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by d4rkp4ttern 13 days ago
A related idea is to have the LLM quiz you, Socratic-style about a topic of interest. It persists in asking questions at deeper levels until you arrive at the answer yourself. This forces you to think hard about a problem, and this effort helps with understanding, learning and retention. Of course I made a Socratic-quiz skill for this, to use with any coding agent or similar:

https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...

For example I’ve used this to better understand counter-intuitive things about diabetes/insulin, dopamine and motivation, Claude’s implementations, etc (to combat so-called cognitive debt).

Strong LLMs are surprisingly good at this type of quizzing, they display a semblance of “theory of mind”.

4 comments

I think this might be useful if you are supplementing your learning from actual sources. Like you casually said you understood counter-intuitive things about diabetes/insulin, dopamin and motivation etc but these are very complex topics and require a lot of study to fully "understand". Its okay if you just see it as curiosity-driven learning but I dont see this as a way to learn anything that is actually important or serious.

Traditional method of looking up stuff, going through guided lessons etc are just more streamlined and faster than this method.

How do you deal with context length degradation here?

The harder questions will only arrive when the context is getting full.

If you have it question you for 1M tokens (aka the full length of the Wheel of Time series), I think your own context might get full before the LLMs.
The Wheel of Time is 4.3M words: https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/comments/zs1ust/chart_of_wot_wo.... Some of its individual books are near 400k.
Right, even a conservative 200k context length is on the order of 200 pages, which is more than enough context to arrive at an answer.
If it's a well-known concept (like pretty much anything you can find from undergraduate textbook), the LLM doesn't need the whole context to teach you.

If it's something actually novel, no matter how much context you provide it'll still hallucinate.

This is really good! Thank you for this skill, it seems like this method of learning is working really well for me, it is much more engaging, and I have just learned new things about my team's project by using it.

I'll definitely check out your other skills.

if your power is LLM, what are you without it ???
Without it, I was a stack overflow lurker, and before that a forum reader
i suspect a lot of us started out as encyclopedia readers before we discovered that strangers on the internet would answer questions for free
say wallahi
If your power is literacy, what are you without it?
seems like someone didn't get the joke