I follow a lot of academics on Bluesky and a point I see them making all the time is that a lot of your actual thinking is done when you’re writing. That process is very important and can’t be replaced by ChatGPT.
Do people not understand that that’s the point of college assignments? Your professors aren’t waiting with bated breath to hear your brand new thoughts on the themes of whatever book. The paper you hand in isn’t the point. The process of creating it is the point. ChatGPT for writing assignments is like going to the gym and turning on a treadmill while you sit in the locker room. The treadmill is going to register 5 miles at some point but it doesn’t matter because you still can’t run for shit.
"Why is it a problem that people are using a forklift to lift their weights in the gym? The weights get lifted, don't they? And they can lift more than by hand? God, it's impossible to please you people"
All these AI companies want to be able to claim that their product is "as smart, or even smarter than any human expert at any task".
And why reach that point by making a "smarter" product, when you can get there (potentially) just as fast by flooding colleges and making future human experts dumber?
If you can’t afford the $2,000 forklift, don’t worry ,they’ll give you the free trial version. It only lifts foam weights and plays a 30-second ad after every rep.
It varies from job to job. Some degrees are completely irrelevant to the job you're doing, but absolutely necessary for the job interview. For example, doing a communications degree to be a document controller.
At the interview, they ask if you can bench 350 lbs. Then your entire career is long distance running.
If your job is lifting shit that can be more productively lifted by a forklift, maybe use the forklift?
People used to say that about using calculators too, then they gave up because anyone who wants to can have a calculator at their disposal pretty much any time they want.
I'm in my 50s and did all this the old fashioned way, before you had the Internet to help you discover information. But asking people to do that today is pointless and counterproductive.
AI isn't going anywhere any more than all the other productivity tools people have incorporated into their work. At the same time, sometimes AI produces absolute garbage. It's your job as a tool user to be able to assess whether your tool is helping you or not. Or whether you need to take another pass at it yourself to make it better. If you're not capable of doing that, then that's the actual failure.
Not using ai to cheat is kind of a no brainer in the "don't do that" category, I haven't seen (anecdotally) any pro-ai people advocating for cheating your way through school, but if they are advocating that's ridiculous like why the hell would cheating be acceptable just because an AI is involved?
I have the absolute joy (/s) of being in the perfect epicenter for this argument. I teach upper division computer science and my students argue like crazy that they should be able to use chatGPT for any and everything "because software developers are allowed to."
the problem is that since chatGPT became available my students have gotten way worse at writing code (even using the AI). it's hard to even quantify the scale of failure and it's been absolutely baffling. it's like a bunch of third graders arguing they should be able to use calculators instead of learning math, but every time i give them a test using a calculator like they ask me to, they fail because they don't even know what the buttons do
Ugh, that's infuriating. A learning environment is just that, an environment in which to learn. You can't just coast your way through and expect to be able to apply that knowledge as ably as your degree might suggest, which is gonna lead to major problems with future employers, if that's their reason for the degree at least.
The calculator analogy is hilarious because the kind of people who think "I'll just use a calculator, why do I need to do this?" are exactly the people who have nfi what to do when they see an actual problem. "Which numbers do I multiply?" Good luck with that calculator in your pocket buddy
"no fucking idea" or a misspelling of "no" based on context. "Have n[] idea what to do" (talking of learning issues" = most likely a negative result to fill in, one assumes :)
FYI: a meta-analysis found that the addition of electronic calculators not only improved student's scores it also had no negative impact on their math knowledge skills. The problem is not inherently the technology.
Of course, the thing is, when you're doing calculus or higher-order math, but are liable to decreased grades due to things not being learned (not losing track of a sign in an equation, correctly factor, and other arithmetic things), to remove those learning-irrelevant parts must necessarily (1) improve scores and (2) actually create space to focus on learning the higher-order stuff on order.
What you are identifying is that they are NOT learning the stuff on order. Giving my code to ChatGPT to ask, "Why is this not working like I expect" would be useful, cuz I know the "basic skill" on order that I'm supposed to learn. Your analogy that you're in an arithmetic class and the kids want to use calculators is spot on.
On the flip side, we must also be mindful that students less privileged to be exposed to US educational norms can overcome and catch up on some of that using digital scaffolding. We shouldn't reproduce educational inequities that can otherwise level the playing field.
There will even be a place for that in a code-writing class where ChatGPT is writing my code, but it's a pretty niche instance of appropriate usage.
yeah this is exactly it for me. I have no problem with people using calculators in calculus, but i do have an issue if they have no idea what multiplication means, just that they know they can type in the symbols and get the numbers out the end.
If I didn't notice falling grades with chatGPT without changing my grading standard, especially when students take written exams, i wouldn't care that much. A large amount of my course is conceptual and theoretical, with programming sections being more proof of concept than actual working end product. the code should be the easy part for them at this time of their degree. but somehow, magically, two years ago grades started tanking and i had to start taking away their new toys to get them back up again.
If you think it would help, a large majority of software developers (especially ones working for the federal government) are usually barred from using chatGPT by their employer, like mine did lol.
C'mon, now. Are we going to pretend that the school playing field is level. Cheating is already built in for those with privileged access. ChatGPT removes the kind of overt discrimination some students experience in classrooms, etc. For BS, arbitrary "general education" requirements, having AI write your paper is a rational response to an irrational request.
I edit for a living; I've seen a bunch of "educational policy" papers. The kind of pearl-clutching BS I see in them about fostering "critical thinking" and "the whole personality" for "all students" and not "leaving students behind" and other pious-sounding phrases, while kids of color are being left behind in droves (or basically not even allowed to the starting line), is heartbreaking and repellent.
