Conversation

QC
@QiaochuYuan
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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QC
@QiaochuYuan
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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QC
@QiaochuYuan
@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
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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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QC
@QiaochuYuan
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
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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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QC
@QiaochuYuan
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
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.
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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.
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Alex Gregory
@alsnotepad
Genuine q: What would it look like to set an essay task that was unambiguously for genuine engagement? Or unambiguously for practice?
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Something along the lines of: (Engagement) Write an essay articulating whatever idea, reaction, or connection strikes you most powerfully from the readings; or if none of them inspires you, write a critique.
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