AI will make being knowledgeable, smart, hard-working, curious, and intellectually humble more important

[JohnL]

It was teaching HOW to study the Bible, instead of WHAT to believe the individual Bible books were saying. It was how to discover the meaning of the Scriptures. That is, in my thinking, critical thinking. (The Homiletics course was also that sort of thing.)

Our plan for our Sunday School is to first tackle how to study the Bible and develop a habit of daily Bible reading. Then we’ll tackle each NT book in turn and show how the teachings were arrived at. Kind of a both-and of the two approaches you described. Ours won’t be fancy or high level academimicry. I guess you could say it’s going to be an average Joe’s approach.

[Bootstrap]

I agree with the subject line: with AI, it is even more important to be knowledgeable, smart, hard-working, curious, and intellectually humble. But I suspect few people check all of those boxes.

AI can actually help develop those skills, but only for someone who steps up to the plate. Used well, AI can help you develop:

• Curiosity if you use it to learn how to ask better questions and follow-up questions
• Knowledge if you verify the information using other sources
• Humility if you learn not to immediately accept results that sound good to you and reinforce what you already believe

I also think the Internet made all of these virtues more important long before AI. In the early days, I assumed that would happen naturally: if anyone, anywhere in the world has access to so much of the world’s information, wouldn’t people become more informed, thoughtful, and humble by default?

Here's what surprised me: the more powerful the tools become, the more important central human virtues become, the less they are practiced. Powerful tools also make it easier to fake these virtues, and that's the lesson most people seem to learn. These tools make it easy to sound curious without being curious, confident without being knowledgeable, and informed without doing the work.

That seems to be the lesson most people actually learn.

[Soloist]

I liked this quote by Greg Lukianoff.

You do all realize that increasingly intelligent technology—like LLMs and other AI—will actually make being deeply knowledgeable, smart, hard-working, curious, and intellectually, humble MORE important, right?

But not in the way you can fake with a fancy degree you phoned in. It will favor real intelligence, knowledge, and hard work; things that are not best captured by our current K–PhD system.

The phrase that impacted me was "not best captured by our current K–PhD system." I've come to think that in many ways real intelligence and knowledge and hard work really aren't very well measured by the educational system, and I lump all kinds of education in that- public, private, homeschool.

Wife: Thank you for creating this topic. Several of us needed this small bit of affirmation this week.

[Bootstrap]

Wife: Thank you for creating this topic. Several of us needed this small bit of affirmation this week.

I did not understand that comment. What kind of affirmation was this for her?

[JohnH]

AI can actually help develop those skills,

Is there any evidence this is actually the case?

Teachers report AI is not making students more curious but rather teaching them to just regurgitate consensus information and doesn’t teach them how to learn things from primary sources.

Elite schools are banning the use of AI (along with banning smartphone use by students) in class or on the school grounds whatsoever.

Poorer schools will, as usual, get left behind.

Here's what surprised me: the more powerful the tools become, the more important central human virtues become, the less they are practiced. Powerful tools also make it easier to fake these virtues, and that's the lesson most people seem to learn. These tools make it easy to sound curious without being curious, confident without being knowledgeable, and informed without doing the work.

That seems to be the lesson most people actually learn.

I think the lesson from the Internet and smartphones is that giving people powerful tools means they end up scrolling short form videos for hours at a time.

When can we stand up and say that these tools simply do more harm than good?