The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition
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I believe you and agree.
I have to be carful to not ask the AI leading questions. It’s very happy to go off and fix things that don’t need fixing when I suggest there is a bug, but in reality it’s user error or a configuration error on my part.
It’s so eager to please.
Yeah, as soon as the question could be interpreted as leading, it will directly follow your lead.
I had a weird issue with Github the other day, and after Google and the documentation failed me, I asked ChatGPT as a last-ditch effort.
My issue was that some file that really can't have an empty newline at the end had an empty newline at the end, no matter what I did to the files before committing. I figured, that something was adding a newline and ChatGPT confirmed that almost enthusiastically. It was so sure that Github did that and told me that it's a frequent complaint.
Turns out, no, it doesn't. All that happened is that I first committed the file with an empty newline by accident, and Github raw files has a caching mechanism that's set to quite a long time. So all I had to do was to just wait for a bit.
Wasted about an hour of my time.
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The problem with AI here is that it tends to prefer agreeing to you over being correct and it's very likely that it teaches patterns and terminology to you that doesn't exist.
For example, I just asked ChatGPT to explain a "backflip" in the context of agile development (I claimed I was an university student and that a teacher used that term in the context of moving tickets), and it came up with this:
If your teacher linked "backflip" to moving tickets in a predictable fashion, they might have been emphasizing:
The importance of minimizing rework or regressions.
Understanding why work items move backward (if they do) and making that visible in your process.
Managing workflow policies so that tickets don’t repeatedly “backflip” between stages, which can disrupt predictability.
How This Might Help You Move Tickets More Predictably:
If "backflip" means work moving backward:Track the Cause of Backflips:
Identify why tickets are moving backward (incomplete acceptance criteria, insufficient definition of done, unclear requirements).Improve Definition of Ready/Done:
Tighten entry/exit criteria to reduce backflows.Add Checkpoints:
Build small validation steps earlier to catch issues sooner.Visualize Flow:
Use a Kanban board to visualize backward movement and analyze bottlenecks or quality gaps.It just takes the nonsensical word, makes something up, and claims that it's right.
The joke is on you (and all of us) though. I'm going to start using "backflip" in my agile process terminology.
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I'm still looking for a good reason to believe critical thinking and intelligence are taking a dive. It's so very easy to claim the kids aren't all right. But I wish someone would check. An interview with the gpt cheaters? A survey checking that those brilliant essays aren't from people using better prompts? Let's hear from the kids! Everyone knows nobody asked us when we were being turned into ungrammatical zombies by spell check/grammar check/texting/video content/ipads/the calculator.
IMO, kids use ChatGPT because they are aware enough to understand that the degree is what really matters in our society, so putting in the effort to understand the material when they could put in way less effort and still pass is a waste of effort.
We all understand what the goal of school should be, but that learning doesn't really align with the arbitrary measurements we use to track learning.
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Lots I disagree with in this article, but I agree with the message.
On another note, I found this section very funny:
Disgraced cryptocurrency swindler Sam Bankman-Fried, for example, once told an interviewer the following, thereby helpfully outing himself as an idiot.
“I would never read a book…I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Extend his prison sentence.
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Lots I disagree with in this article, but I agree with the message.
On another note, I found this section very funny:
Disgraced cryptocurrency swindler Sam Bankman-Fried, for example, once told an interviewer the following, thereby helpfully outing himself as an idiot.
“I would never read a book…I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Extend his prison sentence.
Initially I thought it was something like Aurelius' diary entry on not spending too much in books and living in the moment. Nope, he's just lazy. I have a friend like that, who reads AI summaries instead of the actual articles. Infuriating to say the least.
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It's sad because for most people school is about the only time anybody cares enough about your thoughts to actually read an essay and respond to it intelligently.
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Lots I disagree with in this article, but I agree with the message.
On another note, I found this section very funny:
Disgraced cryptocurrency swindler Sam Bankman-Fried, for example, once told an interviewer the following, thereby helpfully outing himself as an idiot.
“I would never read a book…I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Extend his prison sentence.
Yes but let him take time off for reading and shiwing ge comprehends good books.
In a way you or i could knock out in like a really nice month full of cocoa and paper smells.
He will die in a cage.
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Once again I'll say, I'm perfectly fine with the death of the essay as viable school homework.
In my experience, teachers graded only on grammar and formatting. Teaching - and more to the point, grading - effective writing skills is harder than nitpicking punctuation, spelling and font choices, so guess what happens more often?
You want school to mean anything, you're going to have to switch to verbal or demonstrable skills instead of paperwork. Which society probably needs to do anyway.
Or you let radicals be teachers, and you let teachers put some fuckingbpasdion into their work.
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I'm still looking for a good reason to believe critical thinking and intelligence are taking a dive. It's so very easy to claim the kids aren't all right. But I wish someone would check. An interview with the gpt cheaters? A survey checking that those brilliant essays aren't from people using better prompts? Let's hear from the kids! Everyone knows nobody asked us when we were being turned into ungrammatical zombies by spell check/grammar check/texting/video content/ipads/the calculator.
Critical thinking is on the downturn, but, interestingly, it's by date, not birthdate. It happens with exposure to social media algorithms and llm's, more than anything else.
The living death of our humanity is a monumental testament yo neuroplasticity and our ability to keep changing deep into old age.
Its a really inspiring kind of horror.
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IMO, kids use ChatGPT because they are aware enough to understand that the degree is what really matters in our society, so putting in the effort to understand the material when they could put in way less effort and still pass is a waste of effort.
We all understand what the goal of school should be, but that learning doesn't really align with the arbitrary measurements we use to track learning.
I think as long as you hit some very basic milestones, and don't become a fascist, you're recoverable. Can be a person.
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We had copy and paste lol, nothing close to chatgpt but it was similar
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I'm still looking for a good reason to believe critical thinking and intelligence are taking a dive. It's so very easy to claim the kids aren't all right. But I wish someone would check. An interview with the gpt cheaters? A survey checking that those brilliant essays aren't from people using better prompts? Let's hear from the kids! Everyone knows nobody asked us when we were being turned into ungrammatical zombies by spell check/grammar check/texting/video content/ipads/the calculator.
Relevant article
https://web.archive.org/web/20250314201213/https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-458b-a371-e0e1c54a13fcAdmittedly the downward trend began sometime in the 2012s so it predates LLMs.
