Keep it light, keep it moving.
I am doing no harm.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2023

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  • I quickly learned how ChatGPT works so I’m aware of its limitations. And since I’m talking about university students, I’m fairly sure those smart cookies can figure it out themselves. The thing is, studying the biological sciences requires you to understand other subjects you haven’t learned yet, and having someone explain how that fits into the overall picture puts you way ahead of the curve because you start integrating knowledge earlier. You only get that from retrospection once you’ve passed all your classes and have a panoramic view of the field, which, in my opinion, is too late for excellent grades. This is why I think having parents with degrees in a related field or personal tutors gives an incredibly unfair advantage to anyone in college. That’s what ChatGPT gives you for free. Your parents and the tutors will also make mistakes, but that doesn’t take away the value which is also true for the AIs.

    And regarding the output that appears correct, some tools help mitigate that. I’ve used the Consensus plugin to some degree and think it’s fairly accurate for resolving some questions based on research. What’s more useful is that it’ll cite the paper directly so you can learn more instead of relying on ChatGPT alone. It’s a great tool I wish I had that would’ve saved me so much time to focus on other more important things instead of going down the list of fruitless search results with a million tabs open.

    One thing I will agree with you is probably learning how to use Google Scholar and Google Books and pirating books using the library to find the exact information as it appears in the textbooks to answer homework questions which I did meticulously down to the paragraph. But only I did that. Everybody else copied their homework, so at least in my university it was a personal choice how far you wanted to take those skills. So now instead of your peers giving you the answers, it’s ChatGPT. So my question is, are we really losing anything?

    Overall I think other skills need honing today, particularly verifying information, together with critical thinking which is always relevant. And the former is only hard because it’s tedious work, honestly.






  • Lemminary@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world[META] MBFC bot
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    12 days ago

    Because a lot of people don’t spend effort researching the sources

    I don’t think that’s fair or true, especially on Lemmy. We don’t need babysitting. And even if it is an endorsement, what examples of reviews do you have that call MBFC into question? I say we don’t bog down ourselves with whether they labeled something center-left that may be center-right or whatnot. What matters is the facts. Everyone can have a say in how they interpret whatever slant they find. Nobody takes it as the ultimate judge. We don’t need it to be impeccably accurate and perfect, either.

    In my case, I pay little attention to the rating on sources I already trust. Instead, I use it to hold obvious propagandists to face the quality of their posts. I have many instances of that happening. There’s value in this.

    If people want to do the research to evaluate a source, they can do that on their own.

    This is one way to get started doing that. It’s a convenient shortcut for the search I was going to do anyway. I’m surprised you preach about source evaluation and push back on this in a post about allowing for multiple sources.



  • Lemminary@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world[META] MBFC bot
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    12 days ago

    but they offer a convenient tool for evaluating the efficacy of antimisinformation interventions

    Also my source. You know, when used like a person with more than two brain cells would. Instead of nit-picking at the bot, why don’t we look at the bigger picture for the value it provides?


  • For me, it was the interface. I found it rough around the edges and not as inviting as Twitter used to be. I know it’s seen as superficial but UX/UI is important.

    Like, for example, to create a post or reply, the input was on the left navigation panel for some reason. I used to have trouble visually separating one post from the next in my head until I got used to it. Also, the way thread comments were nested could’ve been improved. And why did it only show me the top 5 trending news stories? Why couldn’t I browse more? Idk, overall I felt like I was fighting the UI mentally.

    I think Lemmy did a better job subtly improving on the details. I didn’t see Mastodon doing that much when I was on there.



  • Lemminary@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world[META] MBFC bot
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    13 days ago

    I’m absolutely for the bot and I know I’m not alone. I like having it and I find it useful. I don’t know why other people think it’s “a source of truth” like I’m some mindless sheep who can’t think on my own. I can and do take its rating with a grain of salt.

    I don’t like sports but you don’t see me asking admins to remove those subs. It’s selfish of people to ask for it to take it down for everyone. A good aspect of using Lemmy is being able to customize your experience–so do that. If you don’t like bots, hide them all in the settings or block them individually. It’s that simple.

    Now that I think of it, maybe Lemmy should ask new users how they want to experience the site when creating their accounts.