> What are these results actually telling us that the average person doesn’t already know?
Nothing. It's a trivial claim, but does this imply we should not research it?
An enormous amount of effort in the hard sciences is dedicated to proving/stating:
* Claims that on their face appear trivial - like 1+1=2, or the "two points determine a line" postulate
* Things that seem obvious and hardly worth stating - like the pigeonhole principle, or laws of associativity/commutativity/distributivity
* Seemingly redundant re-phrasings of the thesis (every theorem, once it clicks)
But these sorts of mathematical rules become increasingly non-obvious when combined with each other. There is a reason the hard sciences works like this: you want to arrange knowledge hierarchically. You need to have a foundation of knowledge in order to do anything more complex.
The social sciences don't work like this, but they should. Whenever someone proves obvious things, they get told, "why are you wasting time proving that? Everyone already knows that." But psychology, with its replication crises, has a long way to go before it becomes like a hard science. You need to accumulate a hierarchy of proven foundations.
I really like this approach, but I tend to use a slightly modified version that is along the lines of "explain me why an intelligent person would do [dumb thing]".
I think this phrasing is more welcoming for a healthy discussion.
I don't find the author's argument, that students who essentially skip learning via LLM could avoid fairly being labeled "stupid", particularly convincing.
Not that I think it to be a particularly useful label, but I don't find awareness of self-sabotage to preclude one from such a label.
This is similar to how I believe the label "smart" alone does not carry much use.
And "If there is a use, there may be a product."
So, "Than if there is a product, people may use it, and after an unknown time they are likely or not to judge it, or say something about - if they like."
Had I get "been 'a human'" that wrong before ?
While saying "That i didn't get it before, if someone meant 'infinite' that instead ment 'unmeassureable', or?"?
...not?
Edited: Typo
However, I do believe most people are uncurious. Since information is so cheap, it seems many people just reach for what feels good and doesn't risk their existing worldviews.
Where is the article doing that? I.e. assuming that the students are sleep-walking into not learning?
It's obvious to the rhetorical everyone that students are using AI to cheat, and that they know that because of that they are not learning, and that they don't give a shit.
Maybe we could call it a local maximum, personally, although something of a disaster, societally.
> they’re intelligent when it comes to their own lives and the areas they work and spend time in
Are people likely to get fat when they have easy access to a bunch of cheap food that is optimized for overconsumption?
Are kids likely to skip all necessary and/or useful preparation for adulthood, given the opportunity to watch porn or TikTok instead?
Are people likely to believe pseudoscience influencers over mainstream medical advice?
If you dig into these examples, you can explain each of them in more specific and illuminating ways. "Stupid" is just shorthand for the fact that we're not perfect rational optimizers of anything, including our own happiness.
(I think people twist themselves into knots trying to avoid using pejorative words like "stupid." I appreciate the good intentions, but I don't think it's necessary. I'm stupid a lot in my own life. Everybody is stupid sometimes. We're human beings.)
Is that enough, though?
Sure, lab rats are intelligent in navigating their mazes to get to the reward.
The ratio of those two values shows, in my experience, that a lot of people are not very good at things they spend a lot of time doing, and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings
The average American spends 4.2 hours a week in the car. A typical 40 year old american has driven around 50,000 miles. For someone to continue to be bad at driving after that much experience, it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding. Drive to work any given day in Denver and you will see that a large number of people suffer from those fundamental limitations.
This article seems to present a world where most people the author interacts with can think critically about a complex topic, and are interested in learning or improving themselves. I wish I lived where the author lives, because I have had multiple jobs across multiple countries and never encountered an average population like the author describes.
It makes my skin crawl to say this*, but the answer for most people on HN is probably "yes, they are."
* both because people in tech are prone to Paul Graham style 'nerd martyr' arrogance, and because I often read views that disappoint me here and I do not like to admit that an intelligent person can hold them
Although you could say we're idiots in the emotional sense.
Unless you are striving to continuously improve, experience per se does not guarantee improvement
And people being knowledgeable about what they do day in and day out seems like a good example of people being really good at habituation, but that's not "not stupid." Stupid is when people do the same things day in and day out and then use that as a crutch to say there's no other way to do that thing even when there's evidence in front of them that contradicts what their habituation has led them to believe. I guess you can read the first example as a political statement, but I'm not trying to make one, and the second one applies to everything under the sun, I think.
