Top
Best
New

Posted by tosh 2 days ago

Jane Street: Socratic Tutor(github.com)
351 points | 81 comments
Tar90 3 minutes ago|
I've been experimenting with a lot of these learning skills (see also, e.g., https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/blob/main/skills/produc..., which I think addresses the progress tracking part better than this skill) and they're great for getting simple answers, getting unstuck on exercises, getting some intuition through simulations, etc, but I still feel some more structure is needed for effective self-teaching. Has anyone tried using a hard book as a sort of course structure and asking the LLM to teach you through it? You could of course just read the book, but a lot of advanced subjects don't have great learning materials.
zkmon 5 hours ago||
This is really cool. I think we will see more of these, inching towards 'refined' thought and expression percolating from AI models into human minds.

I noticed that the quality of email text has gone up around my work these days. everyone is sounding like a master of drafting emails. Ofcourse Ai has a role in it. But real cool thing about this is, this is pulling up people's thinking to have a structure, minimalism and sequencing of expression. Same as how textile industry has enabled people to have an style and expression in clothing.

elcritch 2 hours ago||
> Same as how textile industry has enabled people to have an style and expression in clothing.

I'd tend to agree with what you said, except this part. Mass produced clothing is fantastic for many reasons, but not for style and expression. Look at the traditional clothing from almost any part of the world and it was gorgeous and colorful. Now it's all just a t-shirts.

zkmon 49 minutes ago|||
Before the stitching machine arrived in my village, all you can see was large rectangular pieces of cloths, delivered directly from the weaver craftsmen of the village, for men and women alike (only color difference - white for men and mostly dark green for women). The washermen still delivered clothes correctly across dozen's of families everyday, after washing. The famous Indian Saree is an example of unstitched clothing. Dhoti, lungi, turban and towel are other forms rectangular clothing.

People had cultivated an art in how the rectangular cloths are wrapped around them and they clothes are secured at their waist, or around their head. Talk to a Sikh or Afghan about turban.

ben_w 1 hour ago||||
> Look at the traditional clothing from almost any part of the world and it was gorgeous and colorful.

Was it?

There's a lot of survivorship bias in old things; we don't see the things which weren't recorded. Old things had their style, that much is unavoidable, but before mass production normal people inherited their clothes because it was just that hard to create.

Also, a lot of the pigments we take for granted today didn't exist at any price in the pre-industrial era, and some which did involved trekking to a mine in Afghanistan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarine

This also means (in general, not specifically clothing) a lot of "traditional" things are post-industrial recreations or re-imaginings of the past.

ineedaj0b 1 hour ago||
spoke to a clothing historian in Europe years ago. Pigments, shoes, and washing have improved… But all clothes being tailored and more craftsman made the experience better.

She said she’d only choose the modern era because of the washing machine.

williamdclt 2 hours ago||||
It was gorgeous and colourful, but highly impersonal. Traditional clothing, almost by definition, isn't really an enabler of personal style and expression. And you can't really compare traditional clothing to day-to-day clothing, these are entirely different purposes and codes.

Day-to-day clothing is definitely not "all just tshirts" nowadays, even in the mainstream. Women fashion is very varied, and while men's fashion is a lot poorer there's still a huge spectrum of expressive clothing that's available. I don't think personal style and expression has ever been as available and encouraged as it is today.

troupo 1 hour ago||
> It was gorgeous and colourful, but highly impersonal.

So is mass-produced clothing. Go into any store, and you will see the same shit with very few variations. For actual personality you have to search for niche/hand-made/small-productions etc.

jbjbjbjb 33 minutes ago|||
> textile industry has enabled people to have an style and expression in clothing

That’s a very good analogy!

Lithuanian 2 hours ago|||
It's not really good that email (and written content overall) quality has gone up. The problem is that there's tons of high quality content but no way to know which content is useful or good. Before we could know someone's personality from their style, now everyone's just wearing Balenciaga.
prolly97 5 hours ago|||
I love this positive take :)
iugtmkbdfil834 4 hours ago|||
And, hilariously, as an AI booster, I personally dislike it, because now everyone sounds like they have a PR company ( and the same PR company come to think of it ). It was bad before in corporate land, but the level of standardization for optimized response is aggravating to me, when I am simply trying to have a short conversation.

Case in point, I reached about syllabus to my kid's teacher. Long story short, email ended with their boss, who sent me long winding non-answer that I had to resist to not knock down.

I dunno, generic executive summaries can be canned, but I would like to hope I pay them enough for an person to person exchange.

Arkhaine_kupo 4 hours ago||
I have resorted to asking some people "just send me the prompt", like as messy as it might be, I will get the gist much faster than reading through Claudish or Gptinglsh which my eyes gloss over half the text
tarkin2 2 hours ago|||
If they are copying and pasting the answers and replies how will it "pull up people's thinking"?
ineedaj0b 1 hour ago|||
I have Ai read those emails and condense into one sentence summaries.

I’m not reading all that. I want one word answers.

Also noticed huge uptick in “call me” emails.

close04 3 hours ago|||
> everyone is sounding like a master of drafting emails

> this is pulling up people's thinking to have a structure, minimalism and sequencing of expression

I see the same for the former but the opposite on the latter. Everyone sounds like expert drafters because the AI is doing all of that.

