[teiferer]

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions.

That trained and sharpened invaluable skills involving critical thinking and grit.

[jlebar]

> [Trawling around online for information] trained and sharpened invaluable skills involving critical thinking and grit.

Here's what Socrates had to say about the invention of writing.

> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439

I mean, he wasn't wrong! But nonetheless I think most of us communicating on an online forum would probably prefer not to go back to a world without writing. :)

You could say similar things about the internet (getting your ass to the library taught the importance of learning), calculators (you'll be worse at doing arithmetic in your head), pencil erasers (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/pencil...), you name it.

[johnnyanmac]

>I mean, he wasn't wrong! But nonetheless I think most of us communicating on an online forum would probably prefer not to go back to a world without writing. :)

What social value is an AI chatbot giving to us here, though?

>You could say similar things about the internet (getting your ass to the library taught the importance of learning)

Yes, and as we speak countries are determining how to handle the advent of social media as this centralized means of propaganda, abuse vector, and general way to disconnect local communities. It clearly has a different magnitude of impact than etching on a stone tablet. The UK made a particularly controversial decision recently.

I see AI more in that camp than in the one of pencil erasers.

[djeastm]

>Here's what Socrates had to say about the invention of writing.

I think you mean to say, "Here's what Plato wrote down that Socrates said"...

[samuria]

And also taught people how to actually look for information online. The average person still does not know how to google, I still see people writing whole sentences in the search bar.

[Zambyte]

This is the "they're holding it wrong" of search engines. People want to use a search engine by querying with complete sentences. If search engines don't support such querying, it's the search engine that is wrong and should be updated, not the people.

Search engines have gotten way better at handling complete sentences in recent years, to the point where I often catch myself deleting my keyword query and replacing it with a sentence before I even submit it, because I know I will be able to more accurately capture what it is I am searching for in a sentence.

[Anamon]

Funnily enough, I've shown some people who said they liked using ChatGPT over Google because they can ask questions in natural language, that they can paste the same natural language question to Google's search bar and get their answers just as easily, and with actual sources. That was before search engines started showing "AI summaries", so I guess the demonstration effect wouldn't be the same today.

Natural language search queries have worked surprisingly well for quite a while before that, even.

[wiseowise]

It didn’t. Only frustrated and slowed down students.

[teiferer]

Sounds like somebody who disliked implementing QuickSort as a student because what's the point, there is a library for it, you'll never need to do that kind of thing "in the real world".

Maybe someday an LLM will be able to explain to you the pedagogical value of an exercise.