All that said, I think the author is only saying that when someone uses "most people are stupid" as an excuse but I don't think most folks actually ever say "most" people are stupid. Instead they point out that a decent enough chunk of people are stupid and that's enough to cause some issues.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying I'm not one of the stupid ones. Sometimes I am for sure
4.2 hours a week in a car doesn't imply that any of that time is spent doing things that may make one a better driver (by whatever standard we're measuring this), it's just repetion of the minimal amount of driving skill that's enough to get you by.
If it's not possible to increase one's skill in anything without practicing things that are just on the edge of capability then no amount of regular, unsupervisied driving without any critique targeted towards improvement is going to help.
By a mathematical necessity, half the people can say “Yes, most people are stupider than me." without lying.
"Perfect" is too strong an hypothesis, but none of those behaviors are irrational per se.
People would rather be fit than overweight, but that's not the choice on the table. You can either make sacrifices now to be fit X time from now, or eat that ice cream and suffer later. The rational choice depends on the relative value you put on those things (and your discount rate, if you want to get really technical).
Taking the "wrong" side of the tradeoff could certainly qualify as being stupid, and as you note all of us would turn out to be plenty stupid if we started rigorously analyzing our choices, but this is a matter of people claiming to have preferences they don't actually have, as proven by the only thing that matters: their behavior.
> it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding
You said it yourself. Assuming people are doing something without being mindful and purposefully trying to improve then 50k miles on mental autopilot it is not a surprise that someone wouldn't get better at driving. Without a desire to improve and/or being involved in a process that would give feedback then there will be no growth.
In politics, it's a red flag because it is often used to defend bad policies that only appear good when one doesn't have the fortitude to understand the better policy.
People driving and making decisions are error prone.
A simple test is to watch how people turn. Do they turn early potentially hitting the curb or cutting it too close to pedestrians. Or do they increase their radius by turning late? The latter are better drivers.
Edit: here are more tests,
- do they signal
- do they cutoff others
- do they let those who signal in
- do they drive too slow or too fast for the given road and conditions
- do they have an awareness of all cars around them
- do they block the passing lane
- do they maintain a reasonable distance behind other cars
- do they let emergency vehicles pass
etc.
I've always assumed the reason people don't get better at driving with that much experience is the reason people don't get much better at most of the things they do: they've never pushed themselves to the limit of their capabilities. While this can be dangerous in a car, it can be even more dangerous when you're put in an unexpected circumstance with no ability to respond calmly and correctly.
Seeing that your essay is about people’s presumptions about one another, and you say that you lose respect for people based on their chat bot opinions without a lick of self-awareness around the topic of the essay it can be concluded that your overall thesis is that people that don’t like chat bots like you do are inherently less worthy of respect.
You don't see your own here? Are you honestly sitting on the side of the road and intentionally evaluating drivers according to some criteria? Or are you just allowing yourself to notice that which inconveniences you?
Do you ever take time to notice how _convenienced_ you are? How cooperative other drivers can be? How often the rules get followed even though there is no one around to enforce them?
> the author interacts with can think critically about a complex topic
People can. They let their emotions get in the way and they simply choose not to. Frustratingly they never seem to notice when this happens. They remember that they _can_ make rational decisions so they assume _all_ their decisions are rational.
> I wish I lived where the author lives
Your experiences would likely not change.
Something like 50% of college graduates in the US are considered functionally illiterate, despite an enormous number of opportunities for intentional practice; and despite presumably knowing, at least somewhat, of the benefit of attaining more advanced literacy. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755
When I think of poor drivers, I think their incentives to become a good driver are much higher. After all, their own lives and the lives of their loved ones are at risk.
"I think most people know what’s considered healthy food. They maybe wouldn’t be able to perfectly break down ideal ratios of macronutrients, but they have a rough idea. The average person whose bad diet is making them unhealthy would probably be able to point to the bad diet as part of the problem. If I walked up to the average person and asked them to make an ideal meal plan for themselves to be maximally healthy, I think most people would do a decent job."
This is why most of america is stuck in diabetes land. I bet you most americans couldn't tell you the difference between if something is high in carbohydrates or fat.
Another one that made the rounds recently was the one where they asked people to estimate what percentage of the population is trans, and the median answer was like 20%. There is no way this captures actual beliefs held by real people, it's a number so unaligned with basic reality that the only thing it points to is a flaw in the test.
