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by lambdatronics 1202 days ago
I wouldn't say it is useless. But, there's an extent to which "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it to you." There's an interesting school of thought saying that in order to understand an idea, it requires creative act similar to that of the individual who originated an idea. (B/c verbal communication is very limited.) For instance, in order to comprehend the idea of Newton's Laws, one needs to have in some sense the capability to have come up with them, because teaching is really just prompting the pupil to reinvent the concept in their own mind.

IMO, this is why "natural language processing" with LLMs will not amount to "natural language understanding." Natural language explanations are targeted at intelligences capable of forming concepts based on IRL experience (naive physics, etc). The goal of teaching is to induce the formation of the concepts, not to directly transmit the concepts.