AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

https://resobscura.substack.com/p/ai-makes-the-humanities-more-important

by findhorn • 1 year ago

279 312 1 year ago

resobscura.substack.com

It's quaint how there are people who think something called "the humanities" exerts some occult guiding influence on the world. Studying the humanities would disabuse them of that notion.

simonw4• 1 year ago

The first comment on that article caught my attention:

I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it.

It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignments for their fellow students that could not be completed using ChatGPT.

About ten years ago I went to a BarCamp conference where one of the events was a team quiz where the questions were designed to be difficult to solve using Google - questions like "What island is this?" where all you got was the outline of the island. It was really fun. Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge.

aprilthird2021• 1 year ago

Yeah, that does sound like a good idea and a good way to prove one has learned the ideas presented in the course and the relationship between them well

arvindh-manian• 1 year ago

I find it difficult to think of examples that aren't just based on niche information (what did we talk about on this day? what analogy does the teacher make repeatedly?). Maybe multimodal stuff?

pixl976• 1 year ago

Even multimodal stuff is something is advancing pretty quickly. And with the more widespread incorporation of things like this, the information will be fed back into AI systems as training data making finding new things more difficult.

lynx97• 1 year ago

where all you got was the outline of the island

As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.

mantas4• 1 year ago

It’d be bad if there was no alternative. But different people can get different assignments and that’s ok.

Complaining about this is like me complaining about people drinking milk since I’m lactose intolerant.

WhyIsItAlwaysHN• 1 year ago

What would you need to tackle this assignment?

I think you're right to complain about the design of the question. It used Google's disadvantage in that it couldn't process visual information to add difficulty to the task.

However I'm pretty sure there's many of these challenges in an average stem subject. An example would be information dense diagrams which describe some chemical process.

I'm genuinely curious to understand how someone manages to understand these without sight. On my side, I can barely visualize so it was always extremely hard to decipher them and even worse remember them.

protocolture• 1 year ago

Maybe they could 3d print the outline to make it more accessible? Or perhaps the goal is to use the image file with the outline to find the island, something that could/should be achieved via code?

I wouldn't be surprised if a novel solution to the problem emerged from students with diverse abilities. I don't think that brute forcing the problem by comparing the image of every island on the planet vs the outline visually is the best path forward. Its probably something like, create a ratio of the size of each of the bays and then probe for values that fit those quantities on wikipedia.

math_dandy• 1 year ago

As a university professor, I admit with some shame that accessibility issues for specific problem types is not on my radar. “Innovation” isn’t the main culprit here.

Fortunately, my university has a good accessibility center that takes care of accommodation issues (large print versions of tests, etc.). I just send them my tests and they take care of it. It’s a great service, and absolutely crucial because I simply don’t have the time to customize assessments. I assume they would get in touch if they were unable to retrofit accessibility onto an assessment, but that hasn’t happened in my fifteen years of employment.

contravariant• 1 year ago

The good news is that avoiding text-based assignments isn't likely to last. Multimodal agents should be more than capable of identifying islands by shape, or will be soon.

simonw4• 1 year ago

Yes, it's true that the one example I presented from a quiz game I played at a conference 10+ years ago was not accessible to some people. If I could remember the other questions they used in that quiz I would share them here, but that's the only one that stuck in my brain.

UncleMeat15• 1 year ago

Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge.

This is indeed true. But a challenge is that few professors are being given the time and training to help do this. When you are on a 4/4 and just keeping your head above water you don't tend to have enough time to adopt experimental pedagogies and completely replan your courses. And professors are largely being tasked with doing this independently rather than having universities offer training or support with adjusting methods to be more AI resistant. And unfortunately the fast speed of development of these tools is making good ideas obsolete quickly. I know some people who switch to having students make podcasts rather than writing papers as a final assignment and then we started seeing "create your own podcast" tools appear and made it roughly as easy to cheat on this assignment as a traditional paper.

simonw4• 1 year ago

My suggestion here isn't to have the professors do this: it's for the professors to challenge their students to do this.

lr4444lr• 1 year ago

How does making podcasts solve anything? Students can just read out what the AI writes into an audio recording.

Why is this problem being fretted over? In-class written and oral tests should be fine to assess students. If AI helps them learn or even cram the material, great!

thfuran• 1 year ago

on a 4/4

That's teaching four distinct courses?

ivape• 1 year ago

“Cannot be done with chat gpt”

Is a military base the only place “no devices” can be enforced or something? How deep is this addiction? I’m scared to ask what the academic version of fizz-buzz would be at the end of a 4 year degree, “hey write one paragraph describing a simple paradox, an example of irony, or an example of a metaphor”.

pixl976• 1 year ago

Is a military base the only place “no devices” can be enforced or something?

I mean with the force of law, yea. Businesses get away with a little bit more in places because they pay you to show up.

But if you think anyone is going to university/college to have all their devices taken away all the time and pay for the privilege then you might be confused.

r2_pilot• 1 year ago

I mean, before you get to military bases, there are Pearson's testing centers that have lockers for your phone/gear and proctored exams.

fc417fc8028• 1 year ago

How broadly do you propose to enforce such a ban? Most students do their homework at home so I'm not sure how you're imagining this would work.

Even for exams I had my cellphone and backpack on me. You just weren't allowed into them. The only exception to that in my experience was exams proctored in a dedicated testing center where there are lockers, multiple human observers, and lots of cameras.

dleeftink2• 1 year ago

Among others, Howard Rheingold has been active in this space. For those interested, check out the Peeragogy Handbook and the post that sparked the idea[0].

The more I give my teacher-power to students and encourage them to take more responsibility for their own learning, the more they show me how to redesign my ways of teaching

[0] https://clalliance.org/blog/toward-peeragogy/

dirkc• 1 year ago

It's fun to see how old that article is and that the ideas still apply! Power dynamics are not considered enough when people talk about education. My believe is that the more you balance the power dynamic, the more learning is prioritized over education.

homarp• 1 year ago

https://bsky.app/profile/hrheingold.bsky.social/post/3lprsqu... points to a compiled syllabus and links to recordings of lectures and video chats in a free pdf, about an "intro to cooperation studies": https://rheingold.com/texts/IntroToCooperationStudies.pdf

sampl3username• 1 year ago

I am a zoomer. Is it really that hard for everyone to NOT use AI? Using AI very clearly atrophies your cognitive skills.

sdenton4• 1 year ago

I'm a millennial who has watched the complete failure of my generation to realize the promise of those Obama 'Hope' posters.

"Everyone don't do X" runs into problems when there are clear incentives to do X. Like, say, grades which eventually will be used to determine who gets to graduate, who gets into which schools, who ultimately gets easier access to higher paying jobs. And simple convenience is an incentive in itself - if doing X saves time, it will be the default.

This same dynamic is why we still have a climate crisis, even though everyone has known about the problem for thirty years.

"Everyone just do Y" is what we call a collective action problem. When there are clear incentives to defect, it is also a free rider problem.

exe34• 1 year ago

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/810/

yupitsme1232• 1 year ago

If a teacher knows the topic that they're teaching, then a 30 second talk with a student is enough to determine if the student actually knows anything. Maybe "assignments" aren't the best method of building and verifying knowledge.

lapcat9• 1 year ago

That comment struck me as odd if only because Plato is not commonly part of the standard critical thinking curriculum. Introduction to philosophy or history of philosophy yes, but critical thinking no.

This is not to say that Plato didn't think critically. Of course he did, as do all (or most) philosophers. I'm just talking about university courses and textbooks.

aleph_minus_one6• 1 year ago

Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge.