My working theory is that a good chunk of the interviewees are uncomfortable being asked nerd shit like this and they just say whatever they think will make the game stop.
Making decisions that are better for the collective group?
Or making decisions that are better for them individually?
I think most of you assume the former when you should really expect the latter. Viewed through that lens both the set of problems and solutions should be obvious.
But are they a bad driver? Maybe. Or maybe they are driving according to another region's expectations. So any time you see a bad driver from another region, or you are the one in another region, stop and think is it really bad, or just unexpected?
For this reason I ignore all claims of "People from X are terrible drivers." No, they just drive differently.
Journalists have spilt a lot of ink recently about arrogance in the tech community. They point out tech figures who mistakenly think their aptitude in one knowledge domain means they know better than experts in other domains.
That's one reason.
Umm, OK? I still don't get why, in the author's view, they do the bad thing on purpose, and why that is not stupid. (Perhaps the author might make say that doing a stupid thing doesn't make someone a stupid person, or something to that effect -- but, even if so, I don't see any sign of that argument in TFA.)
But it's the former metric that I care about.
The average person gets through their day, and that's great. I don't interact with them about that. It does not affect me one way or the other.
Their opinions about "abstract ideas and far-off events" do affect me. That's clearest every couple of years, when they vote (or fail to). In between, the results of their opinion are imposed upon me by literal force. The government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and those elections determine what is "legitimate". Just the threat of violence is sufficient to drastically affect my life.
I don't expect people to be experts. Democracy rests on the proposition that reality puts a thumb on the scale. If ignorance is randomly distributed, and the experts mostly agree, then you'll get the right choice most of the time regardless.
That's a pretty nifty proposition. It means that nobody has to designate who the experts are, which is fraught. But that presumption of ignorance being randomly distributed is dubious. People can easily become convinced of very bad ideas, and there are no good options for dealing with that.
However, you could also choose to believe their regrets, when they look back on their own choices and say that the pleasure than they gained from them did not repay the misery they suffered because of them.
If you choose to disbelieve their regrets, then maybe you would agree to label their regrets as stupid?
(For what it's worth, I'm making this argument as someone who _is_ a bad driver, and that's a large part of why I don't drive anymore!)
To produce plausible sounding statements on a complex topics without regard to their actual truth is almost a necessity for the opinion journalist (the predominant type of journalist of the modern era).
To be criticized for intellectual hubris by that class should be meaningless.
Students are often fully aware their use of ChatGPT is a bad idea. Like the gambling addict, that doesn't mean they stop. Forcing yourself to do your schoolwork has always been difficult, and they've been given a way out.
What gnaws at me is when someone has a system of beliefs that, to my mind, seems based on nonsense.
I guess that isn’t so surprising as most of us deal with people constantly and so our intuitive understanding of human psychology is actually pretty good.
But it does prove the value of constructing the scientific theory painstakingly and carefully out of tiny claims rather than trying to do something bombastic.
1) Even the obvious claims (and often especially these) deserve scientific verification.
2) Most people are dumb is not because they are missing the relevant information, but because they are failing to act upon the information.
3) The real magic is understanding and being able to predict higher-order effects. And then taking action which steers everyone towards a more desirable outcome.
People will keep eating junk food and writing essays with AI despite knowing that this will lead to unhealthy bodies and minds. Does this make them stupid? Yes it does. Knowledge is the ability to apply information and conversely stupidity is the inability to do so. Most people are indeed stupid and the only way to fix this is to change the system they are part of so they are no longer incentivized to make the stupid choices.
Something I've noticed from time to time in my career is the following:
1. Someone does something they know perfectly well they shouldn't have done, but they think they won't get caught.
2. They get caught.
3. They feign ignorance or confusion about the rules, hoping to lessen their punishment.
4. The organisation takes their claim of ignorance seriously, and introduces incredibly patronising training/rules/signage.
A person who doesn't notice this happening could easily get the impression their peers have room-temperature IQs.
The author seems to be projecting their own above average intelligence onto other people. He’s imaging their inner world to be somewhat like his when it’s anything but.
> but they’re intelligent when it comes to their own lives and the areas they work and spend time in. We should expect the average person to struggle with factual questions about abstract ideas and far-off events, but not so much about what’s right in front of them day to day.
