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Comment by unyttigfjelltol | Hacker News Reader

> this enthusiasm is hardly dampened by, say, a clear statement in one’s syllabus prohibiting the use of AI.

I've learned from AI about weird wonderful, obscure and niche topics, important and trivial. The university used to be defined by the size of its library, when knowledge was confined to physical places. Now the academy locks a modern storehouse of knowledge? And students pay for this?

Education needs to evolve. It's no longer enough to teach students to think deeply and critically. It reminds of my first month of law school when some chipper professors painfully educated us on "Sheperdizing" case decisions using the printed volumes. The equivalent of printing your database and indices to run your next query. Several layers of obsolete, pointless activity they should have stricken from the syllabus in favor of a future-oriented curriculum. So too here.

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They're not banning using it as a "storehouse of knowledge," they're banning using it as a way to go from prompt to essay without passing either one through your own brain.

Author does also say:

> Or: 'I just used it to help with the research.' (More and more, I have been forbidding outside research in these papers for this very reason.

Students who sign up to a running class are complaining that the coach locks them down from using a car. Ridiculous! In the real world, you'll have access to a car! Why bother exercising your body?

Give it time, when I was younger I was not allowed to use Wikipedia as a source. Change takes time and in the meanwhile people will complain.

>Most academics agree that you shouldn't cite Wikipedia as a source in your academic writing...

https://www.scribbr.com/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-cit...

> I was not allowed to use Wikipedia as a source

Ummmmm

One of the "rules" of referencing is that one never references an encyclopaedia. An encyclopaedia is where you get only the basic background information for your study, not details worthy of referencing.

Reference an encyclopaedia in an academic paper and the referees will, quite rightly, reject it and request a better source for your reference.

Mine had the same rule specifically for Wikipedia, the reasoning was "anyone can edit it" - even if a bad change is reverted later, you may have just happened to be looking at it while it was there and are now propagating something false.

As I vaguely remember from very long ago secondary school, no one was forbidding me from looking at an encyclopedia in the school library but, as you say, it wasn't a referenceable source--much less something to essentially cut and paste from.

> It reminds of my first month of law school when some chipper professors painfully educated us on "Sheperdizing" case decisions using the printed volumes

Not really understanding your argument.

I would expect, not being a lawyer, that the classes in the first months of law school would serve to do more than teach specific case law. Maybe get students indoctrinated into the anarchistic[0] ways of the judiciary or something?

Though... I have heard that lawyers have been very successful in getting sanctions from using ChatGPT in pleadings so you do you.

--edit--

[0] Or even "archaic" but I like the typo...

I believe he's objecting to having to learn how to do legal research using printed books instead of entirely online.

Here's an old comment describing how legal research was in the days before everything was computerized [1] if you are curious. The specific thing he mentioned, "Sheperdizing" is the word for using the series of books from the Frank Shepard Company which are mentioned at the end of that comment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8491076

Still don't understand the argument as they are inherently the same thing.

What I gather is they are teaching students how to research case law and the medium is completely irrelevant to that task. I suspect the concept is the most important part.

Though, as always, I'm probably completely wrong and this is just some gatekeeping conspiracy to keep the ranks of people with knowledge of the law artificially low.

Here is the process for Shepherdizing in a commercial service online: look at the icon, click on it.[1]

Here is the same process performed via printed volumes-- see the link.[2] The point was this exercise was not taught as an incident to case law, the first month of class was specifically about navigating these printed volumes, which may be hard now to even comprehend.

The two processes are "inherently the same thing" as much as supermarket shopping is the same as working a farm. Or flipping a light switch is like lighting an oil lamp.[3] Which is to say, these are different skills, which have no clear connection to an ability to prepare a meal, on the one hand, or read a book, on the other.

[1] https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis/shepards.pag...

[2] https://constitution.org/1-Law/uslaw/how2shepardize.htm

[3] https://lampity.com/how-to-light-an-oil-lamp/

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