> the system loses legitimacy, defection becomes the dominant strategy.
Almost every sentence of this piece is a very powerful reminder that we're not really talking about education vs cheating and it's actually about real work vs optics, appearances vs reality, fake news vs information, and all the rest at the same time. A certain amount of bullshit is and always has been standard, and you see it in all kinds of folk wisdom (e.g. "the people capable of being politicians are the least qualified", "those who do not steal steal from themselves", "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"). But in a very short period of time, society itself has shifted away from rewarding real effort or real results almost everywhere.
I agree that game-theory is a pretty good way to understand it, but the conclusions are pretty dark. Defection as the only available strategy and equilibriums that add up to large-scale attractors that we maybe cannot escape.
In the Good Old Days, part of the role of a good education was to set oneself up to join influential social groups. These groups contained smart, interesting, learned people. They tacitly or overtly selected new members based on how smart, interesting, and learned they were. You can get the grades but remain excluded if your interviewer at Oxford or Harvard thinks you are boring, or the chaps at the Worcesthampton Natural History Club think you’re an uncouth moron, or the managing partner at Wasper & Vanderson LLP doesn’t find you engaging enough. It’s not just these posh elite groups either. Hacker cliques, artists communes, and the like have always focused on cultivating an elite membership on some axis or other through exclusivity that rewarded interestingness.
What is the equivalent nowadays? Are these groups being taken over by fakers who are constantly all pretending to each other, to the extent that the entire ranks fill up with people who can’t spell competence without a computer? If someone makes an interesting remark about a poet or artwork or engineering practice does everyone else excuse themselves for a bathroom break in order to open up Wikipedia and find something interesting to say in response?
Do they actively reward fakers, seeking out their ilk to the point that the most influential groups are the ones filled with the best self-promotion soloists? Or perhaps the whole ideal of influential social groups is just going to disappear?
Society is going to big on IRL communication and activity in my view. It's sort of like office work, anyone who has ever worked in large corporations can spot a faker a mile off. Some people who can wax lyrical nothingness in meetings they've prepared for etc. but grab them unprepared an the artifice is pretty clear. Same thing will happen in wider society because ultimately our existing filtering systems which were kind of outsourced to schools etc. are seemingly in the process of breaking down
Or, "the tide goes out, and reveals those who are skinny-dipping".
In this context, the crisis--brown-outs; natural disaster; political instability--will show who retains enough knowledge or hard-copy references and resources to survive.
I'd love to hear a good argument for optimism if you've got one. I suppose the pendulum thing works sometimes on certain timescales, but for a physical analogy "shit rolling downhill" might be more accurate. Typically doesn't roll back up and momentum builds. Just as "rich get richer" and inequality accelerates, so "bullshit makes bullshit" and things begin to spiral if truth / earnest effort is not even neutral, but now arguably a disadvantage as mentioned in TFA. Small course-corrections seem pretty rare in history or in nature without revolutions or catastrophe
When I joined workforce I was full of ideals "I'll meet smart people and together we'll build great technology for better future". That was silly. Once I started seeing workplace as a zero-sum game where the goal is to extract maximum money for minimal effort, I started winning.
You know, back in the day, teachers used to try and convey the "why" behind things like writing essays and reading books. Spark notes existed, but a good teacher could convey, hey, there is a reason we are doing this thing, it is because it has value outside the note that says you completed the task itself.
teachers still do this today. It's just that kids are less disciplined, and more prone to attention deficits. Not to mention that punishment for failure has been dulled down to almost non-existent. "No child left behind" had noble intentions, but the way it was implemented leaves much to be desired.
To me, the fix is to cure the lack of consequences in the outcome of cheating. If you're allowed to cheat in an exam (or not enforced), then obviously it's seen as an encouragement to cheat.
Bring back in-person, closed room, no calculator/phone exams, and these score determines your grade(s), rather than the teachers from the school.
> It's just that kids are less disciplined, and more prone to attention deficits.
I think this puts the blame too much on the kids. Its not their fault we've created a world where they are surrounded by dopamine treadmills.
I know you go on to say that we need to change their environment to solve the problem, and I wholeheartedly agree. I just wanted to point out that kids today are the victims in all this mess.
I think it's important to distinguish between actual learning (e.g. the "why") and learning to repeat magic words. A lot of school level tests involve prompting the student to repeat a magic word at the right time (e.g. "condensation") rather than actually understanding the underlying process.
They still do this. The difference is, in my experience, is that parents are totally cool with their kids cheating. I've overheard parents openly mention it at line-up at school.
Hate to say "back in my day" but even as a millennial raised by laid-back parents I'd have been in deep shit if I cheated.
This article isn't really about AI. It's about how this blogger doesn't value high-school education beyond it serving as a day-care. Talking about AI is for dressing this up as a controversial hot-take for click-bait.
