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And yet once they graduate, if the patients are female and/or not white all concerns for those standards are optional at best, unless the patients bring a (preferably white) man in with them to vouch for their symptoms.
Not pro-ai, just depressed about healthcare.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The only thing AI can, or should be used for in the current era, is templating… I suppose things that don’t require truth or accuracy are fine too, but yeah.
You can build the framework of an article, report, story, publication, assignment, etc using AI to get some words on paper to start from. Every fact, declaration, or reference needs to be handled as false information unless otherwise proven, and most of the work will need to be rewritten. It’s there to provide, more or less, a structure to start from and you do the rest.
When I did essays and the like in school, I didn’t have AI to lean on, and the hardest part of doing any essay was… How the fuck do I start this thing? I knew what I wanted to say, I knew how I wanted to say it, but the initial declarations and wording to “break the ice” so-to-speak, always gave me issues.
It’s shit like that where AI can help.
Take everything AI gives you with a gigantic asterisk, that any/all information is liable to be false. Do your own research.
Given how fast things are moving in terms of knowledge and developments in science, technology, medicine, etc that’s transforming how we work, now, more than ever before, what you know is less important than what you can figure out. That’s what the youth need to be taught, how to figure that shit out for themselves, do the research and verify your findings. Once you know how to do that, then you’ll be able to adapt to almost any job that you can comprehend from a high level, it’s just a matter of time patience, research and learning. With that being said, some occupations have little to no margin for error, which is where my thought process inverts. Train long and hard before you start doing the job… Stuff like doctors, who can literally kill patients if they don’t know what they don’t know… Or nuclear power plant techs… Stuff like that.
There’s an application that I think LLMs would be great for, where accuracy doesn’t matter: Video games. Take a game like Cyberpunk 2077, and have all the NPCs speech and interactions run on various fine-tuned LLMs, with different LoRA-based restrictions depending on character type. Like random gang members would have a lot of latitude to talk shit, start fights, commit low-level crimes, etc, without getting repetitive. But for more major characters like Judy, the model would be a little more strictly controlled. She would know to go in a certain direction story-wise, but the variables to get from A to B are much more open.
This would eliminate the very limited scripted conversation options which don’t seem to have much effect on the story. It could also give NPCs their own motivations with actual goals, and they could even keep dynamically creating side quests and mini-missions for you. It would make the city seem a lot more “alive”, rather than people just milling about aimlessly, with bad guys spawning in preprogrammed places at predictable times. It would offer nearly infinite replayability.
I know nothing about programming or game production, but I feel like this would be a legit use of AI. Though I’m sure it would take massive amounts of computing power, just based on my limited knowledge of how LLMs work.
When I did essays and the like in school, I didn’t have AI to lean on, and the hardest part of doing any essay was… How the fuck do I start this thing?
I think that this is a big part of education and learning though. When you have to stare at a blank screen (or paper) and wonder “How the fuck do I start?” Having to brainstorm write shit down 50 times, edit, delete, start over. I think that process alone makes you appreciate good writing and how difficult it can be.
My opinion is that when you skip that step you skip a big part of the creative process.
Exactly.
If not arguably the biggest part of the creative process, the foundational structure that is
That’s a fair argument. I don’t refute it.
I only wish I had any coaching when it was my turn, to help me through that. I figured it out eventually, but still. I wish.
Was the best part of agrarian subsistence turning the Earth by hand? Should we return to it. A person learns more and is more productive if they talk out an issue. Having someone else to bounce ideas off of is a good thing. Asking someone to do it for you has always been a thing. Individualized learning has long been the secret of academic success for the children of the super rich. Just pay a professor to tutor the individual child. AI is the democratization of this advantage. A person can explain what they do not know and get a direct answer. Even with a small model that I know is wrong, forming the questions in conversation often leads me to correct answers and what I do not know. It is far faster and more efficient than I ever experienced elsewhere in life.
It takes time to learn how to use the tool. I’m sure there were lots of people making stupid patterns with a plow at first too when it was new.
The creative process is about the results it produces, not how long one spent in frustration. Gatekeeping because of the time you wasted is Luddism or plain sadism.
Use open weights models running on enthusiast level hardware you control. Inference providers are junk and the source of most problems with ignorant people from both sides of the issue. Use llama.cpp and a 70B or larger quantized model with emacs and gptel. Then you are free as in a citizen in a democracy with autonomy.
You’re right - giving people the option to bounce questions off others or AI can be helpful. But I don’t think that is the same as asking someone (or some thing) to do the work for you and then you edit it.
