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Comment by cccybernetic | Hacker News Reader

This is a problem I’m working on.

I’m a software engineer at major US research university developing AI-powered software to improve critical reading and writing skills in higher ed. The idea is to provide immediate, high-quality feedback to students, closing the “latency” of submitting something and waiting to hear back from you professor.

I do genuinely think AI can reshape teaching and learning, but it will be a slow iterative process. We can use it scale what works (personalized learning and tutoring, helping students develop mastery/automaticity on topics, targeting areas where they struggle). It can also automate time-consuming tasks that bog teachers down.

If you're interested in pedagogy, AI, and tech, please reach out.

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> I’m a software engineer at major US research university developing AI-powered software to improve critical reading and writing skills in higher ed.

Oftentimes, the root cause of the critical reading problem is the quality of the writing that students are subjected to. My daughter recently showed me one of her economics readings, and said she couldn't understand it. It was 40 pages of convoluted academic writing like this:

Wibbels argues that developing countries face an inherently disadvantaged position in the world economy due to their dependence on foreign capital and an undiversified base of commodity exports as primary sources of hard currency. This dependent position relative to capital markets prevents developing countries from borrowing to engage in counter-cyclical aggregate demand management.

Is such language the optimal way to express ideas for comprehension by peers, students, and policymakers?

I hope your mission to improve writing skills in higher ed addresses the source of output - professors, teaching assistants, journal editors, and others who continue to promote outdated, inconsistent, and counterproductive academic writing styles.

As an interesting example, i passed that passage to chatgpt3.5 with the prompt "make the following passage much simpler to understand"

Wibbels says that poorer countries are in a tough spot in the global economy. They rely a lot on money from other countries and mainly sell raw materials to get cash. Because they're so reliant on foreign money, they can't borrow much to manage their economy when things are going bad.

This is a pretty basic prompt too, you can add qualifiers to fit your general audience: "easier to understand for a high school student". You could provide context of previous and subsequent passages as well. Yeah its not perfect, but the right prompt could provide at least a consistent output style.

Claude 3.5 to the rescue:

“Wibbels claims that developing countries are at a disadvantage in the global economy for two main reasons:

1. They rely heavily on foreign investment.

2. They depend on exporting a limited range of raw materials to earn foreign currency.

Because of this weak economic position, developing countries struggle to borrow money when needed. This makes it hard for them to boost their economies during economic downturns, unlike wealthier nations that can more easily borrow and spend to stimulate growth. “

Wow, I would have killed to have access to something like Claude when I was in school. I would have spent a lot less time stuck on problems or topics.

Are those really the same?

- "commodity exports" -> "raw materials"?

- "hard currency" -> "foreign currency"?

This does illustrate a problem when talking about complex topics or mechanisms is the need for specificity. Using short, simple sentences comes at the risk of making things seem overly vague and hand wavey, or worse, misrepresent the concept.

In continental philosophy or mathematical papers this gets all too apparent, as alot of argument hinge on very fine differences and nuances that need to specified else people get the wrong idea.

>Is such language the optimal way to express ideas for comprehension by peers, students, and policymakers?

Those are three completely different groups with completely different needs.

This sounds great.

I have a roommate who is a weak non-native English speaker. However, he needs to write and submit scientific papers in English. He uses the "pro" version of ChatGPT to improve his written English. He said it is like having a 1:1 English language tutor because he gets nearly instant feedback when trying to rewrite a sentence or paragraph. I am native in English. He showed me some before and after examples. His message remained unchanged, but the revised versions were so much smoother. My point: He is not using ChatGPT to "cheat", rather to improve delivery of his message. I wrote about this previously here on HN. It received very mixed reviews.

I'm using ChatGPT to help me learn German. It is good, but as with all current AI it has a tendency to be very confidently wrong. This is especially true for more nuanced grammatical questions, such as "Why is this in dativ?" For that reason, I never feel I can fully trust it (and certainly wouldn't build a language-learning product around it). With that said however, it is a great addition to the various tools I use.

I think what your roommate is doing is fine. Being a native English speaker is a bit of a cheat anyhow. I very much appreciate the challenge of learning another language, so am not going to fault someone for using different tools to help improve their language. So long as the ideas are (relatively) original, the specific wording seems less important.

I'm glad I got my degrees before people starting trying to integrate bullshit generators into my education. I've been really frustrated with the conversation about the potential applications for this technology. These chatbots have no relationship with the truth or with knowledge, and are designed to agree with users and act accommodating regardless of how wrong someone is. We're talking about putting this tech between patients and doctors, students and teachers and meanwhile McDonald's is rolling back deployments because it can't even take a fast food order accurately.

I think you’re confusing the technology with a product developed using that technology. The prevalence of poorly implemented products or the lack of fit of some products to a particular target market, do not inherently provide evidence for conclusions about the technology itself.

The lack of successful implementation is surely at least evidence that the technology might not be living up to the hype, though — no?

It’s like “but that wasn’t real communism”.

I’m a teacher turned web developer building tools to help other teachers automate their menial admin tasks. I’d love to chat when you have a moment!

Absolutely, email is in my profile. Please reach out.

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