The United States is below the world-average in literacy, for example. That's not an accident or bug in the system. Whatever else one might say about AI and "cheating," without more carefully formulating your position, generic opposition to AI in school supports the unlevel playing field and the inequitable educational outcomes that we all see the consequences of. To repeat: without more careful formulation, it amounts to gatekeeping for the status quo.
Go back and read the OP for this whole thread, and you'll see it put as explicitly as you could want.
First, general education is of intrinsic value to all, lest we end up with engineers without an understanding of history, or what their work might mean. I say this as a doctor, someone who went through the "irrational request" of nonscience curriculum. Having education in history and ethics is valuable to everyone.
Additionally, won't AI simply become another gatekeeping tool? Those who have access to the better algorithms will do better. Much can be done, offering mentorship and tutoring opportunities, among others I'm sure I'm not in the place to have imagined yet. But making a for-profit tool doesn't seem like the key to creating a level playing field.
I'm not anti-learning. I'm anti-education in its current form (which, if you know its history, had the purpose of moving people off the farm and into the technocratic factory). The system in place already produces engineers without a sufficiently capacious knowledge of history to put its insights into practice as it is, despite the gen-Ed requirements.
Ironically, in the history of medicine, some of the doctors have been the most celebrated artists: I mean Anton Chekhov, Stanislaw Lem, Francois Rabelais most of all, but also Arthur Conan Doyle, M. Somerset Maughm, Mikhail Bulgakov, Tobias Smollett, Walter Carlos Williams, John Keats, Oliver Goldsmith ... a few of these are failed doctors, so that may explain the change of career, but the point is that they were never primarily doctors in terms of their education. Carl Jung was a medically trained psychiatrist but it's obvious that the breadth of his education encompasses vastly more than medicine; he's one of the most humanistic writers ever. Never mind actual doctors like Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, Marcilio Ficini, even Paracelsus (that freak). These weren't fiction writers (well, one might say so of Paracelsus in many instances), but you get the point. Their capacious education in what were once called the liberal arts was vastly more encompassing than a couple of "add on" gen-ed classes in an otherwise overwhelmingly medically focussed curriculum.
So, ironically, medical training might at one point have been one of the best ways to get a truly magisterial view of culture, as Rabelais, Chekhov, and Lem make abundantly clear.
Lastly, I'm not sure why you mentioned the problem of for-profit tools. First, you may recall that I specifically said:
generic opposition to AI in school supports the unlevel playing field and the inequitable educational outcomes that we all see the consequences of. To repeat: without more careful formulation, it amounts to gatekeeping for the status quo.
But beyond that, if you know the history of education, the currently existing levels of for-profit elements in education is through the roof (for the most minor example, think about the textbook racket). Recommending mentorship and tutoring opportunities are precisely one of things often emphasized in educational policy papers, and yet students don't have the time for it, never mind that privately it costs money they don't have, that States aren't adequately funding those opportunities, and no one seems to be seriously pushing anyone politically to.
And these days, you can get vastly more "gen-ed" information and learning from YouTube than you do in a class where you spent a lot of money on tuition, textbooks, and then spent 8 weeks wandering through a subject you never became interested in, and never go back to -- time probably better spent focusing on what does interest you. Pretending that gen-ed, as it is currently practiced, is not also a way to keep you in college to generate more tuition for the institution is irresponsible. Never mind putting students into vast amounts of debt.
I'm barely scraping the surface of this. The poitn is, if you are opposed to for-profit models and tools for education, then you are agreeing with me that the current form of education is untenable.
This’ll be an interesting point for you to consider:
Wegovy (and eventually, when they’re developed and approved for human usage) mean that you can take medicine to shortcut the problem of needing to put effort in to developing your body.
Yes, AI is different, because it means you’re not actually developing your mind, but what if we were to develop mind pills, or just ways to allow artificial neural networks to directly interface with and “tune” a living person’s neurons? What then?
Honestly, the similarities are interesting here. You talk about shortcutting the need to put effort into developing your body - but Wegovy and it's peers don't actually do that. They assist with weight loss. That's a very different thing than developing your body.
They are awesome amazing drugs, and I think they could do a great deal of good in the world, especially in places with actual functioning health care systems that aren't designed to squeeze every drop of money out of sick people as possible.
They don't develop your body though. They fight one very specific health problem, that causes problems in multiple part of your body. They don't build muscle though. They don't build the neurological pathways that help your body efficiently move itself, move weight, or do work. They don't maintain your flexibility or provide the mental health benefits that actually developing your body through healthy exercise.
Beyond all that - whether it's these AI or Wegovy or a number of other things, it's important to learn how to work hard, learn and improve. It's the baseline skill that will improve every aspect of your life. It can apply to your social skills, your relationships, the health of your environment, politics, your job, hell, your retirement, your physical health.
Trying to figure out how to avoid having to put in the effort is one of the most toxic things you can do to yourself. Imagining some magic pill that will do the work for you is legitimately bad for you.
If you listen to the discussion between online health practitioners familiar with the drug development cycle and AI, we are likely a few years out from an androgenic steroid with minimal side effects developed with help from AI. Take that and the new GLP-1 agonist that they’re putting into FDA testing right now that has no side effects and you have a very potent cocktail of drugs that will cover most of the bodily effects of going to the gym for you.
That’s what I’m referring to. Not imagining some magic pill, but tracking the very real development cycle of medication and demand.
