I didn’t realise people genuinely thought summaries led to actual understanding. I alway thought the people obsessed with summarisation were all about passing as read without actually reading
@baldur I wonder if a lot of people think that, if they can pass the test (literally or figuratively) without having done the reading, that actually does equate to understanding. So much of our culture’s current obsession with “outcomes” seems to be about getting to results with no concern for how we got there.
@baldur The Cliff Notes analogy is an excellent way to understand the problems with ChatGPT. What happens if we get in the habit of leaning on these AI crutches? We become dependent on the AI for access to all of that knowledge and understanding. Maybe this is what OpenAI wants.
@baldur There was a fantastic book series called No Fear Shakespeare where the book was split between the right and left pages with the bard's full text on one side and a modern English "translation" on the other. It removed a lot of difficulty from understanding the text while never making you leave the real sonnet or play itself. The idea was you eventually could catch on and wouldn't need to keep using their crutch to read the real stuff.
Cliffs Notes and ChatGPT perform the exact opposite function. They are designed to be useful in ways that give you an answer without helping you understand how. As @petebrown so perfectly put, "Outcomes without understanding."
@gregmoore When I was in high school and college, there was some mass market series of Shakespeare (not the Signet Classics, but similar) where the right page was the text and the left page was the notes (i.e., instead of footnotes or end notes). I found that similarly helpful.
@gregmoore I love two-column approaches like this. Great use of layout. And yeah, generative AI is all about outcomes without understanding