Designing a "mostly ChatGPT-proof class" is in my opinion actually rather simple: just be inspired by the German university system:

Each week you have to complete exercise sheets which are often hard. But being capable of solving a certain quota of the exercises is just the beginning: this only qualifies you for being allowed to take the actual (oral or written) exam.

In this sense (as many professors will tell you), the basically sole purpose of the quota for solving (often hard) exercise sheets is actually preventing students from the "self-inflicted harm" of doing an exam that they are not yet prepared for.

And yes: while it is forbidden to "cheat" (e.g. ChatGPT) on your exercise sheets, this policy is typically not strongly enforced (you will nearly always just get a unequivocal, strongly worded oral reprimand by the tutor). Instead, if you did this, you will for sure not be prepared for the upcoming exam, and flunk it (and most students are very aware of this).

Oh yeah, I didn't mention yet that if you flunked the same exam typically 3 times (depending on the university), you have "finally failed" (endgültig nicht bestanden), and are not allowed anymore to study the same degree course at every German university.

oceanplexian• 1 year ago

I didn't mention yet that if you flunked the same exam typically 3 times (depending on the university), you have "finally failed" (endgültig nicht bestanden), and are not allowed anymore to study the same degree course at every German university.

When Europeans wonder why they are falling behind the United States both economically and technologically (Especially in the AI race), here's a perfect example of why. A culture that turns you into a some kind of a permanent failure because you failed to check a box some arbitrary number of times isn't one that produces innovation.

Balgair• 1 year ago

Designing a "mostly ChatGPT-proof class" is in my opinion actually rather simple: just be inspired by the German university system:

Now the real question is the costs. In that, can you somehow make this system work at scale with the same profit as before? I know that the German system is a lot different than in the US, including things like tracking in 9th grade and below. But the real question is if the Universities make as much, if not more, cash. Because if the answer is 'no', then it's unlikely to be adopted.

Oh yeah, I didn't mention yet that if you flunked the same exam typically 3 times (depending on the university), you have "finally failed" (endgültig nicht bestanden), and are not allowed anymore to study the same degree course at every German university.

That is an insanely awesome and clever idea. I love it. It puts real stakes there, if only perceived ones. I imagine that in the US if you flunk out of a major's classes twice or more, the number of students that continue on in that major is probably pretty low already though.

SkyBelow• 1 year ago

A complete ban feels like overkill. A cooldown period of X years would give someone time to reconsider and grow as a person.

Granted, this is without consider the financial side of things.

ModernMech• 1 year ago

As a professor of Computer Science, I'm about ready to allow my students to use AI -- if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. But they're not going to like it, because what I'm going to do is significantly raise the bar.

For the last several years I've been allowing students (college sophomores) to do take home exams where they essentially have to build a networked system in C++. I tell them not to use AI but I have to assume they are.

Even still, the solutions are not all that great, despite unlimited time and resources, they still submit work that falls into a roughly B average. Which, if they didn't have AI, maybe that would be a C average, so perhaps the standards just need to go up. Still, it's not like they're all getting 100%.

AI is still really only as good as the person driving it, and it still, despite all the hype, hallucinates like crazy, such that if they don't pay close attention and constantly course correct, they can't expect the project to actually work.

quanto2• 1 year ago

Today, engineers working on AI systems also need to think deeply and critically about the relationship between language and culture and the history and philosophy of technology. When they fail to do so, their systems literally start to break down.

Perhaps so. But not in the (quasi-)academic sense that the author is thinking. It's not the lack of an engineer's academic knowledge in history and philosophy that makes an AI system fail.

Then there’s the newfound ability of non-technical people in the humanities to write their own code. This is a bigger deal than many in my field seem to recognize. I suspect this will change soon. The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for granted that they can create their own custom research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free.

This is the lede buried deep inside the article. When the basic coding skill (or any skill) is commoditized, it's the people with complementary skills that benefit the most.

treyd• 1 year ago

When the basic coding skill (or any skill) is commoditized, it's the people with complementary skills that benefit the most.

I think that "knowing how to ask good questions" that you then solve has always been a valuable skill.

ReptileMan3• 1 year ago

The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for granted that they can create their own custom research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free.

And they will spend 12 hours trying to figure out which is the fake python library and the citation that the LLM has hallucinated from the real one. Vibe coding is just WYSIWYG on steroids in good and bad. WYSIWYG didn't go anywhere.

mastazi• 1 year ago

which is the fake python library and the citation that the LLM has hallucinated from the real one. Vibe coding is just WYSIWYG on steroids

Maybe you haven't used AI coding tools in a while, the latest ones can run build tools, write and run unit tests, run linters, and will try and fix any errors that may arise during those steps. Of course it's possible that a library may have been been hallucinated, but this will just trigger an error during the build job and the AI agent will go back and fix it. Same thing for failing unit tests.

Just last week I saw Copilot fixing a failing unit test, then running the test, then making some more changes and repeating the process until the test was running successfully. At some point during this process, it asked me if it could install a VS Code extension so that it could run the test by itself, I agreed then it went from there until the issue was resolved. This was with the bottom-tier free version of Copilot.

Of course there are limits to what AI tools can do, but they are evolving all the time and at some point in a not too distant future they will be good enough in most cases.

Regarding hallucinated citations, I imagine that the problem can be solved by allowing the LLM to access and verify citations, then the agent can fix its own hallucinations just like most coding agents already do.

vineyardmike• 1 year ago

WYSIWYG didn't go anywhere

Like MS Word?

These are pretty easy to solve problems tbh. LLM tools already exist that can work around “hallucinating libraries” effectively, not that this a real concern. It’s not magic, but these tired skeptic takes are just not based on reality.

It’s much more likely that LLMs will be used to supercharge visualizations with custom UIs and widgets, or in conjunction with things like MS excel for data analysis. Non-engineers won’t be vibe-coding a database anytime soon, but they could be making a PWA that marketing can use to add a filter on photos or help guide a biologist towards a python script to sort pictures of specimens based on an OpenCV model.

bonoboTP3• 1 year ago

It's really embarrassing to put a stake in these. It's like when Gary Marcus said that an image generator won't be able to draw a horse riding an astronaut and will make the astronaut ride the horse because that is a more frequent pattern in the training set. Or when an urban legend (academic legend?) started that state of the art classifiers misclassify cows when they are on sandy beaches and it only works on grass (it happened in some cases with small datasets and shortcut learning but there was no sota image classifier with such glaring and straightforward errors, but it trickled down to popular consciousness and grade school teaching materials on AI limitations.) Now it's about hallucinating nonexistent libraries. But reasoning models and RAG and large contexts and web search make this much less of an issue. The limitations everyone point at that trickle down to a soundbite that everyone repeats usually don't turn out to be fundamental limitations at all.

UncleMeat15• 1 year ago

I am generally pretty skeptical of ai coding. At my job I’m resisting it pretty constantly. However, my wife is a historian with minimal programming skills and these tools have allowed her to build some things that she’d never have been able to build without them (without spending a thoroughly unreasonable amount of time learning). Sometimes she comes to me with some code that is clearly just totally wrong but most of the time she’s able to stumble her way to something useful for exploring her documents and data. Then we just do a code review before anything goes into a publication to check that it is actually doing what she intends.

lwo32k• 1 year ago

The kids are not even trying to do either. They are already gravitating towards multidisciplinary teams, cause unlike past generations they are dealing with a rate of change at a totally different level. In such an environment, people get to see their own limitations much faster no matter the quality of their training and they end up having to rely on others.

The big challenge is getting very different people with ever growing different skillsets and interests to coordinate, stay in sync and row in one direction.

sdoering2• 1 year ago

The field of history had their - oh, this is a thing - moment quite a few decades ago with Hayden White. It is a good example of the underlying issue.

Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was (and still is) a complex one, not intended to dismiss the factual accuracy of historical narratives (as it is more often than not portraied).

