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

[mike]

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.

[barnhart]

Or to say it another way, AI will create a hunger for what is real and what is human.

[mike]

Or to say it another way, AI will create a hunger for what is real and what is human.

Right, and I think what he says goes a bit deeper, and shows that this is not a new need. Our education system itself has created such a hunger also, failing to capture, as he says, "intelligence, knowledge, and hard work."

[JohnL]

Or to say it another way, AI will create a hunger for what is real and what is human.

Right, and I think what he says goes a bit deeper, and shows that this is not a new need. Our education system itself has created such a hunger also, failing to capture, as he says, "intelligence, knowledge, and hard work."

This is a good topic. We’ve been saying for years that public education really doesn’t teach students critical thinking skills. I also think there’s more to the story. Tv has been used as a baby sitter for years and then there’s the video games too. Kids expect to be entertained a lot of the time and so there’s this whole couple of generations that don’t spend enough time in the real world tackling activities that increase knowledge and critical thinking skills to improve intelligence.

[JimFoxvog]

We’ve been saying for years that public education really doesn’t teach students critical thinking skills.

But is this true? In my AP History classes in the 1970s reading reproductions of original documents and making arguements from them was the central activity. One of my sons dropped out of homeschooling to do public high school. He also had a history teacher who encouraged critical thinking.

Maybe it depends on the school and teacher. My school was in a rich suburb, my son's was in a poorer small town, but we had similar experiences in this way.

[Soloist]

We’ve been saying for years that public education really doesn’t teach students critical thinking skills.

But is this true? In my AP History classes in the 1970s reading reproductions of original documents and making arguements from them was the central activity. One of my sons dropped out of homeschooling to do public high school. He also had a history teacher who encouraged critical thinking.

Maybe it depends on the school and teacher. My school was in a rich suburb, my son's was in a poorer small town, but we had similar experiences in this way.

I think it depends dramatically on the teacher.
That being said, a school can definitely cripple the ability to teach thinking skills.
As well intended as “no child left behind” was, I think one of the premier problems that have been stated is that people are teaching to the test but that’s always sort of been a problem.
In college, I think I only had maybe two professors that tried to address critical thinking. Most of them were just teaching the test.
Nursing School involved a little more, but it sort of felt more like we’re trying to guess which answer the teacher decided to call right that day.
There are multiple correct answers, but there’s one that is more correct than the others. and it definitely was subjective based off of the instructor.

[JohnH]

Public schools do not teach critical thinking about whether or not to reject evolution (the idea that a soup of chemicals turns into a monkey, which then turns into a human being), nor do they teach critical thinking to accept the obvious truth of God's word.

[Soloist]

Public schools do not teach critical thinking about whether or not to reject evolution (the idea that a soup of chemicals turns into a monkey, which then turns into a human being), nor do they teach critical thinking to accept the obvious truth of God's word.

The problem here is that people are not adequately trained to actually be able to respond to the first position because they don’t even understand the science behind the arguments.

Ultimately, both positions are founded on faith by the vast majority of people. Not logic and rationalism.

[Robert]

[Neto]

Critical thinking:
I was in a High School Government class when the Water Gate scandal broke, and President R. M. Nixon was accused of involvement. We had organized debates (going by the real rules for debates, not the nonsense you see in political debates now) about whether he was guilty or not. At that point there was still not complete information, and he had not yet resigned, although Vice President S. T. Agnew may have already resigned. The teacher assigned the teams - no once chose which side they were going to help present. So we all gathered what information we could, and organized our arguments. I would suggest that was teaching critical thinking.

Fast forward to after I was long out of Bible college, and different Mennonite constituencies began organizing Bible schools. When I looked at the list of offered courses, I immediately saw a fundamental contrast between their course offerings, and what I had taken myself, first in a Bible institute, and then later in a Bible college. The difference is most stark in comparing these newer Bible institutes and the one I had attended my Freshman year. The newer institutions offered courses on multiple books of the Bible, where as I had only a single course that focused on a single book of the Bible, and what was actually being taught in that course was Bible study methods - the Bible book was simply used as the material on which these different methods were applied. 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.)