> 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
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
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.
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 have a hard time blaming parents as well to be honest. Think about it this way, if you truly believe parents are disciplining children less, and doing a worse job of controlling their kids on average, why is that?
Is it because people just "aren't as good" now? Obviously not. I think the same environmental factors are at play on the parent's side as on the children's. We can throw our hands up and say "they should know better", but the fact remains that the incentives in our society are changing things for the worse.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'd love to hear how. I'm a firm believer in education, but saying we can fix the wealth gap by just educating our kids even more is like saying we can stop deforestation if only we had even sharper axes.
The wealthiest are the luckiest, but also the best at exploiting resources like an educated work force. I can't think of a single invention of our modern day that has lessened the wealth gap. (The last one that did was probably the guillotine, and even that was a small blip on the graph.) The latest invention AI, is only accelerating the widening of the gap, just like other inventions before it. Point being, just being smarter seems to only accelerate the gap, not fix it. Unless you know of some hidden inflection point coming up.
I do think having a good understanding of our political systems, etc is obviously important. And I suppose that would fall under the umbrella of education. But if we just pumped out more doctors, each doctor just gets a smaller slice of the doctor pie. Elon isn't magically going to get less money.
Well that and decades of being the only industrialized nation not carpet bombed in a world war we have been riding on that and being issuer the global reserve currency for decades.
Thanks for the correction, I was late night scrolling and didn't want to look it up, but looks like we're behind UAE, Ireland, Switzerland, Singapore, Belgium.
I do want to push back that higher level of education attained equates to universally better outcomes, because there's opportunity cost to being in school into your twenties, not becoming a taxpayer, getting deep into debt only to become underemployed. Again, people I've met who entered work at a young age are plenty intelligent and more skilled in their field than peers who went to grad school. I don't know that schools increase your intelligence, just your credentials.
> 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.)
I would like to point out two fundamental misconceptions towards the end of the article:
1. "AI is a filter. It strips away everything that can be automated, leaving only what requires actual thinking: creativity, collaboration, real-world problem-solving."
At any reasonable school-college level this is false. LLMs are perfectly fine replacing creative and collaborative aspects of work or study at intermediate levels. Yeah, they are unrealiable in results, but the participants don't care. LLMs produce data in shape of creative and collaborative work and that is enough to submit it.
What I mean by this, is when the house of cards will burn down (and it won't, because education is not a purpose of a school), it will also burn down creative training too.
2. Solving real/actual/applied/etc problem at the education facility of any level is nice and all (running business or solving community problems), but some studies just don't afford to be that "real" or "applied". All humanities, most of the harder STEM, etc. In USSR we had a whole separate class of higher-ed facilities, below universities called "technicums", which focused only on the applied knowledge. They were fine, but they definitely didn't fill all the demand.
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?
And who's liable if I pay a testing center to properly administer an important test that will heavily impact my future, and during such test a phone rings, another phone's alarm goes off, and another phone gets a series of audio notifications? - when the center could have simply taken all the phones to a another location until the conclusion of the test.
This is nonsense. School work is important. It isn't just teaching kids things, it's making them _practice thinking_.
I hate the classic question that often comes up in regard to math education, "When will I ever use this??"
The answer is simply that it makes them practice thinking. Human knowledge is transferable across domains. And practicing concentration and persistence is critical. Without these things, people can have all of the information in the world at their fingertips, but be completely unable to make reasoned decisions or continue to continue building new things upon the foundation that all of mankind has been building up diligently for millennia.
Don't let the kids cheat. Make them do their homework after hours in the library. Or the auditorium. Or the gym. Anywhere. Homework is supposed to be a couple of hours of "on your own" study after all, isn't it?
First of all, the entire post reads like it was written by AI.
Secondly, the author / prompter misses the point entirely with this closing paragraph:
> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters.
You learn fundamentals because they are necessary for you to understand how the magic works, and because that’s how the human brain works.
Is it important for you to be able to write a binary search algorithm perfectly from scratch? Not especially, no. Is it important for you to be able to describe what it’s doing, and why? Yes, very much so, because otherwise you won’t know when to use it.
If your rebuttal to this is “we can feed the problem to AI and let it figure that out,” I don’t want to live in that world; where curiosity and thought are cast aside in favor of faster results.
I was allowed to use a scientific calculator in all my high school math exams. My parents were shocked by this because it would've been considered cheating when they were in school.