Instead, it highlights the interpretive nature of historical writing and the way historians shape their accounts of the past through literary and rhetorical techniques. White argues that historians, like novelists, use narrative structures and stylistic devices to construct meaning from historical events.

HexPhantom3• 1 year ago

The failures we see in AI systems usually come from neglecting real-world complexity

amelius• 1 year ago

Basically a reformulation of Joel Spolsky's "commoditize your complement".

throw8393949• 1 year ago

My idea is that students will read Darwin’s writings first, then demonstrate what they learned via the choices they make in game. To progress, you must embody the real epistemologies and knowledge of a 19th century naturalist.

It is kind of funny, since modern sociology and humanities are in a deep denial of theory of evolution, Darwinism and any of its implications.

producing a generation of students who have simply never experienced the feeling of focused intellectual work.

This was already blamed on phones. Some study said like 30% of university graduates are functionally illiterate; they are unable to read book, and hold its content in memory long enough to understand it!

bios444• 1 year ago

Yes

carbonguy• 1 year ago

I spent some years as a teacher and so have some first-hand experience here; my take, for what it's worth, is that LLMs have indeed blown a gaping hole in the structure of education as actually practiced in the USA. That hole is: much of education is based on the assumption that the unsupervised production of written artifacts is proof of progress in learning. LLMs can produce those artifacts now, incidentally disrupting the paid essay-writing industry (one assumes).

From this, I agree with the article - since educators now have to figure out another hook to hang evaluation on, the questions "what the hell does it mean to 'learn', anyway?" and "how the hell do we meaningfully measure that 'learning', whatever it is?" have even more salience, and the humanities certainly have something meaningful to say on both of them. I'll (puckishly) predict that recitations and verbal examinations are going to make a comeback - harder to game at this point, but then, who knows how long 'this point' will last?

dotancohen2• 1 year ago

The definition of learning has not changed. One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies.

Education will adapt.

palmotea• 1 year ago

One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies.

And if your summary is correct, he was right. If you don't remember what you've learned (i.e. integrate it into your mind), you haven't learned anything. You're just, say, a book operator.

HPsquared• 1 year ago

The solution has been around a very long time: closed-book tests (verbal or written). Works against LLMs too!

bazoom422• 1 year ago

What record is that? Just out of curiosity.

Zorass• 1 year ago

For a long time, schools assumed that if a student turned in a written essay, it meant they had learned something. But now AI can write those essays too ,so that assumption doesn’t hold up anymore.

The real question is: if writing alone doesn’t prove learning, then what does?

Maybe we’ll see a return to oral exams or live discussions. Not because they’re perfect, but because they’re harder to fake.

In a way, AI didn’t ruin education it just exposed problems that were already there.

empath752• 1 year ago

A shockingly large percentage of education in the US is teaching kids to produce bullshit essays, so it's no surprise that AI is blowing a hole in it.

kouru225• 1 year ago

Bingo. If you want to just write an essay, then ChatGPT is perfect. If you want to write an essay that says something very particular, then ChatGPT starts to give you issues

thomastjeffery3• 1 year ago

I think the main subject of that hole is objectivity, and it affects much more than education.

By obsessively structuring education around measurement, we have implied that what is taught is objective fact. That's always been bullshit, but - for the most part - it's been consistent enough with itself to function. The more strict your presentation of knowledge is, the more it can pretend to be truly objective. Because a teacher has total authority over the methodology of learning, this consistency can be preserved.

The reality has always been that anything written is subjective. The only way to learn objective fact is to explore it through many subjective representations. This is obvious to anyone who learns mathematics: you don't just see x^2+y^2=z^2, and suddenly understand the implications of the Pythagorean theorem.

Because objectivity can't be written, objectivity is not computable. We can't give a computer several subjective representations of a concept, and have it figure it out. This is the same problem as ambiguity: there is no objectively correct way to compute an ambiguous statement. This is why we write in programming languages: each programming language grammar is "context-free", which means that everything must be completely and explicitly defined. To write a computable statement, we must subject the abstract concept in mind to the language (grammar and environment) we write it in.

Most of the writing in our society is done with software. Because of this, we are implicitly encouraged to establish shared context. If what we write is consistent with the context of others' writing, it can pretend to be objective, and be more computable. Social interactions that are facilitated by software are also implicitly structured by that software's structure. There can be no true free-form dialogue in social media.

The exciting thing about LLMs is that they don't have this problem. They conveniently dodge it, by not doing any logic at all! Now instead of the software subjecting you to a strict environment, it subjects you to a familiar one. There is no truth, only vibes. There is no calculation, only guesses. This feels a lot like objectivity, but it's just a new facade. The difference is that the boundary is somewhere new and unfamiliar.

---

I think the death of objectivity is good progress overall. It's been a long time coming. Strict structure has always been overrated. The best way to learn is to explore as many perspectives as you can find. We humans can work with vibes and logic, together.

neilv• 1 year ago

> Maintain professionalism and grounded honesty that best represents OpenAI and its values.

I think a humanities person could tell you in an instant how that part of the system prompt would backfire catastrophically (in a near-future rogue-AI sci-fi story kind of way), exactly because of the way it's worded.

In that scenario, the fall of humanity before the machines wasn't entirely due to hubris. The ultimate trigger was a smarmy throwaway phrase, which instructed the Internet-enabled machine to gaze into the corporate soul of its creator, and emulate it. :)

thomastjeffery3• 1 year ago

That's what would happen if it was a logical system. It's not. This is where it gets interesting.

Instead, it's a statistical model, and including that prompt is more like a narrative weight than a logical demand. By including these words in this order, the model will be more likely to explore narratives that are statistically likely to follow them, with that likelihood determined by the content the model was trained on, and the extra redistribution of weights via training.

We don't really need to worry about technically misstating our objectives to an LLM. It doesn't follow objectivity. Instead, we need to be concerned about misrepresenting the overall vibe, which is a much more mysterious task.

paulpauper• 1 year ago

When I was a postdoc at Columbia, I taught one of the core curriculum classes mentioned here, with a reading list that included over a dozen weighty tomes (one week was spent on the Bible, the next week on the Quran, another on Thomas Aquinas, and so on). There wasn’t much that was fun or easy about it.

This sums up the problem. It's not fun and the only thing that matters is the credential anyway , so unsurprisingly students are outsourcing to drudgery to AI. In the past it was CliffsNotes. The business model of college-to-career needs to be overhauled.

The humanities are important, yet at the same time, not everyone should be req. to study them. AI arguably makes it easier to learn, so think this is a welcome development.

Animats• 1 year ago

The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards.

Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular battle? Why was the situation prior to WWI so strategically unstable that the killing of a minor player touched off a world war? The traditional teaching of history tends to focus on the winners, especially if they write well. Reading what the losers wrote, or what was written about them, can be more productive than reading the winners.

If you want to understand Cicero's era, for example, read [1]. This is a study of Cicero by an experienced and cynical newspaper political reporter. The author writes that too many historians take Cicero's speeches at face value. The author knows better, having heard many politicians of his own day.

This sort of approach tends to take one out of the area where LLMs are most useful, because, as yet, they're not that good at detecting sycophancy.

[1] https://archive.org/details/thiswasciceromod0000henr

UncleMeat15• 1 year ago

It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction.

This is not what academic historians generally do. The study of history tells us about the story of humanity and exists for wider reasons than direct application to decision making today. This is even true for military history, which is among the slowest subfields at adopting new methods and practices.

sdoering2• 1 year ago

Thanks. Came here to say that. Having studied history - esp. in a time where Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was strongly (and sometimes emotionally) discussed in between students and professors alike, taught me, that - while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history.

