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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

To a certain extent I think it also exposes how much busy-work there really is out there. A lot of people have been talking about ChatGPT as the ultimate bullshit artist, well if that is true, the stuff it is producing perfectly would be what, bullshit in the first place?

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Essays produced for school aren't of much value for someone else to read. The value is to the writer who gets to practice synthesizing ideas and communicating them into words. There's still value to be had in learning how to communicate effectively in writing.

I underestimated the power of writing myself when I was in high school. I always preferred math, physics, programming, and chemistry, to the vague, almost arbitrary nature of writing good essays.

As I've gotten older I've noticed how my day job depends more on communicating effectively than solving hard technical problems.

The best technical idea doesn't serve you if you can't communicate it to others.

Is having kids learn to read and write bullshit because text to speech and speech recognition software exist? The point of school work isn't the output, it's learning.

The problem is how those essays are graded. In some cases the teacher just count the number of pages and skim the text.

One of my friends once submitted an essay where the introduction and the conclusions were coherent, but all the text in the middle was just unrelated garbage. It's an extreme case, but in many cases if the extremes and the subtitles are fine, the quality of the middle is not so important.

Writing essays is certainly more useful if there's helpful feedback given, but the exercise is useful in and of itself. I don't think the fact the bad teachers exist is "the problem".

Yeah this is more my point. Teachers should be carefully pouring over students' essays, but they aren't paid enough to do so

I know some recently-unemployed Kenyans with relevant work experience who could be hired cheaply to assist the overworked teachers.

(BTW, it's "poring" not "pouring".)

That's an interesting idea.

I wonder how easy it is now for Western high school teachers to outsource things like lesson planning or grading tests to lower-cost countries? Startup idea: build a marketplace like that. There has to be a market for it.

For essays certainly would be good, could even be better If multiple people read it and give independent feedback.

It can't be too much of a surprise that a lot of white collar jobs involve a fair amount of BS. I have 3 to 4 meetings a day and only 1 or 2 are really necessary =[

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