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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35502 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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ChatGPT will separate the wheat from the chaff. It will be perfect at imitating verbose yet ultimately uninteresting content, and woefully unable to imitate the most interesting yet poorly written paragraph of novel ideology or analysis. The construction of new ideology is a skill more similar to composing a compelling melody or profound counterpoint than what is ordinarily considered writing. The moment AI can replicate persuasive ideological writing is the moment it truly becomes our overlord.

agree. AI will not be able to replicate the nuance of the top authors/writers. It will always have a certain boringness, stiltedness, or genericness to it. It will read like something written by a low-paid Forbes contributor or something written for Investopedia. This may be good enough for search engine content, but will not fool discriminating readers.

It will always?

Caplan got shown up just today when he predicted that AI wouldn't get an A on his Economics mid-term exam before 2029. He made the prediction three months ago. https://twitter.com/finmoorhouse/status/1638221410328797186

I'm split on whether the best models can already replicate the 'nuance' of the top authors if you prompt-engineer them to do so. But I'm very confident that 'it will not do X by Y date' predictions are unwise.

The missing question here is; on what criteria does Caplan grade his papers?

The missing question here is; on what criteria does Caplan grade his papers?

It's all laid out here: https://betonit.substack.com/p/gpt-retakes-my-midterm-and-gets-an

It's all laid out here

I'm not even five sentences into the linked post and I have to ask, "since when has a 73% been enough to earn any student a fucking A?" What is Caplan doing? grading on a curve against illiterate morons? At the risk of leaning a bit too hard into my flair, back in my day (which was only ten years ago) 73 out of 100 would've barely earned a student a 'C'.

You know, I had kind of assumed that most of the stories about grade inflation were being over exaggerated but maybe I was wrong.

Well the mean is only 54% for this test! 6/20 students got an A which is too high IMO but not totally unreasonable.

Caplan is a harsh and petty marker IMO, so grades have to be proportionately more generous.

Sorry but these claims read to me as mutually exclusive, the guy can't be both a "a harsh and petty marker" and "giving out too many As".

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