An 'education legend' has created an AI that will change your mind about AI
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> Remember when people were furious about kids using ChatGPT to cheat on their homework? If I may be so bold as to psychoanalyze the United States of America, it’s possible the hysteria was not entirely about homework but also the speed with which artificial intelligence was infiltrating our daily lives. How else do you explain so many people defending the sanctity of a thing none of them ever wanted to do?
"When you were 13 years old you wanted to cheat on your homework, did you not? But now that you're 45 and your son is using ChatGPT to cheat on his homework, suddenly you're upset. Curious. Perhaps the issue is your own discomfort with technology your feeble brain can't understand?"
Schools would be much better off fostering curiosity, self-reliance, tool use, and practical problem solving rather than the all-too-common busy work. So I can relate to what they're saying (to a degree) about AI.
This acutely reminds me of the transition from basic calculators & lookup tables to scientific calculators to graphing calculators to mathematica/maple. At every step, people said "that's cheating". Now we just accept them as tools. Life moves on.
- the first line is me, being so annoyed at the article that I want to destroy a laptop
- the blockquote is a quote from the article itself, including a really dumb, condescending rhetorical device about "sanctity of homework"
- the part in quotation marks is mocking the author
I have fought this my whole life, and only in my adulthood, and self guided learning, have I found the freedom to accept it: I learn better from being given the answer and working backwards. (Even literally reading textbooks “backwards”)
I hope there’s more nuance to this than this quote suggests, because I shudder to imagine a student experiencing what I did but now with a tireless unempathetic agent refusing to just tell a struggling student the answer and instead continually looping on suggestions to “look at it from another angle” in every way but the one “angle” I’m explicitly asking for.
Aligning digital teachers with our broken education system that thinks “answers” are the important part of education is a terrible terrible idea.
That quote should have read ~“the agent has been designed to work tirelessly to do anything to ensure the student understands the material well enough to wield it”
Because the real/natural world doesn't work that way. it's very ill-adapted to real life learning. Only in a constructed and false environment can anyone give us the answer to help us learn. The point of learning is not just the acquisition of information, but also to learn how to acquire future information. Leaning into your current tactics (and advocating ppl be supported to learn this way) will leave the learner very ill-equipped to learn in the real world and real jobs, where no one has the answer to give. Learning to thrive (or at least cope) in that situation, that's important
I mean, we're talking "learning". Even negative reinforcement and beatings are a way that was a "learning style" at one point, that ppl defended as "worked for me". "Every way of learning is fine" is not a sensible way to enter the conversation about education
I'd be happier to accept this if you'd explain why it's dysfunctional.
EDIT: I realize maybe I prematurely submitted and it was just the first paragraph for a minute. It was all one thought, so apologies if that's what happened
I don't think you can be prescriptive about how people should learn. In the end we'll have to be able to operate without someone giving us the answers, but in the beginning however we get the learning process we need, that's all that counts.
I guess you could amend the old adage to “on the internet everyone thinks you’re a dog”.
I am decades removed from advanced university degrees.
I am saying how I, as in me, learn best, and acknowledging that it’s different.
My point was why restrict a “generalist engine” to only teach one specific way.
All the old restrictions that pander to: this is how the text book is written, there is only one teacher and 30 students; are baggage and should be discarded in their absence.
I made my educational intentions clear:
> That quote should have read ~“the agent has been designed to work tirelessly to do anything to ensure the student understands the material well enough to wield it”
But I do like and agree with one point you made:
> but also to learn how to acquire future information.
What’s the student learning in regard to acquire future information? To hope some megacorp will steal all of humanity’s creative output to build an llm to teach it to them?
Maybe just consider my comment self-talk. I guess your comment hit a nerve with familiarity, and I ended up talking to myself more than speaking to you. I apologize for that. And thanks for the original sincere comment. I'm sure others have seen it and at least some of them felt a little less alone in the weird world of our own brains <3
Actually, the real/natural world is perfectly adapted to real life learning.
Your position is inherently incorrect and a conflation of what you think is being done.
Being provided the answer might be a decent method to learning X concept. But the answer is ALWAYS downwind of the techniques, which you are actually being taught every step of the way, in every single teaching system. If you learned+mastered the technique or concept, getting to the answer is just proving it with those things, and mostly mechanical while you write down the steps.
