[simonw]

How can you bring yourself to trust a human teacher? Humans are wrong sometimes too, often with confidence.

The trick to learning effective timely (with both LLMs and human teachers) is to recognize that you should learn from more than one source. Think critically about the information you are being exposed to - if something doesn't quite feel right, check it elsewhere.

I genuinely believe that knowing that an information source is occasionally unreliable can help you learn MORE effectively, because it encourages you to think critically about the material and explore beyond just a single source of information.

I've been learning things with the assistance of LLMs for nearly two years now. I often catch them making mistakes, and yet I still find them really useful for learning.

[aleph_minus_one]

> How can you bring yourself to trust a human teacher? Humans are wrong sometimes too, often with confidence.

If humans/AIs are wrong about a topic (in particular wrong in a confident way) multiple times, I will stop trusting them to be experts in the topic. What I experienced is rather that many human experts in academia tend to be honest when they are not sure about the answer.

[brendoelfrendo]

A human understands what they're saying. If a human teacher is working through a math problem and isn't sure of their work, they're able to stop and correct their mistake. An AI math teacher is trained on a corpus of data - probably very similar to the data that the human teacher was trained on, though I'm sure the AI was trained on far more data than any single human ever was - but can't do the introspective part. To put it another way, I think we agree that humans learn better by assessing multiple sources and thinking critically. An AI is very good at the former, but very bad at the latter, and I would rather have a teacher that can think critically about what it is saying to me.

[camdenreslink]

The problem is that LLMs in their current state confidently lie. They will tell you that 38 + 22 = 3822 without a shred of uncertainty.

If you are a 7 year old learning how to do arithmetic with fractions, there is no way that will help you learn more effectively.

[simonw]

Right, so don't use them if you are a seven year old. LLM-assisted learning requires skill in learning.

[danielmarkbruce]

To your point... if you trust anything, you already are at a big disadvantage in learning. It's the wrong attitude.

[camdenreslink]

If you can't trust a teacher or a textbook, then you are in big trouble. Especially if it is a brand new subject to yourself where you don't have an intuition about what is correct/incorrect. Part of a teacher/student relationship is obviously trust.

[danielmarkbruce]

No, you aren't. You can listen to ideas and think about them and attribute them to the sources and come to (or not) your own conclusions.

The reason it's such a bad idea to "trust" the way you are suggesting is that many fields are quackery. Do you trust that fancy textbook and sophisticated sounding professor from first year macroeconomics?