This is cosmically untrue. My cleaners can’t work my vacuum. I’ve spent a year constantly re-explaining it. They can’t put the oven racks back the way they found them, just force them in the wrong way around every time. No number of reminders seems to help. My landscaper could not work out he had our landscape wiring crossed, spent days coming back replacing bulbs, digging up wires and replacing them, randomly rewiring sections. 5 minutes with a multi-meter and I had it solved. I know a nurse who thinks deoxygenated blood is blue.
The average person tries to memorize a handful of things from someone smarter and then stays in their lane. That’s fine, I don’t think we should call them “stupid” but capable thinkers and problem solvers they are not.
Then there's the more subjective ones, such as: 1. Does it appear this person has fully thought through the short term and long term ramifications of their actions? 2. Would I have done that specific thing in that specific scenario? 3. Would a member of my peer group reasonably concluded the same thing?
The author seems fixated on subjective definition 1, claiming that people should be assumed to have made decisions rationally and thoughtfully and that people are too harsh on those who lack specific domain knowledge.
I'm not sure why he thinks that all the empirical evidence we have of what I will summarize as nutritional illiteracy in the US should ignored or that high school and college students (two groups with a well documented history of ignoring long term consequences of their actions) should be assumed to be rational, thoughtful agents, but my only guesses are that he has never interacted with any of these people or that he doesn't care because this is just a leaping off point for his defense of AI (my money is on the latter).
Subjective definition #2 seems to be what most people use, which I feel is unfair.
I added subjective definition #3 because it's one I've talked about with my friends a lot. Due to the removal of human interaction from most menial tasks (self checkouts at grocery stores, delivery of most goods via Amazon, etc.) and the fact that everyone I work with and nearly everyone I live near has at least one advanced degree and a high income, I literally can go weeks without interacting with a single person with an IQ of less than 115, which must skew my definition of stupid somehow, and I believe I am far from alone in this bifuraction of society.
IMO, contemplating that would be a much more interesting article than creating a very self-congratulatory method to chastise those who aren't all-in on AI as our future.
- I now have information I did not have at the time I made a choice that binds me now.
- I changed my mind.
Whether I believe it or not makes no difference because it contains no information.
As an aside: none of this is supposed to invalidate the experience of people having regrets, or struggling with addictions. If I see a friend getting drunk every night I won't go "ah, yes, they are correctly maximizing their utility according to their own discount rate and inter-temporal budget constraints". They are separate conversations, though, and we can have the kind of conversation where I help you solve problems or the kind of conversation where I just listen to you. They don't tend to mix well.
> We assigned participants to three groups: LLM group, Search Engine group, Brain-only group ... to write an essay. We recruited a total of 54 participants...
> We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record participants' brain activity in order to assess their cognitive engagement and cognitive load, and to gain a deeper understanding of neural activations during the essay writing task. We performed NLP analysis, and we interviewed each participant after each session. We performed scoring with the help from the human teachers and an AI judge (a specially built AI agent).
> We discovered a consistent homogeneity across the Named Entities Recognition (NERs), n-grams, ontology of topics within each group. EEG analysis presented robust evidence that LLM, Search Engine and Brain-only groups had significantly different neural connectivity patterns, reflecting divergent cognitive strategies. Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support...
And then: "...in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of a likely decrease in learning skills based on the results of our study."
I'm not sure "likely decrease in learning skills" is quite right here.
Smarter than most isn't an exclusive club. It's a massive class.
You nailed one of the biggest concerns I have in the face of that, which is that we all have an equal say in how our society is ruled, despite clearly not being equally equipped to make good decisions. Of course, all the alternatives to that method of governance seem to be worse, so...
People advocating for drug legalization do the same thing for example.
Students often cheat because they claim "they won't need to know this in the future", but school isn't about memorizing facts as much as learning how to research, learning how to communicate, learning to manage their time etc. When I think of someone who's "smart" by my definition, I would expect them to have all these skills that these students are (semi purposefully) avoiding.
Furthermore, - and this might be the sleepwalking bias - the conclusion that "I won't need to know this" is subtly against their best interests, because imagine for example, you spend $200,000 and 10 years to go to medical school, you "cheat" on everything, and pass only to find out, that DRs aren't in demand anymore because AI knows everything (and more that) you would have learned in school, so now the lay person just uses that instead. Wouldn't you have preferred to avoid wasting your time and do something niche that the AI doesn't know instead?