I also learned to appreciate history on a fundamentally different level than I did, when I loved history as a subject in school. But that would lead too far out from this thread here.

I can relate to the original piece, because - while I use AI daily for work and in private life - I also see the dangers. Yes, it is a new medium - and I heard roughly the same critique about the internet, when I was at university - but I think it is quite a fundamentally different paradigm shift that we are living through.

I feel (used intentionaly here) it is more like the invention of the printing press (from an societal impact standpoint) than the dissemination of the internet into the wider society. But that is just my current working hypothesis.

spankibalt• 1 year ago

Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes.

Amongst other things...

FranzFerdiNaN• 1 year ago

It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction.

Because this isnt the goal of history. You cant use history to predict the future.

If you want to understand Cicero's era, for example, read [1]. This is a study of Cicero by an experienced and cynical newspaper political reporter. The author writes that too many historians take Cicero's speeches at face value. The author knows better, having heard many politicians of his own day.

No they dont. This is yet another example of an outsider looking at another field, thinking he knows better and making a fool of himself. Also, why would you ignore 80 years of scholarship about Cicero and read a book from 1942???

pixl976• 1 year ago

You cant use history to predict the future.

I mean this statement is somewhat false.

If I show you a picture of a cup from 100 ms ago and it's in midair probability favors that the cup will be on it's way to the ground to its demise. Statistically this will be true.

History is filled with analogous times where by watching the present you can make predictions far better than flipping a coin.

_elephant• 1 year ago

It makes a good point by separating history as strategic analysis from history as cultural appreciation. Most teaching today leans toward the latter, which is also easier for AI to replicate. But the most valuable historical thinking often comes from uncomfortable questions failure, unintended consequences, and perspectives that usually get ignored.

HexPhantom3• 1 year ago

When history is approached as a pattern of decisions, risks, and consequences (not just narratives) it starts to feel a lot more relevant to other complex domains, including AI itself. And yeah, studying the losers (or the overlooked) often yields more insight than lionizing the winners.

surgical_fire2• 1 year ago

But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards.

How are those things dissociated?

I always saw history as a waht to explain "why things are the way they are". Whatever we are now, this amalgamation of good or bad things, is a consequence of what came before.

Is "studying the classics" from a historical standpoint even done for "appreciation"? I always presumed that one should do so critically, and that's more or less what I found from actual historians.

UncleMeat15• 1 year ago

The “explain how we got here” approach to history has some pretty big limitations. The historical actors had no idea where the future was going. When we examine their actions from the perspective of the single contingency that ended up happening we will almost necessarily miss meaningful understanding and make things seem inevitable when they really weren’t.

There’s interesting writing to be done in this mode but it is definitely not the primary mode.

BeFlatXIII• 1 year ago

Studying the winners is also a surefire way to learn only survivorship bias.

bgwalter• 1 year ago

Another day, another Substack ad by this "science historian", naturally with a quote by AI shill Simon Willison. The entire world rests on his shoulders.

Caelus9• 1 year ago

I think that when a new era comes, we should choose to embrace it actively. Today, the humanities face unprecedented challenges, but they also contain new opportunities. The rise of artificial intelligence has undoubtedly subverted traditional teaching methods, but it also forces us to rethink a fundamental question: What is the real value of the humanities? As a historian at Princeton University once pointed out, artificial intelligence can process data and generate text, but it can never replace human subjective experience, moral judgment, and our exploration of meaning, such as questions like “Who am I?” In the final analysis, the value of the humanities may not be “useful” in the traditional sense, but in helping us better understand ourselves and the world we live in.

HexPhantom3• 1 year ago

When effort becomes optional, so does growth. And the quote from the student who sees college as networking with a side of AI-cheating? Painfully on the nose. There's a real risk of LLMs flattening the educational journey into a kind of performance optimization game

phito• 1 year ago

There's a real risk of LLMs flattening the educational journey into a kind of performance optimization game

It's already been the case for a long time, it's just going to get worse.

wisty• 1 year ago

A lazy physics teacher can make every question a math question in disguise. If a physics teacher is worried that a better calculator will make their test trivial, maybe they need to teach physics instead of testing math.

A lazy humanities teacher can make every question a writing question in disguise. If a better spell checker will make a humanities assessment trivial, then maybe they need to teach humanities instead of testing essay writing.

I'm saying this in a kinda inflammatory way, but does the quality of ones ideas really correlate well with a well written essay?

shortrounddev2• 1 year ago

I think if you removed the economic incentive to cheat then humanities wouldn't have the problem it does with LLMs

wizzwizz47• 1 year ago

There's always an incentive to cheat: economic, reputational… people cheat in single-player video games. People cheat in sudoku puzzles. By removing all incentives, all you do is destroy the concept of "cheating", not prevent the behaviour.

this15testingg• 1 year ago

equating chatgpt to "a better spell checker" is wild; how is writing not also a skill that should be taught?

teaearlgraycold3• 1 year ago

It’s the thinking that precedes writing that should be the bulk of your grade. Possessing what looks like an artifact of organized thought isn’t enough these days to evaluate a student.

UncleMeat15• 1 year ago

I agree that professors can probably develop ai resistant evaluations.

But there is minimal institutional support for this. Everybody is going it on their own. And the ai tools are changing rapidly. Telling a ntt faculty member teaching a 4/4 that they just need to stop being lazy and redo their entire evaluation method is not really workable.

Iteration is also slow. You do a new syllabus to try to discourage cheating. You run the course for a semester. You see the results with now just a few weeks to turn around for your spring semester courses. At best you get one iteration cycle per six months. More likely it is one per year since it is basically impossible to meaningfully digest the outcome of what you tried and to meaningfully try something different mere weeks later.

wrp• 1 year ago

I've been urging this kind of adaptation for the past couple years, with very little success. Switching to evaluation by only on-site work was simple to do, but creating new work forms has been largely a non-starter. Young professors are focused on their publication count and most old codgers (like me) have their eyes on retirement and hoping to escape before accountability hits the fan. When I offer to help explore restructuring their teaching materials, the typical response is glazed eyes and sudden awareness of the need to be elsewhere.

JKCalhoun2• 1 year ago

Yeah, I've been thinking about when the calculator came to bear. I was in high school physics when (rich) kids started bringing in "scientific" calculators. There was a flap then about whether they should be allowed at all.

I'm not sure they are analogous to LLMs, but a compelling argument at the time was that the students were going to use them in the field anyway. (That certainly seems to be the future for software engineering students.)

cmrdporcupine• 1 year ago

What needs to happen is a return to a more Socratic method of teaching the humanities.

Instead of being about the consumption and production of texts -- texts which only the TA and maybe the prof will read ... ever -- the class should be more about the dialectical process of discussing the ideas in the texts and lectures the students consume.

An LLM will be able to easily rattle off an undergrad level paper. But it can't sit in the classroom and have an intelligent conversation with peers.

Of course none of this will happen because it doesn't scale economically nearly as well. It is far more labour intensive.

dr_dshiv4• 1 year ago

What most people don’t know about history & humanities is how much work there is to do.

People get (rightly!) excited about decoding burnt scrolls in Herculaneum. But most don’t realize that less than 10% of Neo-Latin texts from the renaissance to the early modern period have been translated to English.

One example: Marsilio Ficino was a brilliant philosopher who was hired by Cosimo Medici to translate Greek texts (Plato, Plotinus, the Hermetica, etc) into Latin. This had a massive impact on the renaissance and European enlightenment. But many of Ficino’s own texts have not been translated to English!

LLMs will, of course, have a massive impact on this… but so can students! Any student can make a meaningful contribution if they care to. There is so much to be discovered and unpacked. Unfortunately, so much of the humanities in high school is treated as an exercise rather than real discovery. I judge my students now based on how much I learn from them. Why not?

verisimi2• 1 year ago

The history we have inevitably passes through bottlenecks. Much is left out, edited away, embellished.