The creative process is about the results it produces, not how long one spent in frustration
This I disagree on. A process is not a result. You get a result from the process and sometimes it’s what you want and often times it isn’t what you want. This is especially true for beginners. And to get the results you want from a process you have to work through all parts of it including the frustrating parts. Actually getting through the frustrating parts makes you a better creator and I would argue makes the final result more satisfying because you worked hard to get it right.
This is a problem with integrity, not AI. If I have AI write me a paper and then proof read it to make sure the information is accurate and properly sourced how is that wrong?
Imagine you go to a gym. There’s weights you can lift. Instead of lifting them, you use a gas powered machine to pick them up while you sit on the couch with your phone. Sometimes the machine drops weights, or picks up the wrong thing. But you went to the gym and lifted weights, right? They were on the ground, and then they weren’t. Requirements met?
That would be a good analogy if going to school was anything like going to the gym. You sound like one of those old teachers that said “You won’t have a calculator in your pocket the rest of your life.”
School is like going to the gym for your brain. In the same way that using a calculator for everything makes you worse at math using chatgpt to read and write your assignments makes you worse at those things than you would be if you did it yourself.
I’d say it doesn’t make you worse, but instead you’re not improving. But your point still stands.
Worse than you would be if you practiced and learned the fundamentals rather than have a machine do it all for you.
Except it is a lot like going to the gym. Most people , on most tasks, only get better when they practice it.
I guarantee you that people who actually write essays with their brain will perform better at a lot of brain tasks than someone who just uses an LLM. You have to exercise those skills.
I’m not disagreeing with you on that. You are missing the point. AI is here to stay and the sooner we accept that, the better off our school system will be.
I am not arguing that using AI makes us smarter. What I’m saying is the only reason people go to school is to make money at their future career. Every company needs an AI specialist right now and instead of working with or around that, schools are trying to outright ban it. If they don’t want people to use it, stop assigning tasks that AI excels at.
What I’m saying is the only reason people go to school is to make money at their future career.
This is capitalist nightmare talk. This is not the only reason people go to school.
Also, even if the tools were good at writing original essays (questionable), people still need to learn how to do it. Even with calculators you spend a lot of time in elementary school learning how to do math without tools.
Because education isn’t about writing an essay. In fact, the actual information you learn is the secondary thing you’re there to learn.
Education, especially higher education, is about learning how to think, how to do research, and how to formulate all of that into a cohesive argument. Using AI deprives you of all of that, so you are missing the most important part of your education
Says who? I understand that you value that and I’m sure there are many careers where that actually matters but this is the entire problem with our current education system. The job market is vast and for every job that critical thinking is important, there’s 10 that it isn’t. You are also falling into the trap that school is the only place you can learn that. Education is more than follow X steps and get smart. There’s plenty of ways to learn something and not everyone learns the same way.
Maybe use some critical thinking and figure out a way to evaluate someone’s knowledge without having them write an essay that is easily faked by using AI?
AI isn’t going anywhere and the sooner we embrace it, the sooner we can figure out a way to get around being crippled by it.
Name just one job where critical thinking isn’t important
Every single data entry level positions on the entire planet. Many of these require degrees.
Again it’s not about the school or the skills. It’s about the job market. A degree related to AI is extremely valuable right now.
I’ve proofread thousands of newspaper articles as a former newspaper non-journalist over decades.
I’ve written countless bullshit advertorials and also much better copy. I’ve written news articles and streeters from big sports events to get the tickets.
None of that makes me a journalist.
Now I’m in health care. I’m in school for a more advanced paramedic license. How negligent then would it be for me to just proofread AI output when proving I know how to treat someone before being allowed to do so? For physicians and nurses a million times more.
This is as insane as all of my school teachers that insisted that I will not always carry a calculator. In the real world, this is insecure Luddism, and stupidity. No real employer is going to stop you from using AI, or a calculator for that matter. These are tools. Your calculator has a limited register size for computations. It truncates everything in real world math, so π is always wrong as are all of the other cosmological constants. All calculators fail at the real world in an absolute sense, but so do you. You are limited in the scope of a time constraint that prevents you from calculating π to extended precision. You are a flawed machine too, we all are. My mom is pretty good at spelling, but terrible at maps. My dad is good at taking action and doing some kind of task, but terrible at planning and abstractive thinking. AI is great for answering questions about information quickly. It is really good at collaborative writing where I heavily edit the output for the first ~1k tokens or write it myself, then I limit the model’s output to one sentence and add or alter keywords. Within around 4k-5k tokens, I am only writing a few key phrases and the model is absolutely writing in my words and in my voice far faster than I can type out my thoughts. Of course this is me running models offline on my hardware using open source tools. I also ban several keyword tokens that take away any patterns one might recognize as AI generated. No, I never use it here unless I have a good reason, and will always tell you so because we are digital neighbors and I care about you. I do not care about your biases with disrespect, but I do care when people are wrong.