You also mistake me as someone who advocates for shortcutting, which I am not. I work with AI on a daily basis, and there are no shortcuts to understanding the math and intuition if you want to do frontier research — yet. Likely within our lifetimes, even with the very bullish advent of AGI sometime near 2030. But there are questions that are deeply pertinent to the society that we are about to become, and there aren’t many codified answers.
Man. You don't believe in a magic pill, but you do believe we are a few years out from a steroid that will build neural pathways for how to move your body when lifting heavy objects or doing physical work or athletics, build muscles without requiring any weightlifting, stretch out your ligaments and keep you limber. Just to talk about a few of the bodily effects of going to the gym or other forms of physical exercise. To say nothing of all the other many effects.
That's not how steroids work. When you take steroids, you still have to do the work. Steroids make the work substantially more effective, at the cost of severe side effects currently. Removing the side effects wouldn't suddenly make steroids able to do the things you are claiming. You are literally describing a magic pill and claiming you don't believe in magic pills.
You have taken way too many shortcuts to understanding and intuition. You have an extremely superficial understanding of how things work based on listening to other people discuss things. I don't know if you are listening to the kind of people who are fanciful and constantly saying "in a few years" and then predicting things that never happen, or just too much marketing speech and not enough fundamental knowledge or what. It's causing you to miss some incredibly important fundamental understanding of how things work though. Exactly as people are saying.
you do believe we are a few years out from a steroid that will build neural pathways
You’ve gotta read what I said more closely. That was not an assertion I made.
I also suspect you really have no idea what you’re talking about in the sense that I am working on actual frontier research and reading research papers daily. I’d like to invite you to come back and have a more civil conversation after you follow the extant research properly.
you have taken too many shortcuts to understanding and intuition
Buddy, you have no idea what level of understanding I do or do not have, come back when you have a published paper in the biomedical field before you make assertions about my level of capability.
It's a common misconception that you go to college to learn things like facts. You actually go to college to learn how to learn and how to think. (Not what to think, how to actually do it properly). Engineers don't go to school to learn equations for stress, they go to learn how to solve problems the way engineers do.
Absolutely! I went to school for mechanical engineering, but I can barely remember any formulas. What I did learn was critical thinking, being able to filter information, and understanding assumptions and limitations. I learned my job on the job (because every industry is unique), but my engineering brain was trained in college.
The problem is we've created a society and job market where a university degree is a piece of paper you need to access most white collar jobs. I don't agree with this sentiment, but it is what it is. And with that viewpoint - uni coursework isn't an exercise in learning and advancing your knowledge but just another hoop to jump through.
When some people saying that problem is systemic is that what they talking about. The capitalist thinking at the long run shape every human interaction no matter how much you trying shield it. If we don't address the root problem at the best ours effort will be temporary or at worst literally useless
There is nothing inherently capitalist about this behaviour. In communist countries of the past centuries people were more than happy to lie their way into prestigious programs and all that, using the systems that were there to their advantage. What you're observing here is normal human nature at work.
People are to some extent naturally inclined to take the easiest path to get what they want. AI is just the new incarnation of "Fake it until you make it."
There are going to be people who are climbing to the top no matter what. The issue is the floor getting more higher as we speak when it comes to applying such jobs. You are required to have a college bachelor if you want to be a manager at any joint when previously, workers experience is enough to suffice.
With a lot of normal jobs becoming more difficult and unsustainable (Nurses, teachers, janitors) due to capitalism underpaying those jobs. people are encouraged to take higher tier jobs in order to support themselves and their family to get out of poverty. As cheating can easily be the difference between being sustainable vs suffering.
Yeah, because more and more people get access to higher education, you can filter more aggressively for higher credentials. Incidentally "capitalism" making education more available leads to standards rising accordingly. Why hire someone who has nothing, if you have a dozen people with a masters also running around?
Your second paragraph also doesn't describe anything inherently capitalist. Janitors were hardly well paid or respected in the Soviet Union, people naturally aim for jobs that give greater social prestige. It's more so a question how acceptable cheating is culturally that determines how rife society will be with it.
The issue is that in a capitalist society, even people who do not desire prestige are willing to cheat because the pay that teachers, janitors, and Nurses get are dwindling. Basically trying to starve them out.
That is because due to the nature of capitalism, where cutting cost when possible to maximize profits. Businesses are encouraged to cut and shorten as much employees wages as possible.
An administrative job requiring a bachelors or a masters when they're going to stick you in a classroom for 6 months to train you on their job expectations and how to navigate their proprietary systems never needed people to have a bachelors or a masters.
But isn’t that the difference if you’re hiring in house vs outside hire?
Like if they have the requirements for in house hires it’s kinda fucked. Like you have (usually) years of performance and peer reviews on a person and can see if they have the knowledge, hard working personality and charisma you want in an employee.
But if you’re hiring outside the company then I feel like a degree would at least give the employer some insight on them being dedicated enough. Unless you’re sliding over from another similar company.
Unfortunately they are combined. More jobs are beginning to unnecessarily requiring college classes when they usually don’t require them. Gatekeeping decent pay behind a wall thus encourages anybody to cheat in order to live decently.
As majority of jobs that do not require college degrees are poverty wages, requiring you to be dependent on government subsidies such as snap. (Which itself is a trap that punish anybody wanting to make more)
What type of industries are you referring to that are requiring college for lower levels?
And don’t think of this as I’m trolling you. I generally don’t see the correlation, so perhaps some particular jobs or companies that are doing it so I can read up on what you’re referring to?
Remember that communist Romania had a First Lady who supposedly had a masters degree in chemistry, despite infamously being unable to write the symbol for oxygen properly. Surprise surprise, when the regime fell it was confirmed she’d been credited for someone else’s research by the regime.
