General Politics Discussion (XI) [ARCHIVED] World • Page 779

Imposter syndrome sucks. Sometimes I try to remind myself that's all it is but then I'm like "but what if I'm RIGHT?"

 

Imposter syndrome has been hitting me hard while interviewing for jobs lol.

 

Still dealing with that now

 

This is where I think the onus is on the teacher though, to teach how to use the tool. If you ban it, what you're saying is "there's this tool at there that can do this for you, you can cheat and it's perfect and we aren't going to let you do that" - which can then become 1) a crutch later on in life where people now think they can use this tool that does not actually do that, 2) an even bigger incentive to use it in an improper way. Developing the skill should be teaching people in the same way we moved from pencil to typewriters to word processors and what each of those tools lets you do. Building blocks for how to write, and then the tools you can use to do it better. Not so you end up like Joey with a thesaurus, which is what happens if the skill with the tools aren't taught, but instead how do you change words using a thesaurus to actually improve the piece. How do you use GPT to transition from one paragraph to another in a better way. How do you strengthen an argument, and how do you make sure someone has the skills to tell the difference.

I can have GPT write me an argument, but because I also know how to craft one myself, you can use the building blocks to see the outline and what needs to be added to it .. that's all taught ... and I think should be taught without "banning" a technology that has value and people will end up using in their real lives and jobs probably very soon. Next versions of Word and Google Docs is going to have this sort of stuff built into it and it's going to continue, the banning of it, IMO, never works for kids and often teaches them the wrong lessons about what the tool can be used for and has the opposite effect than an actual education around writing and the tool chest an author can use.

 

The same way going to a book on writing, or reading other authors, or cribbing another author for inspiration is. I've written millions of words at this point. I think I average 250k a year now. I am absolutely not coming up with ideas without there being all kinds of inspiration. Other people, other pieces I've read, Tweets I've seen, all of that is in a soup that I pull from when I sit down to write. And I think using a search engine and using generative LLM can produce very similar levels of inspiration for how to write. I think that because I've done it! I have used it to uncork things when I couldn't find what I was looking for, or knew I had heard something in the past, or a turn of phrase that I couldn't quite get to sound right. To have a line of something I've written and then say "give me 4 versions of this" and re-read those, and go, yeah, those all suck, but I do like this little part here, let me tweak that, grab what I said before, and add this here.

 

Gun to head someone asked me to do long division right now ... I'd be shot.

Wish I woulda spent that time learning how to pay my stupid taxes instead of getting yelled at for using a pen instead of a pencil while doing math.

 

I definitely agree, but I think it’s super unrealistic to expect that of teachers. There are so many things that are on their plate, for dozens and dozens of kids, that adding AI as another topic/skill to teach is a really unfair expectation.

in addition, it’s such a new tool that no one actually knows *how* to teach it yet in a successful way or the impacts it has on the learning process. Those things won’t be determined for years.

as a similar example, as a younger teacher I was always super pro-smartphone as an educational tool. I actively went out of my way to educate kids how to use it both creatively and academically. Turns out, the actual benefits are extremely minimal and the negatives are SO extreme. I’ve totally flipped my approach to believing the best way to handle cell phones in schools is to not have them. Does that prepare them for college and life beyond high school? It doesn’t teach them how to responsibly use a phone, but it definitely allows them to develop other life skills that they need.

 

I get imposter syndrome at times, too, but then I try to remember that basically every single person in life is just wingin' it. I think that was one of the biggest lessons I learned entering adulthood. When you're a kid you look at adults and think they've got it all figured out and then you become one and realize that no one knows what they're doing

 

I don’t think my personal pride would let me use chatGPT at all when writing. I’m not as hardlined on other people using it in any form of art at all, but my line is conservative. People who input prompts for generating art, whether an article or an image or a novel or song or whatever, and then post it claiming authorship, doesn’t count to me. I don’t care. Even when someone is editing something they got AI to create for them, if the generative model did the most of the work in the form (most of the image creation, most of the prose), I’m not taking them too seriously as an artist or writer. I’m open to the statements being made using prompts/AI in a readymade sort of way, in the vein of Warhol/Duchamp, though. I also don’t claim that I’ll be able to discern the difference as AI gets “better” and people get better at integrating it, but the percent of art/writing/music I’ve seen using AI right now that I consider worthwhile is extremely small. I think it’ll probably get bigger, but I’m extremely apprehensive about how it will infiltrate popular art/writing/film/etc given the state of most creative industries

 

Heh. I actually got put in an occupational therapy course in elementary school because I hold my pencil like I'm gonna stab someone, but eventually they relented because my handwriting was good and it wasn't hurting me. Still do it to this day.

Things like that are dumb, but the conversation between my mom and I started because of cursive writing and how it was phased out of some schools. I started wondering why it was important myself, so I looked it up and articles were suggesting the act itself helps develop motor skills and other cognitive functions.

