Discussion

SmarterArticles

vrganj: The real problem is that we all know AI is bad for our thinking, but we can't stop using it because we're addicted.We should treat it more like cigarettes.

scotty79: Or calculators.

chromacity: I'm guessing they also didn't teach writing, because AI wrote this article.

ceejayoz: > It is whether the education system that ushered AI into classrooms with such breathless enthusiasm…Was it?Anecdotally, my kids' schools (sample size two, both high school) are quite anti-AI in the classroom.The kids tend to be very much for "do my homework for me", but the education system? No.

himata4113: I think AI is in a unique state right now where it's not smart enough to replace software developers, but it is smart enough to interpret logic and accelerate workflows by turning any kind of scribbles into code. It's really only as good as the user right now, but at times I feel like I started to lack the ability to do once basic things and it has only been 4 months since I've fully switched to such workflow.The question is if I am becoming better at thinking and planning at the expense of losing the ability to turn words into code or if this is a larger kind of regression that I am experiencing that is making my overall capabilities drop.Although I am becoming faster and better at using AI I am keep more agents busy with less effort, plan larger scopes and keep more moving parts in my brain which is completely different than what I used to do which was keeping the entire source-code in my brain. I can still recall pretty much every project I ever interacted with and tell you exactly how any part of it works or the vague code flow which made me really fast at figuring out bugs and fixing them.The kicker here is that instead of knowing how an application works from knowing the sourcecode instead I know how an application from the abstract flow which can develop inconsistencies since there's no ground truth anymore and that part worries me, but I do maintain a strong documentation now - something I never used to do since I have the unique capability of recalling the entire project I am working on - which ironically also improves agent performance since they have something to work from on fresh sessions instead of reinventing the wheel and having to re-explore.

Fricken: Automobilies, grocery stores, watches, central heating: these amenities also have major deskilling effects. The whole point is so you don't need the old-fashioned abilities anymore. Personally I believe the hunter gatherer lifestyle is the way to go, but it's an unpopular view.

epsilonic: Ted Kaczynski shared a similar view, but he would’ve added that these technological artefacts or amenities have major de-humanizing effects.

vrganj: Okay but if we give up critical thinking, we're nothing but slaves to the makers of thinking machines.Which I'm pretty sure is the plan, FWIW.

quietsegfault: My kids’ schools also are anti-AI. My kids don’t have personal experience with it yet, other than funny pictures on Gemini.

Hard_Space: Yes - the two-part title tells it all. I wonder of the likes of The Guardian, who are addicted to this style, will be forced to abandon it to be less associated with LLM-produced text.

epgui: I don’t think you can really know this with such certainty.

Lihh27: schools spent decades training kids to produce the right-shaped answer as fast as possible. AI just plays that game faster.

cjbgkagh: My teachers, prior to AI, encouraged the 'equivocating waffle' essay. These essays met word count and touched on the topics but failed to say anything interesting. Basically how ChatGPT writes, and I've as mentioned previously (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40646682), I am very happy that AI can do these essays so well that we're going to be forced to actually think in order to differentiate ourselves.

srslyTrying2hlp: I learned about 'Sterotype grading'.The teacher doesnt read, they skim, and they already know who deserves As or Ds.I was a victim of this. I was a general A or B student, but I thought the funny kids (D students) were funny and hung out with them. I got stereotype graded. My last paper of the year I completely gave up, the least effort ever. Teacher gave me an A and said 'You improved so much!'

greenavocado: You failed to establish the link between giving up and getting bad grades from hanging out with the funny kids and how any of that is even remotely caused by stereotyping.

pessimizer: This is just mass cheating. If you want to fix it, tell the kids to study with AI at home, and make them write in class. Schools should stop accepting homework altogether. Assign it, and tell them if they don't do it, they're going to end up failing the tests, which are all that's going to count for their grade.The problem that they're going to have with this is that the schools have already been covering for bad teaching and lost students by making all the criteria fuzzy, and relying on homework that kids could cheat their way through for a large part of the grade i.e. credit for participation. Now, with AI, there's no way to deny that kids are cheating, and that's thrown the institution into a difficult position.There's no educational threat from AI, AI will only help people learn. The threat is to the institution, which runs on a lot of dishonesty. We'll have to learn to tolerate some kids being left behind and make the effort (and create the systems) to move them forward again, instead of pretending like everyone is handling it. A system that can't deal with every kid losing a year of school, like what happened during covid, is a system that is focused more on schedule than student.

