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by pibaker2 hours ago |

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by gretch1 hours ago|

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> Do we actually have any measurements of if AI helps you learn something better?

To me this is intuitively true based on anecdata. 2 examples

1) learning spanish - when I hear or read a phrase I don't know, I type it into the LLM and I learn a new word/phrase. Sure, I could have cracked open a spanish language dictionary, but tbh, I wasn't going to do that. Not to mention that dictionaries are translating word by word and not phrase by phrase.

2) growing vegetables in the garden. I literally watched YT tutorials and did what they did, and now I have vegetables that I didn't before. Yes, I could have probably could have gotten this from a botany book, but once again, I probably was not going to do this. I also was trouble shooting a lot in gemini

Here are the problems I traversed: - How much water should I give these per day? what's the watering schedule? - how much sun vs shade? - when do I move seedling to the ground outside? - Is trimming good? which parts and when do I trim? - [take a picture of weird growth] - Is this a disease on the plant? Or part of the plant naturally?

by srdjanr49 minutes ago|

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I also have one anecdote - I (think) I understood basics of quantum mechanics intuitively for the first time. Of course it's probably superficial and maybe not 100% correct, but it is better than every time I tried to understand it before.

It definitely wasn't a single prompt, but two hours of back and forth, with a lot of time spent thinking (me, not LLM) in between. There were multiple times where I misunderstood something, so if I just read a book I'd probably get stuck many times.

by dakolli1 hours ago|

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Do you retain that information? Or are you just constantly relying on having access to an llm to re-look things up. The amount of information I retain when using llms to learn is far less than other methods, not sure why, you'd think it would be just as effective as reading a book, but it's definitely not. Probably for the same reason that learning math and always using a calculator does not make you great at math.

I've wasted a ton of my life already trying to make llms work for learning over the last few years, I'm especially bitter about it. I think this technology is a scam made to make us reliant on a think-for-me machines.

by srdjanr44 minutes ago|

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I think it depends on how much time you spend learning something and "engaging" with LLM.

I have many times asked it something I was slightly curious about, got the answer after the first or 2nd-3rd prompt, spent 3 minutes in total and forgot it after 15 minutes probably.

But a few times I've spent an hour or more on a topic, asking many questions, thinking between responses, and I actually learned something.

by rescbr45 minutes ago|

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For me it depends, if I simply take the answer from the LLM it goes straight into the shortest memory neurons my brain has.

Now, if I go back and forth with the LLM to say, taking the language learning example, to explore the etymology of the word (which for me is far more interesting than the translation itself), then I learn a ton more.