Homework, exams, essays, assignments and so on are all tools designed to help students achieve learning outcomes. Those tools are becoming less effective due to the technology to which the students now have access.
Making adjustments to the educational tools makes more sense to me than banning the technology.
No, we should ban the technology, at least until we can somewhat verify the students understand the underlying concepts.
Like, yes, we allow calculators for highschoolers. But we'd never give a calculator to a 3rd grader learning their times tables. Because then they'd never learn that 9 * 9 is 49, and now they're permanently handicapped in math. And now, when they are in high school, the calculator doesn't even matter, because they can't do math at a basic level.
Or, consider reading. Certainly high schoolers can use audio books. But imagine if we didn't teach reading at all, and just used audio books, from kindergarten. Would anyone know how to read? I doubt it.
Learning is unique in that it builds on lower-level stuff. If you just skip that stuff, sure, it might look efficient - but it's not. You actually learn much less if you do that. It's not like me at my job, where if I use AI I finish a project in half the time and I'm better off. No, if I learn in half the time, I've learned less!
I know this will come across as a trope, but a calculator doesn’t seem to me to be at the same level as AI in most circumstances.
If we’re talking about grade school children who are learning multiplication, then yes, a calculator is unhelpful to their education. If we’re talking about a high school physics exam, it probably doesn’t matter if you can show your work on converting units so much as it does that you knew which formulae to use.
I think it's easy to say this now, because calculator technology is ubiquitous, assessment methods have been adapted to account for calculator use, and we now have multiple generations of adults who used calculators in schools as students.
And yet the debate on calculator use in schools raged for a good 40 years or so before it quietened down - only to be replaced a short decade or two later by AI cheating.
> If we’re talking about grade school children who are learning multiplication, then yes, a calculator is unhelpful to their education.
Why not just let it be survival of the fittest? Those who are lazy will continue to be lazy. Those who are determined will continue to be determined. We don't need to help everyone, especially those who don't want to help themselves. If they want to suffer financially in the future because they are being lazy now, oh well, it can't be helped.
This. Technology tends to increase the value of capital and not the value of labor, at least that has been the pattern for the last 50+ years. Take that trend to its conclusion and merit is crushed under the weight of who your parents are.
Real wages are effectively unchanged since 1970 [0]. So, either technology hasn't advanced enough to make people more productive, or technology hasn't increased the value of labor. One of the two has to be true.
Note on the above, be weary of data that starts ~1980 since that was a deeply recessionary period. Lots of information likes to use that period as the origin since it makes it look like real wages have increased. During 1970 to 1980 there was a steep decline in real wages.
Because we live in a society, and all of us suffer if the average worker and citizen falls significantly in their competence and understanding of the world.
I think there must be a different angle to win this game.
If you play fairly, the skills and knowledge you learned are truly yours. But if you are outsourcing all your proficiencies to an AI, than what will become of you?
Kids want to be cool unique snowflakes, if one can master a skill without the resorting to cheating, one will gain the ability to impress the peers.
You'd hope AI would be used more to support children and teach them. Can you imagine a patient teacher who's available 24/7? I actually ask LLMs to teach me stuff sometimes, and it does work, but... early days.
This article doesn’t really jive with me. Homework is more about spaced repetition and the discipline to do it. The notion that it is about writing an insightful essay with a novel interpretation of an already well trodden topic is overly dramatic. Maybe that’s truly what happens at Ivy Academy but most of the children around me are filling in the blanks to conjugate verbs, practicing cursive, or doing some other variation of 10 - catpaw = 7? drill*.
At some point these kids will be faced with a timed pen-and-paper exam. The earlier you can show them what that’s like and how one needs to prepare for it the better.
On the other hand, I taught high school CS that was assessed solely with terminal examination. If you’re managing pupils whose mark comes from papers they write at home I concede the article’s point entirely!
> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student? And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters.
While this might be more true of "factoid based classes" (such as geography) - it completely misses the point of subjects where students actively benefit from struggling through the act of the craft itself. (writing, music, foreign languages, etc.)
> students actively benefit from struggling through the act of the craft itself.
Hard agree! Although I'm biased as a foreign language teacher :)
Geography is a great example actually because it can be "factoid based" or it could be based on investigation. Off the top of my head, students could make rivers through sandpits to investigate erosion. Hopefully AI inspires a change to the latter approach.
