this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT::The growing number of students using the AI program ChatGPT as a shortcut in their coursework has led some college professors to reconsider their lesson plans for the upcoming fall semester.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You use literally everything you learn; it shapes your worldview and influences everything you do, especially how you vote. Don't tell us that useless knowledge exists. It all has inherent worth.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, within limits. Due to the information explosion, it became impossible to learn "everything". We need to make choices, prioritize.

How does your voting behaviour suffer because you lack understanding about how exactly potentiometers work, or how to express historic events in modern dance?

Both have inherent worth, but not the same for each person and context. We luckily live in a society of labor division. Not everyone has to know or like everything. While I absolutely admire science, not everyone has to be a scientist.

Because there is more knowledge available than we can ever teach a single person, it is entirely possible to spend a lifetime learning things with no use informing your ballot decision. I would much rather have students optimize some parts of their education with AI, to free up capacity for other important subjects which may seem less related to their discipline. For example, many of my fellow computer science students were completely unaware how it could be ethically questionable to develop pathfinding algorithms for military helicopters.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It actually suffers a lot because now companies that do understand those things have total control over your access to the modern world, and so turn you into a consumer and a peasant. Which is why the post-modern world is the way it is.

In a sane world, you know basic electronics so you can build your own shit when manufacturing companies decide to get smart and impose planned obsolescence to make you buy their shit continually, which damages the environment and society and fleeces you.

Modern dance is a hugely important aspect of our culture spanning music videos, theater, movies, all of which make billions of dollars so you're not even going to pretend it doesn't matter from a capitalist perspective either.

Without generalized knowledge of the world around you, you are beholden to everyone, and can trust no one. Anyone can lie to you and abuse you as they please. We see it happening with the MAGA cultists and tanktards on other Lemmy instances. We saw how a lack of generalized knowledge in a population destroys everything with our own eyes and see it every day. Don't sit there and pretend it doesn't matter or that the point of education isn't to ensure that doesn't happen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While all of what you say is true, we simply cannot teach everything since there is just too much knowledge and too little time in a human life.

And not everyone is equally interested or capable in learning everything.

This is necessarily the world we live in, even without adding capitalism or any evil intentions to the mix. Any education you can get or offer can only be a more or less well selected subset of the knowledge available.

In this light, I don't see it as a dramatic loss to remove educational emphasis from skills which can easily be replaced with modern technology. It would make sense to shift the focus to teaching a critical usage of said technology.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That's why you just teach the basics in a variety of fields. That way, people have the baseline they need to be able to build the skills in the fields they need or care about, or have to deal with at some point in their lives. And it will be all of them sooner or later.

We live in a representative democracy and that requires everyone who can vote yo hae that kind of basic education to avoid being schnookered. Amd we gave it up, and look what happened. It's not optional or a hobby. It's a requirement for society to function, so the lazy/disinterested people will have to get over it if we're going to have a modern civilization.

The fascist nightmare that the U.S. is slowly becoming is showing us why we take that approach and why we do not treat knowledge as something you only learn the bare minimum of to get a paycheck. A fucking monkey can get a paycheck. Humans learn and expand our body of knowledge. That's just what we do.

Just the act of basic shit like reading and writing affects cognitive function which affect your odds of getting Alzheimer's when you're older. And that knowledge is the foundation of our culture.