How would you solve a problem that no one has ever touched before, and that no one knows the answer to? Where are you going to be provided the answer?
Test your theory on something that requires quite a few years of intuition building and understanding.
From my days as an MLE: Why does stochastic gradient descent, work?
From that question, you know the answer - it works! Great, now why should I believe you? I.e, prove it.
The knowledge to answer that question only really requires some understanding of stochastic processes, randomness, and vector calculus. But you would be pressed to get an answer like I did out of numerous people who did ML research and put things into all the types of conferences, and these people were not dumb at all, yet all of them used SGD in some form without really getting into why it works, effectively they do not get the tools they're using.
This is very near and dear to my heart.
We are talking about “teaching” and I doubt anyone who supports the current education status quo is advocating to teach using unsolved problems.
That said, I do feel, personally, and have long advocated for, teaching using unsolved problems as a better technique, because you learn strategies for approaching a problem much better than: here’s theorem 13.4 heres an exercise problem that uses the theorem, what’s the answer?
It reads like you see my opinions are black and white and yours as spectra.
Using your own reading on your own comment the logical conclusion is “a system that teaches to an answer will be unable to answer unanswered questions because the students were only taught to answer questions that already have answers.”
A great example of the answer being the most useless part of one’s own personal knowledge is Timothy Gowers YouTube content:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=byjhpzEoXFs
But who’s cares what some YouTuber is up to? He’s just out here promoting an inherently incorrect education method wrought from a dysfunctional mind.
No, we're talking past each other.
Your claim is the current system is "broken" because you think teachers believe the "answer" is the ultimate goal. I refute that. The teacher does not believe the "answer" is the ultimate goal, they are teaching you techniques on how to solve problems, and the answer is the standard upon which you are being measured in correctness.
This is why "show your work" exists, your steps to get to the end (the answer) is employing the techniques, they measure how effective you are at getting there. The best teachers even mark you down if you make a mistake somewhere, but still get the right answer without proving it fully.
That sounds like something an especially patient autodidact might use to automate some busy work or help them explore the basics of a new topic, which is fine, but not what the article is trying to champion.
Maybe blocking the AI from doing math itself and just redirecting those queries to a normal calculator is enough to get the accuracy acceptably high, at least for grade school topics that it's been extensively trained on. At the very least, I'm newly convinced that the whole thing isn't necessarily a doomed idea.
I already struggle with some intellectual laziness after subscribing to GPT4, which is fairly out of character for me. Why should I expend the mental energy on something when it can do the task for me? Now imagine GPT5, 6, and so on.
People who "learn" are going to become a rarity.
Thamus replied: ... In this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing...
_The Phaedrus_, Plato, circa 370 BC
This conversation has been going on for a very long time. :-)
Am I just old? Is this what getting old and curmudgeonly feels like?
yawn
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Personally, I am looking forward to AI enabled healthcare, my sister has been dealing with health problems and she has to wait up to a month between appointments. At the very least AI can be used to speed up all the paperwork that doctors have to complete.
How much do you know about the healthcare/medical system? Where specifically in the process would AI be used to speed up paperwork?
Growing up, my family friend who is a trauma surgeon always told me she hated all the paperwork she had to do.
I could go on. The local personal health information (phi) approved ai could greatly reduce time spent on paperwork and double work like resubmitting procedure codes to billing.
Coding isn't done by the doctor anyway. Replacing a fairly low paid employee with a bot might net out but it's not obvious.
Then on the diagnostic stuff, we've been working on this for decades, I think there is real promise there but it's not a quick fix either for getting the system performance good enough to deploy more widely than e.g. CAD systems, and for getting systemic uptake. They aren't nearly good enough yet, we'll see what the next decade of improvements gets us.
Doctors care about getting paid, they mostly don't care about coding per se, and they don't do it themselves. It's not at all clear that a NLP AI would be more cost effective at it than the people who do it now. Where you will probably see it is auto-rejects, from the insurance side, forcing more iterations.
None of this stuff is off the radar of (at least some of ) the people who build medtech systems, they've been incorporating aspects for a long time. The idea that there is a sudden radical change to be made with todays tech is naive I think, lacking context of both the history of AI systems in medicine and the current techs' limitations...
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/ai-cannot-be-used-to...