I remember books using simplified models, but being flat out wrong?
Re:How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
by bonoboTP on Monday August 10, 2026 @07:05AM
(#49242116)
It is sometimes typos, but even those can be confusing. But okay I'll admit books are usually on the end of simplification, at least for hard sciences. But sometimes they do handle the edges of the authors knowledge and sometimes misconceptions creep in. Famous ones include the reason for airplanes flying or similar "let's relate the hard science to practical reality" and making mistakes there where they think they can just improvise and wing it. Even evolution is sometimes explained very wrong. History and humanities is more murky.
Of course "it's just simplified" is a defense that can be attempted to explain away all mistakes.
Luckily I had my dad available who is a scientist, during my high school and he corrected several fundamental mis-explanations of my teacher that even to my mind logically simply didn't add up. I learned not to relay this back to the teacher of course and sometimes regurgitated the wrong answer in tests. Not everyone is so lucky. This has been my frustration quite often. Textbooks are sometimes wrong, both because the author really doesn't have good expertise on that slice of the topic or out of didactic simplification reasons. Having an LLM that can consult the real grownup literature and give the full story, not the birds-and-bees is quite useful.