Comment by doug_durham
7 hours ago
The article is a thought experiment. The author hypothesizes that Bob isn't getting the same benefit that Alice is getting. That hypothesis could be wrong. I don't know and the author doesn't know. It could be that Bob is going to have a very successful career and will deeply know the field because he is able to traverse a wider set of problems more quickly. At this point, it's just hypothesis. I don't think that we can say we need more Alices any more than we can say we need more Bobs. Unfortunately we will have to wait and see. It will be upon the academic community to do the work to enforce quality controls. That is probably the weakness to worry about.
We do know. There have always been ways that people could avoid the painful process of learning, and...they don't learn.
Here's a competing thought experiment:
Jorge's Gym has a top notch body building program, which includes an extensive series of exercises that would-be body builders need to do over multiple years to complete the program. You enroll, and cleverly use a block and tackle system to complete all the exercises in weeks instead of years.
Did you get the intended results?
Do you think you learn as much from reading summaries of papers as reading the full thing? Do you think you learn as much from asking a friend to write a paper as when you write it yourself?
A more fair comparison might be, do you learn as much by reading one full paper vs. in a similar amount of time reading summaries of 3-4 papers, asking questions about details, reading the portions of those papers that you are interested in, etc.
I don't agree with both of the above analogies. Sometimes you must go in depth on a single paper, while other times it's broad research that's required. Different tools and methods for different tasks.
What your describing here
> reading the portions of those papers that you are interested in
Is a hybrid use of the technology which no one would argue against.
The question remains if students have the foresight to use the correct method and which results in the best learning outcomes.
For myself, I would have absolutely let LLMs summarise swaths of text and write my essays when I was at Uni. That's just me though. Maybe today's learners are better than I.