And of course - what are students typically doing instead of learning? TikTok, instagram, fantasy football, youtube shorts - all things that "we as a society" have decided are brain rot.
So it's hard to say that someone who choses things against their best interest for no real upside, who hasn't learned the skills to survive in society is smart by whatever definition
A lot more "intellectuals" defended Pol Pot and Milosevic compared to ordinary chums. The denial of the Cambodian genocide was known as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia".
As for the 53% stat, dude just go to Walmart and talk to regular people [2]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-think-mino...
Example: I'd bet many people who are at least gen X grew up with PBJs as a staple food. It seems healthy enough: bread, peanut-butter, and a little jelly. However, today there's sugar added to the bread, sugar added to the peanut butter, and most certainly sugar added to the jelly, far beyond what it was when growing up.
If you aren't really careful when at the grocery store or making food from scratch, you can easily end up consuming a lot more sugar than you realize.
I can't think of a position on anything that someone couldn't twist into an appeal to 'common sense'
There are different cheap rhetorical devices that some intellectuals use. I don't like that either.
Consuming junk food and using LLMs to do homework are examples.
When it happens at scale one could call this stupidity.
-Video games: Provide fun, but probably overall bad for society bc people waste too much time on them.
-Alcohol: Most drinkers get a lot of value out of drinking, but alcoholism is so bad that on net alcohol's probably bad.
-Guns & nuclear weapons: Wish both didn't exist, but each provides a lot of use to the specific people who have them.
-TikTok: Overall causes too many people to believe misinformation, but for a lot of other people is fun or interesting.
It's possible to think AI chatbots are net bad because people use them to cheat, or they rely on them for information too much and believe false information, without believing that they are always useless in all circumstances. I can use ChatGPT to alphabetize a long list for me. That's useful, even if I think overall chatbots are net bad.
Getting the job will depend more upon the grade and the network then it does upon any one homework assignment...
Is it stupid to do something perfunctorily when there is no direct evidence that a huge time& effort investment is going to pay off?
I really wanted to avoid leaving the reader with any impression that I think (1) intelligence is easy to quantify, and (2) HN readers are some kind of nietzschean elite who have all the answers.
This requires all of: being aware of a given problem, being sufficiently informed of the relevant context (which is further a matter of curiosity, discerning between trustworthy sources, and robust sense making), and finally caring enough to apply any attention and effort to the issue in the first place.
In this regard, almost everyone is "stupid' about everything most of the time. If anyone manages to achieve "smartness" it's usually in a very narrow decision space.
In terms of AI and education, the problem is: the path of least resistance is an optimal one - at least in a greedy sense.
The usefulness of the tool and "smartness" of the user are irrelevant to the core issue - general education is rapidly eroding. This is strongly correlated to (if not outright caused by) the ongoing rapid changes in technology.
The issue is that structured education originally meant: relying on your own wits, which in turn strengthened them. No cheat codes allowed.
This is no longer the case. Not only because of students using AI, but because "the path of least resistance" applies to educators and administrators as well.
Technology will change but educating people remains a fundamental good - to that end, institutions must adapt to make sure every student gets the proper enrichment they deserve. Get cheat codes out of education.
As a side note, there is good peanut butter that is just roasted peanuts and salt. It’s pretty damn healthy — much more balanced and healthier than most breads or jellies.
Here is one that is very common in the US:
https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-organic-peanut-but...
As far as we know there is no direct competitor in learning to doing it repeatedly, in different ways. Now whether a mixture of structured and truly unstructured learning is superior is another discussion.
If so, that's a pretty radical position, and if not I don't understand how they're relevant.
I like this reasoning. If something is popular it is objectively good. For example 21.7% of adults on earth use tobacco, so it must be good then.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.PRV.SMOK?name_desc=f...
Except for TikTok, which is bad because people share their experiences of chat bots not being very good on there.
As an aside, “dumb” is subjective, though if we had to put a label on it, “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” sounds like it could be something?
