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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, no. Training people doesn't work like that. Education is about training people, we don't utilize the output of the kids and reward them with grades that they can exchange for food and toys.

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.

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Before ChatGPT, there has been criticism education as we know it today. The notion of “education” has not always been about training, and putting someone in a hypothetical situation and grading progress — indeed, the measurement of progress itself — is not present in all notions of education, or all methods of learning, or even all systems of determination of truth (epistemology). Behavioral conditioning with reward incentives are also not the only method in education.

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.

Well that's a strawman argument right there. Obviously by training I don't mean perfecting repetitive tasks or anything of that sort. If that was the case, I would have advocating on training prompts or fast typing or something of that sort.

You can check my other replies in this thread to understand better.

I said a lot more than that, namely that there are other notions of education than what you are describing:

- 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.

Training people (or anything) using a flawed objective function is not useful.

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.

Have you not noticed that when you write something down with the purpose of summarising it in a structured way you tend to understand it better?

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.

Agreed. Yet many students, parents, and even teachers lost sight of this purpose.

School essays and actual essays aren't even the same thing.[0] It sounds like a more didactic use of these kids time would be arguing on forums about their favorite anime.

[0]: http://paulgraham.com/essay.html

> School essays and actual essays aren't even the same thing.

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

Long form essay isn't great for that, especially as taught in school.

Writing an idea down as concisely as possible is important, the rest is just embellishment and is easily handled by AI.

There is a progression though.

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.

Automatability may make an output ubiquitous to the point where marginal value for any given output is small, but if it was really "worthless" no one would bother automating it in the first place.

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.

We train AI's by giving them flawed objective functions as well. Nobody is impressed if you are able to copy an image, just use ctrl c and ctr v! All imagines the AI is trained on are worthless, we already have them, why train the AI to generate images we already have?

Or, maybe practicing things we know how to do is a good way to practice?

Why should I take your deliberations seriously? You’re saying that your writing is a worthless operation already.

Yeah, no. Have you looked at the way education is performed and assessed lately?

> 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.

This is an interesting point of view.

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.

> Those with the best grades and thus highest rank would be given the best opportunities for wage-slave class work

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

Respectfully, I think it's you who are missing the point. There is value in teaching humans to communicate and synthesize information. It's possible that in the future the best thinkers and philosophers and historians and political analysts will be AI, but 1/ we are very very far from that, and 2/ it's important for civilisation that we don't leave thinking to the machines.

Exactly, educations is not a vocational school where we teach people useful skills so they start doing whatever they learned. Machines have long been able to do things that we teach in the schools, the purpose of teaching is developing people. Once they are developed(that means they built understanding of how nature and society works and how to interact with) and its time to expect an output, only then we can talk about teaching useful skills.

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.

> There is value in teaching humans to communicate and synthesize information.

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!

Similar arguments were/are made about the use of calculators.

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.

Curriculum learning. It is pedagogically useful to teach simpler and easier versions of something before teaching the harder versions.

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 think it's the same reason why we are teaching assembly even if there are compilers. Or teaching Latin even though it's a dead language

Which means testing student under supervision and letting them us AI for assignments is probably going to work fine.

Sure, I also find AI and all other devices that we already had(calculators, programming languages, simulators etc) very useful for learning. Incorporating the latest and greatest tools into education works well.

> you don't want to end up with a generation that cheated their way up without learning anything.

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.

Do you think Trump and Sam Bankman-Fried took your advice? I need a pool of people to flip burgers and take orders and those people better not take cookies from the jar. For everyone else, it's called creating shareholder value. Your advice makes for great burger flippers.

You’re either a burger flipper or a con man? That’s your binary state on mankind?

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