They’re using flipped learning even in universities now.

Flipped classroom was a popular method when I was teaching math. Some students found it very helpful. The trouble was getting the students to do the reading before class. If students came in unprepared they struggled to keep up.

Flipped classroom method?

Interesting. Ages?

Everytime a student says this—it's because they're procrastinating on their work. The hardest part about anything new is starting it. Once you build some momentum, interest and focus tends to build as well.There certainly are some homework assignments that are boring.

A child today can absolutely be successful at doing their homework if they have time to... sit down and write, or draw, or do crafts or things that require them to focus. It's not like Screens exist, therefore no attention span.

What's happening is people are only fixating on screens, and foregoing these slower forms of media. That's akin to saying all children will be obese now that fast food is around. Of course, obesity rates will sky rocket if all you eat is fast food. But if a kid grows up to have homecooked meals, and eat with their parent(s) then they won't. It's as simple as that.

Learning how to do "boring" things is probably one of the more important skill a child can learn, most things worth doing tend to be kinda boring at least at some point.

Homework isn't boring.....its the social media and addictive games that completely are destroying our attention span.

After I detox from online games, I can go back to learning new "boring" stuff. There are nerds(myself included) who find learning fun, and using AI boring because it doesn't scratch the learning itch.

Yep, learning is hard work.

So your complaint is...it's boring?

The point is to train the brain via repitition and iteration.

If your goal is entertainment, I'm not sure what you are looking for.

In my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.

Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.

If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.

If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.

On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.

Your employer gave you your job based on your exam results.

Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.

The exams aren't the thing that matter, they're an experiment to measure the thing that matters. Which, presumably, still matters at work!

One of the main reasons safety standards are written in blood.

Your career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.

Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.

You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")

Sure. Let's not think too hard about what it means that general thinking and creativity are the skills we've stopped practicing this time. It will be fine.

(You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)

you know we let social media companies cause massive harm over 2 decades; but clearly, this will be deifferent!

These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.

Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.

Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.

Why one would care? Look at your comment from two days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363319

> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.

Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.

Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366313

You gotta pick a lane with your rah-rah-ism.

The important thing is that I could learn to use a flint and steel pretty easily if I wanted to. I don't need to carry out that particular task, but my ability to adapt to new problems means I can carry out more relevant tasks when needed. The most useful part of school and university for me wasn't that I learned the difference between a cirrocumulus and a cirrostratus cloud in geography class. It's that I learned how to learn.

If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all. I suppose your counter-argument to that will be "but we can just hand over everything to the AI" but that's an essentially an argument that humans should be considered obsolete altogether. I sincerely hope that that's not a path we end up going down (although I'm genuinely scared that it is).

It's critical to understand the fundamentals on your own and that is different from AI being used in public. Sure school doesn't have as much value as it used to but it was always more about social credit or a certification that you took the time and effort to understand the world under pressure (obviously not true for all disciplines) or goals attached preferably in group settings.

This is something that AI cannot replace. Viewing things as memorizing is the wrong take.

How do you differentiate between mastery of a topic and mastery of using an AI in an exam setting?

Open book tests and allowed cheat sheets already solve the memorization-is-not-required gap. It seems like allowing use of AI pushes that closer to thinking-is-not-required. And if no thinking is required, then how can you prove personal mastery?

This is not, in fact, fine. The point of education is to learn things, and these results show that kids are not learning things as effectively when they use LLMs.

A good analogy to caching and memory lookups. You store in your head only the most valuable immediately necessary information, the rest can be outsourced.

A lot of expertise is actually knowing things about the domain. You can't make a good judgement call on a topic without getting relevant knowledge in your head to make that decision. You can't even lookup the relevant knowledge without knowing what knowledge is important to make the decision, so reference material is not enough.

Completely agree.

Absolute waste of time getting babies to walk now that we have cars and electric scooters!

One more step towards eliminating the value of labor entirely. What "work" will people be doing on a daily basis, and what makes it valuable?

This is too simplistic. There are disciplines, like Anatomy, where you're basically just memorizing bones, glands, and other parts of the human body. For organic chemistry, students need to memorize most of the krebs cycle diagram for their exams (because doing so and drawing it lets them reference it later).

Thinking is infinitely more complex than "critical thinking" vs. rote functions. You want students to get to critical, eventually, but the lower orders on bloom's taxonomy serve important roles, too.

Course design built around multiple choice questions, essays, and a lot of the historical assessments that we're used to are largely not great for learning in the first place—–they're used because they can be auto-graded or score assigned quickly. AI, conversely, is kind of revealing the limitations of these outmoded learning design practices.

Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).

AI is a new tech—so of course people are still figuring out the limits of it. In 10 years a lot of the paradigm will be set. Until then, students are unfortunately kind of in the thick of it.

Memorizing stuff is good for understanding. Of course memorizing without understanding doesn't really help, which is what a lot of student last-minute "cramming" boils down to. But without concrete and memorized knowledge, any abstract reasoning skills become quickly impossible.

Definitely not fine. People are graduating from Computer Science programs literally unable to write a line of code without AI assistance.

These people have fallen into OpenAI and Anthropic's trap and are illiterate without the assistance of coin-operated slop generators.

Good exams don't just test memorization

What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).

If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" we can drop all jobs - and only the surgeon has some authority over the machine. When we have a surgery robot, then they can go to. And at some point we'll be recommending and forcing surgery for athletes foot because some kind of best practice or viral post going out of control and a bunch of openclaw bots randomly decide to make tons of recommendations online for amputation for athletes foot and GPT 8.6 agrees this is the way to go.

OR we can somehow decide there is a boundary, there is some room for human memory and decisions.

Appreciate your summary of this summary of the economist’s summary of the paper.

Around here kids get homework in kindergarten. It's absurd.

This is the answer. Many (all?) European schools don’t give homework (this is partly because of the way the grad programs work). It’s on the students to study in order to pass the (difficult) exams.