Microblog Memes

Typically, when I want to demonstrate the full breadth of my mastery of the ethos/logos complex to an authority figure, I mostly talk about orthogonal relativity and how it is möbiation of entanglement within our topological matrix that gives rise to higher order thinking, like ordering breadsticks at Arby's.

Synthesis: Learning is a mistake, return to ignorance, just figure stuff.

Think about it, do you really think it's a coincidence that all major religions reject asking questions??

How is anyone using ChatGPT in an exam? Surely exams are taken in controlled conditions?

Say John is a student in med school. As a professor, I want to know if John truly understands everything he has been taught. I can do this one of two ways:

1. I can give John a difficult exam.
2. I can send John to the Emergency Room in the hospital and see if he saves lives or kills people.

Number 2 is obviously a much more accurate way to determine what John has learned. It's much harder for him to cheat that assessment. It's a real-world scenario instead of some words on a page. The only slight drawback is that people might die if John didn't study hard enough. It's going to be essential to eventually do number 2, but it's probably better to do number 1 first.

A while ago I took a course in teaching English to adults. One of the things they talked about is assessments. They talked about restricted vs. freer questions. A restricted question might be a true/false question, or a multiple choice question. A freer question might be an essay type question. There's a lot of value in restricted questions even if sometimes a student can get them right just by flipping a coin or guessing. The value is that they can help focus in on areas of difficulty, like verb tenses, spelling, etc. An essay type question tests them differently, but it's still an artificial construct. Even a no time limit, open book test isn't assessing a student's performance in the real world.

Tests and homework may be annoying, and they're not foolproof, but they're very useful tools for a teacher to assess progress in learning. People cheat on them because we don't know of a way of assessing learning in a way that's fun without demanding way too much of the teacher.

Also, the whole format of this argument is stupid:

Thesis: forklifts are capable of lifting heavy weights, and supposed weightlifters are using forklifts instead of lifting weights.

Antithesis: forklifts do not have muscles.

Synthesis: lifting weights does not develop muscles.

Humans are not LLMs. Just because an LLM can give the correct answers for a test without understanding anything doesn't mean that a human can also pass that test without understanding what's on it.

Uhm no?

First of all, humans and machines work in very different ways. I haven't met a human who could produce correct facts without actually knowing them. And if a human can deduce a correct answer given enough information, is that bullshit or critical thinking?

Second of all, "plausible sounding" is not what you need to pass an exam. "Factually correct" is what you need.

Every gdn teacher in the world knows that, or at least should know. It’s next to impossible to create tests that would measure understanding, and actually using that kind of tests in real life would be so time-taking and slow that schools and universities would grind to a halt.

As notabot below says, homework (and exams) are for the student. The “measuring” aspect in them gives only a sign that the student should note and act on (and of course, the society being what it is, the “measures” are also used in other ways whether we like it or not).

Is this meant to be pro-AI? Because people can be fooled by plagiarism?

Same reason Paul Blart should get off that Segway and walk. It's less convenient but it makes you stronger.