WotC Would you buy WotC products produced or enhanced with AI?

[Belen]

Out of curiosity, what do they teach instead in high school? Or was the topic just dropped out of the curriculum where you live to shorten study hours/introduce other subjects than humanities?

They still teach humanities but the rigor is gone and most of the critical thought is missing. From what I see, they teach mechanics like diagramming a sentence/ the 5 paragraph essay or they teach short form writing but longer research and thinking critically seems absent. I see a lot of folks in humanities with hardened "this is the way" mentalities.

 

[Belen]

"Why did you throw out that trial but kept this trial" is a very basic question that any scientist doing proper work should be able to answer. Maybe some scientists do a bad job of it. But it's very much in the realm of STEM education.

"What questions are worth asking" is also very important. You see that in grant applications, when people develop their research programs, in faculty hiring decisions...

What you're criticizing isn't STEM, but it could be bad STEM.

Ironically the remedy for that, and for scientists who are poor at statistics as Belen mentions, is...more STEM.

Or employ a good statistician or methodologist when designing your study. The same goes for grant review. I run team that peer reviews grant-funded research and we are constantly begging the funder to allow us to start peer reviewing their protocols so that the studies we get have fewer flaws.

Scientists are people and subject to blinders or biases as much as anyone.

Publish or perish also needs to die in a fire. It encourages volume over quality.

 

[mamba]

The unshakable faith in "the scientific method" as a tool for divining truth from falsity is, itself, one of those biases that needs to be carefully examined. Science is a wonderful thing and extremely good at uncovering truths, or at least, improving our awareness in objectively useful ways. But it is not the only road to truth

while I agree that it does not automatically lead to truth and you need to check for bias, I wonder what other road you think there is

 

[The Firebird]

while I agree that it does not automatically lead to truth and you need to check for bias, I wonder what other road you think there is

I think logic and mathematical proofs are a good example. There is a lot that can be done without needing empirical data.

The scientific method is...ha, like an LLM. It's only good at things in the training data.

I don't want to appear to disparage the humanities. They are harder to do well than science. Science is a setup job; the universe is there waiting to be tested.

The challenge with science these days is that there is so much to know.

 

[Incenjucar]

Sure, more power to you! I have absolutely no qualm with people not liking AI products. "I don't like it" is perfectly fine and can't really be questionned, "it should be legally forbidden" is another level of demonstration.

I didn't say "it should be legally forbidden", I said it was a shoddy enough technology that it's going to keep me well-employed as it ravages the internet.

I am trying very hard to stay on the topic, which is "Would you buy WotC products produced or enhanced with AI?" I would not.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I am trying very hard to stay on the topic, which is "Would you buy WotC products produced or enhanced with AI?" I would not.

Wouldn't either, for entirely different reasons, which should worry WotC.

 

[mamba]

I think logic and mathematical proofs are a good example. There is a lot that can be done without needing empirical data.

in a theoretical space, yes. As soon as you cross over from Mathematics to Physics, that is already no longer the case, let alone Biology or Chemistry

 

[Sulicius]

Wouldn't either, for entirely different reasons, which should worry WotC.

One person will never worry WotC. They don’t work like that. It’s exactly why I set up this poll. To get a sense of where the majority’s preferences lie (on this website, at this moment, who bothers to fill it in, located entirely in my kitchen)

 

[The Firebird]

in a theoretical space, yes. As soon as you cross over from Mathematics to Physics, that is already no longer the case, let alone Biology or Chemistry

Yeah, the sciences need data. Just saying there are types of knowledge beyond the scientific.

 

[Umbran]

The problem is, when you remind a STEM researcher that "who decides what questions are worth asking?" and "why did you throw out that trial, but kept this trial?" are questions where bias leaks in and where the scientific method is dead silent about how they should be answered, they tend to get really really mad at you.

The problem?

I would think "the problem" is that the populace is so science-illiterate that they get duped by hucksters and take ivermectin to protect them from covid, wind up shedding their intestinal lining into their toilet, and then catch covid.

When that's happening, maybe, "for profit reasons, corporate America will drive STEM well enough" is not as solid an idea as previously suggested.

Corporate America needs a very small number of people to be solid in STEM. The rest of us need more than that.