I often see people online saying "We were never taught this in school!" as if the point in education is to memorize all the factoids. But we should be teaching people how to do experiments, look things up and apply critical thinking.
Memorizing things, like place names, creates places in the brain to hang new information. New unknowns to pick at. Things other than how to get better at fortnite.
> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?
The purpose of an assignment is to give the student problems that can be solved by applying the knowledge and techniques they were taught in class, so that the student can gain experience using that knowledge and those techniques and demonstrate that they have done so to the teacher.
before you can work on unique problems, you need to learn to solve problems that have already been solved. the problem then is that if a problem has already been solved, AI has been trained with the solution and is able to reproduce it.
think about it this way: any question or task you give to a student that is similar to a question or task that you gave students a year earlier, can be solved by applying the solutions collected from the previous year. and if that is the case, then a machine can solve those tasks too.
the amount of effort needed to design questions and tasks so that a machine can not solve them is way to big to be realistic for any subjects that are not novel. which is everything you learn in school.
> “The work must be something the child feels is worth doing.”
Schools forgot and flipped that.
That’s a nice premise, but it seems the author imply the school has to come up with some idealized activity that would magically kids teach kid reading, writing or doing maths problems without really doing it, because it’s supposedly boring.
But in reality at one point kids have to acquire the love for these, that they are worth doing and rewarding for the sake of it.
So my (maybe unpopular) opinion is that the author is part of the problem. Because the root cause is that it’s parents, not school and teachers, that forgot it’s their role to nurture their kids into this. I’m not blaming parents for the multiple complex reasons they aren’t doing it, but it’s time we stop putting everything on teachers.
> To be clear, I’m not advocating for AI in real learning. AI is only useful right now as a stress test as it reveals how hollow adolescent work has become. If it pushes schools toward offering work with relevance, impact, and agency and away from hopeless busywork (“When will I ever use this?”), that is a win.
But how will they ever know that if they don’t go through the process? I am not saying the current way of teaching is perfect but you can’t tell what is and isn’t bullshit without some experience at some point.
We had a mandatory home economics class that taught how to balance a check book, cook, do laundry, and even how taxes worked. Yet people still thought that class was bullshit and a waste of time. Many classes such as health, gym, shop, a/v, typing, all had people blowing it off as useless stuff they will never need to know. ChatGPT turning every class into that is a nightmare future for the youth of the world. People will grow up entirely unable to think.
> We had a mandatory home economics class that taught how to balance a check book, cook, do laundry, and even how taxes worked. Yet people still thought that class was bullshit and a waste of time.
Sounds about right. This author is talking about whether the kids think the material is important as if kids have good judgement and can be trusted. But that obviously is not the case. Kids are overconfident and ignorant and have no basis at all to determine what is and isn't good learning for them.
Given that I worked with people well before the advent of LLMs who had no idea how marginal tax rates worked, it seems like we should be more aggressively pursuing this as an educational goal.
This writing an essay / writing a paper obsession doesn't make any sense to me. All American kids are always "writing a paper" on something. I never wrote a paper on anything of significance. If this constant writing of papers had a great effect, you'd expect me to perform at the 50th percentile or lower of people. But my income has always been much higher than that, I'd say I write more blog posts than the 50th percentile (the quality of which might suffer from the lack of paper-writing, one might claim), and I'd rate my life at much higher than the 50th percentile.
My parents took a different tack, and insisted that I spend my time reading, playing, or doing something. I spent very little time on homework because my parents negotiated this with the school. My school scored us entirely on exams, which I performed well on - just as I did well on the GRE to come here.
By the pedagogical standards of America, this must mean that I was atrociously educated. Why then am I happy and successful here? I suspect it is because paper-writing is a waste of time. I suspect that almost all education comes from solving the unknown related to the known (exercises), repeating the known (revision), and introduction of model-breaking notions (for which I don't have a short word). Even literary criticism would probably benefit from this structure.
This, along with the religion of note-taking[0], has made me suspect that US pedagogy is not particularly well-informed. The higher-education system is obviously superlative, but the teaching of children seems pretty haphazardly determined.
It is not a spiral. The connection from "Engagement drops even further" to "AI gets better, harder to detect" doesn't make sense. It's not related.
I agree that AI drags down the education, but it doesn't have to be (and it is not) a spiral. To be credible and prevent false slop smell, please use proper narrative frameworks.
