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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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@QiaochuYuan

Apr 16

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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@QiaochuYuan

Apr 16

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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@QiaochuYuan

Apr 16

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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@QiaochuYuan

Apr 16

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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@QiaochuYuan

Apr 16

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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@QiaochuYuan

Apr 16

@sashachapin

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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Sasha Chapin

@sashachapin

· Mar 8

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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@QiaochuYuan

Apr 16

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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rob hardy

@ungatedcreative

· Dec 28, 2021

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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@QiaochuYuan

Apr 16

in this way i, for one, welcome our machine overlords. if GPT-4 destroys the essay, or the concept of homework entirely, i will cheer and applaud raucously. we do not need them and we never did

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Alex Gregory

@alsnotepad

Apr 17

By the logic of this thread, there's no point in teaching children basic maths either. Assignments can be valuable because they help students *practice* skills they are not *yet* able to do in a way that brings new value.

Replying to

and

Yes, you're right. I won't speak for QC, but my complaint about the essay is that it *pretends* to be a venue for authentic intellectual engagement (what do you really think about this literature?) while cynically existing for practice. It's the false pretense I don't like.

8:11 PM · Apr 17, 2022Twitter Web App

Replying to

and

Genuine q: What would it look like to set an essay task that was unambiguously for genuine engagement? Or unambiguously for practice?

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Apr 19

These are good questions. I'm not sure the former is possible in a typical high school context, where the student hasn't even necessarily chosen the course. But assuming something like an elective undergraduate literature course… /

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