Pasha
Defend Kebab
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User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Amusing that training your own employees more or less this way with apprenticeships used to be the norm until governments started using the public university system to subsidize the costs of educating the labour force. This allowed universities, a medieval guild system designed to groom young men for power positions (plus medicine) to spend a century LARPing at bringing enlightenment to lower classes by forcing them to write low quality essays on Nietzsche or whatever and then handing them middle class admission cards. It seems that the racket got too ridiculous to keep up by now and we are regressing back to apprenticeships.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Using the word "modern" in any such discussion without exactly specifying what it is supposed to mean is usually a massive source of confusion. The comment you are replying to seems to use it with the meaning of post-1945-liberalism, and with such a comparison of course historical fascism is not "modern". post-1945-liberalism was pretty explicitly theorized to be a complete refutal of historical fascism.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Going from memory of how a friend described his Oxford classics education to me a while ago, amount of tutoring required per student sounded quite minimal actually. Mostly the students did a gargantuan amount of self-reading and the tutors were there to direct their efforts and thinking rather than do anything particularly time intensive.
Of course this obviously can't be replicated anywhere else except in the most top universities of each country (who already usually have their own separate traditions of elite education) because you need a very impressive student body to sustain this.
I actually wrote a long comment with my reasons for holding a similar opinion before: https://www.themotte.org/post/970/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-21/206072?context=8#context
edit: I have just realized this comment was a response to you actually
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
As someone who totally picked up this habit from my education, totally agree with you. I almost always learned tremendously more when I actually got myself to read the whole thing, except when it was badly written, and often it unfortunately was. I really hate the justification of poor educational practices with "corporate life also sucks, this prepares you for it". You don't need to pay for a degree to teach you basic life hacks. You can pick up the ability to realize a text is not important and skim through it in a couple weeks into any corporate job. The college degree was supposed to teach you to read deeply with high quality sources.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.
This is so strange to read. Literally half my degree dropped out in our first year because of self-selection and mandatory credit requirements. This was treated as entirely normal and a good thing, as it is obviously a bad thing for people to waste their time and money on degrees they don't like/aren't capable of following.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Undergrads here are typically 3 years. I remember having 8 crunch periods per year for my degree. 4 quarters with one review exam in the middle and one big one at the end. Besides this, nobody stopped you from taking extra courses to graduate earlier and many did.
By no means continental European university system is great. Most countries have their own pathologies and the Bologna Process makes everything typically shittier but it’s pretty strange to claim students got to goof around because they don’t have constant deadlines to write parroting essays about queer indigenous history.
I fail to see how almost any of my education would had been disrupted by the LLMs the way the New York mag article is describing. The only courses I can imagine are currently swamped with LLM problems are the bunch of liberal arts inspired nonsense courses I had to follow for credits.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I wonder if AI will make us all polyglots because it’s an incredibly useful tool of language learning or eliminate any learning altogether because it’s also really good at translating. Or perhaps it does both at the same time simultaneously so we have a bunch of conscious smart learners mastering new languages in 6 months and everyone else loses any motivation at all because any digital content they ever encounter is instantly perfectly translated (desire to access broader internet/gaming/tv shows was the reason I got good at English as a teenager, school instruction was useless)
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
That’s obviously a much real problem than what the article is complaining about. But I can’t help myself from thinking that it might be good if this leads to the destruction of the extremely time consuming rituals around academic publishing. So much word salad academese jargon. LLMs are clearly extremely good at transforming relatively simple sentences into correctly worded monstrosities so none of that can act as a smartness proxy anymore. So maybe real humans writing clearly and to the point will make a comeback?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Sorry but I get a strong feeling you have never been exposed to any university system other than modern American liberal arts colleges. What I have seen around Europe typically was that learning happens during exam crunch time and coursework is either just recommended or has relatively little effect on your end grade. If you are doing a “hard” degree then for many major exams you are also responsible for subjects of previous semesters as well so you have to stay on top. This works perfectly fine. I don’t think American students are any lazier than their counterparts in continental Europe, I think they just got conditioned heavily by the only education they have ever experienced.
Also no I liked maths a lot and I have an engineering job using a decent amount of trig-calculus level maths regularly. But I also observed how nonsense the maths requirements were for most degrees.