nzach: I've been thinking about critical thought in our society from another angle. In my opinion if you assume that every person employs it's critical thinking abilities to reason about the world you would expect to see a lot of different opinions about the world.But with each passing day we see the opposite, more and more people are converging in one of a few opinions about each topic. This is great if you want to move the world in a specific direction, but I think it demonstrates that people are exercising less their critical thinking abilities.AI definitely made this worse, but I think it started long before that.Another factor that I think contributes negatively to this effect is that our society doesn't really like when someone is wrong, or changes ideas. If we want to encourage to use their critical thinking skills we also need to tell them that arriving at bad conclusions is ok, the important thing is to always keep improving.

srslyTrying2hlp: >I think AI is in a unique state right now where it's not smart enough to replace software developersUh..... Do you know about AI Agents? Claude Opus?Dont judge AI on the instant chatGPT model.

techsystems: Just out of curiosity, is 'critical thinking' a thing in other languages also? I'm a native speaker for two other languages and learned a couple more, but it's never mentioned or is an issue in other languages. I feel it's just a way to call other people stupid, but the reader isn't, creating another chasm or us vs. them.

SpicyLemonZest: It covers what I think other languages often consider a subset of literacy. The point is to carefully avoid calling anyone stupid, while acknowledging that the ability to deeply think through what other people are communicating is a learned skill which often must be explicitly taught.

srslyTrying2hlp: Its so verbose... I wish AI could simplify things.

jayd16: That's strange. For me the persuasive essay with clear thesis and supporting evidence was the major format that was pushed.

theonething: My experience as well and this was at public school. I really thought that was the only way to write a good essay.

pessimizer: It's a meaningless, empty phrase. Even worse, the focus of the OP is on a RAND survey of some "youth panel" where they asked them how they felt about other kids' relationship to this empty phrase.It's like when they poll people to ask them how the economy is doing. How the hell would they know? And what do you mean by the economy?

tayo42: If you ask someone how the economy is your asking about how your expenses are growing, income is keeping up with it, savings and investments, job stability. That all goes onto someone's sense of the economy.

taeric: Why would you expect that more critical thought would lead to more visible opinions? Would be like expecting everyone to have a different route they take out of their neighborhood. Nothing wrong if someone does want to try a different way, to a large extent, but often nothing is gained from it, either.The counter hope, of course, is that more critical thought will result in more people discovering some abstract truth out there. I don't think that is realistic, either.The mundane landing spot, I think, is the likely one. For most things, critical thought is just not much of a benefit. Knowledge and understanding are far more beneficial. Is why we don't constantly reinvent how to drive a car. We have largely agreed that we have some mechanisms that work, and it is better to educate folks on how those work, than it is to get people to think critically about the controls.Going further in that regard, understanding is far more immediately useful than critical deconstruction. Learning about affordances and how they guide you to what you are wanting to do is far more useful to someone's daily life.Which is not to say that critical thought in designing said affordances is not good. Just, for most of us, we are not in a position to really impact any of that.

jfengel: Democracy requires allies, so the overall position will tend to settle into two camps.I'm not sure how well that reflects people's actual opinions. In many cases I think people don't care much about most topics. They simply accept the position of their allies. Occasionally they even find it abhorrent but necessary.I think that mass communication has exacerbated that for decades, and AI at most optimizes it a bit further.I don't really expect fine critical thinking. Most people aren't experts at most things.But I am a bit surprised at the degree to which people have twisted themselves in knots to justify positions that do not withstand even the slightest scrutiny.

spiritplumber: My literature teacher started reading my essays when I turned a report on Dante's Inferno into a crossover with Doom.

cjbgkagh: I think that is a misreading, they got good grades due their prior stereotype of 'A' student despite doing 'D' student effort.