The learning is the point. Learning by nature shouldn't be optimized for efficiency. You learn deeply when you have to read sources, draw conclusions, synthesize information, and connect it to your own experiences. I recall writing essays in grade school and what mattered wasn't the end product but the process to arrive at the end product. The hours of research and analysis... figuring out what was true and what was questionable. When you skip steps 1-10 and arrive at the final deliverable a la ChatGPT, you miss the entire point of the assignment. Unfortunately, students are only judged on the final deliverable.
Truly, I think the only way we get back to real learning is through paper and pencil. The problem is that we've optimized our systems for learning efficiency, not learning efficacy.
Execution is the point for the vast majority of the population, and academia has always been tone deaf to the raison d'etre of their enrollment base. people are there for jobs, academia is aware they are there for jobs, academia pretends they are the elite socioeconomic class there for knowledge and networking or on the path to be. they are not, they are an underclass in a world where it was temporarily beneficial for a broad population to be knowledge workers. A brief half century that caused all problems that academia faces today.
A half century that will be a footnote in the millenium of these institutions as a reversion to total class segregation returns, glasses clinking to laughs over this case study of folly.
Now, we're experiencing the industrialization of knowledge work, a segment that has been spared for 260 years of the industrial revolution. The nihilism is entirely warranted, and those validating the output of agents should remain specialized in their domain, trained by niche organizations on an adhoc basis via apprenticeships.
academia is for research, not for jobs. our obsession with academic degrees is an abuse of the academic system. it is used as a tool to filter candidates, but in my opinion it should actually be illegal to require an academic degree for any job that isn't about research. that's not what academic degrees were designed for. academia isn't tone deaf, it's the industry that is misguided.
germany introduced the concept of fachhochschule, which is specifically designed to fill that gap. fachhochschule is not academia, but it is designed to teach skills for jobs. the US could do something similar by designating colleges for jobs and limiting universities to research. an institution could offer both on the same campus, and there could be overlap in the classes. it just should be clear what is a job qualification and what is a research qualification.
Not sure about kids these days but as an adult I find the LLMs very good for education - you can ask pretty much anything and get a good answer, often with links to youtube lectures.
Re stopping cheating, just give them proper exams like we've had since time immemorial.
This is just another aspect of the failure to foster a positive society. The rich who are balls deep in AI don't give a fuck about what happens at a societal level. They want numbers to go up and the result is dumb people in charge of things they shouldn't be in charge of.
Learning skills are hard. Learning to add numbers requires drills. Learning to read big books is hard. There's no getting around that except that some students are intrinsically motivated, but all of them need to learn to read, write, and calculate and hopefully do so with meaningful and accurate information.
It's just so... AI. If the author wanted to make a pro-AI-writing point, maybe they shouldn't have let the AI start their essay with the exact AI grammar we're all exhausted having to read every day.
> 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.
Brilliantly said.
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
I disagree about your final conclusion. To add another aphorism to your collection, "The pendulum always swings back".
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
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.
From that one quote alone you can likely tell this was written by AI.
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.
yeah the real war is between people who do useful stuff and the trillion dollar industry which means to displace them.
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.
That’s the sort of winner mentality America needs much much more of.
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.
> back in the day...
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.
> puts the blame too much on the kids.
kinda, but i would say it's more a blame on the parents. They need to be able to control, and discipline their kids - ala, raising them properly.
I have a hard time blaming parents as well to be honest. Think about it this way, if you truly believe parents are disciplining children less, and doing a worse job of controlling their kids on average, why is that?
Is it because people just "aren't as good" now? Obviously not. I think the same environmental factors are at play on the parent's side as on the children's. We can throw our hands up and say "they should know better", but the fact remains that the incentives in our society are changing things for the worse.
Back in the day when teachers’ salary can support a family I bet
Teachers salaries were never super amazing. Experienced teachers probably could, but it did take a good 10-15 years to get there.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'd love to hear how. I'm a firm believer in education, but saying we can fix the wealth gap by just educating our kids even more is like saying we can stop deforestation if only we had even sharper axes.
The wealthiest are the luckiest, but also the best at exploiting resources like an educated work force. I can't think of a single invention of our modern day that has lessened the wealth gap. (The last one that did was probably the guillotine, and even that was a small blip on the graph.) The latest invention AI, is only accelerating the widening of the gap, just like other inventions before it. Point being, just being smarter seems to only accelerate the gap, not fix it. Unless you know of some hidden inflection point coming up.