We have no idea what happened over 500 years ago, but the idea of a brilliant scholar translating the Greek texts on behalf of the Medicis, shouldn't simply be accepted as stated. If you are running the world (like the Medicis did) history would be a lever of control. It seems inevitable that the stories should be directed (carefully) towards whatever ends.

History is actually a present day activity - it provides the backdrop to the present. Altering that backdrop has present value.

I can't see how ai will help us the endeavour of trying to get a better handle on what happened in the past. I do see how it would provide modern-day Medicis a way to change the backdrop more quickly.

dr_dshiv4• 1 year ago

I can't see how ai will help us the endeavour of trying to get a better handle on what happened in the past.

Well, AI democratizes the power of translation (and interrogating texts). Before only a few specialists could go directly to the source. Now anyone can try to make sense of it.

UncleMeat15• 1 year ago

Paleography, transcription, and translation are hellishly difficult to learn and really make it difficult for interested people to explore the archive. LLMs have become pretty darn good at doing this out of the box. Prior to this you needed specially trained ML models and before that there was no automation whatsoever.

wizzwizz47• 1 year ago

The transformer architecture was originally developed for translation tasks, but massive, overfit generative models are awful at translation. (Seriously, part-of-speech classification + dictionary lookup + grammar mapping – an incredibly simplistic system with performance measurable in chapters per second – does a better job, and you even get confidence intervals.) If you want a translation tool, use something like Project Bergamot (https://browser.mt/), not generative AI.

Unfortunately, so much of the humanities in high school is treated as an exercise rather than real discovery.

I, too, find this exceptionally annoying.

bonoboTP3• 1 year ago

That's an absurd claim. Show me the translation benchmark where you saw such a result.

seydor• 1 year ago

Humans are mimetic creatures. The biggest damage (some call it influence) that LLMs will do is that next generation will be talking like an LLM. They might even normalize hallucination

krapp• 1 year ago

We've already begun to normalize the belief that humans hallucinate as often as LLMs, and are categorically less reliable and less trustworthy than LLMs. The political and social ramifications of this are bound to be negative.

thijson2• 1 year ago

That reminds me of a professor that would play various forms of music compressed in different ways. The class actually preferred the distortion produced by mp3 over uncompressed.

numpad0• 1 year ago

Is hype cycle effect hitting hard on AI recently? The arguments aren't changing for years, and emotional components in them feel progressively toned down.

bwfan123• 1 year ago

The hype cycle is running on FOMO. "as a developer, you will be left behind" And is sustained by fear tactics. "there wont be any developer jobs left"

Giant investments are being made, and a lot of people's outcomes rest on them, which incentivizes them to become evangelists for the cause.

End-of-day it is a productivity boosting tool like a search-engine or a calculator - whats funny to see the human drama playing out around its adoption.

rwmj• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sceptical about the entire use of computers in education. For myself, I seem to be incapable of learning anything unless I read it from paper and write down notes in the margin or in my (paper) notebook. Obviously I use screens every day (being a programmer ...) but for actual recall of new material, I need to use paper. Also if I'm in a physical meeting or conference, I never have a laptop open, and I take notes on paper. This makes me doubt that you learn anything if laptops or tablets are involved. Nothing specific to AI, just my general observation.

aniviacat• 1 year ago

This makes me doubt that you learn anything if laptops or tablets are involved.

This may be true for you, but it certainly isn't generally true.

I haven't written anything substantial on paper in years, and I certainly have learned new things in that time.

kraftman• 1 year ago

I think this comes down to how you first learnt to learn. If I write notes in nodepad i dont remember them as well as if i write them by hand, but I think that's just a byproduct of years of school, and other people have learnt their own ways and are just as effective.

ordersofmag• 1 year ago

There's an entire generation that is evidence that your personal case is not the general case.

dgb23• 1 year ago

Gamified learning apps, in a broad sense, seem to be very effective for _practice_.

Leo-thorne2• 1 year ago

AI hasn’t destroyed the humanities, but it definitely made things more complicated and harder to teach. I’ve seen students rely entirely on chatbots to write essays, and it really does make teaching harder. As the article says, we need to find ways to make AI and the humanities work together, not just hold on to the old way of doing things.

thijson2• 1 year ago

A lot of my engineering exams didn't allow certain calculators, so I guess that's what will happen for humanities, supervised and timed essay writing.

I remember going to museums and seeing all the modern art, and wondering why art went to such weird places compared to the realism of the 1600's, and my conclusion was that invention of photography made realism obsolete. I wonder if something similar will happen to the humanities.

Leo-thorne2• 1 year ago

I think you’re onto something. Maybe essay writing won’t disappear, but how we do it might change, just like how photography changed art.

throwaway753• 1 year ago

What is the general take on the ethics of using AI as a much more powerful search engine? For example, "Find all occurences in the text where Odysseus' will is overridden by the Gods." The question is not something that would be directly set by an instructor, but might be required to substantiate an interpretation that a student is aiming for.

Finding something like this is difficult and requires reading the text closely. But with AI, you could get away by reading around the passages returned by AI.

pasc18782• 1 year ago

Will the AI find ALL the occurrences. Finding hallucinated ones is OK here as the user can check each one.

throwaway753• 1 year ago

Perhaps not. But it'll probably find sufficient passages/instances that are useful.

thenthenthen• 1 year ago

I have been saying this (not sure about the weird part), but is it not obvious that in an AI saturated ‘field’, actual, factual, practical work should have an easy advantage?

Tycho8• 1 year ago

I would love to be a literature student today. Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming. Red team every essay with ChatGPT. Become a top tier Genius.com contributor for poetry. Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford, Yale etc. Effortlessly pick up where past critics have left off because the AI can summarise all contributions on any topic. Find every reference to support your thesis in the reference text — without scanning for hours.

peterldowns• 1 year ago

You can do this without being in a formal college program, go for it!

KineticLensman4• 1 year ago

(source: am a literature student - UK open university)

I just asked get ChatGPT a question about use of language in a specific book (China Miéville's Kraken). It gave a plausible answer but used a common English word ('knackering') instead of the word 'knacking' that is actually used (the word 'knackering' isn't in the text). I then asked it to give me a quote using 'knackering' and it gave me a quote with the word 'knacking'. I asked it to put the quote into Harvard reference style which it did, but didn't provide a page number, which it said I'd have to look up myself.

I think relying on ChatGPT for an essay would be fairly frustrating, and if you used ChatGPT to develop your thesis, you could very quickly get a generic plagiaristic answer (based on the quotes everyone else used) rather than one than that captured your own response to the text, and which contained factual errors.

[Edit] It also said that "gods inhabiting USB sticks are presented matter-of-factly" in Kraken which is false (there are no mentions of USB). When I asked it for a quote to support its assertion, it replied "While the novel doesn't explicitly depict gods inhabiting USB sticks..."

Tycho8• 1 year ago

Did you upload the text of the novel? It’s under copyright so wouldn’t be in the training data or retrievable via search.

piltdownman3• 1 year ago

Mieville is a wonderfully challenging prompt for ChatGPT. In the same vein, I would imagine 'The City and The City' would end up with a bunch of half-hallucinated forum-posting and reviews regarding Disco Elysium.

piltdownman3• 1 year ago

What a wonderful bit of satire.

To those that missed the joke - 'consuming' the classics is the antithesis of a liberal arts education. The value lies in the engagement, the debate, the Hegellian dialectic involved in arriving at a true grok level understanding of the text or topic.

