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To go with the gym analogy, thus far it would seem that using AI to help study seems to be working out about as well as the Enhanced Games did. Before we get a

To go with the gym analogy, thus far it would seem that using AI to help study seems to be working out about as well as the Enhanced Games did. Before we get ahead of ourselves and hype up AI as a tool for making people smarter, let’s first demonstrate that AI really does help them learn better. Otherwise we risk wasting a lot of time and money on silicon snake oil.

_aavaa_ 1mo ago
I don’t think the comparison is fair, consider the incentives for the Enhanced Games. Once an athletic declared their taking banned substances, they are barred from every other competition, so it’s no surprise that “clean” athletes dominate. As for proof, I think it’s self evident for anyone who has tried to us it in that way. If you’re studying math ask it to generate more questions for you to try. If you don’t understand a concept, have it use the Socratic method on you. Learning a language, talk back and forth with it over voice. Writing an essay, have it mark and proofread it and provide feedback based on known good criteria.
- bunderbunder 1mo ago
  The thing that really made the Enganced Games à debacle isn’t that the participants failed to beat top clean athletes. It’s that they failed to beat their own performance from when they were still clean. Meaning that they didn’t just fail to demonstrate that these supplements could lead to superhuman performance. They didn’t even just fail to demonstrate that they enhance performance. They failed to demonstrate that their overall effect isn’t deleterious. And yet everyone involved believed quite firmly, based in part on personal experience, that it was self-evident that these supplements would make them better athletes. A lot of the arguments for AI in education aren’t far off from the reasoning behind the kinds of popular supplements they used in the Enhanced Games. The limits of that style of thinking are demonstrated quite nicely in the 2010 Canadian Medical Association Journal article “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/

_aavaa_ 1mo ago

I don’t think the comparison is fair, consider the incentives for the Enhanced Games. Once an athletic declared their taking banned substances, they are barred from every other competition, so it’s no surprise that “clean” athletes dominate. As for proof, I think it’s self evident for anyone who has tried to us it in that way. If you’re studying math ask it to generate more questions for you to try. If you don’t understand a concept, have it use the Socratic method on you. Learning a language, talk back and forth with it over voice. Writing an essay, have it mark and proofread it and provide feedback based on known good criteria.

bunderbunder 1mo ago
The thing that really made the Enganced Games à debacle isn’t that the participants failed to beat top clean athletes. It’s that they failed to beat their own performance from when they were still clean. Meaning that they didn’t just fail to demonstrate that these supplements could lead to superhuman performance. They didn’t even just fail to demonstrate that they enhance performance. They failed to demonstrate that their overall effect isn’t deleterious. And yet everyone involved believed quite firmly, based in part on personal experience, that it was self-evident that these supplements would make them better athletes. A lot of the arguments for AI in education aren’t far off from the reasoning behind the kinds of popular supplements they used in the Enhanced Games. The limits of that style of thinking are demonstrated quite nicely in the 2010 Canadian Medical Association Journal article “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/