obscurette

You can't even touch student and don't even think about slap. Some years ago I witnessed the case where teacher grabbed the student (14y old) who ran around screaming, kicking things and other students. A teacher was charged with a criminal offense (physical violence against a minor) and must now comply with behavioral supervision. What happened with kid? Nothing. He had a bad day and don't have skills to regulate his emotions yet.

It's worse, it happens all over the world. Just one of many examples - https://yle.fi/a/74-20239397

My wife is in manufacturing and although not in US, working for a company having production in US, EU, Asia etc. Her 1-minute comments why it's increasingly difficult to produce something in EU and US.

Bureaucracy - the levels of it are insane especially in EU, but US is not far behind. The loss of local partners and environment - every little thing you can do locally makes production easier and cheaper. Failure to attract young people – although production is cool, it's not Youtube influencer level cool and industry relies increasingly on older generations. Education - the quality of it is sinking almost all over the world. Insecurity - partly just part of times, but mostly coming from regulation, taxes etc.

I have experience with highschool students and I'd like to add one thing. There is a clear anti-AI attitude especially amongst brighter students because they see this as yet another clear attempt, in an education system already in chaos and staffed by underqualified teachers, to shift even more responsibility onto the pupils’ shoulders. Responsibility that ought not to be there in the first place.

No. I'm making a claim that the world is too safe from a perspective of my students. I see it very clearly that a lot of anxiety actually originates from fear. They are afraid to explore environment because they are not allowed to do it. They are afraid of conflicts because they are not allowed to learn to resolve these themselves. They are afraid of resolve any of their problems themselves because they are not allowed to discover the power to do it etc.

It's much more universal and complicated than that. One of the big issues schools and pedagogy in general struggle with is that our environment is far too safe in too many ways. For kids there is too few ways to learn from failures. Attempts to solve the issue look often like "Hey, kids, let's fall over now all at once in safest way possible and learn from it!". But it doesn't work at all. Real failures have to be unexpected, related to your decisions and really hurt so that you can learn from them.

PS. Btw, I am certain that this is the main cause of the mental health crisis amongst young people.

Just one of many tragedies bound to one of the biggest problems in modern society – obsession to victims. Framing yourself or others as a victim gives you complete immunity and frees you from any responsibility for the consequences of your actions. This obsession has a potential to end the world we know.

Do you think people behind DeepSeek don't have their own interests? And people/parties controlling people behind DeepSeek?

64 year old nerd with social phobias here. When I was in school, I had to practice oral knowledge tests since grade one. I had my first oral exam in grade six (math) and 2-3 oral exams every year since then. If I hadn't had that experience, I would never have gotten into university. I still don't like verbal communications with people (especially in a tense situations like exam), I'm slow etc, but it's manageable because I had to practice it a lot. I don't think I would have survived in modern "the environment must be made suitable for everyone" school/university.

This is especially relevant today where there are thousands of attempts to create AI "voice to text" apps to automate away "boring" note taking. My daughter working in medical field says that she is contacted at least once a week "hey, we are startup having a novel idea for voice to text app". And she have to explain yet again that she doesn't want to automate note taking away. Writing is the process how we structure our thoughts and discover new things. This is how we learn.

I grew up and went into school in seventies in Soviet Union. I remember myself discovering local libraries, bookstores etc. I still love books, I have a lot of them, but process of discovery is very different. When I was young almost every book I found in library or bookstore about topic I was interested in, was almost certainly worth to read. Publishing books was slow and expensive process and there was a very slim chance that not good books were published at all. During last decades it hasn't been a case any more and I had to develop a skills how to find a stuff worth to read – what reviews to trust etc. In AI age these skills became almost worthless as well and I trust only recommendations from people I know and trust.

It's a pattern much wider than Google or event technology sector. It's very apparent in AI craze trough society, public governance sector, journalism etc. For people like me (growing up in seventies) it seems that there is teenagers everywhere and nobody is responsible for anything any more.

This. And I blame schools. People like to rage about kids reading a lot more books in the past, but I don't think that's was the main contributor. I went to school in seventies and if I look at my pupils now, there is no huge difference. Most of my classmates didn't like to read books either, let the others summarize books they had to read etc. But there is a huge gap in everyday reading – none of my classmates couldn't get away without opening textbooks. Almost all learning no matter of course (history, geography etc) followed a recipe "read 2-4 pages from textbook, then we'll discuss it in classroom etc". There is no such thing nowadays – almost all learning is "slides, videos, interactive animations" and textbooks are almost extinct.

Being close relative for several med and care workers we have discussed it a lot and consensus is that it really depends. For example relying on LLM summaries sounds great until it doesn't. It doesn't matter whether you misunderstand LLM summary or LLM "misunderstands" you – there are real risks involved, and you wouldn't want them to weigh on your conscience if they were to materialize.

Relying on LLM to summarize things for you has one more issue. To outsiders, this seems like a tedious process, but is actually very important part of the thought process. Wording your thoughts and writing these down helps people to discover new aspects of the problem. It's how people learn.

At the moment consensus is that it must not be banned, but also not mandated in any way - people must take responsibility, and they must be able to decide for themselves where and when the LLM use is justified and where it is not.

Only with final answer, if you have to round etc. With slide rulers and tables you had to think about it with every step, where to put your decimal separator etc.

> calculators didn't make us dumber

I think that most of people misunderstand what calculator changed. Calculator didn't replace people doing math, calculator replaced mathematical tables, slide rulers and other already existing devices.

And regarding making people dumber ... Math teachers who saw this change said that there was a clear shift – students started to think less critically. With slide rulers and tables you had to think about answers – significant figures etc – with calculators you don't.

I had a discussion regarding this some time ago with my grandchild who has an ADHD diagnosis. She has troubles being in noisy (especially visually) environments, yet she finds my home (relatively large home full of books, music always playing etc) comforting. She explained that all this stuff in my home is interesting for her and speaks with her - "It's you and grandma, it's full of stories". But the very modern and "must be comforting" environment in school full of patterns and pictures drawn on walls etc is just irritating – "There is no stories, just noise".

For the record – nope, there is no real plans, it's a pure PR stunt.

https://news.err.ee/1610065480/peeter-p-motskula-ai-agents-n...

Good point. As a former highschool teacher, I tend to think on this (K12 in US terms?) level, but of course universal higher education wouldn't work. Some comments though. In my experience this point in life when people will figure out their direction varies wildly. I had classmates who figured it out in their early teens and others who found their way in late twenties. And even more important point against specializing too early - some of them had already three careers (I'm in my sixties). Times change, jobs disappear and strong universal foundation helps enormously if you have to start a new career.

Yes. And that's why universal education has been success and why a modern idea of education – "let's find out everyone individual needs are, adjust to these, show how cool it is to think critically etc" – is such a disaster.

> Universal, mandatory education rarely achieves this attitude.

As a former teacher I think that's very common, but a fatal error to assume that it's something that it's up to education to achieve this at all. It's up to student to decide what they want to achieve, what their motivation is, whether they are motivated at all etc. The point of education have always been to provide students tools.

Btw, what makes a great teacher? One of my most influential teachers was universally hated by the rest of the class.