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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

If a professor learns from multiple books, generalizes from them and then shares his knowledge he is providing a valuable service. Versus someone who makes a recording of the professor's lectures and resells them to undercut the professor--that guy is not providing a valuable service.

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What kind of fresh hell does the sentence "undercut the professor" come from?

Teaching isn't a race to the bottom. You don't undercut teaching by giving more lessons, just like you don't slight the hospital by performing CPR.

We are not really talking about teaching here.

No, we’re talking about an intimate set of tensors, not a human being.

A tree falling and killing someone isn’t tried for manslaughter.

So I don’t care about a hypothetical teacher.

We sure wouldn't be, if we picked better metaphors.

> If a professor learns from multiple books, generalizes from them and then shares his knowledge he is providing a valuable service. Versus someone who makes a recording of the professor's lectures and resells them to undercut the professor--that guy is not providing a valuable service.

I'm confused now; isn't the LLM that trains on that professor's lectures, videos and textbooks undercutting him?

Where were you going with this?

What about a student attending lectures of other professors and generalizing what he learns from them, then going on to become a professor?

If the student is really good at generalizing we wouldn't even be having this debate because he would've just generalized from the same source materials the professor used.

What are you even trying to say: "undercut the professor"...

The further you try to constrain this topic into this illformed analogy the weirder it becomes. If we start off with a better analogy...

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