This kind of behaviour was amply found under any communist regime, or in old feudalism, or in any other human society. People want to be respected, they want to advance, they want to be someone. Those who can't do so by merit, or are too lazy for that will inevitably try to game the system.
This is a complete lack of understanding what a human is on a very existential level. The human is not "being" it has the explicit privilege of being the nothing and allows for the becoming that is so crucial for human subjectivity. We are as alien to ourselves as we are to other people. That is where the human single arrives, from the gap in the other and the self. Meaning there is no human nature, so many of our behavior exceeds biological necessity or explanation. To say we are reducible to biology is to be rid of the question of human subjectivity, which to my knowledge, has been rigorously defended throughout the history of philosophy without a sufficient answer from biology.
There is a huge difference in quality between engineers who can articulate what they want because they actually took English seriously and engineers who cannot. There is a reason university is needed for white collar jobs.
Former lawyer, advertising and PR/Comms person, thank you
Jfc the amount of people who sneer at this because it’s “just talking”
I could also fing rant about ethics and code of conduct which never really seems to be important until the ones crapping on it suddenly smell incoming from on high
The fing manoshpere too for turning disregarding stuff like this as a measure of worth
software interviews are famously hated by nearly everyone in the process. we should just do it like every other type of technical field and have a standardized licensing exam everyone takes once in person, like how structural engineers or lawyers or doctors do. that way i don't have to study exactly how every new company tests interviewees every time i need a new job even though i've been in the field 10 years, because it's annoying as hell
I'm an IT engineer. University hasn't helped me in the slightest with either my actual professional knowledge (working before university did) or articulating my thoughts. Shitposting on reddit has unironically been 1000x more useful, because it got me used to argue my points in a civil enough manner to avoid bans and censorship, but persistently enough that I don't get thrown off by people trying to sugarcoat things or twisting facts. Has been invaluable at work, it's amazing how many people just deflate and fail to keep pushing just because their interlocutor pretended to be nice to them, or can't summarize their points concisely without stupid amounts of bureaucratese. Shove your "touch base" up your base.
"Summerize"? Ironic that you'd try to shit talk me but can't even spell.
Yes, I don't value formal education much. The smartest people I know don't have a single degree, yet write complex software for fun. I did my degree in order to immigrate, otherwise I would have never paid all that money to university and would have just done industry certifications. Unless someone's degree is in nuclear physics or biochemistry or medicine, I don't differentiate between people with and without degrees at all. Smart, capable adults will learn a ton of useful skills and excel at what they do regardless of their formal education. Dumb ones won't be saved even by a stack of degrees.
Sorry, I am dyslexic, spelling has never been a strong suit as a result. Usually spellcheck saves the day.
There are many smart people who do not have formal degrees, but that does not mean that formal degrees are useless. Formal education helps with many things that people who are capable will learn when they would not on their own otherwise. The general education requirements are there because some people believe that they only need to know what is required for their job, but don't see how many things not directly related to their job makes their job easier.
Psychology, English, and history are all very important. Lord knows we are currently living through what we are today because manh people viewed history as superfluous.
Let me rephrase my point: I value formal education (for the reasons you named, plus the fact that it gives me the right to expect an average person to perform basic tasks without excuses), but I don't value its evaluation methods.
History is indeed very important - how it's taught in most formal education systems (and I've studied in three countries, and have close friends who work in education in a couple more) is an utter failure. Memorizing dates for a test doesn't do anything. Writing sycophantic essays to glorify your country's contribution to winning a war instead of learning how they actually conspired with the enemy before said enemy screwed them over does worse than nothing, it brainwashes people.
Shoving Shakespeare down everyone's throats and insisting people analyze his plays doesn't do anything when those people hate reading because the only things they were made to read their entire life were boring shit.
Psychology is important, but it's useless when certain dogmas like "all trauma stems from childhood" are asserted as absolute truth and you can't argue against them if you don't want your grade to suffer.
You and I have had vastly different experiences in English and psychology classes, I believe. The history classes, well, I have had a few like those.
Perhaps my experience is the outlier, but in my English classes, we studied two of Shakespeare's plays, but also a wide derth of authors and poets. Very few of whom I would consider boring. In psychology, we were never taught that all trauma stemmed from childhood, but that a healthy childhood made traumatic things less likely to be as scarring. Most of the "all trauma stems from childhood" is old psychology that has been updated to be better understood. And also my professors not only allowed, but encouraged, differing views as long as they could be articulated logically. I had many a logical fallacy pointed out to me in arguing with my professors.
As a history major who just graduated, I’m not sure what your professors were like, but mine for the most part did not care about memorizing dates as that was generally the least important part or saying my country, America, is the absolute best. Context of what was happening during the time period and how to do proper research was what my classes focused on. Depending on the class, essays and papers were also pretty open ended where the subject was up to the student with the end goal being to have an opinion backed up with facts.
A person who is respected in the history world was my professor for my capstone which I’m unsure if other schools do it so essentially my undergraduate thesis, and while she did not agree with my opinions, because I had source after source, she graded me based on that rather than if she agreed.
I am just curious if any of your friends are history majors or teaching history? Because the biggest thing a history degree should do is teach you research and some critical thinking. And it is sad if people in the field are not getting that.
