“The failures are the curriculum.

[electricarchaeo@scholar.social]

“The failures are the curriculum. The error messages are the syllabus. Every hour you spend confused is an hour you spend building the infrastructure inside your own head that will eventually let you do original work. There is no shortcut through that process that doesn't leave you diminished on the other side.” https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/

[electricarchaeo@scholar.social]

“the grunt work is the work. The boring parts & the important parts are tangled together in a way that you can't separate in advance. You don't know which afternoon of debugging was the one that taught you something fundamental about your data until three years later […] Serendipity doesn't come from efficiency. It comes from spending time in the space where the problem lives, getting your hands dirty, making mistakes that nobody asked you to make and learning things nobody assigned you to learn

[electricarchaeo@scholar.social]

… We have centuries of accumulated pedagogical wisdom telling us that the attempt, including the failed attempt, is where the learning lives. & yet, somehow, when it comes to AI agents, we've collectively decided that maybe this time it's different. That maybe nodding at Claude's output is a substitute for doing the calculation yourself. It isn't. We knew that before LLMs existed. We seem to have forgotten it the moment they became convenient.

Centuries of pedagogy, defeated by a chat window.”

[electricarchaeo@scholar.social]

“ I'm not arguing that LLMs should be banned from research. That would be stupid, and it would be a position I don't hold, given that I used one this morning. I'm arguing that the way we use them matters more than whether we use them, and that the distinction between tool use and cognitive outsourcing is the single most important line in this entire conversation, and that almost nobody is drawing it clearly.”

[adr@mastodon.social]

@electricarchaeo this is SO GOOD

[scschmidt@archaeo.social]

@electricarchaeo this! This puts a lot of my feelings into words.
I like learning. I like breaking my brain. I like the feeling or finally understanding something by doing it myself. I dread the moment I finally give in and start using LLMs to be faster and loose that.

[paulnatsuo@scholar.social]

@electricarchaeo I tripped up on “Bob's weekly updates to his supervisor were indistinguishable from Alice's.”

There's never been the case for me. With students/junior colleagues, the questions asked by people working through their own learning processes are very different from those who are only trying to prompt an LLM for ‘correct’ slop.

[lsteinmann@archaeo.social]

@electricarchaeo I hate that I feel suspicious of every single text on the internet by now, and that almost everything feels stylistically LLM-ish, but I absolutely share the sentiment of the post... Thinking through (maybe sometimes foolish) problems is what makes people understand stuff, and "optimizing for the metric" is real.

[shandyist@c18.masto.host]

@electricarchaeo “The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing.”