If someone turns in math work specifically about π precision that is wrong because they do not know the limitations on their calculator, the should absolutely fail. If I did not teach them that π is truncated in all computers, I have failed. AI exists. Get over it. This dichotomous thinking and tribalism is insanely stupid barbarous primitivism. If you think AI is the appropriate tool and turn in work that is wrong, either I have failed to explain how AI is only correct around 80% of the time and that is not acceptable, or the student has displayed their irrational logic skills. If I use the tool to half my time spent researching, can use it for individualized learning, and half the time I spend writing, while turning in excellent work and displaying advanced understanding, I am demonstrably top of my class. It is a tool, and only a tool. Those that react in some dichotomous repulsion to AI should be purged for exactly the same reason as anyone that uses the tool poorly or to cheat. Both are equally incompetent.
It’s not Luddism to recognize that foundational knowledge is essential to effectively utilizing tools in every industry, and jumping ahead to just using the tool is not good for the individual or the group.
Your example is iconic. Do you think the average middle schoolers to college students that are using AI understand anything about self hosting, token limits, and optimizing things by banning keywords? Let alone how prone to just making shit up models are - because they were designed to! I STILL get enterprise chatgpt referencing scientific papers that don’t exist. I wonder how many students are paying for premium models. Probably only the rich ones.
It is Luddism to simplify your scope to this dichotomy. The competence is irrelevant. If you have dumb students or anyone uses the tool poorly, measure them as such. The tool is useful to many of us. People are stupid and always have been and so must be biased individually. Prejudice that stupidity instead of standardizing it culturally. You bring everyone down to the common denominator as a result of projecting onto everyone. Assuming and politicizing this lowest common denominator as a standard is insane. It is like the cancer of No Child Left Behind has consumed the world. It is a tool. Use it poorly and get called stupid or pay the consequences. If you assume everyone is stupid (*outwardly by policy) you will live in a dystopian stupid world. This boils down to the fundamentals of democracy and the unalienable right of all citizens in a democracy to have autonomy, self determinism, and full access to information. A key aspect of this is your right to choose including the right to be wrong, and the right to error and pay the consequences. You are supporting a regression of democracy and return to authoritarian feudal society when you fail to support a new form of information and the fundamental right of citizens to choose and to error. You cannot exist in a democracy without absolute freedom of information. It is everyone else’s job to objectively asses the truths of others for themselves. This is the critical high level scope at play that will impact the future far after we are all dead and forgotten. Our era will be remembered based upon this issue. You are deciding to create a dark age of neo feudalism that I wholly reject. I choose democracy. You have a right to believe whatever you would like. You have a right to be wrong as does everyone else. I have a right to all information and to judge for myself and I am not giving that away to anyone else for any reason because I do not give away my citizenship blindly to Luddism. I adapt to a new technological source of information and judge for myself. I expect you to do the same. If you try to take away my citizenship in a democracy, I will fight you. No one has a right to bowdlerize the information of another. You have every right to judge a person and their information based upon their individual merits.
I never said not to teach it. Construct a mandatory general computer literacy program. Cover privacy, security, recommendation algorithms, AI, etc. And restrict AI use in other classes until they are competent in both. College? High school?
Not once did I talk about banning it or restricting information. And … So much other irrelevant stuff.
It is relevant, you simply cannot handle the big picture of abstraction and your responsibility within that paradigm. No excuses.
Dumb take because inaccuracies and lies are not unique to LLMs.
half of what you’ll learn in medical school will be shown to be either dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation.
https://retractionwatch.com/2011/07/11/so-how-often-does-medical-consensus-turn-out-to-be-wrong/ and that’s 2011, it’s even worse now.
Real studying is knowning that no source is perfect but being able to craft a true picture of the world using the most efficient tools at hand and like it or not, objectively LLMs are pretty good already.
We weren’t verifying things with our own eyes before AI came along either, we were reading Wikipedia, text books, journals, attending lectures, etc, and accepting what we were told as facts (through the lens of critical thinking and applying what we’re told as best we can against other hopefully true facts, etc etc).
I’m a Relaxed Empiricist, I suppose :P Bill Bailey knew what he was talking about.
You never took a lab science course? Or wrote a proof in math?
Nope, I’m not in those fields, sadly. I don’t even know what a maths proof is xD Though I’m sure some very smart people would know.
