As straw men go, this is an attractive one, but...
When I was fresh out of undergrad, joining a new lab, I followed a similar arc. I made mistakes, I took the wrong lessons from grad student code that came before mine, I used the wrong plotting libraries, I hijacked python's module import logic to embed a new language in its bytecode. These were all avoidable mistakes and I didn't learn anything except that I should have asked for help. Others in my lab, who were less self-reliant, asked for and got help avoiding the kinds of mistakes I confidently made.
With 15 more years of experience, I can see in hindsight that I should have asked for help more frequently because I spent more time learning what not to do than learning the right things.
If I had Claude Code, would I have made the same mistakes? Absolutely not! Would I have asked it to summarize research papers for me and to essentially think for me? Absolutely not!
My mother, an English professor, levies similar accusations about the students of today, and how they let models think for them. It's genuinely concerning, of course, but I can't help but think that this phenomenon occurs because learning institutions have not adjusted to the new technology.
If the goal is to produce scientists, PIs are going to need to stop complaining and figure out how to produce scientists who learn the skills that I did even when LLMs are available. Frankly I don't see how LLMs are different from asking other lab members for help, except that LLMs have infinite patience and don't have their own research that needs doing.
AI does not give you knowledge. It magnifies both intelligence and stupidity with zero bias towards either. If you were above average intelligent then you may be able to do a little bit more than before assuming you were trained before AI came along. And if you were not so smart then you will be able to make larger messes.
The problem, and I think the article indirectly points at that, is that the next generation to come along won't learn to think for themselves first. So they will on average end up on the 'B' track rather than that they will be able to develop their intelligence. I see this happening with the kids my kids hang out with. They don't want to understand anything because the AI can do that for them, or so they believe. They don't see that if you don't learn to think about smaller problems that the larger ones will be completely out of reach.
Maybe the solution is for an AI that acts as an instructor instead of just trying to solve everything itself. I do this with my kids, they ask me how to do something. I will give them hints, but not outright do it all for them. The article writer in the first part mentioned that this is how they would instruct too.
I recently heard that a professor said to the class, you can use an ai to solve the assignments. However I'll see if you really understand the material on the final exam.
Students are given student-level problem, not because someone wants the result, but because they can learn how solving problems works. Solving those easy problems with LLM does not help anyone.
Here I was thinking this article would tell me how to turn my unmanaged switches into routers, but no, "anything" actually means "any fully featured general purpose computer with networking".
That's theoretically possible but a bad idea for a managed switch, because they seldom have enough CPU performance or IO between the CPU and switch silicon to provide respectable routing performance. For an unmanaged switch, it's more likely that whatever CPU core is present (if any) doesn't have enough resources to run a real network stack.
Something many may not know is that beyond his own novels, Tracy was also deeply involved in Jonathan Harr's book, "A Civil Action." He and Harr were friends, and he told Harr about the courtroom case. Later, when Harr would get stuck, he worked with Harr to edit and give feedback on his drafts.
He always spoke more about "Mountains Beyond Mountains" than his other works, I think because of what he had to endure to write it. It caused him severe illness and health problems due to the locations he had to go to.
He was extremely proud of the other work he did, like "Mountains Beyond Mountains," but I'll always remember the bookcase where he kept every edition of "The Soul of a New Machine" in every language it was printed in. I think seeing that his work was worth being translated into so many languages was for him the biggest achievement of all.
I feel like I've been waiting for this to mature for a decade. I love that the vision has been realized despite the enthusiasm for functional programming languages cooling off somewhat.
That's actually brilliant! Most of my classes only taught what tools were needed to accomplish coursework, not generally useful tools. Even our OS class focused on the workings of the kernel, not the Unix philosophy and how it influenced what tools were included, and how to use them. Then again, 20 years ago the year of the linux desktop was much farther away than it is today...
While Russia is not quite a western country, the European upper classes around St. Petersburg and Moscow were no less "western" in philosophy and thought than people from nearby Latvia, Ukraine or Finland.
Tolstoy delighted in Schopenhauer, a western philosopher who he based much of his later ideas on. And yes, Tolstoy was later influenced by eastern thought, and was famously a Sinophile, but that is, again, a western tendency common among upper class europeans of the period (along with Japonisme).
Furthermore, "War and Peace" is often called one of the greatest works of "western literature". It's even included in Encyclopedia Brittanica's "Great Books of the Western World".
Just because the Russian Empire wasn't universally western doesn't mean large groups of people within were not. My own great grandparents came to America from St. Petersburg and considered themselves western.
The only thing that can make Russia "western" is if you equate white and western.
MAGA is western, because it is American. Russia is not western, because it is neither europe nor america. And they themselves consider themselves east. And did for over a hundred years.
If you have traveled a bit around the world, and first hand experienced different cultures, you will recognize that Russia of Moscow/Petersburg and other big cities is much closer to 'west' than to 'east' of China/India/Japan/Mongolia/Indonesia.
Maybe not western enough for you, it does have a distinct flavour (but then Sicilia is also distinctly different from Sweden), but still much closer to Europe than to Asia proper.
> The only thing that can make Russia "western" is if you equate white and western.
The thing that makes it western is similarity of culture, philosophy, religion, social structure, historic exchange and cross-pollination. [0] All of which exist well within the range set by countries that you would have no qualms of calling western.
It is very similar to the rest of Europe on all those axes, in a way that Indian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American, African[1], Polynesian culture, philosophy, and structures are not.
Yes, there are some peculiarities about it that the anglosphere finds alien. The same can be said for any distinct culture within the western sphere.
---
[0] Keep in mind that when I am speaking of Russia, my claims cannot be generalized among all of the ~100 ethnic and cultural groups that compose it. Just of the ones that make up the country's political center.
[1] I am speaking from a position of incredible ignorance when I just roll up an entire continent into 'African'. It's quite likely that people who know their ass from their elbow would be able to tell me why I'm wrong to do so.
When I was fresh out of undergrad, joining a new lab, I followed a similar arc. I made mistakes, I took the wrong lessons from grad student code that came before mine, I used the wrong plotting libraries, I hijacked python's module import logic to embed a new language in its bytecode. These were all avoidable mistakes and I didn't learn anything except that I should have asked for help. Others in my lab, who were less self-reliant, asked for and got help avoiding the kinds of mistakes I confidently made.
With 15 more years of experience, I can see in hindsight that I should have asked for help more frequently because I spent more time learning what not to do than learning the right things.
If I had Claude Code, would I have made the same mistakes? Absolutely not! Would I have asked it to summarize research papers for me and to essentially think for me? Absolutely not!
My mother, an English professor, levies similar accusations about the students of today, and how they let models think for them. It's genuinely concerning, of course, but I can't help but think that this phenomenon occurs because learning institutions have not adjusted to the new technology.
If the goal is to produce scientists, PIs are going to need to stop complaining and figure out how to produce scientists who learn the skills that I did even when LLMs are available. Frankly I don't see how LLMs are different from asking other lab members for help, except that LLMs have infinite patience and don't have their own research that needs doing.
reply