Right now, teaching elementary school aged children to solve complex multiplication and division is considered an effective way to teach people critical thinking, persistence, and basic logical reasoning structure. Structured education typically relies on an ability to assess student improvement, so 3rd graders don't get a calculator when they take a multiplications table test, even though we'd all use one at our desk at work.
I would surmise that likewise there is value to students learning to read, analyze, and report insight about a text, to attempt to identify symbolism and patterns, to communicate their ideas effectively, and to be assessed about that - even if by the time they're in the workforce they'll usually just ask an AI to do it.
I usually use a calculator or Python for large numerical computations, but the algorithmic understanding is something I use every day.
In my friendly/complementary rebuttal, the catch lies somewhere in the phase of learning foundational material. In the same way that traditional mathematics education emphasizes doing problems by hand that could be solved computer, there’s something to be said for learning to parse the research material that ChatGPT has indexed when you’re writing a term paper. It’s worth noting here that math education may be moving away from the rote memorization and routine problem solving that today’s math researchers state are essential.
ChatGPT has made it much harder to detect cheating on untimed power tests. The biggest downside I see to this is that it makes an old problem worse. If a prof has no choice but to administer a non-computer (proctored) timed exam, students who take tests slowly or have anxiety disorders are going to suffer.
This already mirrors the real world pretty well. Outside of your first job or two, nobody really cares what your GPA is or what college you graduated from. In the real world if you managed to cheat with an AI you’d probably get a nice promotion. I don’t personally see a downside, other than the demise of certain flawed notions of academic success that deserve to die out anyway.
We learn by doing. Relying on smart tools puts you in a local optima, it is hard for you to improve over those tools, but people who don't rely on tools continue improving and then start using the tools later.
My PhD mentor is actually leading a discussion about ChatGPT use by students, and the tone is mostly concern. But it’s not all bad; it’s an incredible tool for quickly diving into a subject at a surface level and getting your bearings regarding what’s important. It saved my ass on one of my finals too when the rest of the questions were harder than I expected and ChatGPT helped me tear through the remaining T/F questions.
If you think about it, most of the stuff you learn at school (beyond reading and writing) has not much value apart from certifying that you are not stupid and compliant to do stupid tasks.
You need both memorization and applied reasoning to be taught in school. Without something to apply reasoning to you can’t really reason about anything. And without applied reasoning, memorization is pretty useless.
If the ai can get a good answer, the questions must be fairly well constructed, and it's reasonable to expect a student exposed to the same info could also come up with a good answer.
For example, writing a basic screenplay can be done with ChatGPT, but it can’t write one that will likely be turned into a movie/show.
And automation will continue to make some jobs obsolete and create new ones. For example in youth sports we don’t get great coverage of youth/school events. I’m hopeful in the not too distant future we can get game summaries and stats for all games — and editors will probably be needed to add commentary. That’s something I’d love to see.
The whole point of testing is to put them in hypothetical situations and grade their progress with purpose of being aware of their development so we can improve it. Another thing we do is selecting the particularly good ones for further advanced training.
The problem with cheating is that it provides wrong data about their progress, you don't want to end up with a generation that cheated their way up without learning anything.
The selection for further training is probably not that big of a problem, its mostly about supply and demand and ChatGPT won't change that.
Writing essays, specifically expanding a list of well-reasoned bullet points into communicative written prose will be a worthless operation in the future, and likely already is.
There's no market for kids essays, we never made them write these things with the purpose of being useful output. The market for essays for grown ups is also very small, making kids write things down was not with the purpose of covering the case of them becoming journalists or something. It's just that makes them learn to think and structure their thought process. That's why people take notes and write down things even if its not going to be graded or read by anyone else.
Yes. And one interesting thing about ChatGPT is that, when asked to write an essay about a topic, it defaults to the standard introduction-body-conclusion organization of a school essay assignment [1]. Since its training data must have included texts organized in many other ways, I wonder if it was tweaked to default to the school-essay format.
[1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html
Writing an idea down as concisely as possible is important, the rest is just embellishment and is easily handled by AI.
For students, the objective is to write what to an adult would be mediocre essays, because they are on a path to writing adult level essays.
The AI can write mediocre essays, but not adult level essays.
Assuming that a student must write a bunch of mediocre essays in order to progress past the AI to write adult level essays, then they need to be evaluated on writing a bunch of mediocre essays.
