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StevenXC

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I wrote a small novel but lost it due to user error, so here's a hot take with much less nuance from a college math professor. Just like calculators meant we needed and could pivot the skills we ask our students to learn, AI will also shift the paradigm. But unlike calculators, which are very good at what they're meant to do, AI produces BS in the academic sense [0] and if used uncritically frequently produces work that's just nonsense. So I tell students I don't care so much if they use it, but that the students who do tend to end up looking foolish.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

As an math educator, I think there's a huge flaw in this study. The investigators failed to follow up to see why the mistake was made. They leap to assuming the player is trying to "deny the antecedent", but I think there's a much simpler explanation: the players aren't reading the instructions carefully.

There's two reading errors I would expect someone to make given this experiment:

1. The instructions that each card has exactly one letter and exactly one number are before the big cards. I bet many players just skipped that instruction.

2. Mistaking the P→Q as P←→Q smacks more of a reading comprehension error than a logical error.

Disclosure: I made both mistakes. (-:

Math Puzzles 2 years ago

Nice to see JRMF trending on HN. JRMF puzzles and festivals are a great way to engage general audiences of grade school students in mathematical inquiry and problem solving.

Little surprised there isn't a prompt to upload the copy of the ROM we all legally dumped from our personalized copies of the cartridge.

I'm a donating supporter of the Mathstodon.xyz instance, but (sadly?) most of "math Twitter", at least the education-focused university faculty, ended up on BlueSky. I think there's a strong appeal for "a straight forward Twitter clone without Musk" for a lot of people.

Probably not what you mean by "at work" but as a non-CS STEM academic that needs to help my colleagues get dev environments so we can collaborate on research software, devcontainers are a game changer. I work a lot with folks that are scared of the command line, but I can get them productive in their web browser with much less friction these days.