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> Software engineers types are often pretty ignorant, without really realizing it, and often assume their superiority because "intelligence" or some dumb shit like that.

It’s clearly on display here. He made me skeptical when he pooh-poohed the importance of reading books and writing about them in school, and lost me when he casually claimed that all people think in bullet points. These things are incredibly egocentric and stereotypically engineer.

I think the problem is the disconnect between learning vs passing. The goal of writing a book report is supposed to be to develop your brain and improve some skills. But society cannot simply give away knowledge without some kind of testing, so there must be an exam. And you have curricula where students are "required" to take a list of classes. Not all students are deeply excited every class on that list (or their teacher, or textbook) so some students are in some classes purely to tick a checkbox. That means to them, whatever skill is taught there is useless, so they'll happily use the LLM and cheat in other ways.

First part of the problem is we need to stop cookie cutter course lists. Forcing people to take a course they don't care about is a futile ability. Back in the day it was easy to do it, but now it has gotten harder due to LLMs and reliance on exams as a compliance tool. Yes, this will make it harder to say someone has a degree in X. Instead you will have to handle a bit more nuance and discuss what specific topics they studied.

Second part is we need to dial down the credentialism. Treating third party exam grades as an indicator of ability is no longer feasible in the LLM world. The only viable way is to have a extremely controlled exam environment, but that greatly restricts what sort of things you can examine. A lot of knowledge is relevant on a timescale of days or longer, not a few hours, and you can't detain people for days just for an exam grade.

Both of this are challenging for sure but I don't think it's impossible. The programming industry has dealt with this for decades. When someone has a degree in CS or related area, it doesn't mean all that much in practice, and the GPA in that degree is also a weak indicator. Instead, the industry found other ways to directly evaluate ability. Sure, they're not perfect, but not exactly hopeless I would say.

>so some students are in some classes purely to tick a checkbox

As a student I was forced to take classes I would have never willingly chosen to take, and yet I still learned from them. I worked for an A and didn't consider cheating an option. I'm not really sure why, I can answer why I wouldn't today, but I can't particularly say why my yesteryear self was so against it, yet it remains as a key point in me gaining a very useful education.

>Forcing people to take a course they don't care about is a futile ability.

While I think sometimes we include too many unrelated courses, I also don't agree with the idea of only giving someone courses they are interested in. I would have been weaker for it. I think the issue is the culture that encourages cheating as a valid response, but where does that come from and how to fight it are massive problems.

>The only viable way is to have a extremely controlled exam environment, but that greatly restricts what sort of things you can examine.

I think oral exams are great at testing knowledge, but they suffer other problems. They don't scale at all, and they leave more room for bias than other forms of exams. I'm sure there are other problems, but those two are enough to start with. If only there was some option that had the benefits of an oral exam with an expert without the issues (this sounds like I'm hinting there is such a solution, but I promise I'm not, it is just wistful thinking).

>But I'm kinda surprised why he "hasn't a clue" that the answer to that question is a clear "yes." The whole point of school is to teach kids to use their brains, and reading something complicated, understanding it, and being able to synthesize something about it is a pretty important brain-use.

I also believe that there's something to be said about being able to sit and focus on something like reading a book for a long period of time. Patience and focus seem to be diminished these days.

That and it's only in reading A LOT that builds the proficiency needed to absorb, evaluate, comprehend, and respond to other documents you will eventually come upon. Whether it is reading for enjoyment and allowing a virtual world to wash over you, while simultaneously scanning your eyes across a page, or reading a scientific paper to understand the research topic and results well enough, to know when to review and reread for context and understanding.

Some level of long focus and deeper awareness of written material is necessary to create anything substantially new and massage it into what you actually desire.

I'm not sure this is as self evident as you believe it is. Outside of school, I don't think I've read an actual book and gotten use out of it. I read for pleasure but the actual useful information in my life has been accumulated from reading many many short form (<10 page) things over a long time.

I don't mean to criticize you but... my God, this is such a sad statement to me.

I understand where you're coming from when it comes to technical stuff - I would agree that I haven't gotten very much of my engineering knowledge from books, but rather from shorter-form stuff.

But there are so very many things I've read over the years that have stuck with me, that have informed the way I think about the world, that have provided comfort or food for thought or new lenses through which to view things. My life would be so much poorer without the books I've read, they all mix around in my brain and come to me at random times, and give me a lot of use, even if it's the kind of "value" that is hard to quantify and pin down.