I do think having a good understanding of our political systems, etc is obviously important. And I suppose that would fall under the umbrella of education. But if we just pumped out more doctors, each doctor just gets a smaller slice of the doctor pie. Elon isn't magically going to get less money.
Well that and decades of being the only industrialized nation not carpet bombed in a world war we have been riding on that and being issuer the global reserve currency for decades.
more than just carpet bombing -- the nukes, the genocides, the Communist purges before (USSR) and after (Red China)
all advanced countries basically got slaughtered to varying degrees and the US saw no real systemic damage and comparatively light levels of dead.
it's like if all of NATO and the Asian Tigers collapsed today except for China -- already a dominant player they jump to superpower status
Thanks for the correction, I was late night scrolling and didn't want to look it up, but looks like we're behind UAE, Ireland, Switzerland, Singapore, Belgium.
I do want to push back that higher level of education attained equates to universally better outcomes, because there's opportunity cost to being in school into your twenties, not becoming a taxpayer, getting deep into debt only to become underemployed. Again, people I've met who entered work at a young age are plenty intelligent and more skilled in their field than peers who went to grad school. I don't know that schools increase your intelligence, just your credentials.
> 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
What, you never went for a bathroom break and perused the slick in your pocket while there?
... memorising something is a big help to understanding it.
Not if you overfit the training set.
- the solution is very simple, stop giving homework completely
- 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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
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.)
exactly, i just explained this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226251
I would like to point out two fundamental misconceptions towards the end of the article:
1. "AI is a filter. It strips away everything that can be automated, leaving only what requires actual thinking: creativity, collaboration, real-world problem-solving."
At any reasonable school-college level this is false. LLMs are perfectly fine replacing creative and collaborative aspects of work or study at intermediate levels. Yeah, they are unrealiable in results, but the participants don't care. LLMs produce data in shape of creative and collaborative work and that is enough to submit it.
What I mean by this, is when the house of cards will burn down (and it won't, because education is not a purpose of a school), it will also burn down creative training too.
2. Solving real/actual/applied/etc problem at the education facility of any level is nice and all (running business or solving community problems), but some studies just don't afford to be that "real" or "applied". All humanities, most of the harder STEM, etc. In USSR we had a whole separate class of higher-ed facilities, below universities called "technicums", which focused only on the applied knowledge. They were fine, but they definitely didn't fill all the demand.
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?
this would likely make the test administrators liable if any of the phones went missing.
And who's liable if I pay a testing center to properly administer an important test that will heavily impact my future, and during such test a phone rings, another phone's alarm goes off, and another phone gets a series of audio notifications? - when the center could have simply taken all the phones to a another location until the conclusion of the test.
Discipline is the test.
I'm looking forward to the day a student accidentally turns in a solution to P vs NP and nobody realizes it for months because nobody is doing work.
Maybe that’ll be when AI starts testing us
This is nonsense. School work is important. It isn't just teaching kids things, it's making them _practice thinking_.
I hate the classic question that often comes up in regard to math education, "When will I ever use this??"
The answer is simply that it makes them practice thinking. Human knowledge is transferable across domains. And practicing concentration and persistence is critical. Without these things, people can have all of the information in the world at their fingertips, but be completely unable to make reasoned decisions or continue to continue building new things upon the foundation that all of mankind has been building up diligently for millennia.
Don't let the kids cheat. Make them do their homework after hours in the library. Or the auditorium. Or the gym. Anywhere. Homework is supposed to be a couple of hours of "on your own" study after all, isn't it?
First of all, the entire post reads like it was written by AI.
Secondly, the author / prompter misses the point entirely with this closing paragraph:
> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters.
You learn fundamentals because they are necessary for you to understand how the magic works, and because that’s how the human brain works.
Is it important for you to be able to write a binary search algorithm perfectly from scratch? Not especially, no. Is it important for you to be able to describe what it’s doing, and why? Yes, very much so, because otherwise you won’t know when to use it.
If your rebuttal to this is “we can feed the problem to AI and let it figure that out,” I don’t want to live in that world; where curiosity and thought are cast aside in favor of faster results.
I was allowed to use a scientific calculator in all my high school math exams. My parents were shocked by this because it would've been considered cheating when they were in school.
Homework, exams, essays, assignments and so on are all tools designed to help students achieve learning outcomes. Those tools are becoming less effective due to the technology to which the students now have access.