Trying to imagine using enough energy to boil two liters of water(1)(2) to sort a list instead of typing
sort list.txt
which is a command that works pretty much the same on Windows(3), Linux/Bash(4), macOS (5) and does not have any risk of hallucinating at all, and the only reason I could imagine myself doing that was if for some reason, using enough energy to boil two liters of water to sort a list made me feel good. Like I would only do that if I got some sort of rush out of it or if it made people on the internet think that I am smart.
1 https://ai-basics.com/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-really-us...
2 https://eatwithus.net/how-much-energy-does-it-take-to-boil-1...
3 https://www.windows-commandline.com/sort-command/
On the one hand the fact that people accept hallucinations is all the proof you need to indicate that chat bot usage is driven by feelings and not results, and on the other hand there’s a blog post that might’ve been written by a chat bot about how chat bot energy usage is pretty cool, actually, so who is to know anything about anything
That's hard to believe. Any nurse has drawn blood from veins and seen deoxygenated blood with their own eyes.
Frankly, the inherent contradiction of your vehement support for something you think shouldn't exist has confounded me, and your position that video games, guns, and alcohol also should not exist is so far on the fringe of society that it's hard to take at face value.
Often and fully aware? I sincerely doubt it. I’d bet it’s only a tiny minority of students who use ChatGPT who think it’s a bad idea.
Unlike the gambling addict, they can’t feel the immediate repercussions of their actions. Those will only be available in hindsight, long after they can correct.
The author seems to be pretending these people don't exist, and I think you made a good guess as to why.
I am not conflating "useful" and "good overall". You are the one claiming that something (let's pick TikTok) is useful to its users, but shouldn't exist. Why should something that is useful to its users not exist?
When you say useful in this case, I think you mean that users are deriving short term pleasure from interacting with the app by choice. You also seem to believe that the long term effects of near-constant social media consumption are so harmful that it should be banned. In my mind, if the latter is true, the short term pleasure is not in reality useful. If the latter is false, then the short term pleasure could be considered "useful" but there's no need for a ban.
This pattern also seems to hold with your example of students using chatGPT to avoid writing papers themselves. If I needed to succinctly describe the actions of someone who is spending tens of thousands of dollars a year and at least several hundred hours a year at a place for the express purpose of learning yet also actively avoids making effort to learn, "stupid" is a word that jumps to mind. Yet you seem to be arguing that is not the case because they know they're making a bad decision, which is hard to accept as an attempt at honest dialogue.
In both cases, people are trading long term gains for short term enjoyment. Calling that choice "stupid" may be rude or blunt, but it's not incorrect in most instances.
I'm not trying to put words into your mouth so I would welcome an actual answer to my question above (Why should something that is useful to its users not exist?), but I did want to explain what seems to me like an inherent contradiction in your position.
I would say that's true using a strict definition of the term, and is definitely true for common usage of the term.
In the future, you should just tell people up front when you're going to redefine terms to suit your needs (in your article and in your posts here, you apparently define "useful" as "providing immediate gratification with no consideration of any long term effects" and you seem to be define "stupid" only as "making decisions without full knowledge of the consequences" above) rather than confusing nearly everyone who reads your writing.
Yes, it is possible for something to be useful in specific circumstances but still be bad overall.
We have disagreements about what counts as useful. If our definition is "This is only useful if it leads to longterm happiness" that seems way too specific and would exclude too much.
It's stupid to cheat, I agree and try to make that clear. What I'm saying is the claim "Students think they're learning when they cheat using AI" assumes students are so stupid that they think cheating off of a robot will help them learn as much as writing an essay themselves. That's obviously wrong.
You provided a list of things you don't think should exist, which is equating them on some level to me, but okay. That context matters, which is why your "guns and balloons" example isn't meaningful.
Ultimately, I'm reading into this that you're deflecting from your actual point that you can't really defend by only bringing up nuclear weapons as a response to a statement about all the other items on that list of things that you think should be banned.
> Yes, it is possible for something to be useful in specific circumstances but still be bad overall.
Of course. No one is disputing that. That doesn't mean that things in that category should be banned outright, because it would make no sense to do so in many cases. Therefore, regulation exists.
> We have disagreements about what counts as useful. If our definition is "This is only useful if it leads to longterm happiness" that seems way too specific and would exclude too much.
You seem to disagree with nearly every person interacting with you (and the rest of us don't disagree with each other) about the definition of "useful" and a couple other key words, which really makes it hard to discuss your content. Even more so when you refuse to provide an explanation of what seems to be a very obvious contradiction in your reasoning.
