[throw8404948k]

> This quest for deep understanding also explains a common experience for mathematics graduate students: asking an advisor a question, only to be told, "Read these books and come back in a few months."

With AI advisor I do not have this problem. It explains parts I need, in a way I understand. If I study some complicated topic, AI shortens it from months to days.

I was somehow mathematically gifted when younger, sadly I often reinvented my own math, because I did not even know this part of math existed. Watching how Deepseek thinks before answering, is REALLY beneficial. It gives me many hints and references. Human teachers are like black boxes while teaching.

[jgord]

Its not too late to hope for the current crop of LLMs to give rise to a benevolent, patient science based educator, like the "Young Ladies Illustrated Primer" of Neal Stephensons Diamond Age.

We clearly will soon have the technology for that .. but it requires a rich opinionated benefactor, or inspired government agency to fund the development .. or perhaps it can be done as an Open model variant through crowdsourcing.

An LLM personal assistant that detects my preferences and echoes my biases and massages my ego and avoids challenging me with facts and new ideas .. whose goal is to maximize screentime and credits for shareholder value .. seem to be where things are heading.

I guess this is an argument for having open models.

[ohgr]

I suspect you probably don't understand it after that. You think you do.

I thought I understood calculus until I realised I didn't. And that took a bit thwack in the face really. I could use it but I didn't understand it.

[sarchertech]

I think you’re missing the point of what the advisor is saying.

[throw8404948k]

No, I get it.

My point is human advisor does not have enough time, to answer questions and correctly explain the subject. I may get like 4 hours a week, if lucky. Books are just a cheap substitute for real dialog and reasoning with a teacher.

Most ancient philosophy papers were in form of dialog. It is much faster to explain things.

AI is a game changer. It shortens feedback loop from a week to hour! It makes mistakes (as humans do), but it is faster to find them. And it also develops cognitive skills while finding them.

It is like programming in low level C in notepad 40 years ago. Versus high level language with IDE, VCS, unit tests...

Or like farming resources in Rust. Booring repetitive grind...

[WhyOhWhyQ]

Books aren't just a lower quality version of dialog with a person though. They operate entirely differently. With very few people can you think quietly for 30 minutes straight without talking, but with a book you can put it down and come back to it at will.

I don't think professional programmers were using notepad in 1985. Here's talk of IDEs from an article from 1985: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800225.806843 It mentions Xerox Development Environment, from 1977 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Development_Environment

The feedback loop for programming / mathematics / other things I've studied was not a week in the year 2019. In that ancient time the feedback look was maybe 10% slower than with any of these LLMs since you had to look at Google search.

[sarchertech]

The point is that time and struggle are required for understanding. The advisor isn’t telling the student to go read these books because he doesn’t have time to explain.

He’s saying go read these books, wrestle with the ideas, go to bed, dream about them, think about them in the shower. Repeat that until you understand enough to understand the answer.

There’s no shortcut here. If you had unlimited time with the advisor he couldn’t just sit you down and make you understand in a few sessions.