Comment on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

• 5C5C5C@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I don’t think this is a fair comparison because arithmetic is a very small and almost inconsequential skill to develop within the framework of mathematics. Any human that doesn’t have severe learning disabilities will be able to develop a sufficient baseline of arithmetic skills.

  The really useful aspects of math are things like how to think quantitatively. How to formulate a problem mathematically. How to manipulate mathematical expressions in order to reach a solution. For the most part these are not things that calculators do for you. In some cases reaching for a calculator may actually be a distraction from making real progress on the problem. In other cases calculators can be a useful tool for learning and building your intuition - graphing calculators are especially useful for this.

  The difference with LLMs is that we are being led to believe that LLMs are sufficient to solve your problems for you, from start to finish. In the past students who develop a reflex to reach for a calculator when they don’t know how to solve a problem were thwarted by the fact that the calculator won’t actually solve it for them. Nowadays students develop that reflex and reach for an LLM instead, and now they can walk away with the belief that the LLM is really solving their problems, which creates both a dependency and a misunderstanding of what LLMs are really suited to do for them.

  I’d be a lot less bothered if LLMs were made to provide guidance to students, a la the Socratic method: posing leading questions to the students and helping them to think along the right tracks. That might also help mitigate the fact that LLMs don’t reliably know the answers: if the user is presented with a leading question instead of an answer then they’re still left with the responsibility of investigating and validating.

  But that doesn’t leave users with a sense of immediate gratification which makes it less marketable and therefore less opportunity to profit…

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    arithmetic is a very small and almost inconsequential skill to develop within the framework of mathematics.

    I’d consider it foundational. And hardly small or inconsequential given the time young people spend mastering it.

    Any human that doesn’t have severe learning disabilities will be able to develop a sufficient baseline of arithmetic skills.

    With time and training, sure. But simply handing out calculators and cutting math teaching budgets undoes that.

    This is the real nut of comparison. Telling kids “you don’t need to know math if you have a calculator” is intended to reduce the need for public education.

    I’d be a lot less bothered if LLMs were made to provide guidance to students, a la the Socratic method: posing leading questions to the students and helping them to think along the right tracks.

    But the economic vision for these tools is to replace workers, not to enhance them. So the developers don’t want to do that. They want tools that facilitate redundancy and downsizing.

    But that doesn’t leave users with a sense of immediate gratification

    It leads them to dig their own graves, certainly.

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• BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Don’t lean on an AI if you want to develop general cognition essay writing skills.

  Sorry the study only examined the ability to respond to SAT writing prompts, not general cognitive abilities. Further, they showed that the ones who used an AI just went back to “normal” levels of ability when they had to write it on their own.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    the ones who used an AI just went back to “normal” levels of ability when they had to write it on their own

    An ability that changes with practice

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