The root of the flaw in this thinking is a common assumption that school is designed to create drones for the workforce rather than to round out human beings. Giving youth an opportunity to be a part of a shared understanding and a shared culture that is rooted in the history of the previous generations.
This kind of essay is on par with a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires. It's not doing us any favours because kids pick up on this disdain and make if part of their own identities.
I'm even more convinced by this when I look at other things this person has asked GPT to write for them. Their core focus is on convincing people not to value traditional education so that they can sell their own competing product.
I'm not convinced staying in classrooms from ages 16-22 is actually conducive to a well rounded citizenry. USA must have the highest proportion of 4 year graduates in the world and look where it's got us. It's just more time to grow into your cliques and push off the real world while "preparing for the real world"
Source: John Taylor Gatto, Jonathan Kozol, Ken Robinson to some extent.
When I was in university I went on a trip to Shanghai and met a woman my age who started her career at 14, she was global head of marketing while I was still trying to pass calculus...
> USA must have the highest proportion of 4 year graduates in the world and look where it's got us
It doesn't.
> look where it's got us
Richest nation on earth. To be fair that's as much tied to population size, resources, colonial-style capitalist exploitation as it is to American Exceptionalism and a good education system. And the US is suffering from a worsening wealth redistribution problem. But that's only going to be solved with more and better education not less.
> a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires
It's the dumbest thing for a culture to do to itself. I'm often so incredulous I want to believe it was actually done by soviet-bloc propaganda to undermine the west.
My entire (non American) education career was exam based. The exams were tightly supervised, no books etc. Every thing had to be memorised. Cheating was impossible.
Funny thing is, memorising something is a big help to understanding it.
In that system, AI is a very useful tool. AFAIK, this is how they still do it in many Asian countries.
It worked pretty well. Produced a lot of educated people.
Yes, same. We also had oral exams for particular subjects where you essentially had a discussion with a teacher or panel of teachers on a particular topic. All of that will eventually come back. I don't see how that doesnt come back as a normal thing in schools
This is a well-known concept called the "flipped classroom" and it works excellently. Because the time a student NEEDS a teacher the most is when they are actively struggling on a problem.
This is the correct answer and is being used by teacher friends of mine with great success.
The structure they chose is in-class work counts for 80%+ of their grade. All work in class is done with pencil & paper. Quite simple in fact to solve a large part of the homework cheating issue.
that does mean that there is less classroom time devoted to lecture or other activities though if the teacher is supervising drills and group work, but it might be the only realistic way to proceed
There seems to be a tacit premise here, that anything an LLM can do is meaningless as an exercise for a student, but that is simply not true, and if it were, it would likely be the case that we would soon run out of pedagogically-‘meaningful’ (by this standard) tasks (the author has no practical suggestions for how we could avoid this situation.)
Most western countries have somehow decided over the last couple decades that small negative actions should mostly be free of negative consequences.
You can cheat on tests, shoplift in stores, and pretty much nothing will happen to you.
When teachers can’t give failing grades to students or kick them out of their class for blatantly breaking the rules, this is what happens.
Meanwhile I took a language exam in Japan last weekend where a bunch of people got kicked out of the room - instant fail - for using their phone during the break when it was expressly disallowed (we had to put it in a sealed envelope that we couldn’t open until the exam was over, break included). Given reports I’ve heard, I suspect at least a single digit percent of test takers failed the test this session simply for breaking this rule.
From the test takers who got kicked out of the room and tried to negotiate (unsuccessfully) with the proctors, it was instantly obvious who came from cultures where the consequences of rules are carried out and who didn’t.
> Most western countries have somehow decided over the last couple decades that small negative actions should mostly be free of negative consequences.
There's a general loss of decorum, and it has such immense negative impact. There's so often someone acting like an animal on public transit, which is why many avoid it entirely.
just curious - if they went through the process of providing sealable bags and (I assume) verifying the bags were in fact sealed - why not go one step further and require the sealed phones to all be placed in a bucket which could then be taken to another room to ensure no access, and also no interruptions during the exam from a rogue ring or alarm?
Readit News
Almost every sentence of this piece is a very powerful reminder that we're not really talking about education vs cheating and it's actually about real work vs optics, appearances vs reality, fake news vs information, and all the rest at the same time. A certain amount of bullshit is and always has been standard, and you see it in all kinds of folk wisdom (e.g. "the people capable of being politicians are the least qualified", "those who do not steal steal from themselves", "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"). But in a very short period of time, society itself has shifted away from rewarding real effort or real results almost everywhere.
I agree that game-theory is a pretty good way to understand it, but the conclusions are pretty dark. Defection as the only available strategy and equilibriums that add up to large-scale attractors that we maybe cannot escape.
