It is slightly dismissive, since we see degradation of literacy within the past 20 years.

https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo...

We also know from colleges and schools that students coming in are having difficulty doing the reading needed for classes, even in literature classes.

AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning)

The issue isn’t that we have stupid people then and now. The issue is that trends of literacy and development now are changing direction.

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rpdillon 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning)

I disagree with this take so strongly. Yes, in practice people are lazy and they're just going to ask for the answer. But the potential for AIs to give targeted answers to specific questions about academic topics is so far ahead of anything I had going through undergrad or my master's program that it would be an epic missed opportunity not to leverage it in the educational process. I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.

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snazz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Very few people have the discipline to use it in that way rather than as a way to remove friction, just as practically no one with a smartphone doesn’t, at least occasionally, find themselves “sucked in”.

	▲	rpdillon 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> a way to remove friction Hell yeah. Trudging a mile through the snow and ice from West Campus to the Engineering Quad to sit in my TA's office hours so I could hope to ask a question about problem 19 because I don't understand the second half of it is a vastly worse use of time than firing up Gemini and saying "I'm taking partial differential equations, and I'm seeing a problem where I have to..." I would kill to go back through undergrad with an AI by my side as I study, or even in class, so when the professor loses me 10 minutes into an 80-minute lecture, I have a hope of getting back on the train and not having the lecture be a waste.

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intended 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I disagree with this take so strongly

You are free to disagree, and you are free to have an opinion. I would prefer your position to be the one that dominates, however the data on the ground doesn’t support the position.

If I can make a guess, the issue is that you are looking at the potential for individual learning improvement but I am referring to what is currently happening at scale.

If you remember school, most students didn’t want to be there. Homework exercises are something you would rather avoid.

America and the west, as class mobility became increasingly dependent on education, repeated the patterns in China and India. People went to college not because they wanted to study the subject, but because it got you a decent income when you got out.

In all these situations, you have people who aren’t there for the journey, but there for the outcome. (For that matter, even people who want to study, will take the easy way out.)

Having seen people use AI to study, it can be useful, especially if the underlying text books and notes are bad. However there are already many YouTube videos made by experts covering those topics, so the uplift here isn’t magical.

> I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.

This is a matter of belief, and in a vacuum it’s something most people would agree with. The issue is what the outcomes actually are.

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rpdillon an hour ago | parent [-]

We've only just begun. It's a veritable certainty that LLMs will be critical to education in the coming decades. I'll check back in after a few years!

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intended an hour ago | parent [-]

I have heard that sentiment many times already. It's a statement that is broad enough to capture any benefit and disavow any costs, for some later day when one can choose the nature of their measurement.

How would you estimate actual gains and losses to education for LLMs? What would good look like?

	▲	rpdillon 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The actual gains will be very similar to the gains that I thought would come from projects like Khan Academy (which was also quite hotly contested among teachers when it first came out). I don't agree with your rhetorical statement about the nature of my argument. I'm not trying to disavow any costs. I'm saying that AI represents a unique opportunity in the history of humanity to encapsulate knowledge and carry it through space and time in a highly scalable way. We have an epidemic of schools doing poorly in educating our students with constantly dropping standards, and an unwillingness to raise teachers' salaries. Education is extraordinarily expensive and I anticipate LLMs can be incorporated into a larger automated course load that is not stuck in the rigorous, true/false analysis that other automated systems have been stuck with in the past. LLMs are already excellent at critiquing humans' writing and providing feedback that a talented editor would typically have to be paid to provide. So, to summarize, the gains will be in the average cost of a high school education, the availability of that education across the world, the reliability of the information presented in the course curriculum, and the consistency with which we can educate at scale.

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smokel 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My point is exactly that comparing some variation within 20 years with to a 1000 year period makes little sense. Sure, our collective literacy might be decreasing now, but perhaps it was a bit too high to begin with? Leaders of a country are not the majority. The article makes quite a few of these categorical mistakes.

AI also allows for a lot more learning. Using ChatGPT to read and better understand Moby Dick works wonders for me.

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mplanchard 5 hours ago | parent [-]

AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning. Research on broader populations so far is not so hopeful, with most people using it to avoid learning. This is unsurprising to me, since people are often quite resistant to learning.

As to your point, literacy rates have been declining since the 80s. 40, going on 50 years is plenty of time to study a trend and draw conclusions.

Can you point me to any time in history where low literacy led to better outcomes for the average person than high literacy? Or even a study that looks solely at modern times and doesn’t manage to correlate literacy with positive social achievement?

But even if you can’t accept a historical argument due to the spans of time being incomparable, I personally believe from a more normative perspective that literacy is a foundational and fundamental good for humanity. But, if you can’t accept that argument either, consider how much of our ability to interact with and understand our own society requires literacy: imagine trying to sign up for healthcare, understand your taxes, weigh the risks of a surgical procedure, or figure out who to vote for if you either can’t read, can’t understand nuance, or are constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary.

And of course, being less literate means you are more likely to be convinced by people whose rhetoric is convincing, whether or not their ideas are correct and whether or not they are actually trying to fleece you.

Do you speak more than one language? I think that is also a telling experience. It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to live in a country where my second language is the only one. Sure, I can follow along with a conversation well enough, but dealing with government bureaucracy, forms, healthcare, and politics without the ability to be certain in my interpretation of the text would be a nightmare.

The irony of people sitting here on this all-text discussion site, responding to a textual article about the effect of technology on literacy, responding with “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.

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smokel 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was attacking the arguments used to substantiate the idea that literacy is a good thing. I personally think literacy is great.

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indymike 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> This is unsurprising to me, since people are often quite resistant to learning.

This is an attitude I had when I was 19 and had spent a bunch of time and money going to school. I had a life event that made me leave school and take on a huge debt that had to be paid. Most people learn - they just learn in context of their necessity and their own passions. For other things, they lean on the community around them (doctors, lawyers, accountants, software engineers etc...)

> AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning.

I'm watching the huddled masses start to figure it out. AI is going to be to arrogant intellectualism what the gun was to the knight. Now anyone who can operate a mobile phone (and literacy is not required) has access to a shocking level of expertise and contextualized knowledge. And as AI improves this will be more and more the case.

> constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary

First prompts of non developer employees were "what does ___ mean?". Real time vocabulary is a thing now.

> “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.

It's not a joke. AI is going to reshape society. It's just started. Back to the gun analogy - the knights are just now starting to realize that proficiency with a sword and 70kg of armor are no match for a peasant with a pistol. Likewise, I suspect that Joe six-pack with AI in his pocket can do knowledge work at a "way good enough" level. I don't want to accept it, but that seems to be reality.

	▲	intended 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> - the knights are just now starting to realize that proficiency with a sword and 70kg of armor are no match for a peasant with a pistol This isn’t a metaphor/analogy that works. There is a parallel in the introduction of a tool that has more “firepower” but that isn’t the crux of the issue when it comes to intelligence. You can give fable to someone who has never written code before and someone who has experience writing SW. Your outcomes are very different. The crux of the matter is that you need to know what “good” looks like to use automation or augmentation tools well. This is why it’s a greater boost to people with experience.