Re:AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly...
by TeMPOraL on Sunday September 21, 2025 @03:53PM
(#45326066)
> Yet in conclusion, this self-reported figure is stated as an independently observed fact. When people without ADHD take stimulants they also self-report increased productivity, higher accuracy, and faster task completion but all objective measurements are negatively affected.
Interesting analogy, because all those studies with objective measurements are defied by US students year by year, come finals seasons.
Re:AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly...
by dns_snek on Sunday September 21, 2025 @04:42PM
(#45326443)
Yeah, they take them because they get high. Believing in things that are unsupported by empirical evidence is in the domain of religion, not science.
Re:AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly...
by TeMPOraL on Monday September 22, 2025 @08:29AM
(#45332483)
You can't really get high much on prescription-level dosages - that quickly gets tricky logistically and prohibitively expensive. People who look for highs go to the street for a reason.
Re:AI Was Supposed to Help Juniors Shine. Why Does It Mostly...
by dns_snek on Monday September 22, 2025 @10:55AM
(#45334353)
You pointed out that students abuse stimulants for finals in spite of the evidence, were you just expanding on what I originally said, or is that meant to serve as counter-evidence implying that the research is wrong?
Regardless, I'm not saying it's a cheap or practical to get high this way, especially over the long term. People probably try stimulants because folk wisdom tells them that they'll get better grades. Then they get high and they feel like a superman from the dopamine rush, so they keep using them because they think it's materially improving their grades but really they're just getting high.
> On average, users reported time savings of 56 minutes per working day [...] It is also possible that survey respondents overestimated time saved due to optimism bias.
Yet in conclusion, this self-reported figure is stated as an independently observed fact. When people without ADHD take stimulants they also self-report increased productivity, higher accuracy, and faster task completion but all objective measurements are negatively affected.
The OECD paper supports their programming-related findings with the following gems:
- A study that measures productivity by the time needed to implement a "hello world" of HTTP servers [27]
- A study that measures productivity by the number of lines of code produced [28]
- A study co-authored by Microsoft that measures productivity of Microsoft employees using Microsoft Copilot by the number of pull requests they create. Then the code is reviewed by their Microsoft coworkers and the quality of those PRs is judged by the acceptance rate of those PRs. Unbelievably, the code quality doesn't only remain the same, it goes up! [30]
- An inspirational pro-AI paper co-authored by GitHub and Microsoft that's "shining a light on the importance of AI" aimed at "managers and policy-makers". [31]