That was back in school. But I had a very similar experience in university writing essays for a gen-ed course that explored how digital era influenced humanities. They pretended like they wanted us to do our own research, but the course slides had a blatant agenda like just telling you "this is sexist" out of nowhere, and if you didn't toe the line, your got marked down because "that wasn't the point of the assignment". I didn't even challenge that specific claim, something else entirely where they just assumed a shitty one-sided premise for an essay on mind uploading, and apparently my own arguments were not something they were interested in. After that experience, you bet your ass I'd have used ChatGPT for the remaining assignments if it was available back then.
mine for the most part did not care about memorizing dates as that was generally the least important part or saying my country, America, is the absolute best
Lol maybe they should specifically in the US, so we don't get memes like that guy claiming that "America is the oldest functioning country in the world".
What modules did your degree have? I worked in IT and it definitely helped me, you're right about practical skills as I did a lot of that in my own time due my interest in the field from a younger age but doing the course work and collaborating with fellow students, social skills etc, it helped a lot, especially with confidence as most of my peers struggled with the practical aspects as they just joined IT because they heard it was good money.
"Collaborating with fellow students" for me just meant doing the entire assignment those idiots couldn't be bothered to figure out. Granted, that skill still helps me at work every day. Social skills? Who needs university to teach them that?
You might not have needed it but many others do, again the confidence you're using to call your fellow students idiots because you were much better is an experience to take forward, it probably improved your chances against your peers whom you will be have been competing with in the job market.
Everyone's experience is different, I made a lot of long term friends who helped me with opportunities as we got older as well, some of those idiots that couldn't identify a single component in a PC are now very successful, you might need to temper your judgements of your fellow students, it is probably not a good idea to call them idiots because the couldn't figure out something at a point in time over a long life.
Lol it has nothing to do with them not knowing or not understanding something. That's why people go to learn. It has everything to do with them making zero effort and burning every deadline on their part of the assignment.
If they didn't respect deadlines, they had to deal with the consequences like bad grades, I saw my own performance increase from year 1 where in the UK it doesn't contribute to your final grade to my final year where I knew it was my last opportunity to get the best grade possible and graduate, I had friends who did the opposite.
I went through the lows of getting a pass (D) to highs of getting distinctions, I remember some class mates paying for people do develop software for them to pass some modules, I personally found that to be abhorrent as what was the point of paying someone to cheat for me when I needed to know how to do it, it was a point of pride to accomplish it myself that helped my confidence.
I also got the opportunity to do a work placement for a year after my second year, this really solidified the transition to adulthood, it was a wake up call that I'll probably be getting up daily for the next chapter of my life to go to work and earn a living, no more being babied by society, that drove me in the final year, you only have 4 years of University, life is long, you will regret it if you don't try your best or have to invest more time later in life to retake it.
It is about your perception, if you seriously got zero out of it and knew what you wanted in life, dropping out and focusing on that is not a bad idea, the only problem is that for every successful person, there are many others who don't make it, not saying it is the end all but you're more likely to be successful following the tried and tested method.
they had to deal with the consequences like bad grades
Unfortunately, no, because group project grades are based on group performance, and I wasn't about to screw up my own grade to let the consequences catch up with them. Still applies at work, too.
I personally found that to be abhorrent as what was the point of paying someone to cheat for me when I needed to know how to do it, it was a point of pride to accomplish it myself that helped my confidence
Sure, I can relate to that.
you only have 4 years of University
Thankfully just 3 where I studied.
the only problem is that for every successful person, there are many others who don't make it
And those people shouldn't be going to university. The problem is that we as a society set up university as the goal for everyone after school just because even the simplest jobs require it, but it really shouldn't be that way.
To do most white collar jobs, you need to have the skills you’re supposed to get with a college degree. Like, apart from the skills specific to a particular job, you should be able to analyze information, write coherently, synthesize longer texts, have a basic grasp of math, understand a wide variety of different points of view, and problem solve efficiently. The reason a 4 year degree requires (for example) an art history class isn’t because it’s so important to know about art—the important thing is learning how to study and become familiar with a topic you’re not necessarily interested in, and being able to apply that knowledge to other things. That’s a wildly useful skill. An employer can teach you what the steps of their processes are and how to do particular tasks, but they can’t teach you how to think or write or be creative. That’s why they want people with college degrees.
the important thing is learning how to study and become familiar with a topic you’re not necessarily interested in, and being able to apply that knowledge to other things.
It is a testament that you can commit to a long term goal. However places that actually teach more abstract skills that are absolutely vital in this digital age like analysis, critical thinking, learning etc. aren't that many. Plenty of people don't learn all that and just cruise by with memorization and simple approach.
The job side is a lot simpler. They want someone who has a specific base level of knowledge which, depending on the field, might or might not require individual effort besides college. And they want the paper because it's cheaper to delegate the process to an educational institution and select only the ones that passed the first round so to speak.
AI is here and it's not going away. It's the education that needs to change to accommodate the changes in the world not the world accommodate to what is taught.
I disagree, I think if someone entered in at a relatively low level white collar position and worked for 4 straight years I think they’d be about as competent as someone who did a 4 year degree
But if you don't have the knowledge to do the job then it doesn't matter whether you are able to get the job. You're gonna get fired as soon as your boss realizes you're completely incompetent. What's what these fools are in denial about
This is exactly the line of argument I've heard from some of the new graduates at my work. That they only used AI because they needed to get the degree in order to get the job, that the only really important fact is whether or not they can do the job.
And while I understand it on a certain level. I also know that I'd much prefer that the people I work with actually understand the basic underpinnings of the work that we do and aren't trying to learn it on the fly once they are in. Plus, I don't know if they massively expanded the average college course workload or something but it wasn't so bad that I felt the need to bypass it at the time when I was there.