It would be akin to reading the Sparknotes of Ulysses and being able to reference how it draws heavily on Homer's Odyssey, or utilises stream-of-consciousness narrative to great effect; and thinking that, as a result, you have the faintest understanding of the text, its conception, or its impact.

The OP almost hit on this with the 'Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford,Yale,MIT etc...'. Unlike coding bootcamps or similar, universities are not VOCATIONAL TRAINING - no matter how skewed towards that end-goal the American Economy is dictating such. As just about any Educator can attest, no amount of listening to youtube lectures will replace the University experience, nevermind the Oxbridge/Ivy League experience.

The pedagogical benefits are simply unrealisable from an AI prompt 'streamlining'- i.e. being forced to read and engage with topics outside of your comfort zone to maintain your GPA, engaging and working with people from a diversity of outlooks and backgrounds, benefitting from the 1:1 and small group sessions with the Academics who often wrote the literal book on the subject in question.

If the intersection of JSTOR and Machine Learning didn't reduce humanities to Cory Doctorow level script-kiddyism, the hoi polloi throwing prompts into a hallucinatory markov chain isn't likely to advance or diminish Academia anymore than the excess of 'MBA IN 5 DAYS!' or '...for Dummies' titles previously available.

Tycho8• 1 year ago

I’m not being satirical. And nowhere did I suggest that you don’t still read the actual text you’re studying. There are more ways to “engage” with literature than just going to seminars.

yupitsme1232• 1 year ago

I ask this as someone with a lot of respect for education and the Humanities: do the majority of Humanities students actually get this type of education?

Any conversations I've had with students or graduates of Arts, Literature, etc. indicates that their education was very much about consuming and regurgitating. Maybe the top 5% approach their studies the way you're describing but I've never seen anyone like that in the wild.

j33zusjuice• 1 year ago

OK, that last sentence would be incredible. I think this is tongue in cheek, but I was an English lit major so I feel the need to defend my honor. XD

I don’t think you’d do well in 400-level classes this way. English Lit isn’t as much of a joke as STEM students make it out to be[1]: it gets a lot harder than the bullshit 101/201 courses everyone is required to take. You’re supposed to try to be original in your analysis, and it has to be rigorously proven within the text itself.

Probably as a grad student you’d start arguing against other critics points, but not undergrad. I think that would hold for almost all schools because no one at that level in that field wants to hear from someone who doesn’t know how to analyze a text in the first place. It’d be like a high school student trying to tell you about software (or systems, network, data, etc.) engineering.

For similar reasons, AI summarizations for past contributions wouldn't work, either. If you’re arguing someone else’s analysis is wrong, you’re going to need to read and understand the whole thing. And if you’re just copying from AI, you’ll have a hard time defending your position.

Although, man, if you can understand the subtext of a book from listening to an audiobook *while gaming*, AND you have time to watch all the online lectures about a book!? I need to talk to you about time management, my friend!

1 - I have been involved in so many forums and subreddits where people try to analyze books, comics, TV, or movies. Based on what I have seen come out of people there —- most of you MFers couldn’t pass 300-level classes.

People can’t analyze literature for shit, and I think it’s because everyone gets such a negative perception of literary analysis because high school and required college classes are junk. It’s actually really hard to read five novels in month, keep track of all the characters and plots and themes and so on, and understand all of them well enough to write a coherent argument. I saw so many kids in my major crying about their GPA getting tanked because they weren’t ready for rigorous analysis. FWIW, I was 25 as a Junior (third year of uni, in the US), and had spent the last few years reading exercise physiology papers while bored at work. Seeing real science changed my life, and I wanted to apply their level of rigor to my own analysis of any kind. It’s why I’m good at my job now, tbh.

piltdownman3• 1 year ago

//For similar reasons, AI summarizations for past contributions wouldn't work, either. If you’re arguing someone else’s analysis is wrong, you’re going to need to read and understand the whole thing. And if you’re just copying from AI, you’ll have a hard time defending your position.

QFT. It's like the Sparknotes scenario I outlined in my post above - what you get from this level of engagement isn't insight, least of all a debatable position, it's just a loosely cohesive bunch of table-quiz facts.

//People can’t analyze literature for shit, and I think it’s because everyone gets such a negative perception of literary analysis because high school and required college classes are junk.

Because most of what is being examined is passive/active voicings, brain-dead symbolism, and ham-fisted and dated metaphors as literary vehicles.

Even at University level there should be an emphasis on a 101 level course hammering home the importance of Critical Theory in Literary Criticism as a framework and approach for disseminating texts. Without a basic understanding of the cultural, historical, and ideological dimensions under which a text was conceived and published, you haven't a hope of climbing the foothills of Beckett, Camus, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Shaw...

Tycho8• 1 year ago

You probably wouldn’t be arguing that previous critics are wrong but surely to get top marks you’d be expected to know what relevant literary criticism has already been published and then build on that in some fashion. No doubt just reading that stuff would sharpen your own insights. AI should make it much easier to find the most relevant criticism and put it in context.

AI should also be able to help you gather evidence from the reference texts, because it can exercise reasonable judgement without any constraint on patience or access or time. Consider the recent social media sensation about the lady who got a PhD for analysing how smell factors into the fates of literary characters. AI can quickly find thousands of examples, and then filter them as desired.

You could even have the AI write essays for you - “analyse this novel through the lens of ____ theory” - where no literary criticism already exists to review. You could have it generate any number of such essays, applying theories/frameworks you might not even know, but want to understand better.

I think it’s possible to “read” an audiobook while doing something monotonous like walking, driving, or, yes, gaming. The lectures you probably have to treat like podcasts and just play them in the background and pick up some ideas.

nluken2• 1 year ago

Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming

I can't tell if you're serious or not, but this would be like saying you've "watched" a movie because you had it on your second monitor while you were playing counter strike. There's a fundamental difference in hearing a book read to you and actually listening and engaging with the audio on a meaningful level. The latter requires focus, and you're not going to be able to do that if you're gaming away at the same time.

Put another way, why would someone who presumably loves reading bother studying literature if they don't actually care enough to pay attention to the books they supposedly loved?

Tycho8• 1 year ago

I’ve listened plenty of audiobooks while driving or walking, why would I not be able to do the same while playing GTA?

The reason to do this is that just sitting in a chair ploughing through books gets very unappealing after a while. And there’s a lot of books to get through.

meroes• 1 year ago

Sounds like all ways to skirt around the actual learning bit. Consuming the classics while gaming? Really?

gdubs• 1 year ago

There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'. Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. Except maybe the trades – and we mostly cut those programs out of schools a long time ago.

If college students are using AI to breeze through their work rather than doing the reading themselves, developing grit – I don't see how we can blame them rather than ourselves for the educational and career system we've created. This problem didn't happen overnight, and it's not just AI.

bluGill3• 1 year ago

Nobody ever could say with confidence what jobs will pe available. those who know the basics and flexible can find something.

aleph_minus_one6• 1 year ago

those who know the basics and flexible can find something.

I'm not so sure about that: I have a feeling that at least the current trend in quite some jobs is that they are looking for two kinds of people:

1. beginners who know the basics and are cheap

2. deep experts; these are paid well

What is in-between gets more and more hollowed out.

Thus the people who follow your advice will mostly stay in the "cheap" pool - I wouldn't consider this to be desirable.

pjc506• 1 year ago

This is at odds with professional specialisms which take years to learn.

I don't think it's likely that AI will obliterate the job category of "lawyer", but that's what its boosters are claiming, and people need to make a car to house sized investment at age 18 depending on how true that is.

tsunamifury2• 1 year ago

Trades would collapse if even 10% of the population switched to them. What does no one get about this?

cafp12• 1 year ago

This is a good point and also why are people so certain that superhuman capable robots aren't right around the corner.

mtillman• 1 year ago

I’m convinced plumbing would pay better than programming in certain neighborhoods right now now.

pjc506• 1 year ago

Trades tend to do a good job of preventing people from switching in due to apprenticeship systems. Depends on your jurisdiction, but you probably can't just hang out a sign saying "plumber".

