juniperror

Web repeating actually feels like a good fit for these current gen multimodal agents.

Unsure if the code was provided (logged out I only see the one post) so unable to speak to the code or how it runs, but judging by the poster’s profile I think I can trust they know when code runs correctly. Though it does appear they’re currently working at this specific agent’s parent company.

Honestly, this impresses me more in the work the selenium team has been doing than the llm that used their api.

Getting the answer and working backwards teaches you to use what others have created in novel ways to find new solutions to old problems. Figuring out the answer for yourself (with some minimal guidance) teaches you toy problems with answers have answers. We should strive for the former.

> How would you solve a problem that no one has ever touched before, and that no one knows the answer to? Where are you going to be provided the answer?

This is very near and dear to my heart.

We are talking about “teaching” and I doubt anyone who supports the current education status quo is advocating to teach using unsolved problems.

That said, I do feel, personally, and have long advocated for, teaching using unsolved problems as a better technique, because you learn strategies for approaching a problem much better than: here’s theorem 13.4 heres an exercise problem that uses the theorem, what’s the answer?

It reads like you see my opinions are black and white and yours as spectra.

Using your own reading on your own comment the logical conclusion is “a system that teaches to an answer will be unable to answer unanswered questions because the students were only taught to answer questions that already have answers.”

A great example of the answer being the most useless part of one’s own personal knowledge is Timothy Gowers YouTube content:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=byjhpzEoXFs

But who’s cares what some YouTuber is up to? He’s just out here promoting an inherently incorrect education method wrought from a dysfunctional mind.

> I would try to get to the root of this.

I guess you could amend the old adage to “on the internet everyone thinks you’re a dog”.

I am decades removed from advanced university degrees.

I am saying how I, as in me, learn best, and acknowledging that it’s different.

My point was why restrict a “generalist engine” to only teach one specific way.

All the old restrictions that pander to: this is how the text book is written, there is only one teacher and 30 students; are baggage and should be discarded in their absence.

I made my educational intentions clear:

> That quote should have read ~“the agent has been designed to work tirelessly to do anything to ensure the student understands the material well enough to wield it”

But I do like and agree with one point you made:

> but also to learn how to acquire future information.

What’s the student learning in regard to acquire future information? To hope some megacorp will steal all of humanity’s creative output to build an llm to teach it to them?

> and never coughs up answers.

I have fought this my whole life, and only in my adulthood, and self guided learning, have I found the freedom to accept it: I learn better from being given the answer and working backwards. (Even literally reading textbooks “backwards”)

I hope there’s more nuance to this than this quote suggests, because I shudder to imagine a student experiencing what I did but now with a tireless unempathetic agent refusing to just tell a struggling student the answer and instead continually looping on suggestions to “look at it from another angle” in every way but the one “angle” I’m explicitly asking for.

Aligning digital teachers with our broken education system that thinks “answers” are the important part of education is a terrible terrible idea.

That quote should have read ~“the agent has been designed to work tirelessly to do anything to ensure the student understands the material well enough to wield it”