Post #1757835

2026-04-09 05:14 UTC

@aredridel really good article, I agree with most of it tho I have qualms about some side discussion. I think some pedagogical practices have changed too over the years tho. E.g. nobody teaches "casting out nines" anymore (afaict). Perhaps some of the manual work we considered important for learning just wasn't so.

Replies (1)

@Jmj@hachyderm.io 2026-04-09 17:27

@riffraff @aredridel Yes, Bob and Alice are different, they developed different sets of skills to produce science. However, I’m not sure there is an important distinction to be made between them, the results matter not necessarily the method. The text says Alice developed a skill to close read a paper. I’d argue Bob would only be successful if they correctly used Claude’s summaries to come to the same understanding of the paper. So Bob has the same “skill”, they just use different techniques. A generation or two ago you could have made the exact same argument if Alice used a calculator and Bob used computer code. It’s really had to tell which skills are fundamental and which are a transient artifacts of the tooling and techniques currently in vogue.

Open ##1757841