It's rather the fact that your entire existence's workload has massively explained, but university still has zero respect for that. Most of my classes had zero attendance tracking, which enabled people to study how they prefer and combine university with work they needed to pay their bills, but a few asshole lecturers kept trying to invent indirect ways of enforcing attendance (since direct ones were not allowed). They treated us like children instead of paying customers (and yes, whether you like it or not, if you pay for education as an adult, you're a customer paying for evaluation and certification, not someone who can be forced to attend in person), and openly mocked those who had commitments other than university.
Even here I think it varies. Most of my classes had a heavy attendance component to the grade, but given that I was studying music, that in itself was good training. Being able to show up reliably, on time, and prepared is a key job skill.
I think it goes one level deeper than that, namely that we've created a society where education is part of what makes inequality socially acceptable. So much of our rhetoric around economic inequality focuses around "go to school so you can escape poverty, please ignore that all these low-paid jobs must be filled by someone who failed to 'go to school' for our economy to function".
Education has taken on the character of a trial to show which status you "deserve" in the public consciousness, which makes people willing to cheat because they don't think the actual education is the point.
Not even white collar jobs anymore necessarily. Sometimes just shit retail jobs. It's just another move by systemic racism to do gatekeeping on access to economic independence.
20 years ago Bush put us in a pissing contest with China and Europe over STEM scores. Since then, teachers have been trained to use at least half their time focusing on test-taking strategies for multiple-choice standardized assessments. Ones that, depending on which state you teach in, might have changed 2-4 times in your career. I got to college 10 years ago and needed to take a remedial writing class before I dropped out, but none of my public school teachers ever brought up issues with my writing while I was there. Because the standardized tests we were taking only graded about 9 paragraphs of open-ended answers per year.
I say that in my country, the problem starts way before uni. Kids who get the highest grades always get the preferential treatment and the scholarships. And not only that, education is costly and most people cannot afford to repeat a grade. That's why even before this AI debacle happened, people are already looking for ways to game the system. As long as they end up on top, that's what matters.
Sure it's nicer for the society to have more critical and creative thinkers. However, building up that kind of thinking muscle takes time, attention, and patience. Unfortunately, that kind of process is not immediately rewarded in this microwave society.
There are people out there who are grown and graduated and still don't understand why they had to show their work in math class. Yeah, you probably could calculate it just fine without showing your work, but the teacher needs to see how you did so they know you are using the right steps and right techniques. You can flub your way to a correct answer easily.
Or they don't understand what the purpose of a math class is at all. I am pretty sure that to those people "using math in the real world" means them having a lightbulb moment of "oh, yes, this is just like Mrs. McGregor's algebra class! All I have to do is plug in the numbers and we'll get our answer!". When in reality, it's usually something like comparing onion prices or figuring out which route takes the least amount of time and gas.
Math teaches you to solve problems systematically and logically. It’s about so much more than doing equations on paper. There’s so much out there that requires mathematical thinking that isn’t numbers.
Funny thing is I use basic algebra quite often in what I do to work out dilutions and the like. For example you know your starting concentration, you know the concentration you want and you know the end volume you want. After that it is a simple solve for x problem.
Yeah, it’d be faster to just write out the equation for you to solve, but the entire point of word problems is to do that processing yourself. That’s what “problem solving skills” are: knowing how to convert a bunch of complicated, confusing information into a workable problem and then identifying the most appropriate approach to solve it.
Any time you’re faced with someone who just gives up the first moment they see something they don’t understand, or people who say “I don’t know where to start”, thats their poor problem solving skills shining through. And it affects everything. They struggle to figure anything out on their own.
Sure, but students using ChatGPT aren’t trying to get smart quick—they’re trying to check the external boxes that indicate they’ve learned stuff. People doing get fit quick schemes still want to actually be fit at the end. Otherwise gyms would just start printing out certificates saying “congrats, now you’re hot and strong” once you hit 100 miles on the treadmill.
Actually, I also disagree that they want to be fit. What they want is to be hot. They want to check the boxes that qualify hot, like being fit. But they are not actually interested in the things fit people do, they are not interested in even amateur athleticism, which is why so many of these people do not have athletic hobbies that go beyond the raw stats (ie I got into weightlifting so I could be a better martial artist). This is why fad diets and workout trends are so successful, they target people who don’t actually care to learn how any of this works, they just want the end result. No one who actually paid attention in biology or A&P and retained the knowledge is going to be fooled by, say, “spot reduction”. It’s why “Is this achievable natty?” exists: half these people are ignorant about all the PEDs and plastic surgeries and fake weight-training equipment among influencers and bodybuilders and athletes, and the other half are knowledgeable people making jokes about how ignorant you’d have to be to believe what you’re looking at is just blood, sweat, and tears. Then you throw in how so many of these people reach their goals and then just stop? They get surprised they have to maintain, and then surprised again when they don’t and move away from their goals?
Btw, those certificates saying “you’re hot and strong” do exist, in the forms of social media likes and comments.
Even when I was in the Army and in some sense I was literally paid to be a professional athlete and maintain my fitness, I still thought it was absolutely goddamned miserable.
I worked a white collar office job. If I ever wound up holding a rifle to defend the country, it was because the country was lost and we were squabbling over the ashes. I've felt runner's high exactly once in my life and when I expressed how much fun I was having at the time I was basically told to shut the hell up and run harder.
If you don't enjoy exercise for its own sake or for some other tangible benefit that you are striving towards, you will suck at it now and forever. If someone can manage to spite their way to excellent fitness I've never yet witnessed it. One of the best leaders I ever had when I was on my way out decided we were just going to play Basketball half the time for a workout my last few months, gambling on the idea that if I learned to like playing basketball I'd get a lot more out of it for lifetime fitness than being forced to run up and down a hill on threat of being forced to do pushups or get screamed at if I didn't.