That's what led me to start rethinking my own thoughts on education and curriculum and etc. The idea that maybe some things aren't taught so you know how to do them, but taught so you learn how to apply certain principles.

 

Oh, this I definitely agree with, teachers under paid, under staffed, under ... everything. But that's an issue that needs addressing. My concern is more that because of those issues we end up falling on the old "ban it" fallback. It would be like everyone deciding the calculator was unrealistic to teach, so we all stayed with the slide rule for 10 years too long. Is it a tool to teach right now? Maybe not. But I'd argue we should probably be thinking about how to get it into the curriculum sooner rather than later. Bringing computers, digital art, programing, into my life when computers started to be more of a thing I think was a net positive, and I think the "we don't have the time or resources" argument around that technology could have been made as well. But moving to teaching me how to use a digital encyclopedia instead of what my mom and dad did and look things up in the library in books (and I did until like 6th grade?), was a good thing. Because if all I knew how to do was go find a encyclopedia from 1984, I'd be way behind. The investment in the new education was worth the squeeze.

I think that's also true, but the only way to learn how to teach it is probably to try. Early computer classes weren't to give us the tools how how to use a modern machine, but it did provide a building blocks that as tech grew and got better we knew the framework to how to use it and learned/grew with it. Waiting until we could get plopped down in front of Windows XP or whatever I don't think would have been a good idea. I think hiding it, or making it taboo, usually has the opposite impact on young people. And "this isn't going to do your homework for you, and here's why" is a much better lesson than "there's this magic tool we've banned that the teachers are obviously terrified of you using and knowing about." Cause, if I was a teenager today, that second idea ... ohhhh boy. Finding out how to use it to cheat and get away with it, even if it took me 3x as long as just writing the damn essay, woulda been right on my mind the moment it got "banned."

 

I think this plays with my current thoughts on it. That people using it to do all the work, I find very very very little value in. And it's not writing even a paragraph, let alone two sentences of a review from without being super obvious it came from something that wasn't my voice. BUT, I can tell you I've used it to find transitions between ideas and then I've re-written it "in my own words" and been able to shape something I wouldn't have gotten to with out it. To me it's about words, sentences, idea prodding in the same way I do other things like Google around, or read other pieces, read other books, or just have a bunch of things saved in bookmarks for inspiration. The same way right now I can do this:



And see about other words I may want to use, quickly just by looking at one word. I also can do something like this:



All from my keyboard, and all of a sudden I'm sitting in a different headspace of what I could maybe use to take my sentence in a different direction.

(Image generation and all that I am setting aside, I have other thoughts on that.)

 

On imposter syndrome:

I totally feel like that about my current job in IT.

I had a minor in CIT in college and I did some light troubleshooting for Spectrum, Dell, and Apple, but I never really did IT in a big way until now, for a hotel.

When I started as a contractor at our sister property, my boss couldn't even keep me on because I didn't have as much experience as I needed, which is totally understandable.

Fortunately, he kept me in mind when another smaller property was purchased, and felt it was perfect for me, because it was less demanding and I had opportunities to learn from the ground up.

Even now though, two years later and having outlasted two replacements at the first property, I still feel almost fake because there's so much I still don't know.

But then again, before I came onboard, the property I'm at didn't have an IT person at all, and everyone reminds me every day how grateful they are for me being here.

So I guess the moral is it's all relative. I may not be as technical as other IT people and I still have gaps in my knowledge, but that doesn't diminish the things I do know or the things I've accomplished.

 

imagine always being right like me and still having imposter syndrome.

 

My title is "software developer" and I have absolutely 0 "hard" "programming" knowledge so I think for me in a way I'm just literally an imposter

 

teach me your ways

 

have a liberal arts degree from a private school, get a terrible temp call center job at a place where call center is just a small part of their business, don't leave the temp job when they give you the work of a full time employee within 2 months and keep you on the temp pay for the full length of the temp contract and take months to let you work from home when covid starts at the same time as your contract, eventually get hired perm and work a terrible but decently paying call center job for 2 years until a black sheep department that the CEO will later literally tell a group of interns to their faces that he "hates" has an opening for you to click on PDFs and write SQL queries all day

 

on a somewhat similar note, i recently had to do some writing for some emotional and mental stuff, and man do i feel good now. my brain feels less scrambled and muddled with thoughts and I just feel a lot more loose and positive now. weird.

 

ughh, my history degree is from a state school. but i more or less experienced 4/5 of those points.

 

Some day in the future I feel like I will absolutely write about my experience in the real job market/world. Probably after I retire and don't actually still need one. Real world corporate jobs are so weird.

 

everyday i hate myself for not starting a niche music website.

 

Talking with friends, I have a theory that all jobs end up feeling like you're either grifting and getting away with it and/or the feeling that they're massively screwing you.

 

today's version is to go be a tiktok star. NattySauce is probably an available username.