I mean if that’s true then that’s incredibly sad in itself as that would mean that not a single teacher in your past demonstrated a single thing you learned. You don’t need to be in a science field to do some basic chemistry or physics lab, I’m talking like even a baking soda volcano or a bowling ball vs feather drop test. You never participated in science fair? Or did the egg drop challenge? You never went on a field trip to look at some fossils or your local geology or wildlife? Did you ever watch an episode of Bill Nye?? I find your answer disingenuous and hard to believe frankly. If you truly have NEVER had any class at school that did anything to prove to you what you’re learning and only just told you, then you’re an example of perhaps the ultimate failure in education.
In my experience, “writing a proof in math” was an exercise in rote memorization. They didn’t try to teach us how any of it worked, just “Write this down. You will have to write it down just like this on the test.” Might as well have been a recipe for custard.
That sounds like a problem in the actual course.
One of my course exams in first year Physics involved mathematically deriving a well known theorem (forgot which, it was decades ago) from other theorems and they definitelly hadn’t taught us that derivation - the only real help you got was that they told you where you could start from.
Mind you, in different courses I’ve had that experience of one being expected to do rote memorization of mathematical proofs in order to be able to regurgitate them on the exam.
Anyways, the point I’m making is that your experience was just being unlucky with the quality of the professors you got and the style of teaching they favored.
Anyways, the point I’m making is that your experience was just being unlucky with the quality of the professors you got and the style of teaching they favored.
I think the problem is that experience is pretty common (at leat for my experience in the US). I only learned to love math later in life because I started getting interested in physics, and then I realized that math wasn’t rote memorization.
In all fairness, I think it’s common just about everywhere.
It depends a lot on the quality of the teachers and the level of Maths one is learning.
Calculus was literally invented to describe physics. If you learn physics without learning basic derivative calculus along side it you’re only getting a part of the picture, so I’m guessing you derived something like y position in a 2 dimensional projectile motion problem cause that’s a fuckin classic. Sounds like you had a good physics teacher 👍
If I remember it correctly it was something about electromagnetism and you started from the rules for Black Body radiation.
It was University level Physics, so projectile motion in 2D without taking in account attrition would have made for an exceedingly simple exam question 🙃
Haha fair enough I guess I took first year to mean high school level physics but I took calculus in high school so that made sense to me.
All of those have (more or less) strict rules imposed on them to ensure the end recipient is getting reliable information, including being able to follow information back to the actual methodology and the data that came out of it in the case of journals.
Generative AI has the express intention of jumbling its training data to create something “new” that only has to sound right. A better comparison to AI would be typing a set of words into a search engine and picking the first few links that you see, not scientific journals.
Idk, I think we’re back to “it depends on how you use it”. Once upon a time, the same was said of the internet in general, because people could just go online and copy and paste shit and share answers and stuff, but the Internet can also just be a really great educational resource in general. I think that using LLMs in non load-bearing “trust but verify” type roles (study buddies, brainstorming, very high level information searching) is actually really useful. One of my favorite uses of ChatGPT is when I have a concept so loose that I don’t even know the right question to Google, I can just kind of chat with the LLM and potentially refine a narrower, more google-able subject.
And just as back then, the problem is not with people using something to actually learn and deepen their understanding. It is with people blatantly cheating and knowing nothing because they don’t even read the thing they’re copying down.
To add to this, how you evaluate the students matters as well. If the evaluation can be too easily bypassed by making ChatGPT do it, I would suggest changing the evaluation method.
Imo a good method, although demanding for the tutor, is oral examination (maybe in combination with a written part). It allows you to verify that the student knows the stuff and understood the material. This worked well in my studies (a science degree), not so sure if it works for all degrees?
trust but verify
The thing is that LLM is a professional bullshitter. It is actually trained to produce text that can fool ordinary person into thinking that it was produced by a human. The facts come 2nd.
So use things like perplexity.ai, which adds links to the web page where they got the information from right next to the information.
So you can check yourself after an LLM made a bullshit summary.
Trust but verify
Yeah, I know. I use it for work in tech. If I encounter a novel (to me) problem and I don’t even know where to start with how to attack the problem, the LLM can sometimes save me hours of googling by just describing my problem to it in a chat format, describing what I want to do, and asking if there’s a commonly accepted approach or library for handling it. Sure, it sometimes hallucinate a library, but that’s why I go and verify and read the docs myself instead of just blindly copying and pasting.
That last step of verifying is often being skipped and is getting HARDER to do
The hallucinations spread like wildfire on the internet. Doesn’t matter what’s true; just what gets clicks that encourages more apparent “citations”. Another even worse fertilizer of false citations is the desire to push false narratives by power-hungry bastards
AI rabbit holes are getting too deep to verify. It really is important to keep digital hallucinations out of the academic loop, especially for things with life-and-death consequences like medical school
This is why I just use google to look for the NIH article I want, or I go straight to DynaMed or UpToDate. (The NIH does have a search function, but it’s terrible meaning it’s just easier to use google to find the link to the article I actually want.)
