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you people pretend to hold a rather romantic notion about what school education is. most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, wit

by vlyan 11d ago

you people pretend to hold a rather romantic notion about what school education is. most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask questions. LLMs are an incredible boon for self-education, second only to the Internet itself, being able to function as a tutor on every subject, and you're hand-wriggling about imaginary dangers of... what, exactly? I've seen the same moral panic during the commodification of Internet access in my country in mid 00's -- "students are going to cheat on their homework and become dumb!!1", blah-blah-blah-fart-blah. you only pretend to care about kids to push your politics.

bluefirebrand 11d ago
> most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask question What absolute horseshit I have met a lot of teachers in my life and I don't think I have ever met one that was remotely indifferent to their students. Its not like they're getting into it for the money :/
koof 11d ago
> 40 kids at a time i wonder why that is. what kind of attitude towards the value of education would allow this. grok help me out here
johnnyanmac 11d ago
So let's get this straight: we have many underpaid, overworked teachers who aren't given the resources needed for students to succeed. Our solution to this, in lieu of better educational budgets (and appropriations of said budget), is to rely on the rugged individualism of primary schoolers to be motivated to just learn content by themselves. This being driven by trillion dollar interests who have the budget but not the incentive nor drive to actually make sure students succeed. Meanwhile, private schools who have both budget and drive will teach kids who can afford it and teach them proper railguarding against such tools. Did I get your point of view correct?
- vlyan 11d ago
  my point of view is that "better educational budgets" is a fantasy and kids whose parents can't afford tutors -- the overwhelming majority of them -- are infinitely better off now, with LLMs being able to explain virtually anything much better than a textbook does. they are already better than most humans at it.
  - johnnyanmac 11d ago
    My point of view is that we have more control over our governments, and especially our local governments, than private corporations. I don't have faith that one day LLMs won't simply explode in price and become yet another tool out of reach for all but the most privilege. We already are seeing that as we transition from subscriptions to token based charges. There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured. So why not hold the ones already using our money accountable?
    - vlyan 11d ago
      >There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids there isn't. AI labs don't give a flying fuck about kids, underprivileged or otherwise -- why should they? LLMs being useful for education is a side effect of them being developed to replace knowledge workers. but they are extremely useful, and there are no sane arguments against that. >and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured by whom? the LLM market is delightfully competitive. and even if one of the labs makes a breakthrough and jacks up the prices on their SOTA, the rest of them won't just disappear. I'm not suggesting we replace schools with LLMs. no one sane does. I'm just stating something that's been extremely obvious since GPT-4 almost 4 years ago -- LLMs are an incredibly useful tool for learning. fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been -- I'm old enough to have witnessed Soviet-bred boomers yelling at those clouds, and I'm baffled to see various Internet folx fighting the same fight using the same arguments. "we should fund schools better instead" is not going to happen. it was never going to happen even if LLMs didn't happen.

by vlyan 11d ago

bluefirebrand 11d ago

> most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask question What absolute horseshit I have met a lot of teachers in my life and I don't think I have ever met one that was remotely indifferent to their students. Its not like they're getting into it for the money :/

koof 11d ago

> 40 kids at a time i wonder why that is. what kind of attitude towards the value of education would allow this. grok help me out here

johnnyanmac 11d ago

So let's get this straight: we have many underpaid, overworked teachers who aren't given the resources needed for students to succeed. Our solution to this, in lieu of better educational budgets (and appropriations of said budget), is to rely on the rugged individualism of primary schoolers to be motivated to just learn content by themselves. This being driven by trillion dollar interests who have the budget but not the incentive nor drive to actually make sure students succeed. Meanwhile, private schools who have both budget and drive will teach kids who can afford it and teach them proper railguarding against such tools. Did I get your point of view correct?

vlyan 11d ago
my point of view is that "better educational budgets" is a fantasy and kids whose parents can't afford tutors -- the overwhelming majority of them -- are infinitely better off now, with LLMs being able to explain virtually anything much better than a textbook does. they are already better than most humans at it.
- johnnyanmac 11d ago
  My point of view is that we have more control over our governments, and especially our local governments, than private corporations. I don't have faith that one day LLMs won't simply explode in price and become yet another tool out of reach for all but the most privilege. We already are seeing that as we transition from subscriptions to token based charges. There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured. So why not hold the ones already using our money accountable?
  - vlyan 11d ago
    >There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids there isn't. AI labs don't give a flying fuck about kids, underprivileged or otherwise -- why should they? LLMs being useful for education is a side effect of them being developed to replace knowledge workers. but they are extremely useful, and there are no sane arguments against that. >and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured by whom? the LLM market is delightfully competitive. and even if one of the labs makes a breakthrough and jacks up the prices on their SOTA, the rest of them won't just disappear. I'm not suggesting we replace schools with LLMs. no one sane does. I'm just stating something that's been extremely obvious since GPT-4 almost 4 years ago -- LLMs are an incredibly useful tool for learning. fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been -- I'm old enough to have witnessed Soviet-bred boomers yelling at those clouds, and I'm baffled to see various Internet folx fighting the same fight using the same arguments. "we should fund schools better instead" is not going to happen. it was never going to happen even if LLMs didn't happen.