If the teacher cannot distinguish between AI output and the student's output, and the result is that we give up on evaluating mediocre student essays, then the students are ultimately inhibited from progression to adult level essays, which, currently, are superior to the AI's output.
We automated a lot of arithmetic and then some higher math decades ago, but that hasn't meant that knowing how to do it is worthless.
Effective communicative prose is an inherently high-value part of coordinating human activity. The number of roles exclusively dedicated to it might shrink but it's part of nearly every activity in a specialized society. What's most likely is that people will use it as a time-saving tool but everyone will be evaluating how good the output is and tweaking it. And that means until we're at a point where people trust AI to actually evaluate the value of AI output, many of these roles (and certainly anyone building AIs that do this) will need to know how to recognize good output -- and the training involved in that probably involves practice in personally doing it.
Or, maybe practicing things we know how to do is a good way to practice?
You're missing the point. Why are we making them achieve progress on something that is being trivialized by AI? Let them use AI as a complementary tool and test them on something that requires measurable human skill. If this is difficult it's a sign that perhaps you're not teaching anything valuable.
Vocational schools do exist and they are useful but that's not what we are concerned about. People who cheat not to learn useful skills simply spend their time and money.
I'm not sure this is so significant. Humans naturally communicate and synthesize information. The school system is like a stick that pokes and prods the tip of the iceberg to try to nudge it here or there. By comparison, people's interests, skills, and drives play such an overwhelming role that I think we could chop off several years off the standard education curriculum and be better off.
I would argue the main limitation isn't education, but the opportunity for a student to pursue what their instincts are telling them to pursue. This is difficult today because school is designed for scale at the expense of being one size fits all. This is because teachers are a limited resource, not because it's the ideal way to do things. AI has the potential to provide more targeted education, where different students could take wildly different paths.
Why just use the written word via essays? You could use other forms of media such as video, physical art, or maybe programming to teach this as well. The five paragraph essay isn’t the only game in town!
It will go the same way. You need to understand the basics (to various degrees depending on the direction of your education), then learn how to use the new tools we are creating.
Honestly, I'd prefer we treat this as an opportunity to introduce tight feedback loops into essay writing the way we do with programming. Then evaluate the end result as a whole rather than a way to nitpick grammar rules.
While you likely always have a calculator with you which can do division much more quickly than you can do long division, if you want to teach students more advanced math, it is nonetheless useful to have previously taught them long division of numbers, so that you can teach them long division of polynomials.
If students haven't learned how to do long division of decimals, and how that works, it is harder to teach them to do long division of polynomials.
Of course, nowadays there are computer programs which can do long division of polynomials more quickly than a person can, but this is just an example.
Suppose there are a sequence of levels, where for each level n, it is much easier to teach someone level n+1 if they already have an understanding of level n. If computers can do levels up to level k faster than humans can, it may still be useful to start teaching someone at level 1 and then proceed to level 2, and so on, even though computers can already do those levels, until finally it is time to teach them level k+1 which we have not yet managed to teach computers to do.
I always viewed grades as a way of establishing intellectual hierarchy, which probably wasn't the most healthy way to look at them; a way of deciding where amongst my peers I stacked up. In University, we had class ranks.
Those with the best grades and thus highest rank would be given the best opportunities for wage-slave class work. Eventually people hit University and split up according to passion, goals as well as grades. Of course, there were exceptions; entrepreneurs were the folks that buck the system and don't need grades to succeed. In a sense, the grades were exchanged for food stamps and toys, only later in life. The winners drove the lambos and the losers are still living in their parents' basements.
I don't believe that this observation is true. Those who got into tech, bitcoins etc. at the right time got the lambos - not the most brilliant ones. Tech is full people with inert brains who make much much more mone than some of the most brilliant scientists out there.
It has been good time to be into plumbing instead of astrophysics if you are optimising for money BTW. Just like knowing ReactJS has provided better income opportunities than being rocket scientist.
that's because rocket science requires massive capital investment for said scientist to achieve anything - this aint no more backyard rocketry in the modern day.
ReactJS provides better income because it does not require massive capital investments on the dev to produce usable output.
The idea that societal benefit should match financial benefit is just a story made up because of the inclination that people who are moral should be rewarded etc. It has no economic basis.
