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80% Positive

Analyzed from 1513 words in the discussion.

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#mit#more#education#going#german#learning#universities#research#community#better

Discussion (45 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

testfoobarabout 3 hours ago
This is a bunch of fluff. I hope at least the snacks and lunches during the discussions were good.

"Guiding principles: Be bold. Be humble. Put humanity front and center. Lean into learning. Teach with intentionality. No one size fits all."

"Recommendations: Adapt educational processes for an AI-aware world. Center people, community, and the residential experience. Build processes, teams and tools for continuous reflection, iteration, and improvement"

ChicagoBoy11about 1 hour ago
Yes, but as a K-12 administrator, I sadly have to tell you this is just about one of the more substantive things I have seen.

Yes, it's 95% fluff, but there is a real admission here that the guidance really ought to accept that there will be a whole host of tasks/assignments that kids engage in where the assumption SHOULD be that they basically will leverage AI, and that for their own benefit, resources should be set aside to promote experiences -- both in the context of assessments but also even in the social sphere -- there the influence of AI will be very purposefully prevented.

That is an actual stake in the ground, I think (as far as it goes in context like this). I think I would have been hard-pressed to have predicted that there would be such a revolutionary technology where the explicit ask of MIT faculty would be to prevent its influence in the school.

plasticchrisabout 1 hour ago
It will only get harder. From the trenches in tech it’s hard enough to get people who should know better to put in the work to understand the ai output.

For education I can’t imagine. You might have to resort to actual discussion in classrooms instead of homework, with the accompanying need for both more educators and higher quality therein. Which isn’t going to be easy when education is fully under regulatory capture (at least for K-12 in the USA)

cptrootabout 1 hour ago
I don't agree? By the time you get to the specific policy sections (3.x.x) there are concrete changes outlined in bold, several of which are requests for the institute to invest large amounts of resources changing the current teaching process. Even the non-bolded text occasionally contains real insights, like this gem from the end of 3.1.9:

> Students should not feel policed. Durable change will require instructors to be as clear as possible about their expectations and students to understand AI misuse as an unacceptable deviation from shared peer norms and community values rather than a violation of an arbitrary bureaucratic rule.

rpaikabout 2 hours ago
It's going to be difficult not to be "fluffy" as no one really knows the true impact and what's going to happen. And it's especially challenging for universities as voices questioning the value of higher education will only grow louder.
BubbleRingsabout 2 hours ago
I grew up with PC‘s starting with DOS 1.0. I built a career as a systems engineer, basically by being confronted with thousands of problems that took four hours to figure out because the Windows world was changing so fast there was no documentation to easily find your answer. Those same problems now take me five minutes to figure out by using AI, so I’m able to move onto the next challenge and learn the next thing. That’s one aspect that I think isn’t well recognized in the anti-AI mindset.

That fact, multiplied over 1000 different disciplines, is one of the ways that AI is going to bring amazing progress to our world.

123h-asdgabout 2 hours ago
They have always dressed it up as concerned humanitarianism. They did it already with large donations in the past:

https://www.philanthropy.com/news/can-a-350-million-gift-cha...

All concerns, while the real goal is stated right in the article:

"With this new approach, he says, experts in many fields can gain a deeper understanding of AI so they can better harness it. Meanwhile, computing experts are gaining greater exposure to the work of their counterparts in other fields. That exposure is giving the technologists a better understanding of how to create and train AI tools to better serve others."

I'm sure they will have many meetings about future meetings.

frognumberabout 2 hours ago
Makes me sick.

MIT is so very, very overcapitalized.

These things don't lead to anything other than a rich guy getting his name on a building, and more corruption in academia. By far the best thing which could happen to MIT would be for 95% of the endowment to go up in a poof of smoke, bringing it back to nineties levels. That's the end of the period when the Institute did high-integrity research.

jacobolusabout 2 hours ago
It sounds like you want a return to a time before a lot of the government research money coming to institutions like MIT was gutted.
copperxabout 3 hours ago
I hope AI was used to generate those empty words. What a waste of human effort.
tyraboundabout 2 hours ago
Human slopality
jespinelabout 3 hours ago
> This is a bunch of fluff.

