Advisor & Investor, Humble Parent, Sports Fanatic. Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose.
Santa Barbara, CA
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Brett Queener retweeted
Absolute scenes in Paraguay as the nation celebrates reaching the World Cup Round of 16. Football means everything. 🇵🇾❤️
Santi Carneri Tamaryn
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ChatGpt really lagging now in trying to think through basic tasks - cmon openai, focus on what matters
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Brett Queener retweeted
I just gave a closed-book, pen-and-paper midterm exam in my 300-level course at UBC with 100 students. All exams were graded by an experienced graduate-level TA according to a rubric.
*** The average was 64/100.***
My class averages at UBC are usually 80-85.
Context:
• This was the first midterm, covering ONLY 4 weeks of material.
• Students had a list of possible questions in advance: no surprise questions.
• Questions included (a) 3 concept definitions, (b) 3 paragraph-long questions, and (c) a 1.5-page essay.
• I have taught this class multiple times. Nothing in my teaching style changed this semester.
• We read entire paragraphs of text in class, so students don't have to do something on their own that wasn't covered during the lecture.
• Students take a 10-question multiple-choice quiz at the end of every class (30% of the final grade).
• Attendance is 95-99% every class. Attention during lectures and participation in pair-work activities are very high → anticipating the end-of-class quiz.
*** But unfortunately, I suspect many students are not reading the material on the syllabus. They are asking LLMs to summarize it instead.***
After the midterm, students reported:
• They thought they knew concept definitions but couldn't produce them on paper.
• They thought they understood the arguments but struggled to connect them or identify points of agreement and disagreement.
My view:
It might be “cool” or “innovative” to teach students to summarize readings with ChatGPT or write essays with Claude. But we may be doing them a disservice: reducing their ability to retain material, think creatively, and reason from what they know. If you only read what AI has summarized for you, you don’t truly "know" the material.
Moving forward:
We have a second midterm coming up. I don't know how to convey to students that the best way to do better on the exam is to rely on and improve their own reading skills.
Ezra Klein: "Having AI summarize a book or paper for me is a disaster.
It has no idea what I really wanted to know and wouldn't have made the connections I would've made. I'm interested in the thing I will see that other people wouldn't have seen, and I think AI typically sees what everybody else would see.
I'm not saying that AI can't be useful, but I'm pretty against shortcuts.
And obviously, you have to limit the amount of work you're doing. You can't read literally everything. But in some ways, I think it's more dangerous to think you've read something that you haven't than to not read it at all.
I think the time you spend with things is pretty important."
@ezraklein
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Brett Queener retweeted
Me reviewing code generated by Claude before pushing to prod
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Under-rated - AI's ability, when given proper context, to be an incredible thought partner to flesh through ideas.
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In the End, it May Just be Judgement that Matters Most. open.substack.com/pub/queene…
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Ai and technology and clawdbot and all of that is great.
That being said no better joy can be had once you are one hundred hours in on octopath traveler zero on switch2.
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Brett Queener retweeted
Something that is 100% real but would sound fake if you told a Zoomer is that in the 1990s, for long plane rides, the flight attendants would hold up two VHS tapes at the front of the plane and people had to clap the loudest for whichever one the whole plane was going to watch
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Brett Queener retweeted
Maher Tarabishi, age 62, was taken by ICE last October when he exited his immigration check-in appointment in Texas. He was the primary caregiver for his 30 year old son Wael, who suffers from a chronic muscular condition called Pompe disease. His father provided 24 hour care for many years.
Wael died today, his family told me. Wael’s heath had been declining ever since his father’s detention. He never got to say goodbye to his father. Maher will never see his son again.
Maher came to the United States in 1994. He is not a criminal. He paid taxes. He raised a family. He was attending his immigration check ins reliably. Now that family is destroyed. For what?
If our government has any compassion, Maher Tarabishi should be released from detention now. He should be allowed to attend his son’s funeral. May Wael rest in peace.
Is this what America has become? Is this what we want America to be? Spread the word: #FreeMaherTarabishi
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Brett Queener retweeted
All part of wrecking America...
"This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board." —@_david_ho_
nature.com/immersive/d41586-…
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