Self-assessing your own learning is not easy to do.
Have you ever sat through a really interesting conference talk and felt like you were learning. If pressed could you really articulate what you learned, beyond the idea that it was inspiring?
Have you ever spent weeks or months drudging through hard work on a project, feeling lost or stuck most of the time, and like you were just brute forcing your way through? Did it feel like you were learning in the moment? If you thought about it later, were there skills you developed, or strategies that you decided were more and less successful from going through that process?
Learning isn’t really a feeling, it’s a physical and cognitive process. Our meta-cognition about our own learning often shows up on a delay, because working our brains to understand our own understanding is a more sophisticated skill than whatever understanding we are building, and often depends on first building a basic understanding before we can reason about that understanding. (Yes this post is meta-meta-cognitive, sue me.)
Right now, a lot of people are using LLM technologies on a regular basis. There’s a lot to be concerned about, but much of it is out of scope for this post.
I can offer some perspective as someone who works with how people learn all the time. The human mind is a facile thing, and it’s true that technological changes can confront us with things that are very difficult to adapt to in real time.
So here’s my advice if you are concerned about the “dumbing down” or even “psychosis” effects of LLM technologies:
- Slow down—these things generate text faster than your mind can process information: go at your pace, not the machine’s.
- Interrogate—build your own mental maps of what you’re working through and anything you’re generating, ask follow up questions and clarify things.
- Use your own words—writing is a helpful tool for thought. Write more for yourself, and reflect on your thoughts, to keep the muscles limber.
- Flip the script—these tools are designed to take prompts and produce outputs. Have the LLM prepare prompts for you instead, to develop your thoughts based on structured questions. Make it easier on yourself by instructing it to ask you only one question at a time.
When in doubt, try to approach yourself the way you imagine your favorite teachers would: with patience and kindness, and also pushing you a bit outside of your comfort zone but not too much all at once.
If you’ve got any other helpful ideas, please share!