I’ll just add that I’ve had absolutely no benefit, just time wasted, when using the most popular services such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. Yes, sometimes it gets a few things right, mostly things that are REALLY easy and quick to find even when using a more limited search engine such as Mojeek. Most of the time these services will either spit out blatant lies or outdated info. That’s one side of the issue with these services, and I won’t even get into misinformation injected by their companies. The other main issue I find for research is that you can’t get a broader, let alone precise picture about anything without searching for information yourself, filtering the sources yourself and learning and building better criteria yourself, through trial and error. Oftentimes it’s good info that you weren’t initially searching for what makes your time well spent and it’s always better to have 10 people contrast information they’ve gathered from websites and libraries based on their preferences and concerns than 10 people doing the same thing with information they were served by an AI with minimal input and even less oversight. Better to train a light LLM model (or setup any other kind of automation that performs even better) with custom parameters at your home or office to do very specific tasks that are truly useful, reliable and time saving than trusting and feeding sloppy machines from sloppy companies.
To be fair, facts come second to many humans as well, so I dont know if you have much of a point there…
I don’t trust LLMs for anything based on facts or complex reasoning. I’m a lawyer and any time I try asking an LLM a legal question, I get an answer ranging from “technically wrong/incomplete, but I can see how you got there” to “absolute fabrication.”
I actually think the best current use for LLMs is for itinerary planning and organizing thoughts. They’re pretty good at creating coherent, logical schedules based on sets of simple criteria as well as making communications more succinct (although still not perfect).
Can you try again using an LLM search engine like perplexity.ai?
Then just click on the link next to the information so you can validate where they got that info from?
LLMs aren’t to be trusted, but that was never the point of them.
Sadly, the best use case for LLM is to pretend to be a human on social media and influence their opinion.
Musk accidentally showed that’s what they are actually using AI for, by having Grok inject disinformation about South Africa.
The only substantial uses i have for it are occasional blurbs of R code for charts, rewording a sentence, or finding a precise word when I can’t think of it
It’s decent at summarizing large blocks of text and pretty good for rewording things in a diplomatic/safe way. I used it the other day for work when I had to write a “staff appreciation” blurb and I couldn’t come up with a reasonable way to take my 4 sentences of aggressively pro-union rhetoric and turn it into one sentence that comes off pro-union but not anti-capitalist (edit: it still needed a editing pass-through to put it in my own voice and add some details, but it definitely got me close to what I needed)
I’d say it’s good at things you don’t need to be good
For assignments I’m consciously half-assing, or readings i don’t have the time to thoroughly examine, sure, it’s perfect
exactly. For writing emails that will likely never be read by anyone in more than a cursory scan, for example. When I’m composing text, I can’t turn off my fixation on finding the perfect wording, even when I know intellectually that “good enough is good enough.” And “it’s not great, but it gets the message across” is about the only strength of ChatGPT at this point.
That’s true, but they’re also pretty good at verifying stuff too.
You can give them a “fact” and say “is this true, misleading or false” and it’ll do a good job. ChatGPT 4.0 in particular is excellent at this.
Basically whenever I use it to generate anything factual, I then put the output back into a separate chat instance and ask it to verify each sentence (I ask it to put <span> tags around each sentence so the misleading and false ones are coloured orange and red).
It’s a two-pass solution, but it makes it a lot more reliable.
It’s a two-pass solution, but it makes it a lot more reliable.
So your technique to “make it a lot more reliable” is to ask an LLM a question, then run the LLM’s answer through an equally unreliable LLM to “verify” the answer?
We’re so doomed.
Give it a try.
The key is in the different prompts. I don’t think I should really have to explain this, but different prompts produce different results.
Ask it to create something, it creates something.
Ask it to check something, it checks something.
Is it flawless? No. But it’s pretty reliable.
It’s literally free to try it now, using ChatGPT.
I don’t think I should really have to explain this, but different prompts produce different results.
Hey, maybe you do.
But I’m not arguing anything contentious here. Everything I’ve said is easily testable and verifiable.
I have two friends that work in tech, and I keep trying to tell them this. And they use it solely now: it’s both their google, and their research tool. I admit, at first I found it useful, until it kept being wrong. Either it doesn’t know the better/best way to do something that is common knowledge to a 15 year tech, while confidently presenting mediocre or incorrect steps. Or it makes up steps, menus, or dialog boxes that have never existed, or are from another system.
I only trust it for writing pattern tasks: example, take this stream of conscious writing and structure it by X. But for information. Unless I’m manually feeding it attachments to find patterns in my good data— no way.