This sounds like kind of a good summary of what we are doing to ourselves as we speak. Case in point: the crypto scandal, the housing bubble etc. A ton of people made out like thieves.
One of the interesting voices about this John Taylor Gatto. Mainstream methods of “training” as you described them, may indeed be the most common method today, but it is by no means the most effective, and Gatto goes into detail about it in his book, _The Underground History of American Education_.
For example, an older notion of education is not so much to train people to mechanically repeat results (like you would train people in a factory), but rather, to develop informed and educated citizens that are able to reason, think critically, and participate meaningfully in a republic. There’s little point in having a voting body of citizens unable to think for themselves, and are merely regurgitating ideas they hear.
You can check my other replies in this thread to understand better.
- That there is some outside agent that observes progress and "improves" someone
- That such progress can be quantified, and comparable
- That such measurement is the only way to acertain the truth of progress.
- That there is such a thing as an universal standard by which someone needs to be educated
- That the purpose of education is to produce productive members of society
- That a person starts education as a "blank slate", ready to be filled by what the teacher is teaching
- That the capacity to learn and the potential to be educated is fixed, and therefore, some should be selected for even further education
- That learning only happens when there's an outside agent educating the person
There are so many problematic things with this frame, even if it is fairly mainstream.
> The whole point of testing is to put them in hypothetical situations and grade their progress with purpose of being aware of their development so we can improve it.
Yes, that is the stated purpose, but it does not match reality. I have only seen a couple of examples of this approach to assessment in all of my years of education. Most teachers optimize for their time commitments and "coverage" of the syllabus material.
Using an AI to crap out an essay with no understanding of the topic is not the same thing. While an essay is the way we test students, it is a stand in for measuring understanding, which is the ultimate goal.
In months or years, it's not clear if any human will be able to provide economic value, relative to state of the art AI.
I don't see where any fundamental barriers lie between current AI and surpassing humans across the board. What can humans do that is unachievable by AI in the foreseeable future, given the current rate of advancement?
I also think in terms of knowledge work, we’ll have to work through at least a few more plateaus before we automate away most humans. Transformer models were a huge leap, but you can see us pushing against their limits already.
Perhaps instead, we should have a semester or year classes through 8-12 + college discuss the nature of manias, like analyzing the tulip bubble, crypto bubble, 2008 mortgage bubble, etc. These are all common things that happen over and over again. Lessons which can permanently (and frequently) be called upon.
You can measure and grade people with these topics that aren't officially taught. We just decide to teach less important things
There's probably a lot more to be said about math education in general, but I'll just note that this seems to be a recurring debate in general. Personally, I wished my math education was more rigorous and more abstract. Obviously not everyone uses calculus, but also not everyone takes calculus. I'd also rather a society where a significant portion of students are trained to think of things in terms of rates of change and accumulation of change and apply that to solve physical problems, rather than the society in which even talented students are just trained to add up spare change.
That's like saying 'speech has no value'. It doesn't have value on its own, but if you can't speak then suddenly there is a whole pile of stuff you can no longer do. The ability to put your thoughts down in writing and to organize them into a hopefully coherent form is an act that has implications far beyond the writing itself. Besides the fact that it can help you to organize your thoughts in the process. Plenty of times when I write a longer piece I find out halfway that one or more of my assumptions were wrong and then I get to fix that and re-evaluate my position. It isn't rare at all to go through several such iterations for a single text and at the end of it I have a much better insight into the material that I thought I already knew well enough to write about.
Don't underestimate the value of these foundational skills.
In the same way that in the past being able to do fast, accurate calculations in your head or on paper might have landed you job as a "computer", today technology makes the idea of hiring someone to be a computer absurd. And therefore any tests that test someone's ability to multiply and divide large numbers is basically a worthless test in today's world.
Fields where there's value humans can add won't be cheatable by AI (at least today's generations). Tests in these fields will hold value. In some cases it will mean the education and tests will evolve to educate and test areas where humans can still add value - arguably this has already happened in maths. But many fields could be replaced entirely.
I don't mean to sound unsympathetic to those who's jobs and professions will replaced by AI in the coming years and decades. It makes me sad that someone could spend years obtaining and perfecting skills which might soon become redundant, but for better or worse AI systems like ChatGPT will fundamentally change the value of some skills and educational fields. The sooner we accept this the better we can adapt society for it.