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by lich_king 105 days ago
I'm conflicted about this. On one hand, I think LLMs make it easier to discover explanations that, at least superficially, superficially "click" for you. Sure, they were available before, but maybe in textbooks you needed to pay for (how quaint), or on websites that appeared on the fifth page of search results. Whatever are the externalities of that, in the short term, that part may be a net positive for learners.

On the other hand, learning is doing; if it's not at least a tiny bit hard, it's probably not learning. This is not strictly an LLM problem; it's the same issue I have with YouTube educators. You can watch dazzling visualizations of problems in mathematics or physics, and it feels like you're learning, but you're probably not walking away from that any wiser because you have not flexed any problem-solving muscles and have not built that muscle memory.

I had multiple interactions like that. Someone asked an LLM for an ELI5 and tried to leverage that in a conversation, and... the abstraction they came back feels profound to them, but is useless and wrong.
4 comments
amoorthy 105 days ago
This. I feel this all the time. I love 3Blue1Brown's videos and when I watch them I feel like I really get a concept. But I don't retain it as well as I do things I learned in school.

It's possible my brain is not as elastic now in my 40s. Or maybe there's no substitute for doing something yourself (practice problems) and that's the missing part.

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mvaliente2001 105 days ago
One factor in favor of the use of LLM as a learning tool is the poor quality of documentation. It seems we've forgotten how to write usable explanations that help readers to build a coherent model of the topic at hand.
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ValentineC 105 days ago
> On one hand, I think LLMs make it easier to discover explanations that, at least superficially, superficially "click" for you.

The other benefit is that LLMs, for superficial topics, are the most patient teachers ever.

I can ask it to explain a concept multiple times, hoping that it'll eventually click for me, and not be worried that I'd look stupid, or that it'll be annoyed or lose patience.

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DoingIsLearning 105 days ago
> learning is doing;

I could not agree more.

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