Posted by giuliomagnifico 1 day ago
Maybe she didn't want to bother other people by talking out loud to her phone.
It was garbage before LLMs got good, and the deep thinking models leapfrog whatever it used to be in its heydey.
"you should not google, you should use a web directory, you will get exposed to a more diverse set of sites, not just what google pre-digested for you"
"you should not google, you should go to a library and search in physical media instead, google is for lazy people who can't think for themselves"
Then it was Wikipedia. Since anyone could update it, anything on Wikipedia was suspect.
Now even though Claude seems smarter than any person I interact with on a daily basis, it is all suspect.
Then there is the opposite with arxiv. Anything on arxiv is not just true but has authority in an argument, automatically. Everything besides papers on reproducibility. Those are basically ignored.
Epistemology is not our strong point.
That... is definitely not my experience.
https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc5300/sc5339/...
2000: What? Use a Book for Doing Research? College Students Forsake Library Shelves for Computers
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2000/08/24/what...
2002:
> Point. Click. Think? > As Students Rely on the Internet for Research, Teachers Try to Warn of the Web's Snares > He doesn't consider visiting the campus library or opening a book. Why should he? "You can find whole pages of stuff you need to know on the Web, fast," he says.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2002/07/16/...
2003: Google in the Research and Teaching of Instruction Librarians
> The use of Google as a research tool is widespread among undergraduate students. > There are both librarians and faculty who express concern when Google is used for research and when it becomes a replacement for research tools accessible primarily through libraries.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00991...
Children probably use more critical thinking in the playground and interacting with other children than in class, because classwork is mostly slop anyway.
LLMs are not going to one shot answers in Minecraft through the chat UI. Possibly a more effective resource than checkbox activities at teaching "critical thinking" (abused term in education).
The reason I started those conversations was specifically around when children are learning critical thinking skills. When we broke down exactly what types of exercises teach those skills, it surprised me to find that it starts way earlier than it used to. It is now a late elementary school topic, when it used to be high school.
That doesn't mean that slop isn't creeping into the classroom - it is. But what to do about it is a completely different conversation when it is pushed down from on top vs. assuming teachers are choosing it.
I agree that districts do have a lot of pressure on teachers to keep pushing up test scores which leads them to being gamed either by teachers or children no matter the tools available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law