Making adjustments to the educational tools makes more sense to me than banning the technology.
No, we should ban the technology, at least until we can somewhat verify the students understand the underlying concepts.
Like, yes, we allow calculators for highschoolers. But we'd never give a calculator to a 3rd grader learning their times tables. Because then they'd never learn that 9 * 9 is 49, and now they're permanently handicapped in math. And now, when they are in high school, the calculator doesn't even matter, because they can't do math at a basic level.
Or, consider reading. Certainly high schoolers can use audio books. But imagine if we didn't teach reading at all, and just used audio books, from kindergarten. Would anyone know how to read? I doubt it.
Learning is unique in that it builds on lower-level stuff. If you just skip that stuff, sure, it might look efficient - but it's not. You actually learn much less if you do that. It's not like me at my job, where if I use AI I finish a project in half the time and I'm better off. No, if I learn in half the time, I've learned less!
I know this will come across as a trope, but a calculator doesn’t seem to me to be at the same level as AI in most circumstances.
If we’re talking about grade school children who are learning multiplication, then yes, a calculator is unhelpful to their education. If we’re talking about a high school physics exam, it probably doesn’t matter if you can show your work on converting units so much as it does that you knew which formulae to use.
I think it's easy to say this now, because calculator technology is ubiquitous, assessment methods have been adapted to account for calculator use, and we now have multiple generations of adults who used calculators in schools as students.
And yet the debate on calculator use in schools raged for a good 40 years or so before it quietened down - only to be replaced a short decade or two later by AI cheating.
> If we’re talking about grade school children who are learning multiplication, then yes, a calculator is unhelpful to their education.
FWIW, research doesn't support this:
https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/INFORMIT.46244543468...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42802150?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:176139
> it would've been considered cheating when they were in school.
Doubt. What field of study?
The predominant calculation helper was slide rules, which were allowed in engineering exams in the 60s and 70s.
Besides, in engineering you had to show all of your work and that had a large impact on the grade you got.
I said high school.
I agree, by this argument why teach any child 2+2? This has been performed perfectly by computers for years.
>I don’t want to live in that world; where curiosity and thought are cast aside in favor of faster results.
To be fair, we, all of us, have been living in that world for quite some time now. Not really sure how we'd ever slow down our advance down that road?
Why not just let it be survival of the fittest? Those who are lazy will continue to be lazy. Those who are determined will continue to be determined. We don't need to help everyone, especially those who don't want to help themselves. If they want to suffer financially in the future because they are being lazy now, oh well, it can't be helped.
The lazy and stupid but rich will out-survive the industrious and smart but poor.
This. Technology tends to increase the value of capital and not the value of labor, at least that has been the pattern for the last 50+ years. Take that trend to its conclusion and merit is crushed under the weight of who your parents are.
I don’t agree. Technology simply amplifies your talents.
Real wages are effectively unchanged since 1970 [0]. So, either technology hasn't advanced enough to make people more productive, or technology hasn't increased the value of labor. One of the two has to be true.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
Note on the above, be weary of data that starts ~1980 since that was a deeply recessionary period. Lots of information likes to use that period as the origin since it makes it look like real wages have increased. During 1970 to 1980 there was a steep decline in real wages.
Because we live in a society, and all of us suffer if the average worker and citizen falls significantly in their competence and understanding of the world.
Because children need to be disciplined. That's part of education and parenting.
Because we’re not wild animals.
I think there must be a different angle to win this game.
If you play fairly, the skills and knowledge you learned are truly yours. But if you are outsourcing all your proficiencies to an AI, than what will become of you?
Kids want to be cool unique snowflakes, if one can master a skill without the resorting to cheating, one will gain the ability to impress the peers.
Push in that direction.
You'd hope AI would be used more to support children and teach them. Can you imagine a patient teacher who's available 24/7? I actually ask LLMs to teach me stuff sometimes, and it does work, but... early days.
This article doesn’t really jive with me. Homework is more about spaced repetition and the discipline to do it. The notion that it is about writing an insightful essay with a novel interpretation of an already well trodden topic is overly dramatic. Maybe that’s truly what happens at Ivy Academy but most of the children around me are filling in the blanks to conjugate verbs, practicing cursive, or doing some other variation of 10 - catpaw = 7? drill*.
At some point these kids will be faced with a timed pen-and-paper exam. The earlier you can show them what that’s like and how one needs to prepare for it the better.