Accurate description.

mag7269about 2 hours ago
“Boy, these guys are just [your typical Bill Lumberghs] with upper management written all over them.”
us-merulabout 3 hours ago
I think this has been going on well before AI or LLMs: "A fundamental danger, as we’ve discussed, is that AI can allow students to bypass learning. Equally concerning is that students may internalize a transactional model in which assignments are outputs, teachers are evaluators, peers are optional, and knowledge (or an MIT degree) is an optimizable commodity to be acquired or produced as efficiently as possible."
miltonlostabout 2 hours ago
Ok, but did AI and LLMs make the cheating easier, faster, harder to detect? Whatabout the past doesn't change the problems now.

"My leg already had a cut on it. No need to worry about the new stab wound in my chest!"

us-merulabout 2 hours ago
Absolutely; it's a real problem. But institutions like MIT have also been participating in, and benefiting from, this transactional relationship from their side in offering degrees that they know carry so much value.
bloppeabout 1 hour ago
MIT makes all its money from research (and investing its endowment more successfully than most schools), not tuition, and the success in research comes from having such a high-achieving community of faculty and graduate students. They're pretty incentivized to keep the bar for academic achievement genuinely high.
reagle21 minutes ago
- 2. Guiding Principles

- 2.1. Be humble

- 2.2. Be bold

- 2.3. Put humanity front and center

- 2.4. Lean into learning

- 2.5. Teach with intentionality

- 2.6. No one size fits all

- 2.7. Augmentation not automation

- 2.8. Think beyond the classroom and the campus

- 3. Recommendations

- 3.1. Adapt educational processes for an AI-aware world

- 3.1.1. Revisit course goals

- 3.1.2. Ensure durable learning through new course policies, structures, and forms of assessment

- 3.1.3. Emphasize experiential and project-based learning

- 3.1.4. Build structured in-person social learning into subjects

- 3.1.5. Preserve and expand out-of-class research and career experiences

- 3.1.6. Reconsider grades and incentives

- 3.1.7. Expand in-person spaces for labs and in-person evaluation

- 3.1.8. Provide AI use policies, with justification

- 3.1.9. Exercise caution with AI detectors and online exam platforms

- 3.1.10. Support responsible experimentation in the curriculum

- 3.2. Center people, community, and the residential experience

- 3.2.1. Define and communicate the value of residential education

- 3.2.2. Strengthen social connection and personal wellbeing

- 3.2.3. Encourage instructor disclosure around their own AI use

- 3.2.4. Teach effective, responsible, and ethical use of AI

- 3.2.5. Recognize and mitigate negative impacts of AI

- 3.2.6. Acknowledge AI use in theses and other research work

- 3.3. Build processes, teams, and tools for continuous reflection, iteration, and improvement

- 3.3.1. Establish an ongoing AI and education committee

- 3.3.2. Create school/college- or department-level AI Leads

- 3.3.3. Fund AI Fellows and an AI Implementation Team

- 3.3.4. Create an AI Pilot Fund

- 3.3.5. Provide ongoing training and instructor support

- 3.3.6. Develop metrics

- 3.3.7. Ensure equitable technology access

- 3.3.8. Protect sensitive data and preserve model choice

- 3.3.9. Establish privacy, logging, and auditing policies

- 3.3.10. Monitor AI costs and environmental impact

- 4. Conclusion

beej71about 2 hours ago
I do like that they're open to reconsidering the grading paradigm wholesale. I taught at a boot camp for a while and our highest-placed cohorts were the ones to whom we gave neither grades nor certificates. They plainly understood the game was between them and an eventual interviewer, not them and the school or instructor.
UJ-FLD-ScrTrabout 2 hours ago
You can think what you like about MIT, but at least they're giving it some thought, however perfunctory it may seem. Many German universities prefer to try and ignore the issue and hope for the best.
ncr100about 2 hours ago
How is this interesting? Sincerely?

