Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

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Cal Newport looked in the wrong places. He has no visibility into the usage of ChatGPT to do homework. The collapse of Chegg should tell you, with no other public information, that if 30% of students were already cheating somehow, somewhat weakly, they are now doing super-powerful cheating, and surely more than 30% of students at this stage.

It’s also kind of stupid to hand wave away, programming. Programmers are where all the early adopters of software are. He’s merely conflating an adoption curve with capabilities. Programmers, I’m sure, were also the first to use Google and smartphones. “It doesn’t work for me” is missing the critical word “yet” at the end, and really, is it saying much that forecasts about adoption in the metric, “years until when Cal Newport’s arbitrary criteria of what agent and adoption means meets some threshold only inside Cal Newport’s head” is hard to do?

There are 700m active weeklies for ChatGPT. It has joined the workforce! It just isn’t being paid the salaries.

Wow, homework is an insane example of a "workforce."

Homework is in some ways the opposite of actual economic labor. Students pay to attend school, and homework is (theoretically) part of that education; something designed to help students learn more effectively. They are most certainly not paid for it.

Having a LLM do that "work" is economically insane. The desired learning does not happen, and the labor of grading and giving feedback is entirely wasted.

Students use ChatGPT for it because of perverse incentives of the educational system. It has no bearing on economic production of value.

Importantly, the _reason_ that ChatGPT is good at this kind of homework, is that the homework is _intended_ to be toil. That's how we learn- through doing things, and through repetition.

The problem set or paper you turn in is not the product. The product is the learning that the human obtains from the _process_.

The homework is just there, being graded, to evaluate your progress at performing the required toil.

> The homework is just there, being graded, to evaluate your progress at performing the required toil.

There’s the problem, some students don’t want an education, they just want a qualification, even if it means cheating on the evaluation.

I’ve got much better education reading and researching myself than I did from most of my classes in undergrad where an underpaid TA or professor who was just there for their mandatory minimum teaching time before returning to their research, just reading out loud portions of the textbook and then even doing shit as dumb as giving us physics labs that had a fill in the blank sheet with an answer bank on the paper as the homework.

There are good schools where you can get an actual education you couldn’t on your own but a lot of universities are similarly only interested in getting your money in exchange for a qualification.

Like, all the advertising I saw from schools was about job placement rates after graduation, not praising the education itself

But, taking a step back, assigning homework in the first place is economically insane.

What's the point? Who ever actually learnt anything from homework?

I have. Reading assignments and writing papers on them gave me a good command of topics I carry to this day.

And I never would have been able to learn math without doing a bunch of problems early on... you can think you understand something in class but it takes applying it a bunch of times in different scenarios to really embed that knowledge in useful ways.

I presume I'm not the only one.

I always read more anyway. Homework interfered with my reading. Similarly with maths problems.

But I believe they benefitted you. I just would have carried on without the enforcement.

> He’s merely conflating an adoption curve with capabilities.

Sure, programmers would still adopt LLMs faster than the rest of the work-force whether or not the LLMs were good at writing code. But you have to at credit at least some of that adoption rate to the fact that LLMs are significantly better at text (e.g. code) generation than they are at most other white-collar tasks (e.g. using a web browser)

read it again. he criticizes the hype built around 2025 as the Year X for agents. many were thinking that "we'll carry PCs in our pockets" when Windows Mobile-powered devices came out. many predicted 2003 as the Year X for what we now call smartphones.

no, it was 2008, with the iPhone launch.

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