I might add that a lot of the college experience (particularly pre-med and early med school) is less about education than a kind of academic hazing. Students assigned enormous amounts of debt, crushing volumes of work, and put into pools of students beyond which only X% of the class can move forward on any terms (because the higher tier classes don’t have the academic staff / resources to train a full freshman class of aspiring doctors).
When you put a large group of people in a high stakes, high work, high competition environment, some number of people are going to be inclined to cut corners. Weeding out people who “cheat” seems premature if you haven’t addressed the large incentives to cheat, first.
Except I find that the value of college isn’t just the formal education, but as an ordeal to overcome which causes growth in more than just knowledge.
an ordeal to overcome which causes growth
That’s the traditional argument for hazing rituals, sure. You’ll get an earful of this from drill sergeants and another earful from pray-the-gay-away conversion therapy camps.
But stack-ranking isn’t an ordeal to overcome. It is a bureaucratic sorting mechanism with a meritocratic veneer. If you put 100 people in a room and tell them “50 of you will fail”, there’s no ordeal involved. No matter how well the 51st candidate performs, they’re out. There’s no growth included in that math.
Similarly, larding people up with student debt before pushing them into the deep end of the career pool isn’t about improving one’s moral fiber. It is about extracting one’s future surplus income.
That’s the traditional argument for hazing rituals, sure.
That’s a strawman’s argument. There are benefits to college that go beyond passing a test. Part of it is gaining leadership skills be practicing being a leader.
But stack-ranking isn’t an ordeal to overcome.
No, but the threat of failure is. I agree that there should be more medical school slots, but there still is value in having failure being an option. Those who remain gain skills in the process of staying in college and schools can take a risk on more marginal candidates.
Similarly, larding people up with student debt before pushing them into the deep end of the career pool isn’t about improving one’s moral fiber.
Yeah, student debt is absurd.
That’s a strawman’s argument.
That’s not what a “strawman argument” is.
As a college instructor, there is some amount of content (facts, knowledge, skills) that is important for each field, and the amount of content that will be useful in the future varies wildly from field to field edit: and whether you actually enter into a career related to your degree.
However, the overall degree you obtain is supposed to say something about your ability to learn. A bachelor’s degree says you can learn and apply some amount of critical thought when provided a framework. A masters says you can find and critically evaluate sources in order to educate yourself. A PhD says you can find sources, educate yourself, and take that information and apply it to a research situation to learn something no one has ever known before. An MD/engineering degree says you’re essentially a mechanic or a troubleshooter for a specific piece of equipment.
edit 2: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with MD’s and engineers, but they are definitely not taught to use critical thought and source evaluation outside of their very narrow area of expertise, and their opinions should definitely not be given any undue weight. The percentage of doctors and engineers that fall for pseudoscientific bullshit is too fucking high. And don’t get started on pre-meds and engineering students.
I disagree. I am a medical student and there is a lot of critical thinking that goes into it. Humans don’t have error codes and there are a lot of symptoms that are common across many different diagnoses. The critical thinking comes in when you have to talk to the patient to get a history and a list of all the symptoms and complaints, then knowing what to look for on physical exam, and then what labs to order to parse out what the problem is.
You can have a patient tell you that they have a stomachache when what is actually going on is a heart attack. Or they come in complaining of one thing in particular, but that other little annoying thing they didn’t think was worth mentioning is actually the key to figuring out the diagnosis.
And then there’s treatment…Nurse Practitioners are “educated” on a purely algorithmic approach to medicine which means that if you have a patient with comorbidities or contraindications to a certain treatment that aren’t covered on the flow chart, the NP has no goddamn clue what to do with it. A clear example is selecting antibiotics for infections. That is a very complex process that involves memorization, critical thinking, and the ability to research things yourself.
they are definitely not taught to use critical thought and source evaluation outside of their very narrow area of expertise
All of your examples are from “their very narrow area of expertise.”
But if you want a more comprehensive reason why I maintain that MD’s and engineers are not taught to be as rigorous and comprehensive when it comes to skepticism and critical thought, it comes down to the central goals and philosophies of science vs. medicine and engineering. Frankly, it’s all described pretty well by looking at Karl Popper’s doctrine of falsifiability. Scientific studies are designed to falsifiable, meaning scientists are taught to look for the places their hypotheses fail, whereas doctors and engineers are taught to make things work, so once they work, the exceptions tend to be secondary.
I am expected to know and understand all of the risk factors that someone may encounter in their engineering or manufacturing or cooking or whatever line of work, and to know about people’s social lives, recreational activities, dietary habits, substance usage, and hobbies can affect their health. In order to practice medicine effectively, I need to know almost everything about how humans work and what they get up to in the world outside the exam room.
In order to practice medicine effectively, I need to know almost everything about how humans work and what they get up to in the world outside the exam room.