Tell us more about how MIT giving AI some thought compares superiorly to 'many German universities', and please tell us more about which German universities and in which circumstances.

UJ-FLD-ScrTrabout 2 hours ago
My statement was more of a dig at German universities than a compliment to MIT. I understand your criticism of this institution (which doesn't even exist in that form in Germany), but that doesn't mean I have to reflexively condemn everything from there.
ncr100about 2 hours ago
Oh of course, I understand.

I'm just ignorant to German universities. Honestly, the only thing I know of is not even University level German education, but just the concept of the German gymnasium system, and that was from when a exchange student visited my high school, in the 1990s!

Thanks for the response. Cheers.

CalRobertabout 2 hours ago
I mostly think about what they did to Aaron Swartz.
UJ-FLD-ScrTrabout 2 hours ago
Regarding Swartz, I agree, but those are two different things. My statement was also more about the avoidance of the topic at German universities.
123h-asdgabout 2 hours ago
They also formed committees and investigated after the fact back then!
frognumberabout 1 hour ago
And then they adopted it as a tactic.

No, I can't provide a cite. Insider information. But whistleblowers have been threatened with being "Shwartzed" since (e.g. have frivolous criminal charges filed, to make their lives hell). In every case I've seen, whistleblowers signed an NDA, a non-disparage, and backed down.

That's why I don't trust a !@#$% thing from MIT anymore. Lies and fraud get covered up. Once that starts happening, you can't trust anything.

DataDiveabout 2 hours ago
This seems to have touched a nerve, based on the number of downvotes.

In this particular case that makes the message more trustworthy for me ;-)

zerolayersabout 2 hours ago
Was expecting something more concrete with a set of deliverables that can actually be acted on.
phasefactorabout 3 hours ago
"Be bold" by saying nothing of any interest. I have to agree that this is basically just fluff.

Anyone put it into pangram yet?

16bitvoidabout 3 hours ago
97% human-written
phasefactorabout 2 hours ago
I guess prolific em-dashes is not considered a sign of LLM writing anymore.
tyraboundabout 2 hours ago
It's actually not em-dashes, they are en-dashes, which is either intentionally to deceive (e.g., swapped) or used incorrectly. Both of which are bad, it's up to everyone to decide on which is worse coming from MITality.
a2ff6eeb0about 3 hours ago
Education is so cooked. In 10 years, people arent going to find it useful financially. The AI will be better at economically relevant thinking.

And there aren't enough hobbyist learners to sustain education at its current level.

tyraboundabout 2 hours ago
To be fair, the US education system has long been "cooked" due to policies implemented many decades ago now to sacrifice excellence, exceptionalism, and true merit for engineered social stability and ruling class profiteering and plunder.

AI is an opportunity to improve true education and learning on an individual and community level based on free association without the authoritarian and violent hand of government imposing lowest common denominator uniformity on everyone to produce uniform and manageable, profitable pseudo-citizen cogs.

beej71about 2 hours ago
I figure once it collapses I'll transition into being a tutor for some billionaire's kids at roughly triple my current salary. :)
DataDiveabout 2 hours ago
Isn't that how Parasite starts?
jplusequaltabout 2 hours ago
I'm sick and tired of hearing about how LLMs are somehow going to cultivate a society of "creative people full of ideas" when increasingly the people who are using it the most are accepting the LLMs ideas without question.
DarmokTanagra13 minutes ago
Reminds me of when the crypto people were saying system used almost exclusively for money laundering was going to facilitate a financial revolution.
add-sub-mul-divabout 1 hour ago
It's like assuming that the advent of fast food will create a society of people who exercise and otherwise eat well, to balance it.