from first principles and going through the mechanics of it has value in education (albeit this can be overdone).
Thankfully people have been working on it for some time now
https://annas-archive.org/md5/4ecde1081b42af0cecfda7465e2b29b3
https://annas-archive.org/md5/f9079f12ab35921b7b194de222261afc