I'm not convinced it applies in the example given before your comment, because I 'm not convinced in his interpretation of the observed lower performance -that they are poor explainers- even though I believe his observations.
Instead I am convinced that if modern LLM teachers were given the same luxuries as human teachers, much if not most of this performance drop would disappear, and probably result in higher explanation skills in LLM's.
Which luxuries? a human teacher at a certain school / university and at a certain level has the luxury to have an understanding of what prerequisite knowledge the students already have. The educational system has already sorted them by "level" and "topic" at the start of the first session of a lecture series. Classic texts would be used for teaching materials, or the local text "inherited" from teacher to teacher, and those would already have been impedance matched to the preceding and following courses in the local educational system, such teaching aids would effectively have continuous notation conventions etc. Also compared with long-term human 1-on-1 teaching, I believe that if the educational chronology of the pupil were continuously added to its training corpus for additional post-training, so that it doesn't need to maintain ridiculous context lengths, then I don't see why an LLM wouldn't be capable of systematically introducing the conventional names of symbols it introduces, when referring for them for the first time, or providing definitions instead of referring to certified unknown-to-pupil concepts (which today an LLM can not magically guess, you have to drill into it what you know and what you don't yet).
Everyone has experienced LLM's explaining things and introducing acronyms without their expansion, and everyone has observed that such phenomena can be addressed by stating such demands in system prompts, or repairingly simply demand them in the conversation upon hitting this annoyance.
Imagine future math students (if any motivation still exists to become one) the education software making use of LLM's could train the student during the day, and itself do post-training on all its observations, trying to predict latents that describe which parts of mathematics are ready knowledge and which parts aren't for the student.
To point at a privilege vis-a-vis LLM's and then maintain a raised level of self-confidence does read like cope to me.
If one really wanted to taunt the performance of LLM's by gathering lists of such things it is incapable of, it means one can turn this around and start with collecting lists of priviliges a normal human teacher (or other job position) has vis-a-vis a naive LLM implementation of a human teacher (or other profession). For example a human teacher typically has the privilege of repeatedly teaching the same insights year after year, if different knowledge aware LLM's were connected or offered by the same service, it could build statistics of which concepts stick better and why, where things are hand-waived too much, etc... But the only result of publishing such cope-lists is providing gratis business models to whomever feels like implementing it, destroying the validity of the cope-curtain.
"Guys, I think I see zombies outside of this window!"
"Oh, just close the curtains of this window then if the McKenzie's are acting weird too... what a pity, they were the ones who showed me how closing the curtains is sufficient to keep the Zombies at bay!"
