I don’t know about moderation but optimization is the mother of all evil. All extremists are actually an optimization agents. Let one run for too long and you greatly loose on everything.

So I don’t think that we should meet a middle ground necessarily but wary of people that are trying to maxxx something.

Moderation in fentanyl, too? Some habits are arguably just vices, that have few justifiable middle grounds.

This argument has been beaten to death before AI: Ever since calculators were able to do math, students have been wondering why they need to learn how to do all of this math manually when they could get the same answer from a calculator.

The reasons become more obvious only when you get deeper into a field where the math gets too complex to get a simple answer out of a calculator. If you never learned the basic concepts, you can’t progress to the more difficult topics because you don’t have a good understanding of the foundation.

That’s why changing goals to only look at the output doesn’t work for educating kids. Now that they can have ChatGPT answer every question they might see on a middle school or even high school exam, you could conceivably get all the way through high school graduation never having learned a single thing other than how to copy and paste between the assignment and ChatGPT.

Then what happens in the real world when that student needs to learn something new? It’s obvious: They’re going to try to put the problem into ChatGPT and then give you the result back. They don’t have any foundational tools to do anything else. They haven’t even learned how to learn because there was always an easy way out. Why would anyone hire a person who can only act as an interface to ChatGPT? They won’t. They’ll use ChatGPT themselves.

My unpopular opinion is that some times hard work, memorization, doing work manually, and yes, even testing, are necessary to build up an education and thinking foundation. I don’t believe it can all be replaced by ideas about challenging students to get results and then ignoring how they arrive at the result. I’ve worked with kids enough to know that they are more resourceful about finding lazy ways to pass a test than you could ever imagine.

What would you do instead to make sure the student actually possesses the skills they are intended to have learned by the end of a program?

This is nonsensical. Without a corpus of knowledge memorized and at your fingertips it’s next to impossible to build on it. Project work isn’t going to get you there. Creativity and new ideas happen when someone is deeply immersed in a space and can make connections.

How do you feel about the lines preceeding that?

> He didn’t try to hide that he had used AI to generate much of his assignment. Instead, he admitted his anxiety. He felt that mastering these tools was essential for his future career, yet he had no idea how—or even whether—he was allowed to use them.

I'm empathetic to the student: I'd bet a large majority of employers/careers he's researching right now are making a lot of press noise about "the importance of AI" and how "it's a necessary part of the workplace now." Can you really expect someone in his shoes to avoid it entirely?

Both things can be true at the same time. The article mention switching to shorter reports and oral discussion but other courses may not have the luxury, especially the introductory ones.