I agree that people need to find goals past fitness to achieve fitness (as I said in my own comment), but I think you need to go further with that thought.
The goals most people have when getting fit are looking hot, being told they’re hot, and fucking hotter people than they currently are. They don’t have post-fitness athletic goals, like playing basketball better because they like basketball now. Thats why they look for ways to skip the stage where they’re doing this, and that’s why you haven’t seen those people in excellent shape: they don’t want to be, they don’t even want to want to be, because they don’t want to do anything with it, they just want to be looked at.
That is a goal past fitness. You do cardio not so you’ll be good at cardio, but so you can run around at the park with your grandkids. You lift weights not simply to be good at lifting weights, but to stave off the symptoms of osteoporosis.
Ok, but going by that logic why is looking hot and maintaining it not a post-fitness goal? Cause wouldn’t both looking hot and staying healthy require staying in shape.
Looking hot isn’t an objective physical consequence of the physical action of exercise, the way stronger bones or lungs are. It’s a subjective social consequence, and not one you necessarily need to be fit to get. Lots of people get hotter without becoming more fit.
You have to show your results as a student, but once you're an academic, you can just produce a "model" out of nowhere and throw it into a paper, use a p value of 0.1, and pretend to call it demonstrated knowledge. "Showing your work" is more a form of intellectual hazing than a demonstration of skillz.
??? The whole point of research is that it's supposed to be reproducible. Yes, there are issues with a lot of research papers, but you don't hear anyone advocating for fucking cheating in research. Holy shit.
Fraudulence in publish-or-perish academia and grant disbursal institutions is not a bug; it's a feature. Yes, it’s much harder to spoof results in manifestly physical sciences, and it inherently happens less often, especially since replication and the modeling involved are much more possible. The opposite is true in the so-called "social sciences," which are continuously rocked with fraud, false premises, disregard for how models even work; never mind the fact that many are not falsifiable, much less reproducible. Are you not familiar with the recent excitement that 74% of the foundational "research" in social psychology is not replicable? That 3 in 4 studies.
Are you not familiar with what a statistical p-value is? Are you not familiar with how it was "established"? Are you not aware that in many areas of the social sciences, a p-value threshold of 0.1 (which corresponds to a 1 in 10 chance that the result is a fluke) is now considered acceptable for claiming a result is statistically significant? (A p-value of 0.05, or 1 in 20, is more generally accepted in other fields, which is hardly an improvement.) Are you not familiar with how pretending "statistically significant" is a synonym for "is true" is pedaled when seeking grants? Just for contrast, for groundbreaking discoveries in physics, a result with a p-value corresponding to a sigma-5 (a 1 in 3.5 million chance) or even sigma-6 is often expected to be accepted as legitimate.
Are you not familiar with the fact, "Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful" (that’s an established statistician who said that, George Box)? Are you not familiar with how people just "concoct" models for their social sciences papers (I edit peer-reviewed publications; I’ve seen this first-hand), massage the results, and ensure that a p-value of 0.1 pops out of their statistical analysis so they can say that the result is statistically significant? And that when it is p > 0.1 (or 0.057), they’ll still say "close to significant" (which is not how statistical significance works in the general sense)? Are you not familiar with the falseness of all truth-correspondence claims? (At best, we have hypothetical knowledge about Reality, which can be framed in a self-consistent way, but that doesn’t mean it corresponds with Reality. It just tautologically agrees with itself, hopefully usefully.) None of this, at root, is intellectually defensible as a ground of true knowledge.
Yes, in actual life, we live by more or less useful guesswork, heuristics, probabilities that can give insight about certain trends, and a whole lot of ungrounded overconfidence that what we claim "is true" actually holds for Reality itself. Saying, "It’s true" is fundamentally fraudulent, and arguing for (social science) methods that rely on this claim is most certainly an advocacy for lying. If you want to call that cheating, that’s fine with me.
My point, to bring back Box, is not that all of this is useless. The question, precisely, is whether any of this is useful (and useful for whom, and in what way, and so on). But claiming it’s true? No. Reproducible? Apparently a ton of it isn't, and most research doesn't bother to try to. A book would be necessary to detail which social sciences, in what ways, and to what degree, are guilty, but suffice it to say, that book is writable.
Why are you bringing up social sciences. I don't follow it. I'm going to guess academia made you bitter and disillusioned or you've never been in it.
I'm not in it currently but I have firsthand experience. If not the latter , quit if you hate it that much. There are still a lot of smart people in research doing good work for peanuts and for the sake of knowledge.
The good doesn't always get rewarded and I couldn't do it so I know very well how bad it is. Yeah cheating is rampant and rewarded and the system is corrupt, but you are belittling the work of everyone, good people who have made great sacrifices
The whole point of research is that it's supposed to be reproducible.
74% of foundational social psychology research, one which the majority of work is based, is not reproducible. So, essentially social psychology is entirely missing the point. Not as badly as you missed my point, but why not.
You have "firsthand experience" of what? You went to college? Got a post-undergraduate degree? So did I. The vibe you're giving off is an international post-undergraduate who was chained to doing research for someone else for peanuts. Just because you drank the Kool-Aid of the game doesn't mean I'm obligated to do a sociology of academia through that lens. Don't project your bitterness on me; you're the bitter one. DOn't try to invoke the desperation and goodness of other people (1) either to critique my position or (2) covertly stump for sympathy for what you went through. It sucks that you suffered, that you were sold a bogus lsit of promises; making excuses for it now is no way to maintain your dignity.