True to the "use it or lose it" principle, the people's thinking skills about the emails have weakened. They rely on giving the AI some bits of info, a document they never read, some vague instructions, and the AI molds the message with structure and sequence. Then I get to experience live the joy of discussing with these people face to face and they still just spit out disparate bits of information with no fluid structure and sequence for the ideas because the only time they thought about the topic was when the AI wrote an email about it.

conartist6 2 hours ago||
[flagged]
Mikhail_Edoshin 5 hours ago||
Socratic questions are not asked blindly. They are meant to help the student to realize the incompleteness or falsety of what they think they know. That us, to realise they do not actually know something and thus put them into a position of not knowing, which is the only way to gain understanding.

One man said, that enlightement (as in Zen) cannot be faked. Whoever had it, will be able to tell if someone else had it or not. There is no way to merely sound like it. Socratic method is like enlightement.

awongh 11 minutes ago||
I think there could be some ways to fake this, using RAG or some other kind of agentic process, but in terms of the true meaning of the phrase, this is one of the things that is very far from being replaced by AI- an interaction between two people where a question that seems simple on the face of it is actually exactly what the learner needed to hear at the exact right time.

Very few teachers get to do this or are good enough, but it's just as much a question of relationships than anything else- how do you pose the exact right problem so that the learner can discover something for themselves.

zacian 3 hours ago|||
Socratic questioning needs a lot of thinking to arrive at the realization (and be able to accept it) that one has incomplete knowledge.

I think about this, whenever I have questions which are related to morality and how people act.

andai 2 hours ago|||
The problem is that everyone else can't tell, and that there's a lot of incentive to fake it. See Saints and Psychopaths by Hamilton.

I think this same phenomenon — faking competence, or good intentions — extends beyond spirituality as well.

fahrvrgnugen 3 hours ago||
[dead]
lemax 3 hours ago||
I’ve struggled to get AI to teach me things well without spilling hints or giving answers away. Assuming this was built on some solid evals this could be awesome.

> When the user is wrong, do not give the answer. Ask a narrower question that exposes the contradiction in their reasoning

vkgcr 2 hours ago||
It's a prompt - the LLM will always inevitably veer off path and stop following instructions / start hallucinating.
husseinhb 2 hours ago||
[dead]
koolba 2 hours ago||
This is a cool idea. Though trying this out using the claude CLI is kind of funny because by default it's suggestion for the next prompt is the answer to the question.
nathell 1 hour ago|
Indeed! To turn that off, open /config and turn off Prompt suggestions.
jan_m_savage 3 hours ago||
Oh this is so good. I asked it to teach me programming in Logo; though the model is not the best (GLM 4.7, on pi), the tutor is asking very good questions and is not too pedantic about exact answers.

For those new (beginners), install pi from pi.dev and then your favorite AI model (ask your model how to set up pi and it). Then ask your pi-based AI how to set up the tutor (just give it this link, it will set it up for you).

Then start pi by typing pi in the terminal; and to launch the tutor preface your question with: /skill:socratic-tutor. Like so:

/skill:socratic-tutor teach me Python.

genxy 4 hours ago||
Socratic tutoring is the first thing I did when ChatGPT first shipped. Your liberal arts education is a "huge unlock" if you just apply it.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning

Make your own custom skinner boxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

RugnirViking 2 hours ago|
its offtopic but that Programmed learning wikipedia article is really bad. It's clearly written by someone with personal stake in it and isn't remotely encyclopedic in tone.

Not sure what to do about it because I don't care enough to learn everything about this topic in order to fix it.

Imanari 4 hours ago||
Socratic tutoring with LLMs works great for me and I have used this skill and it also works great (can you do the same with a simple prompt? probably)

Using LLMs this way was really refreshing, I could really feel how I started to think on my own again.

pimeys 4 hours ago|
I also like this skill. It's one of the few I've used the longest: more than a year now which is a century in LLM years. Although you have to remember to ask the LLM to fill its context before starting the questions.

Especially nice when you are not so sure how something should look like, so it makes you stop and spend a few hours answering questions and thinking about what you want to do. Combine that with the RFC skill and you get a good basis for your feature and then a skill to split the RFC to issues on Linear.

arshxyz 4 hours ago||
Been using this with Opus 5.5 on Medium for a week or so. I've used the same model for learning before and I definitely prefer using this skill because it stops the model from the usual handholding. Although I'd say most of the effect can be replicated with this line: "When the user is wrong, do not give the answer. Ask a narrower question that exposes the contradiction in their reasoning."
orbis-tertius 2 days ago|
I love the idea but Jane Street might have copied (or independently rediscovered) https://github.com/bevibing/socrates-skill
beans6543 6 hours ago||
If you read them, the skills are completely different (with the Jane Street skill being more complex). Socratic questioning [0] is a well-known technique. Indeed, a Github search returns 92 repositories for "socratic tutor skill" [1], suggesting that the well-known technique has been added to LLM tools independently by many people.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning [1]: https://github.com/search?q=socratic+tutor+skill&type=reposi...

prolly97 5 hours ago|||
Yep - just looked at my projects in Claude, and my first "socratic tutor" was registered on 2nd of December 2024. I forget where I got the inspiration though (probably X)
vintermann 5 hours ago||||
Same with dialog-tuning in the first place. That you could manipulate the context of unicorn-text generators like GPT-2 in order to actually have something like a conversation with them, or that a model could generate "private thoughts" before answering, were ideas which weren't as self-evident as they seem now. But still ideas a lot of people had at the same time.
orbis-tertius 4 hours ago|||
Yes, the comment was intended as a playfully hyperbolic nod to the lack of novelty and originality in the idea, but I guess the intended tone didn't carry through :)
nimchimpsky 3 hours ago||
[dead]
More comments...