On the other hand, I taught high school CS that was assessed solely with terminal examination. If you’re managing pupils whose mark comes from papers they write at home I concede the article’s point entirely!
* catpaw = 3
From the article:
> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student? And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters.
While this might be more true of "factoid based classes" (such as geography) - it completely misses the point of subjects where students actively benefit from struggling through the act of the craft itself. (writing, music, foreign languages, etc.)
> students actively benefit from struggling through the act of the craft itself.
Hard agree! Although I'm biased as a foreign language teacher :)
Geography is a great example actually because it can be "factoid based" or it could be based on investigation. Off the top of my head, students could make rivers through sandpits to investigate erosion. Hopefully AI inspires a change to the latter approach.
I often see people online saying "We were never taught this in school!" as if the point in education is to memorize all the factoids. But we should be teaching people how to do experiments, look things up and apply critical thinking.
Memorizing things, like place names, creates places in the brain to hang new information. New unknowns to pick at. Things other than how to get better at fortnite.
College prestige locks people into life dependent paths, and needs to go away
> The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?
The purpose of an assignment is to give the student problems that can be solved by applying the knowledge and techniques they were taught in class, so that the student can gain experience using that knowledge and those techniques and demonstrate that they have done so to the teacher.
before you can work on unique problems, you need to learn to solve problems that have already been solved. the problem then is that if a problem has already been solved, AI has been trained with the solution and is able to reproduce it.
think about it this way: any question or task you give to a student that is similar to a question or task that you gave students a year earlier, can be solved by applying the solutions collected from the previous year. and if that is the case, then a machine can solve those tasks too.
the amount of effort needed to design questions and tasks so that a machine can not solve them is way to big to be realistic for any subjects that are not novel. which is everything you learn in school.
> “The work must be something the child feels is worth doing.” Schools forgot and flipped that.
That’s a nice premise, but it seems the author imply the school has to come up with some idealized activity that would magically kids teach kid reading, writing or doing maths problems without really doing it, because it’s supposedly boring.
But in reality at one point kids have to acquire the love for these, that they are worth doing and rewarding for the sake of it.
So my (maybe unpopular) opinion is that the author is part of the problem. Because the root cause is that it’s parents, not school and teachers, that forgot it’s their role to nurture their kids into this. I’m not blaming parents for the multiple complex reasons they aren’t doing it, but it’s time we stop putting everything on teachers.
> To be clear, I’m not advocating for AI in real learning. AI is only useful right now as a stress test as it reveals how hollow adolescent work has become. If it pushes schools toward offering work with relevance, impact, and agency and away from hopeless busywork (“When will I ever use this?”), that is a win.
But how will they ever know that if they don’t go through the process? I am not saying the current way of teaching is perfect but you can’t tell what is and isn’t bullshit without some experience at some point.
We had a mandatory home economics class that taught how to balance a check book, cook, do laundry, and even how taxes worked. Yet people still thought that class was bullshit and a waste of time. Many classes such as health, gym, shop, a/v, typing, all had people blowing it off as useless stuff they will never need to know. ChatGPT turning every class into that is a nightmare future for the youth of the world. People will grow up entirely unable to think.
> We had a mandatory home economics class that taught how to balance a check book, cook, do laundry, and even how taxes worked. Yet people still thought that class was bullshit and a waste of time.
Sounds about right. This author is talking about whether the kids think the material is important as if kids have good judgement and can be trusted. But that obviously is not the case. Kids are overconfident and ignorant and have no basis at all to determine what is and isn't good learning for them.
> how taxes worked
Given that I worked with people well before the advent of LLMs who had no idea how marginal tax rates worked, it seems like we should be more aggressively pursuing this as an educational goal.
Last I checked only about half of US adults understand how marginal income tax rates work.
> If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?
By that logic now that text to speech has gotten quite good we should stop teaching kids to read.
IMO the students are way ahead already. If they have no chance of making a life for themselves why continue with the whole song and dance.
Many of my university classmates would give up on more than one paragraph so I'd say we're already there.
This writing an essay / writing a paper obsession doesn't make any sense to me. All American kids are always "writing a paper" on something. I never wrote a paper on anything of significance. If this constant writing of papers had a great effect, you'd expect me to perform at the 50th percentile or lower of people. But my income has always been much higher than that, I'd say I write more blog posts than the 50th percentile (the quality of which might suffer from the lack of paper-writing, one might claim), and I'd rate my life at much higher than the 50th percentile.