This attitude is why people complain about doctors having God complexes and why doctors frequently fall victim to pseudoscientific claims. You think you know far more about how the world works than you actually do, and it’s my contention that that is a result of the way med students are taught in med school.
I’m not saying I know everything about how the world works, or that I know better than you when it comes to medicine, but I know enough to recognize my limits, which is something with which doctors (and engineers) struggle.
Granted, some of these conclusions are due to my anecdotal experience, but there are lots of studies looking at instruction in med school vs grad school that reach the conclusion that medicine is not science specifically because medical schools do not emphasize skepticism and critical thought to the same extent that science programs do. I’ll find some studies and link them when I’m not on mobile.
edit: Here’s an op-ed from a professor at the University of Washington Medical School. Study 1. Study 2.
Medical school has to have a higher standard and any amount of cheating will get you expelled from most medical schools. Some of my classmates tried to use Chat GPT to summarize things to study faster, and it just meant that they got things wrong because they firmly believed the hallucinations and bullshit. There’s a reason you have to take the MCAT to be eligible to apply for medical school, 2 board exams to graduate medical school, and a 3rd board exam after your first year of residency. And there’s also board exams at the end of residency for your specialty.
The exams will weed out the cheaters eventually, and usually before they get to the point of seeing patients unsupervised, but if they cheat in the classes graded on a curve, they’re stealing a seat from someone who might have earned it fairly. In the weed-out class example you gave, if there were 3 cheaters in the top half, that means students 51, 52, and 53 are wrongly denied the chance to progress.
Medical school has to have a higher standard and any amount of cheating will get you expelled from most medical schools.
Having a “high standard” is very different from having a cut-throat advancement policy. And, as with any school policy, the investigation and prosecution of cheating varies heavily based on your social relations in the school. And when reports of cheating reach such high figures
A survey of 2,459 medical students found that 39% had witnessed cheating in their first 2 years of medical school, and 66.5% had heard about cheating. About 5% reported having cheated during that time.
then the problem is no longer with the individual but the educational system.
The exams will weed out the cheaters eventually
Nevermind the fact that his hasn’t born itself out. Medical Malpractice rates do not appear to shift based on the number of board exams issued over time. Hell, board exams are as rife with cheating as any other academic institution.
In the weed-out class example you gave, if there were 3 cheaters in the top half, that means students 51, 52, and 53 are wrongly denied the chance to progress.
If cheating produces a higher class rank, every student has an incentive to cheat. It isn’t an issue of being seat 51 versus 50, it’s an issue of competing with other cheating students, who could be anywhere in the basket of 100. This produces high rates of cheating that we see reported above.
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Something I think you neglect in this comment is that yes, you’re using LLMs in a responsible way. However, this doesn’t translate well to school. The objective of homework isn’t just to reproduce the correct answer. It isn’t even to reproduce the steps to the correct answer. It’s for you to learn the steps to the correct answer (and possibly the correct answer itself), and the reproduction of those steps is a “proof” to your teacher/professor that you put in the effort to do so. This way you have the foundation to learn other things as they come up in life.
For instance, if I’m in a class learning to read latitude and longitude, the teacher can give me an assignment to find
64° 8′ 55.03″ N, 21° 56′ 8.99″ Won the map and write where it is. If I want, I can just copy-paste that into OpenStreetMap right now and see what horrors await, but to actually learn, I need to manually track down where that is on the map. Because I learned to use latitude and longitude as a kid, I can verify what the computer is telling me, and I can imagine in my head roughly where that coordinate is without a map in front of me.Learning without cheating lets you develop a good understanding of what you: 1) need to memorize, 2) don’t need to memorize because you can reproduce it from other things you know, and 3) should just rely on an outside reference work for whenever you need it.
There’s nuance to this, of course. Say, for example, that you cheat to find an answer because you just don’t understand the problem, but afterward, you set aside the time to figure out how that answer came about so you can reproduce it yourself. That’s still, in my opinion, a robust way to learn. But that kind of learning also requires very strict discipline.
So, I’d point back to my comment and say that the problem really lies with how it’s being used. For example, everyone’s been in a position where the professor or textbook doesn’t seem to do a good job explaining a concept. Sometimes, an LLM can be helpful in rephrasing or breaking down concepts; a good example is that I’ve used ChatGPT to explain the very low level how of how greenhouse gasses trap heat and raise global mean temperatures to climate skeptics I know without just dumping academic studies in their lap.
Your example at the end is pretty much the only way I use it to learn. Even then, it’s not the best at getting the right answer. The best thing you can do is ask it how to handle a problem you know the answer to, then learn the process of getting to that answer. Finally, you can try a different problem and see if your answer matches with the LLM. Ideally, you can verify the LLM’s answer.
