"if the students can use a LLM to do the task it was never really teaching critical thinking to begin with" is a very dumb take, sorry. I can bring a forklift to the gym and bench press more than Arnold. The point is not to move the weights.

March 31, 2026 - 04:16 UTC

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Sure, I’ll say it: I am learning more in-depth material facts when researching with AI, than I ever did from any other digital or book source.
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Facts, huh?
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There it is—the dumbest thing I’m going to read today.
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This is because you're neither intelligent or perceptive, and likely also have no value for accuracy or quality.
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Lmao no wonder you seamen can't put out a "laundry fire" while being surrounded by water.
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The take is more about attacking LLMs than the teaching of critical thinking. It implicitly denies that LLMs could do any ’genuine’ critical thinking tasks. But it’s also such a weak attack given that it uses performance outcomes as criteria rather than the idea of some ineffable consciousness
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It's a bad attack on LLMs though, because it conflates the ideas of "can this task be done without critical thinking by some system" and "do *humans* need to use critical thinking to perform this task". Both can be true, and the latter is all that's needed to decide learning tasks *for humans*
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The question is, are the tasks we set students more like training in a gym, or are they move like moving heavy things around a warehouse?
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It’s training in a gym so that one day they can move the heavy things when they need to, without having to use a forklift.
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that's a good point, but what does 'critical thinking' even mean in this context, are we talking about basic problem solving or something more nuanced?
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Historian Bret Deveraux made a similar point re: using LLMs to write essays.
The point of assigning students to do that is not actually to have thirty essays on the same topic. The essays themselves (probably) have no intrinsic value.
The point is to teach critical thinking and writing skills.
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See also: "addition isn't a math skill because a calculator can do it too"
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