: This is what CS majors actually believe
Thomas Hunter II: AI will change the world but not in the way you think
I have nothing huge to say about this. The argument is familiar, about how LLMs are just wasted effort because they insert a translation layer between my “write an email with these bullets” and your “summarize this email in bullets.” But what jumped out to me from Mr. II’s post was this aside, which is shockingly dismissive of humanities education:
The point of a book report is to test if a student read the required material and was able to comprehend what it was about and the use of an LLM tool defeated this test.
This is what computer science majors actually believe dot jpeg: That teachers assign book reports to check if students did the reading—not for any of the other skills that you practice in writing a book report, like penmanship, typing, forming coherent sentences, forming well-organized paragraphs, operating Microsoft Word, identifying significant plot points and characters, identifying themes, extracting meaning and making connections, encountering differences of interpretation with your peers and resolving them without violence…. We can keep going, and of course the purpose of a book report and what we expect from it depends on whether the author is in 2nd or 11th grade. But the blogger above is clearly just … a guy who didn’t do the reading. Who values speed over craft. Who would rather we send bullet points back and forth to each other than complete sentences.
Speaking of which, I never understood these people who think that emails with long paragraphs are unconditionally worse than those with bullet points. Sometimes a bulleted style can nudge you to be better organized, but in general, concision and organizedness are only loosely correlated. I can fuckin read, you know?