ry-grah: I was in quarantine in middle school. During online school I paid very little attention to anything the teachers tried to teach, usually I played minecraft during class. When I had a big math test I felt fine, because I knew I would find a way to cheat. On the test, every problem was a word problem. I had no clue what the questions wanted of me, so I had no idea how to cheat. After receiving my D-, I realized my mistake and actually started paying attention, and learning. Although this stunted my mathematical development, I was able to get back on track to having a good understanding.Had AI been as prevalent as it is now, I don’t think I would have ever had the revelation. That is why I appreciated the point the author made about the difference between a calculator and LLMs. You have to have some semblance of understanding to put something into a calculator. You need nothing and you gain nothing by copying and pasting into ChatGPT.

skydhash: Yep! My essays in schools had prompts like “Describe the similarities between the Pocahontas story and the first Avatar movies”. The point was not the produced text, but the activity itself. And as a teacher, I believe it’s quite easy to catch cheaters, because producing a stellar text one day and a crappy piece another is an anomaly.

threatofrain: The institution which is passing children through is not corrupt, it is serving the will and moral character of the people. It has not departed from its mission to do the best it can.The people don't want the slightest fluctuation of whatever complex story surrounds the issue to means a chunk of children fail. In contrast parents would rather as much record fuzziness as possible if it means giving children a 2nd or 100th chance (putting aside the dooming issue that bad tests mean funding cuts).So I think you'll find that it's not just that records are fuzzy in school, padded up by participation and homework and extra credit, it's that you'll likely be able to predict which regions are fuzzier than others in record keeping.

madibo3156: Are the points invalid or uninteresting? If so, argue about that.

z2: Even through college I've found that it's hard to optimize for grades vs learning. I've had teachers spite me for disagreeing with them or trying to dig at objective truth that showed they may be wrong (one particularly bad one was an essay on Searle's Chinese Room where the prof insisted that humans have a uniquely intelligent soul).Then I developed a formula that essentially pretended to talk through the "need to consider nuanced implications" of the authors, pros and cons, and combined that with the natural and more convincing flow of using speech recognition with minimal edits instead of typing longer sentences, suddenly the A's started rolling in.

pants2: This is my experience as well. I remember one day completely zoning out and writing pages of drivel "defining what it means to be a X" or whatever. Got an A+. After that I realized professors didn't care about my original thoughts or ideas, but rather the appearance that I was thinking through the prompt deeply.

1vuio0pswjnm7: He also failed to establish how he "learned about stereotype grading" or what exactly this term "stereotype grading" means or how does it relate to who the student was hanging out with. Are terms such as "A student" or "D student", as used by the commenter, stereotypesFor example, one could explain the grades received as the teacher's evaluation of the work submitted, cf. the student's own opinion of the work he submitted, e.g., "I completely gave up", irrespective of who the student was "hanging out" with. How can we confirm that is not the correct explanation for the grade the student received on the paper where he believes he "completely gave up"The HN commenter provides no evidence that shows a causal connection between a student's choice of friends and the grades he received, as opposed (a) to the work that the student submitted and (b) the teacher's evaluation of that workThis is not to suggest that commenter's assessment is not accurate. It could be accurate. We don't know. But it provides no evidence to support the idea that the teacher was not evaluating the work and fails to explain the relevance of who the student chose to hang out with. If a D student hangs out with A or B students, will he continue to receive D'sIt makes sense that teachers will consider a student's past work in evaulating their present and future work. A history of A's and B's, or D's, will have an effect. As an alternative to seeing this as a "stereotype", one could alternatively characterise this as "reputation" as in "based on his past work, the student has developed a reputation for submitting A or B-grade papers"As an analogy, consider the case where an HN user consistently submits "high quality", or "low quality", comments to HN. It makes sense that they might develop a reputation for submitting "high quality" or "low quality" comments. If one day they submit a comment does not match their usual "high" or "low" standard, then HN's evaulation of the comment might receive some deference to their past reputationIdeally, every comment would be evaulated without regard to past behaviour, "stereotype", reputation, etc. But that is far from how it works in practice. Each commenter's reputation is meorialised in "karma" and can effect future evaluation

mcv: My son (almost 17) has turned against AI to the point that I don't dare to admit I use it at work.

Dylan16807: If their grades never changed it could be they're better at writing than they think, even with low effort.