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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

> If you just have a thing explained to you, you miss out on most of the learning benefit, and the understanding you end up with is shallow.

Sorry, but I don't get this. Isn't this exactly what the teachers/lecturers and books do - explain things?

Sure, you have to practice similar things to test yourself if you got everything right. And, of course, it's different for manual skills (e.g. knowing how to make food is kind of different from actually making food).

But a language model trained on a education materials is no different from a book with a very fancy index (save for LLM-specific issues, such as hallucinations), so I fail to see the issue in ability to get answers for specific questions. As long as the answers are accurate, of course.

And - yeah - figuring out if the answer is accurate requires knowledge.

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> Isn't this exactly what the teachers/lecturers and books do - explain things?

In part, sure, but not solely. I wasn't saying that getting an explanation is a bad thing, I was saying that only getting an explanation doesn't advance your learning much.

> And, of course, it's different for manual skills

I don't think that's different. It's the same for intellectual skills as for manual in this regard.

> I fail to see the issue in ability to get answers for specific questions. As long as the answers are accurate, of course.

There's nothing wrong with getting answers to questions. But that's not the process that leads to learning anything other than the specific answers to those specific questions.

Getting an education is much, much more than that. What you are (or should be) learning goes far beyond whatever the subject of the class is. You're also learning how to learn, how to organize your thoughts, how to research, and how the topic works at a deep enough level that you can infer answers on it even when you've not been told what those answers are.

If what you're learning in class is just an compendium of facts that you can look up, you're missing out on the most valuable aspects of education.

Why lift weights when I could just use a forklift?

At some point someone actually has to do some thinking. It's hard to train your thinking if you just offload every simple task throughout your entire education.

So you're saying you've never used StackOverflow in your life?

I find your analogy works against your point, because manual labor does use a forklift and other heavy machinery whenever possible. It's better for human health (and the backs of blue collar workers) that way. Now the only people lifting weights in gyms are those who choose to be there for their health and not because they're forced to.

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