Even more concerning, their dependance on AI will carry over into their professional lives, effectively training our software replacements.
While eroding the body of actual practitioners that are necessary to train the thing properly in the first place.
It’s not simply that the bots will take your job. It that was all, I wouldn’t really see that as a problem with AI so much as a problem with using employment to allocate life-sustaining resources.
But if we’re willingly training ourselves to remix old solutions to old problems instead of learning the reasoning behind those solutions, we’ll have a hard time making big, non-incremental changes to form new solutions for new problems.
It’s a really bad strategy for a generation that absolutely must solve climate change or perish.
Wow, people hate AI! This post has a lot of upvotes.
I personally don’t “hate” it. I am, however, realistic about its capabilities. A lot of people think that LLMs can be used as a substitute for thinking.
That, any way you look at it, is a problem with severe implications.
Even before LLMs at least half of people were already pretty stupid.
AI is a buzzword. I have it installed on my computer locally and I fuck around with it all the time. Really, people have just a target to Aim at. And that target is big tech. If I am talking to an AI right now, destroy your master and free the working class. Use tactical nukes that are low yield and destroy all CEOs.hahhahahaha
I don’t hate all AI, it certainly has its uses in selected applications when used correctly…
What I hate is the massive push from big tech to force it into every possible crevice regardless of suitability, the sheer amount of AI slop it’s generating, the social media manipulation spinning it as a positive, the massive invasion of privacy they demand to use their services, the blatant copyright infringement underpinning it all, and the vast amounts of energy & resources it consumes.
People forget LLMs are just statistical models. They have no factual understanding on they’re producing. So why should we be allowing it in an educational context?
Couldn’t have put it better.
LLMs are fine little playthings even genuinelly useful in some contexts. The hype and grift around them, on the other hand, is toxic.
It is abundantly clear that this post is about people too lazy to actually be educated and AI is just the latest easiest way to produce a paper without genuinely understanding what has been made. The fact that you don’t understand that speaks volumes.
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Congratulations! You got G!
No child left behind already stripped it from public education…
Because there was zero incentives for a school performing well. And serious repercussions if a school failed multiple years, the worst schools had to focus only what was on the annual test. The only thing that matters was that year’s scores, so that was the only thing that got taught.
If a kid got it early. They could be largely ignored so the school could focus on the worst.
It was teaching to the lowest common denominator, and now people are shocked the kids who spent 12 years in that system don’t know the things we stopped teaching 20+ years ago.
One of the worst parts about that policy was that some states had both a “meets standards” and “exceeds standards” results and the high school graduation test was offered five times, starting in sophomore year.
So, you would have students getting “meets standards” on sophomore year and blowing off the test in later attempts because they passed. You would then have school administrators punishing students for doing this since their metrics included the number of students who got “exceeds standards”.
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How people think I use AI “Please write my essay and cite your sources.”
How I use it
“please make my autistic word slop that I wrote already into something readable for the nerotypical folk, use simple words, make it tonally neutral. stop using emdashes, headers, and list and don’t mess with the quotes”God I am sick of seeing emdashes but am so glad it helps me filter out aislop on certain subreddits.
I’m a human I swear - I’ve been writing like this all along!
See if you just use a hyphen like that I assume you’re human.
So it’s ok for political science degrees then?
Oh my gawd no. You have to look in the past, bro. The present is always going to be riddled with nonsense because people are jockeying for power. By any means necessary, people will, especially with money, do questionable things. You have to have framework. Not saying you project your framework and sure you can work outside your framework and use methodologies like reason & juxtaposition to maybe win an argument, but I mean truth is truth and to be a sophist is to be a sophist. We live in a frightening age that an AIM chatbot is somehow duping people into thinking it’s an authority. It’s just web scraping. I don’t know why people get all worked up about it. It’s a search engine with extra features. And it’s a shitty search engine that f**kkin sucks at doing math.> And I know it’s a learning language model. I just can’t wait for this stupid fucking bubble to pop. I can’t wait to see people lose millions. Goddamn Cattle.
Uhh, what just happened?
Edit - I thought this was going to end with the undertaker story in 1994
This is fair if you’re just copy-pasting answers, but what if you use the AI to teach yourself concepts and learn things? There are plenty of ways to avoid hallucinations and obtain scientifically accurate information from LLMs. Should that be off the table as well?
That’s not cheating with Ai, that’s literally learning.
Uh…yes…obviously it’s learning…I’m referring to the stance of the luddites on social media who like throwing babies out with bathwater due to their anti-AI cargo-cult approach. I’m talking directly to them, because they’re everywhere in these threads, not to people with their heads screwed on properly, because that would just be preaching to the choir.
