> But it's like trying to rely on a calculator before you learn how to do addition by hand
I use salt to season my food but I have no idea how salt is mined. I have used log tables books in the past to do math work. Back when I first used these lookup books, I had a shaky understanding of logarithms.
> I use salt to season my food but I have no idea how salt is mined.
Culinary counterpoint: I recently came across a very entertaining subreddit [0] which collects screenshots of scathing reviews of online recipes in which the reviewer admits having made changes in the recipe which are often clearly the reason for their bad results.
What I'm getting at is that you may not know how salt is mined, but you are certainly aware that sugar and flour are never substitutes for salt, however white and powdery they all may be. You also know that skipping the salt will completely ruin the recipe, but skipping the nutmeg will not. You probably safely assume that you can replace table salt with kosher salt, or table salt with coarse rock salt (provided it will dissolve in cooking). However, you hopefully know that if the recipe calls for kosher salt you may not be able to use iodised table salt instead (if doing a fermentation), and that table salt is not a happy substitute for coarse salt for finishing.
You absolutely do need some sort of basic understanding of a process to carry it out successfully, even when you have the full instructions available or a helper tool, because reality is never fully reflected in theoretical descriptions. That's why you must know the very basics of cooking before following a recipe, the basics of arithmetic before using a calculator, and yes, the basics of critical thinking and background knowledge before productively using an LLM.
> You probably safely assume that you can replace table salt with kosher salt, or table salt with coarse rock salt (provided it will dissolve in cooking). However, you hopefully know that if the recipe calls for kosher salt you may not be able to use iodised table salt instead (if doing a fermentation), and that table salt is not a happy substitute for coarse salt for finishing.
Hopefully he'd also know that 99% of recipes that use kosher salt (presumably because it sounds fancier) will work just fine with with table salt (iodised or not). For most uses the grain size will not make any difference at all and for the remaining ones it is still not essential.
> when I first used these lookup books, I had a shaky understanding of logarithms.
this implies that now you do have an understanding of logarithms. how did you acquire this understanding?
The fear that many here share is that LLMs will make too many people get by without learning anything substantial from the ground up. Take away their LLM access and they're completely useless - at least that's what people are afraid of. Myself I'm on the fence - it was always the case that a certain type of people seek to understand how thinks actually work, and others who just want to apply recipies. These trends will likely make the recipy-appliers at first more powerful. I'm afraid though that soon enough they will be driven out by further automation coming on top.
> this implies that now you do have an understanding of logarithms. how did you acquire this understanding?
Not knowing logarithms (a) didn't prevent me from successfully using the log tables books and (b) using the log tables books didn't prevent me from developing a better understanding of logarithms. I expect something similar with happen with GPT based education.
I acquired a deeper understanding of logarithms through a bit of reflection and thought.
The math lessons and teachers didn't help illuminate logarithms in any significant way. They simply rattled off the theory of logarithms and moved on to teaching us how to use them. I had to go out of my way to understand it myself.
Is this any different from a GPT giving you a superficial, regurgitated level of knowledge which you then have to deepen through some effort on your part?
It's not any different, but in my opinion both are not good.
Someone should teach you how logarithms work before giving you a log table. Someone at some point should show you a trigonometric circle before telling you to press the cos button in the calculator to calculate a cosine.
That said, some"one" could be a GPT chatbot. The problem is that you might not know the right question to ask.
Yes, agreed. again though, the question is what jobs will be left in a couple of years for people besides people like you who went and sought out the foundational knowledge to be able to actually check the work the LLMs are going to do. And from my experience it needs a lot of checking.
These are not at all comparable? This would be more like seasoning with salt in predefined amounts and not knowing how to season to taste, which will fall apart the moment you deviate from the recipe or change up the seasoning mix at all.
ChatGPT might tell you how much salt to use but you'll be screwed when it tells you to use 5 tablespoons for a small steak and you don't have the fundamentals to question it or figure out where it went wrong.
Salt never accidentally turns itself into cyanide. This argument is moot so long as llms hallucinate.
llms are not a source of reliable knowledge as a result. they are knowledge augmented in knowledge cases. So really you are arguing students should read the knowledge base, the "augment" is just a thin conversational summarizing veneer.
I use salt to season my food but I have no idea how salt is mined. I have used log tables books in the past to do math work. Back when I first used these lookup books, I had a shaky understanding of logarithms.