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@lzg Everyone's afraid of accidentally turning AI into a paperclip maximizer, but we've already purposefully turned the US public education system into a paperclip maximizer optimizing for the production of really effective standardized test answer regurgitators who've never been asked to do reasoning in their lives. *Of course* GPT is good at these tasks.
@lzg but I still remember the first time I was helping someone debug in office hours, and trying to get them to explain the thought process behind their incorrect code so I could give them a new perspective and the response was "I don't know, I just typed it"
@lzg GPT's stochastic parroting breaks down in the same way as CS 101 students who've spent their whole academic career successfully memorizing and then the combinatorial explosion of control flow hits a week after add/drop period ends and it's too late to recover because they're now 3 weeks behind understanding course material.
The difference of course being that humans are physically capable of learning to reason and our educational system is just bad at instilling it.