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by llmslave2 166 days ago
With all due respect you were reading, not learning. It's like when people watch educational YouTube videos as entertainment, it feels like they're learning but they aren't.

It's fine to use the LLMs in the same way that people watch science YouTube content, but maybe don't frame it like it's for learning. It can be great entertainment tho.
3 comments
simonw 165 days ago
The YouTube analogy doesn't completely hold.

It's more like jumping on a Zoom screen sharing session with someone who knows what they're doing, asking for a tailored example and then bouncing as many questions as you like off them to help understand what they did.

There's an interesting relevant concept in pedagogy called the "Worked example effect", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect - it suggests that showing people "worked examples" can be more effective than making them solve the problem themselves.

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llmslave2 165 days ago
Ok but you didn't ask any questions in the transcript you provided. Maybe that one was an outlier?

In order to learn you generally need to actually do the thing, and usually multiple times. My point is that it's easy to use an AI to shortcut that part, with a healthy dose of sycophancy to make you feel like you learned so well.

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simonw 165 days ago
Yeah in this particular case I didn't ask any follow-up questions directly to Claude Code - I pasted a few things into Claude chat though, here's one of those conversations: https://claude.ai/share/9c404b38-efed-4789-bea1-06bca5f5d6e4
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croemer 165 days ago
Disagree, it can be learning as long as you build out your mental model while reading. Having educational reading material for the exact thing you're working on is amazing at least for those with interest-driven brains.

Science YouTube is no comparison at all: while one can choose what to watcha, it's a limited menu that's produced for a mass audience.

I agree though that reading LLM-produced blog posts (which many of the recent top submissions here seem to be) is boring.

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theshrike79 162 days ago
So if I read a book about something, I'm not "learning it"?

Schools must be the biggest scam ever then :D

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