My parents took a different tack, and insisted that I spend my time reading, playing, or doing something. I spent very little time on homework because my parents negotiated this with the school. My school scored us entirely on exams, which I performed well on - just as I did well on the GRE to come here.
By the pedagogical standards of America, this must mean that I was atrociously educated. Why then am I happy and successful here? I suspect it is because paper-writing is a waste of time. I suspect that almost all education comes from solving the unknown related to the known (exercises), repeating the known (revision), and introduction of model-breaking notions (for which I don't have a short word). Even literary criticism would probably benefit from this structure.
This, along with the religion of note-taking[0], has made me suspect that US pedagogy is not particularly well-informed. The higher-education system is obviously superlative, but the teaching of children seems pretty haphazardly determined.
0: I've always hated note-taking. I'm glad to have found at least some others on HN like me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640454
It is not a spiral. The connection from "Engagement drops even further" to "AI gets better, harder to detect" doesn't make sense. It's not related.
I agree that AI drags down the education, but it doesn't have to be (and it is not) a spiral. To be credible and prevent false slop smell, please use proper narrative frameworks.
Big swing and a miss by the author here.
The learning is the point. Learning by nature shouldn't be optimized for efficiency. You learn deeply when you have to read sources, draw conclusions, synthesize information, and connect it to your own experiences. I recall writing essays in grade school and what mattered wasn't the end product but the process to arrive at the end product. The hours of research and analysis... figuring out what was true and what was questionable. When you skip steps 1-10 and arrive at the final deliverable a la ChatGPT, you miss the entire point of the assignment. Unfortunately, students are only judged on the final deliverable.
Truly, I think the only way we get back to real learning is through paper and pencil. The problem is that we've optimized our systems for learning efficiency, not learning efficacy.
> The learning is the point.
Execution is the point for the vast majority of the population, and academia has always been tone deaf to the raison d'etre of their enrollment base. people are there for jobs, academia is aware they are there for jobs, academia pretends they are the elite socioeconomic class there for knowledge and networking or on the path to be. they are not, they are an underclass in a world where it was temporarily beneficial for a broad population to be knowledge workers. A brief half century that caused all problems that academia faces today.
A half century that will be a footnote in the millenium of these institutions as a reversion to total class segregation returns, glasses clinking to laughs over this case study of folly.
Now, we're experiencing the industrialization of knowledge work, a segment that has been spared for 260 years of the industrial revolution. The nihilism is entirely warranted, and those validating the output of agents should remain specialized in their domain, trained by niche organizations on an adhoc basis via apprenticeships.
academia is for research, not for jobs. our obsession with academic degrees is an abuse of the academic system. it is used as a tool to filter candidates, but in my opinion it should actually be illegal to require an academic degree for any job that isn't about research. that's not what academic degrees were designed for. academia isn't tone deaf, it's the industry that is misguided.
germany introduced the concept of fachhochschule, which is specifically designed to fill that gap. fachhochschule is not academia, but it is designed to teach skills for jobs. the US could do something similar by designating colleges for jobs and limiting universities to research. an institution could offer both on the same campus, and there could be overlap in the classes. it just should be clear what is a job qualification and what is a research qualification.
Not sure about kids these days but as an adult I find the LLMs very good for education - you can ask pretty much anything and get a good answer, often with links to youtube lectures.
Re stopping cheating, just give them proper exams like we've had since time immemorial.
"If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?"
This is Idiocracy in the making.
This is just another aspect of the failure to foster a positive society. The rich who are balls deep in AI don't give a fuck about what happens at a societal level. They want numbers to go up and the result is dumb people in charge of things they shouldn't be in charge of.
Learning skills are hard. Learning to add numbers requires drills. Learning to read big books is hard. There's no getting around that except that some students are intrinsically motivated, but all of them need to learn to read, write, and calculate and hopefully do so with meaningful and accurate information.
children now don't have to work hard, but they're precious because no one is having children in the educated world.
> X didn't.
> Y did.
> And that might be...
It's just so... AI. If the author wanted to make a pro-AI-writing point, maybe they shouldn't have let the AI start their essay with the exact AI grammar we're all exhausted having to read every day.
>AI is a filter.
>It strips away everything that can be automated, leaving only what requires actual thinking: creativity, collaboration, real-world problem-solving.
This is rich coming from an article written by AI instructed to SEO it to the moon.