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by JimtheCoder 1072 days ago
It is more so the fact that someone takes something from ChatGPT, and then just feeds potentially contentious assertions into Google to see if they are true or not.

What does someone learn from doing this? What happens when they actually have to use their brain to do something hard?

At this point, why bother?
2 comments
sebastiennight 1072 days ago
You forgot the part where the Google results that the student double-checks against are actually SEO blogs written with the help of ChatGPT...

I don't think Google in 2024 is guaranteed to be the critical-thinking tool that 2004 Google might have been.

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camdat 1072 days ago
If someone plugs math into a calculator, are they really learning something when it spits out an answer?

Of course! How to apply the calculator to problems, and how to discern if a problem is calculator-solveable. We've decided as a society it's better for students to use calculators as a tool in mathematics, why is chatGPT different in literature?

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tjr 1072 days ago
I don't know how calculators are used in classrooms today, but when I was going through school, the general idea was that we could use calculators to do tasks that we had already learned to do.

E.g., we could not use a calculator at all when learning arithmetic.

Once we learned arithmetic and were learning (say) algebra, we could use the calculator to do arithmetic, but not to compute the algebra for us.

While learning trigonometry, we could use the calculator for arithmetic, but not for computing sines and cosines.

While learning calculus, we could use the calculator for arithmetic and sines and cosines, but we could not use it to perform integration or differentiation for us.

And so on.

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nerdbert 1072 days ago
You can't type your homework into a calculator and get the answer out (at least not after basic arithmetic).

You have to understand the problem and how to use the tool.

If one's understanding of how to use the tool is limited to "access the tool and dump in the question, then blindly paste the response into my homework document", I'd say you are not learning much. It's obvious that every contemporary teenager can learn that in a few minutes. That's not giving us the capabilities to move forward as a society.

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flangola7 1072 days ago
> You can't type your homework into a calculator and get the answer out (at least not after basic arithmetic).

But we can? Students using ChatGPT to get homework answers is the whole thing we are talking about.

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