Incidentally I found it amusing you chose the student using chatgpt to write personal introduction for an “ Ethics and Technology class” as a particularly egregious example. I have never been exposed to an ethics class that wasn’t total non-sense taught by dimwit professors. Just all around busywork. We were either forced to take such classes because of vague ideas about how it would make us more ethical or something or people did so for easy elective credits. The whole faculty had a jobs-program feeling to it. It would be absolutely my top course to cheat through with an LLM.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Forcing students who has absolutely no interest and need to do some mid-level maths courses for half baked pedagogic reasons was one of the biggest cheating incentivizers when I was a student. Remember a hot business studies chick in my dorm slept with half the econometrics track guys to get them to do her maths homework. I guess that is some sort of “preparation for life”…
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Yes. I believe if you do a proper classics study in those unis even today the experience isn’t that far off according to a friend who did so a while ago. One of the most inspirational uni life stories I have ever come across is Bismarck’s actually. 3.5 years of non-stop drinking and partying and sword dueling topped with insane half a year crunch to graduate. Great recipe to create great men.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (NYMag)
Article describing what was predictably coming to college campuses since GPT3 got released. The narration follows some particularly annoying Korean-American student trying to make quick bucks from LLM-cheating start-ups and a rather dumb girl who can't follow basic reasoning, which makes the read a bit aggravating and amusing but overall the arch is not surprising. Recommended for a quick read. Basically all the grunt work of writing essays and the intro level classes with lots of rote assignments seem to be totally destroyed by cheap and easy high quality LLM output.
Some interesting highlights for me:
- There is a consensus in the article even shared by the cheating students that writing essays in "Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries" is an important transformative experience and if young adults miss out/cheat on this for 4 years then we must be seriously worried about the next generation.
- It is not explored much what the students are doing with their time instead of writing these very important essays. There is one throw-away quote from a brain-rot girl about how she scrolls TikTok all day and has no time for essays. Perhaps all the students are getting one-shotted by dopamine addiction algorithms but perhaps they are not and many are socializing or learning actually interesting things instead of writing indigenous studies slop essays. This should be a major question but just left unexplored.
- None of the journos or the academics quoted in the article can bring themselves to question if these young adults should even be in the university if they are all so eager to cheat (and earlier pandemic-era mass cheating spree is mentioned as well). There is a whole paragraph dedicated to justifying seemingly pointless essays, never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises, and the importance of doing "hard things" (which is apparently writing pointless essays and never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises). But there is not a single example of a "hard thing" students are missing out on because of LLMs in the whole article. Literally every single example is students automating busy work which should cost any 120+ IQ individual little brain power but lots of time. And a bizarre out of place paragraph about the need to "consider students more holistically" with a non-sense blurb from some academic.
- Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams. This would immediately solve the whole problem (it would even align the incentives to get students to use LLMs for studying instead of cheating) and it is not even a "revolutionary" solution, just how universities used to work not that long ago. But obviously this would fail 90%+ of the current university students and likely destroy the entire industry as vast majority of the students providing their income stream are not nearly smart or conscientious enough to pass then.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
I think you should subtly start showing your wife some European news. Granted, almost every single Western European country's main media channels are state owned/controlled so bad stuff gets memory-holed or ignored a lot easier here. And often things just don't get translated to English by any reputable sources so can be conveniently ignored by right-minded English speakers. But still it doesn't take much to convey to her that a sizable portion of teenage girls in the English speaking country have been gang-raped rather recently with almost no intervention.
And just spend an afternoon investigating the average net salaries you could earn in a couple Euro capitals and browse websites for properties you could rent/buy with that money as other posters mentioned.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Anki is one of those things that I get excited for about 3 weeks every 3 years, start going over my abandoned vocabulary desks only to quickly give up again. I find the the mental effort simply too much and the whole thing rather too boring unfortunately.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Yes I am aware of that but one country having a slightly higher rate of a single metric really doesn’t indicate an evolutionary process
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
A lot of this doom rhetoric just assumes things like democracy (olds controlling politics), welfare state (olds sucking up resources) or even high life expectancies (olds living long beyond retirement) will keep up. If even a fraction of the predicted problems hit these countries, world will change way beyond our current comprehension and most of these things likely will stop being problems in the currently predicted ways.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
I keep seeing this heritability of fertility argument repeated especially with respect to France but is there any real evidence for it at all?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3mo ago
Legacy of Ashes: History of the CIA. While I am not super convinced the book gets every detail right, still a very interesting look into how total institutional failure and incompetence works when you also have almost total power to hide it and resist any correction efforts and infinite funds. I get out of it the impression that almost every successful CIA action either involves bribing allied country politicians or spying on Americans illegally
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3mo ago
I always assumed the career prospects weren’t that good since you often end up getting tied to one highly specialised machine/procedure of one company and then they have no incentive to pay you. Is this correct?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3mo ago
Border police is what happens when you have police with almost no checks. It’s often pure anarcho-tyranny for its own sake. You can wave through literal millions of third world immigrants enough to cause total demographic change. But as long as the police makes one random English backpacker suffer for minor procedural violations (and often not even that), everyone feels good.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3mo ago
This is a strange statement. German armies of 1914-45 were massive military overperformers who fought much better than almost all their enemies. The problem was that they kept taking on very powerful enemies and failed to sustain the military industrial base.
Very difficult to prove but I would be really surprised if many TAs and lecturers already didn't use LLMs to do some forms of assessment for them.
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