Fatesrider Ars Legatus Legionis
13y
25,622
Subscriptor
KilenWoods said:
“We cannot choose to become idiots.”
Anecdotally, I've noticed that people can indeed choose to become idiots, and prefer being comfortably wrong to uncomfortable curiosity. GenAI just makes this choice easier.
Can't upvote this enough.
One thing stands out in this, though not at all mentioned in the article: The average college student is still physiologically immature.
The human animal does not fully mature until between 23 and 27 years old. That's when the part of the brain - the higher reasoning and critical thinking part - finishes maturing.
If society would acknowledge this fact instead of using that immaturity to exploit younger "adults", or attempting to teach them how to be mature humans when they are physiologically incapable of grasping the nuances of that state, then things might be different, because they'd then have the reasoning skills necessary to UNDERSTAND why cheating on exams and not actually learning the subject matter is important.
In college, it's all about GPA's and that's also the wrong metric to evaluate someone on, mostly because it's easy to game that with a lot of fluff classes to bolster the GPA when the core classes are bringing it down. After all, It's one thing to graduate with a GPA of say 3.4 in Engineering, but only a 2.1 in the core classes with the electives being what brought it up. But few employers ever see the core class grades.
If you ever wondered why you started thinking you were getting "old" when you were in your mid-20's, it's because your brain was finally in an adult configuration for the first time, and you realize that a lot of the "fun" things you used to do were actually pretty stupid to be doing at all.
In college, that would be cheating on exams, of course. Just do the fucking work. I was in my 40's running a business when I went to college and graduated with a degree in computer science and a 3.8 GPA (calculus and an exam on 9/11/01 kicked my ass or it'd have been higher).
AND if they understood that what your GPA was in college means jack shit (unless you're heading for post-grad) to an employer, and that they only care that you graduated, cheating becomes even more of a stupid thing to be doing. //
clewis Ars Tribunus Militum
10y
1,903
Subscriptor++
Aurich said:
<snip>
Why do people pick the jewels when it takes away from playing the game? I think because it's human nature to take the advantage, the shortcut, the skip to the goal. We're wired to find it hard to resist.
These students are facing the same kind of choice. Yes, the shortcuts are ultimately taking away from their experience. But it's so optimal, it makes things so much easier, they can't pass it up.
I honestly believe any solution that relies on pitting long-term self interest vs short-term gain is on the whole going to lose to the short-term option. It's human to choose that.
Click to expand...
Conversely, most people hate to exercise, but do it anyway. And it's got the same downsides that doing assignments have. It consumes limited time and energy.
I don't know why exercise seems to be winning. If I had to guess, I'd guess it's because exercise has a really good advertising team: Nike, the NBA, MLB, the Olympics, etc. Learning doesn't have a good ad team. I'm kind of the opinion that Not Learning has a better ad team than Learning does.