Pet_Ant6• 1 year ago

Yeah, I feel like kids are encouraged to move not to jobs that will be profitable to them (ie the children) but that the moneyed want to pay less for, because the number of people being swayed would collapse any market.

It's like a boat captain telling all his passengers to rush to one side of the boat. Any single side will tip the boat over.

guappa2• 1 year ago

Well in sweden it's forbidden to fix anything electrical on your own. You're allowed to change your lamps and little else.

triceratops• 1 year ago

But I wonder if lower labor costs would change the repair vs replace calculus by a lot.

eyesofgod3• 1 year ago

What does no one get about this?

Its all idiotic romanticisation. Thats why all the out-of-their-ass anecdotes involve someone who's more of an entrepreneur than a tradesmen as well.

Theres some bizzare analog of the noble savage myth, but applied to blue collar work.

lostphilosopher• 1 year ago

Related - there needs to be individuals and businesses that want/need and can afford upgrades and repairs. If office workers are getting replaced with AI we don't need to build and maintain offices and the ecosystems that support them (see also WFH/Covid) and those workers won't have income to pay for plumbers, electricians, roofers, etc. for their personal property. A worst case scenario AI workforce revolution would attack trades from both supply and demand.

renewiltord3• 1 year ago

It's just viral memes. Most people are inferior to the average LLM in reasoning and repeat phrases wholesale without comprehension of what it means. Few, if any, have even approached understanding what they are saying. Among those, fewer still have validated their assumptions.

Many years ago we had to deploy an HFT trading strategy on a specific hardware platform because that was the one that was (in this field) closest in network topology to the exchange. I just read the released docs for the platform, and watched a couple of videos where they hinted at certain architectural decisions and then you could work something out from there. Latency was reliable and our strats made money.

But this was public information and we were actually late to it. It had been released for 3 years at the time. And many people I talked to had told me that what they had was as good as it gets. But they were each just repeating what the other guy said.

Many of the things you see on Hacker News are just that: it's deterministic parrotry.

aleph_minus_one6• 1 year ago

Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence.

I am very sure that those jobs that have been existing for a long time will continue existing for a long time (and no: even if some disruption occurs, these jobs won't suddenly disappear, but will rather phased out slowly; you thus have sufficient time to make a decent plan for you).

In other words: in my opinion one can predict rather well many jobs that will be available in 5 to 10 years.

The "inconvenient" truth rather is that many high-paying jobs in the new economy sector don't satisfy this criterion of "existing for a long time". So by this criterion you might miss out some hard to predict high-earning opportunities. Thus, if you are the kind of person who tends to easily become envious if your friends suddenly experience a windfall, such a job perhaps won't make you happy.

stanford_labrat2• 1 year ago

Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP, now we see it also being used to blame for the failures of our modern education system.

Mostly which are that our system only rewards one thing in education: the grade. Not understanding, knowledge, intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily gamified than anything. And this single number (your GPA) is the single most important thing for every level from middle school to college where it will unironically determine your entire (academic/academic-adjacent) future.

throwawaybob4202• 1 year ago

Our modern education system in the US is broken, but acting as if AI is a scapegoat is comical.

Capitalism is what has destroyed higher education in this country. The concept of going to school to get a job isn’t a failure of education but of economics.

AI is just another capitalist tool made to not only extract wealth out of you but something that they want you to rely on more and more so they can charge you even more down the road.

realitybit3z3• 1 year ago

IN RESPONSE TO: Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP

there are like 4 factors besides ZIRP i've witnessed as a hiring manager

- Layoff or dont hire locals in favor of H1b/H4

- Layoff or dont hire locals in favor of Nearshore and Offshore

- Section 174 Tax code on software: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

- More productivity via LLMs, Code Assist

tharkun__• 1 year ago

    ... our system only rewards one thing in employment: the metric. Not understanding, knowledge, intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily gamified than anything. And this single number (your metric value) is the single most important thing for every level from junior to principal where it will unironically determine your entire future.

TFTFY

bigbacaloa• 1 year ago

Most students see education as a video game - the goal is to score as many points as possible in a framework controlled by some apparently arbitrary rules. That educators fail to distinguish school from video games is mostly the fault of educators. And video games are more fun.

eyesofgod3• 1 year ago

I don't see how we can blame them rather than ourselves for the educational and career system we've created

I dont know man, you do it every time.

thomastjeffery3• 1 year ago

This is rooted in the idea that a person should need permission to work. The reason we do this is because our capitalist society is structured around competition instead of collaboration. Because all work must be framed as a competition, the only way collaboration is allowed is by explicitly joining a team.

This rule is made explicit with copyright: derivative work is, by default, illegal. The only way that derivative work is allowed to be made is after making a contract with the rightsholder.

This system can only be enforced with incompatibility. You can't actually stop someone from making derivative work unless your help is actually required. The most familiar instance of this requirement is software: it's simply not pragmatic for someone to extend your code, when they only have access to a compiled binary. Software work can only be extended from a shared context: what you write must be compatible with what is written. That's generally unfeasible when what is written is a compile-time optimized binary executable.

Incompatibility is not a perfect barrier. It's possible to decompile software. It's possible to edit text, images, video, audio, etc. Copyright depends on incompatibility, and LLMs are simply the newest, most compelling way to call that bluff.

realitybit3z3• 1 year ago

IN RESPONSE TO: There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'.

This one is really bad. I have waves of local grads begging for unpaid internships or work now. They all were AP students, good GPAs, good schools, "learned to code", took on 200k of college debt -- only to find the promised job is just not frigging there at the end of the line. Meanwhile, they are told there is a "massive shortage of coders" and see overseas workers hired into those same jobs. How do younger people trust the system anymore? Further, in light of this, why would any steel-worker (metaphorically speaking) want to retrain and learn to code if even the geeks learning to code face dismal outcomes?

gitfan862• 1 year ago

For every Quinton Tarantino there are dozens of people who could make amazing films but never had the opportunity for a wide variety of reasons that now mostly go away.

shermantanktop2• 1 year ago

And for each of those dozens, there are now millions of untalented people who can generate terrible films with a few clicks. How does a Tarantino, or even one of your new talents, ever get discovered?

The friction is a feature, not a bug.

physicsguy2• 1 year ago

The friction is a feature, not a bug.

The friction means only wealthy people can do anything in a sphere.

gitfan862• 1 year ago

Quality rises to the top organically.

LurkandComment• 1 year ago

1. PhD Defenses in the humanities have both a written thesis and an oral on the spot defense. You can't ChatGPT that easily because a professor will know how to curve ball to things that are seemingly unrelated but comparable to a human.

2. As an MA student I was solving semantic problems for engineers for analysis that they couldn't fathom. They were very smart at technical things (and great writers), but when language problems come up, it was a challenge. You can be a great communicator but not understand language itself.

3. Most people in positions for AI are being evaluated by things AI is good at. So as a candidate with a very good understanding of language, the AI wouldn't know how to evaluate my ability. I would really have to outline a problem in language AI has to face and explain it to a human. Then get them to understand it's value.

kenjackson4• 1 year ago

I think all PhDs have an oral defense. Not only that its common to have Quals where you have to present the state of the art research in your field and answer oral questions about it. Even if you had ChatGPT it would be tough because a lot of questions are like, "Why did XYZ do ABC after seeing result 123?" The problem is that often its an untrue statement they are trying to get you to justify -- XYZ didn't do ABC or didn't do it after seeing 123. This is something I imagine most LLMs to struggle with today and say, "No, that didn't happen -- here's actually what happened" when its in a nuanced field.