In the Good Old Days, part of the role of a good education was to set oneself up to join influential social groups. These groups contained smart, interesting, learned people. They tacitly or overtly selected new members based on how smart, interesting, and learned they were. You can get the grades but remain excluded if your interviewer at Oxford or Harvard thinks you are boring, or the chaps at the Worcesthampton Natural History Club think you’re an uncouth moron, or the managing partner at Wasper & Vanderson LLP doesn’t find you engaging enough. It’s not just these posh elite groups either. Hacker cliques, artists communes, and the like have always focused on cultivating an elite membership on some axis or other through exclusivity that rewarded interestingness.
What is the equivalent nowadays? Are these groups being taken over by fakers who are constantly all pretending to each other, to the extent that the entire ranks fill up with people who can’t spell competence without a computer? If someone makes an interesting remark about a poet or artwork or engineering practice does everyone else excuse themselves for a bathroom break in order to open up Wikipedia and find something interesting to say in response?
Do they actively reward fakers, seeking out their ilk to the point that the most influential groups are the ones filled with the best self-promotion soloists? Or perhaps the whole ideal of influential social groups is just going to disappear?
In this context, the crisis--brown-outs; natural disaster; political instability--will show who retains enough knowledge or hard-copy references and resources to survive.
Other comments suggest the same. Ironic, isn't it?
The city I once knew as home is teetering on the edge of radioactive oblivion.
A three-hundred thousand degree baptism by nuclear fire.
I’m not sorry, we had it coming.
A surge of white hot atonement will be our wakeup call.
Hope for our future is now a stillborn dream.
teachers still do this today. It's just that kids are less disciplined, and more prone to attention deficits. Not to mention that punishment for failure has been dulled down to almost non-existent. "No child left behind" had noble intentions, but the way it was implemented leaves much to be desired.
To me, the fix is to cure the lack of consequences in the outcome of cheating. If you're allowed to cheat in an exam (or not enforced), then obviously it's seen as an encouragement to cheat.
Bring back in-person, closed room, no calculator/phone exams, and these score determines your grade(s), rather than the teachers from the school.
I think this puts the blame too much on the kids. Its not their fault we've created a world where they are surrounded by dopamine treadmills.
I know you go on to say that we need to change their environment to solve the problem, and I wholeheartedly agree. I just wanted to point out that kids today are the victims in all this mess.
Hate to say "back in my day" but even as a millennial raised by laid-back parents I'd have been in deep shit if I cheated.
The root of the flaw in this thinking is a common assumption that school is designed to create drones for the workforce rather than to round out human beings. Giving youth an opportunity to be a part of a shared understanding and a shared culture that is rooted in the history of the previous generations.
This kind of essay is on par with a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires. It's not doing us any favours because kids pick up on this disdain and make if part of their own identities.
I'm even more convinced by this when I look at other things this person has asked GPT to write for them. Their core focus is on convincing people not to value traditional education so that they can sell their own competing product.
Source: John Taylor Gatto, Jonathan Kozol, Ken Robinson to some extent.
When I was in university I went on a trip to Shanghai and met a woman my age who started her career at 14, she was global head of marketing while I was still trying to pass calculus...
It doesn't.
> look where it's got us
Richest nation on earth. To be fair that's as much tied to population size, resources, colonial-style capitalist exploitation as it is to American Exceptionalism and a good education system. And the US is suffering from a worsening wealth redistribution problem. But that's only going to be solved with more and better education not less.
It's the dumbest thing for a culture to do to itself. I'm often so incredulous I want to believe it was actually done by soviet-bloc propaganda to undermine the west.
Funny thing is, memorising something is a big help to understanding it.
In that system, AI is a very useful tool. AFAIK, this is how they still do it in many Asian countries.
It worked pretty well. Produced a lot of educated people.
Not if you overfit the training set.
- when students come to the classroom, before assigning them work, have them place their cellphones at the teacher's table
- then give them homework, as simple as that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
The structure they chose is in-class work counts for 80%+ of their grade. All work in class is done with pencil & paper. Quite simple in fact to solve a large part of the homework cheating issue.
Deleted Comment
You can cheat on tests, shoplift in stores, and pretty much nothing will happen to you.
When teachers can’t give failing grades to students or kick them out of their class for blatantly breaking the rules, this is what happens.
Meanwhile I took a language exam in Japan last weekend where a bunch of people got kicked out of the room - instant fail - for using their phone during the break when it was expressly disallowed (we had to put it in a sealed envelope that we couldn’t open until the exam was over, break included). Given reports I’ve heard, I suspect at least a single digit percent of test takers failed the test this session simply for breaking this rule.
From the test takers who got kicked out of the room and tried to negotiate (unsuccessfully) with the proctors, it was instantly obvious who came from cultures where the consequences of rules are carried out and who didn’t.
There's a general loss of decorum, and it has such immense negative impact. There's so often someone acting like an animal on public transit, which is why many avoid it entirely.