Hacker News Reader

Comment by jumping_frog | Hacker News Reader

Multimodality reinforces each other. Action, speech, listening, all helping to let us understand a subject better.

This is why I think AI chatbots have so much potential for education. Every student can have extended dialogue about the topic and really exercise those neurons.

I think the widespread use of that for education would have precisely the opposite outcome that you'd want.

Nothing sinks in to anyones brain because they're not actually talking about it and they don't need to actually learn it for any reason in school because they can just ask the chatbot again at any moment.

and that is a problem because?

i remember when maths teachers would scold me for not knowing my multiplication tables “are you going to carry a calculator around with you every day?” they would say when seeing me use one. Turns out i do.

That is such a tired, boring, selective memory meme. Did you not use a calculator later on in your education, say high school, for stuff like graphing and helping with equations? Do you not think educators in primary school teaching basic arithmetic knew about that?

All our maths education is based on lies which are progressively disclosed. You’re told we can’t go below zero, that numbers are integers, that you can’t take the square root of a negative number… And slowly are introduced to all those concepts building on what you learned before.

And yet this meme of “hur dur, mah teachers saids I’d haves no calculators on me but I use a phone all the time, epic fail” prevails instead of pondering for two seconds that maybe your teacher was giving a cookie-cutter argument that a literal child could comprehend but be unable to refute so they could continue with the damn lesson.

And as if people use calculators that often. They don’t. Yet being able to do some basic arithmetic is useful in such simple areas as shopping, to make more informed decisions in a world that is constantly trying to trick you.

Technological progress requires that we adapt education at the same time. We can still teach the ability to reason through problems when necessary, but still utilize technology when useful

If there is a good reason to, yes. To chase the latest trends (which is what all this EduLLM talk is all about) then definitely not.

I wonder if having offloaded arithmetic to calculators has led to a society that can't do math in their head well enough to make good choices at the supermarket or in other daily situations where simple math would be useful but the situation is too casual to pull out your calculator.

But the impact of that is tiny compared to the prospect of future generations offloading their general ideation and critical thinking to machines instead of just number crunching.

People internalize conversations and the thought processes that went into them. If I have a conversation with somebody, I often walk away remembering and understanding what somebody else said and why they said it. And these memories get used in future interactions. So just like the offloading of arithmetic likely resulted in people not being able to perform mental math, what would be the result of conversing with an AI that has hallucination/logical issues (a lesser intelligence)? Isn't it reasonable to guess that this will result in diminished reasoning?

I hadn't considered that. If that's the case then we should hope people simply copy and paste the output rather than try to engage with it or take it seriously.

Though in more practical economic terms, perhaps what we're being trained for is a future in which the typical worker has a low paying job sanity checking AI output rather than a higher paying job doing the work themself.

That would not be a side effect of the dialogue, but from awareness of the wider world.

I think AI chatbots could help but only if that is an additional modality to learn and doesn’t trump all the classical ones becoming the main mode. That would be disastrous to learning IMO, nothing will stick because users will internalize they could ask the bot to reason it for them, something like “why remember all that trivia when you could just google it”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com