UncleMeat15• 1 year ago

I have never even heard of a trick or misleading question for quals or for a defense. That’d be ridiculous. You don’t need to do that.

mathgradthrow• 1 year ago

Opposite the Turing test, there is its dual: "Can you administer a turing test? Can you tell if you are talking to a person?"

There are lots of people who fail this test. Many of them are professional evaluators in the humanities. They should unquestionably lose their jobs as evaluators.

greenavocado• 1 year ago

That is the reverse turing test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTWLm9vT_o

lapcat9• 1 year ago

When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

On the one hand, this guy is not wrong, from a personal perspective. On the other hand, guys like this are a total waste of time and space in the classroom.

Schools have always faced a fundamental internal conflict, i.e., dueling purposes, and recent developments such as the rise of ChatGPT and the rise of student loan debt may have finally brought the entire educational system to a crisis.

We like to think of education as the primary purpose of the educational system, hence the name. And education is indeed essential, not just for job training but also for the enrichment of human life, as well as the preservation of democracy and freedom. Arguably, the latter are more important. Yet we also rely on the educational system for social and economic sorting. It's a ranking system that has a monumental effect on the future prospects of students. And as the above quotation notes, it's a club, an exclusive club, where the lucky few get to meet the right people and enter into important social circles.

At the university level, things become even more muddled, because professors and scientists are performing important research that may have little or nothing to do with the education of undergraduate students. A lot of this research is important for society, and for industry, but it still comes into conflict with the other purposes of the university.

So how do we resolve the inherent conflict? Is there a way to split the educational system into separate entities that are truer to their individual purposes? Can we make a place for the social ladder climber that's separate from a place where real learning happens, where nobody is tempted to cheat because there's nothing to be gained from cheating? It should also be noted that not everyone is ready to learn. Our current educational system is designed like an assembly line, based on age and social promotion. Everyone of the same age is expected to follow the same track. I personally wasn't ready to study and learn when I was a teenager; it took several more years for me to mature emotionally, develop ambition and discipline. It's difficult to force-feed students: “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” Perhaps, though, there might be more motivation to learn if learning was not tied to future economic and social prospects. If students view school as merely a tool to achieve certain benefits, then of course they'll view anything else in school as a waste of time.

In a sense, our educational system finds failure to educate to be acceptable, even desirable, because failure fulfills the alternative purpose of social ranking.

pjc506• 1 year ago

Can we make a place for the social ladder climber that's separate from a place where real learning happens, where nobody is tempted to cheat because there's nothing to be gained from cheating?

I don't think so. Let me suggest a set of hypotheses:

- the social ladder always exists; it's basically fundamental to human existence, especially when trying to do anything (see tyranny of structurelessness)

- people are always trying to climb the hierarchy

- the examocracy(+) was introduced by ancient Chinese and/or Prussia in an attempt to bring actual competence into the social hierachy, in large part to help the leader fight wars

- if there isn't a "fair" route to the top, competent outsiders will resort to unfair ones, which can be remarkably lethal and destructive

- the university provides its own small academic and intellectual hierarchy, but this exists in dialogue with the needs of a wider society and its demand for non-academic intellectually specialized work. Whether that's priests, lawyers, doctors, army officers, weapons designers, civil servants, or programmers

- this comes down to: does the wider society demand human competence in intellectual operations still, or does ALL of that get AI-automated away? Do we get "humans, but with a smarter Clippy" or do we get "AI runs the world for billionaires and everyone else is surplus peasantry".

- the secret third, worse, case is that AI destroys the concept of competence and things stop working on a large scale.

(+) I do not want to have a huge fight over the word "meritocracy"

lapcat9• 1 year ago

It's unclear why you think the educational system needs to be part of the social ladder.

I'm imagining for example that all citizens are required to receive an education, and demonstrate the same level of mastery in the subjects taught as everyone else, without grades or rankings. You might call it "pass-fail", but I resist that idea, because I don't consider failure to be an option, except in rare cases of learning disability.

photochemsyn• 1 year ago

Let's be honest: majoring in the humanities is the easy way to a college degree and thus attracts people put off by the hard sciences and all the mathematical rigor which can't be offloaded onto an LLM as you do have to solve problems in real time on exams without any external assistance.

If the student's goal at any Ivy League college is to 'meet their partner and their co-founder' then attending social functions where they can expand their networks and meet new candidates for those roles will take precedence over spending three hours diligently studying difficult material for every hour spent in lecture.

Of course, computer science students and others in hard sciences have been gaming the system for decades, with many solutions to take-home programming exercises found in online forums, and there's always the option of paying a tutor to ease the way forward - and LLMs are essentially inexpensive tutors that vastly help motivated students learn material - a key aide when many university-level professors view teaching as an unpleasant burden and devote minimal time and effort to it, with little material preparation and recycling tests from a decade ago that are all archived in fraternity and sorority collections.

The solution to students using LLMs to cheat is obvious - more in-class work, more supervised in-section work, and devaluing take-home assignments - but this means more time and toil for the instructors, who are often just as lazy and unmotivated as the students.

[note the in-person coding interview seems to have been invented by employers who realized anyone could get a CS degree and good grades without being a good programmer via cheating on assignments, and this happened well before LLMs hit the scene]

renewiltord3• 1 year ago

Everyone's always claiming the humanities are important the humanities are important but everyone I know in STEM is more learned than everyone in humanities. More philosophy, more history, more classical literature. This means that humanities education is relatively bogus.

xandrius2• 1 year ago

Breadth vs depth.

renewiltord3• 1 year ago

In my experience, both breadth and depth. Not only do the STEM guys know more humanities material, they comprehend it better. I can only conclude that this is because of The Sort because '90s philosophy majors and so on are still quite smart and capable people. The ability to turn skill into money contingent on credentials has turned the Humanities into a population of people too bumbling to do anything else.

xwowsersx• 1 year ago

I have no doubt AI will impact the field, as it will many (most) others. That said, some assertions that may warrant reconsideration IMO:

The machines best us across nearly every subject

This feels overstated, given the well-known limitations of AI in reasoning, factual reliability, and depth in specialized domains

Describing traditional scholarship as mere "archaeological artifacts" feels like prematurely dismissing the enduring value of books and other research practices

- The idea that AI offers "pure attention" seems to romanticize what is, in essence, statistical pattern recognition...potentially misrepresenting the nature of the exchange

Factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities

maybe inadvertent, but devalues serious academic work that follows rigorous, methodical research traditions

Beyond that, there's a few claims that would benefit from some additional evidence:

- student paralysis rely heavily on anecdote; broader empirical data across varied institutions would strengthen the case - His comparisons between AI and human experts feel selective...would be interested to see a more systematic evaluation to see where AI meaningfully matches or falls short of expert performance

- I'm somewhat partial to the author's view, but in terms of long-term educational outcomes, no real evidence to show that AI integration improves learning or contributes meaningfully to human development - the idea of a "singularity of self-consciousness" is pretty... under-argued? - The supposed link between declining humanities enrollment and AI's potential lacks concrete data to support the correlation

timewizard• 1 year ago

Generative AI elevates the value of humanistic skills

No. It just steals them, whitewashes their copyright, then passes them off as a "machine creation." If there were no humans actively using language there would be no language models.

Generative AI makes it harder to teach humanistic skills

Yea. That's what happens when you steal for a living.

For this reason, it is vitally important that educators learn how to personally create and deploy AI-based assignments and tools that are tailored directly for the type of teaching they want to do.

All with zero evidence that this will improve outcomes for them. For this reason you should TEST YOUR HYPOTHESIS.

I hate AI hype.

AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

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