FYI, no one I saw is using the definition you provided above either, which would be another very unusual definition of the term.
> It's stupid to cheat, I agree and try to make that clear. What I'm saying is the claim "Students think they're learning when they cheat using AI" assumes students are so stupid that they think cheating off of a robot will help them learn as much as writing an essay themselves. That's obviously wrong.
That is wrong, and no one I'm aware of is claiming that, so I have no idea what the point would be of arguing against it.
If you care to explain your answer to the question I've asked repeatedly now in order to continue the discussion, feel free. Otherwise, I'll leave you to continue to beat on your strawmen (there are at least 3 in this response alone) in peace.
I try to frame it in my head that people aren't generally stupid, but that we do a lot of stupid things. Or we don't do things (eg. read, or think critically) that adds to our level of stupidity.
It's perhaps a privilege of being above-average intelligence, but these days I try to focus less on being smarter and more on being less stupid. I seem to get more bang for the buck.
I'm still pretty stupid, though.
My own anecdote:
I worked with a guy on military aircraft. He was a radar technician. He went to school for it. I also went to school for it. The school was pretty hard with a decently high washout rate, including a lot of 2 year EE graduates, for some reason.
One day, we're working on the flight line on a radar issue and he says something pretty stupid, but we're kind of buddies, so I ask him to elaborate.
Long story short, his belief was that radar tracked other (jet) aircraft airspeed by reading the reflections bounced off of the other jets' turning pistons and calculating airspeed by how fast their piston assembly rotated.
I was completely taken aback by the multiple levels of stupidity. If you think through it a little, there are multiple levels of fail there. I then had to explain how this particular system actually worked and work him through the ludicrousness of each step of his beliefs.
How he 1.) fabricated this elaborate theory from the relatively simple section of training ("measure latency of returned energy transmissions"), and 2.) made it through tech school without washing out, I'll never know.
If you bought a hammer and never used it, so it never actually improved yourself, would you say the hammer itself isn't "useful"?
It's very clear that you're way more interested in avoiding any serious discussion of your position, because the entire premise of that article (anyone questioning why you use chatGPT is saying all chatbots are completely useless, and that a meaningful number of people you interact with are making that claim) is a strawman unless you primarily interact with people who are technologically illiterate.
I suppose that is straightforward and simple, but probably not in the way you intended.
> If you bought a hammer and never used it, so it never actually improved yourself, would you say the hammer itself isn't "useful"?
I have no idea why you think ridiculous analogies like convey your thoughts clearly, but to answer your question: No I would not say the hammer isn't useful, because it has a use and just I didn't take advantage of its utility.
You can’t test this type of awareness with polls. Doing the study itself skews the results.
I think there is a lot of truth here.
I used to teach chem and I would repeatedly warn students not to cheat (especially the on-line students). I'd explain that they would eventually have to take certification tests (for nursing) where they COULDN'T cheat.
So, if they cheated, they'd just waste time and $$$$.
I don't think my warnings helped and I think the reason is related to your statement. The cheaters are basically thinking, "I just have to jump through this dumb hoop. It's not important. I'll figure out the important stuff when the time comes."
I mean, I understand that line of thought, but they're making their decision to cheat based on the assumption that they can learn chem on their own and at a much later date. I'm sure most of them lost a lot of time and money.
You literally speak in riddles (via your endless use of hypothetical scenarios with no attempt to link them to the topic at hand), refuse to respond to direct questions that could clear up confusion, and have some rather eccentric and seemingly inconsistent views that you seem to really want to convey to others.
I'm not the one who needs luck going forward, my friend. Best wishes.
TBH this sounds a lot like something I would say just to fuck with a buddy to see a reaction. Oh and I could sell it with a straight face pretty damn good too. Although I wouldn’t let the ruse last long term. Not saying that’s the case here, but that would be my first assumption if I heard something so off the wall that defies belief from someone who should know better.
Of course you have had folks seriously arguing Q Anon, lizard popes, shape shifting Obama family members and all that mess too…so there are definitely those among us that have probably heard “what is you, stupid or something?” more than once in their lives.
We did make our own jam growing up though, so ... there's that?
Either way, I'm way more conscious now as a nutrient nerd but I believe everyone else is... well, 'a little naive' to put it nicely.