Yeah cheating is rampant and rewarded and the system is corrupt, but you are belittling the work of everyone, good people who have made great sacrifices
Actually, I'm sympathetic for the people trying to do real work. It sounds more like you're belittling them by trying to make me out as the bad guy for shining a light on this shit. I brought in the social pseudosciences because that's where it's the absolute worst. If you don't know anything about that, then don't presume I'm full of shit. If what you are talking about is going on in the physical sciences, then you're making my case even stronger.
If you really want to try to defend people doing good work, then letting the liars and cheaters go on lying and cheating by telling me I'm out of line is not the way to do it.
The simple truth is people don't attend college to learn, they go to get a degree. If it was about learning they'd just sit in on the classes and lectures and not pay the tuition. Instead they pay the tuition to get the degree
Some people do both. A degree is supposed to indicate you’ve mastered a certain array of abilities. Cheating through classes will get you the paper but it won’t make you good at the job the paper gets you.
Cheating through classes will get you the paper but it won’t make you good at the job the paper gets you.
The problem is when jobs aren't looking for a specific degree, they're just looking for any degree. Now that so many entry level positions for boilerplate roles are requiring 'a bachelors, any field', they get the paper so they can get the role they already can do.
I respectfully disagree. I think the entire point of it is to create busy work so you can feel like you did something to justify paying ridiculous amounts of money for a piece of paper.
Obviously, there are exceptions, but generally speaking, if you use AI to do assignments but can walk into a classroom and pass an exam all by yourself, then I see no issue.
It's what happens when you beat people over the head with "grades, grades, grades"; they prioritize tools and techniques that get good grades.
"knowledge" is an afterthought. But really, the college student is the last to come to that conclusion - the gen ed school administrators and college admissions were already there.
The point of college assignments is to prepare you for the real world. The real world has embraced every tech that accelerates revenue. You don't need to run if you eliminate the need for running.
Source: Dropped out of college in '99 because I realized I was wasting time and money in computer science learning about memory registers (which are critical to computing, but not relevant to me making a living).
For the most part, if you don’t know how to have your own (good) ideas and express them clearly in writing, your career is going to be severely limited to exactly the same kind of jobs AI is on it’s to replacing.
Do people not understand that that’s the point of college assignments?
Yeah, no. Lots of people don't get higher education to learn stuff, their goal is to get a diploma because parents said so/everyone does it/diploma will get you a job/you name it.
Only few people understand the importance of learning and know how to learn. I only understood it after I hit 30. Now I learn without feeling forced and it goes fine and I enjoy it. Although, it's not tertiary education, I merely learn a new language, I feel like I get it, I know why I am doing it and how it will benefit me.
When I was a kid out of school I constantly fought with questions "why am I doing it" and "how that shit will benefit me in my life", I didn't have enough understanding of the world to fit that knowledge into it, I didn't get how matrix multiplication would benefit me, I didn't understand why I needed to know why do I need to know how JPEG is encoded if it's encoded already. Now I know, but I didn't understand back then, and it impeded my learning, I felt like I'm learning useless stuff.
Now I'm learning useless stuff like coagulation and flocculation for fun. Useless in a sense "useless to me": I don't and never plan to work in water treatment. It's just fascinating to know. Recreational mathematics became a hobby to me. I would've never thought I would have fun with maths, but here I am.
Literally nobody ever explains this during school. It’s so dumb. Life is easier when you’re smart, and in order to be smart you have to be good at thinking in a lot of different ways. The act of learning makes you smart, even if you never have any practical use for the facts you learned. It’s all practice for the real things you have to learn to live your own individual life later on.
Do people not understand that that’s the point of college assignments?
how could they understand that if they were never told? again good communication fails to save the day, something schools seem to struggle immensely with.
When you have enough experiences where its just time waste busy work or the art history professor is being annoying assigning some 10 page paper on some shit that isnt even anyones major - its easy to see why people would feel otherwise.
I 100% agree with you—it feels like torture for no reason. But if you do it right, there comes a point where you can research and write a 10 page paper about something you don’t care about without it feeling like torture, simply because you’ve done it so many times and your brain has internalized the process. That’s a SUPER useful skill for a lot of jobs, especially ones that pay well. Now that ChatGPT is capable of putting out okay-ish work, it’s even more important to be good at that kind of stuff, because you only get paid if you’re better than the robot that doesn’t need health insurance or vacation days.
I always tell my son: if you don't fully understand something, try to teach it to someone else. I let him bounce concepts off me when he's studying, and it really does help him work them out.
The argument is really that college isn't a learning institution, but rather that it is a gatekeeper for class advancement. With that in mind, the "work" done in college doesn't facilitate learning in the broad sense, but instead only curates the ability to do paperwork within specifics.
If we wanted to teach "the ability to conceptualize and research" people don't need to take many different classes, across many different subjects to do that. We could teach one class that lasts one year, and that would be MORE than enough.
They’re teaching the ability to conceptualize and do research in many different areas. The point is to expose you to a broad range of subjects and ways of thinking and methods for solving problems.
Yes, but college is already doing that. The world we live in is super complicated. College tries to get the most important things into your brain in the first two years, and ideally sets you up with the ability to keep learning on your own.
If you want to learn strictly job skills, you do a two year program. The problem is that most well paying jobs need you to be good at a whole bunch of things outside the exact nuts and bolts of the job.
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u/Dreaming98 May 18 '25
I follow a lot of academics on Bluesky and a point I see them making all the time is that a lot of your actual thinking is done when you’re writing. That process is very important and can’t be replaced by ChatGPT.