Reflections on Rat Fest ’25
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Science writer John Horgan wrote his own article about his experience at Rat Fest:
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/my-weekend-at-rat-fest
… My students are using AI to do their thinking for them.
Generally speaking, people who have properly functioning minds enjoy thinking about things they are interested in and use tools to outsource toil and other things they are not interested in.
They would not want to use those tools to spend less time doing things they do enjoy. If Horgan’s students are using AI, that means they are not interested in whatever he teaches them. (That isn’t necessarily an indictment of Horgan – people often go to school not because it interests them but because they think they should.)
In this sense, AI is more like a calculator allowing mathematicians to focus on what really matters: using their creativity to find new proofs, theorems, etc (I’m not a mathematician, but I imagine that’s what they do).