this essay question garbage is fundamentally fake. every student knows the goal is to write some bullshit that sounds good enough that you're willing to assign it a good grade. you are not actually training the students to perform any kind of useful work and you never were
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here's the opening of an essay i wrote as a sophomore in college. i don't remember writing this. i don't know a single thing about fMRI or the patriot act. i bullshitted this whole thing. this is what happens when you force students to write about shit they don't care about
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this whole thing might as well have been generated by GPT-3 for all anyone could tell by reading it; it contains none of my actual writing voice, which i would not get back for another 8 years. there's none of my personality or life experience or soul in here
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i want to clarify here that i'm using "bullshit" in harry frankfurt's technical sense, and specifically as distinct from lying: when you lie you try to hide the truth, when you bullshit you don't care either way what the truth is
www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f1
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GPT-3 is literally a bullshit engine. it does not have a concept of words as referring to things; it plays games with words *only*, pure syntax, no semantics. literally the thing it is optimizing for when it produces text can be condensed to "put words here that sound good"
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if GPT-3 can answer the essay questions you've assigned as homework then you've learned that your essay questions were optimized for producing bullshit, in the specific sense of words that sound good but are indifferent to their own truth or falsehood
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spending a decade training students to orient towards writing as mainly about bullshit is not the profound education in the humanities some people want it to be. any actual writing ability i have now i trained on MSN messenger, livejournal, forums, social media
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only has a job as a writing coach because school has so thoroughly destroyed so many people's relationships to writing. people who have entire books in them live in fear of Doing The Homework Wrong
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
I’ve worked with at least three people who are Pulitzer level talents just quietly wondering whether they should disturb the universe
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writing in lowercase is magic because it doesn't activate the Uppercase Context. Uppercase is for School and Work; in other words, it's writing someone else is forcing you to do. lowercase writing is *consensual*
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i wrote a thing
it's about how writing in lowercase has done magical, inexplicable things for my creative output
ungated.media/article/lowerc
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yessss!! this whole thread is great but “lowercase writing is consensual” resonates so strongly with me. writing for school is so profoundly coercive and writing in that style feels like being afraid
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Replying to
“h-h-here’s that essay on the war of 1812 d-d-did i do it right p-p-please don’t yell at me” 😩
Replying to
“and here are the short answer questions that i wrote a page for each because if i actually write short answers you’ll take points off bc i forgot to read your mind and include the one detail you wanted”
it’s all a complete farce! grr
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