Why praising people for their intelligence can hurt them

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Dr. Carol Dweck gave every child a test that consisted of fairly easy puzzles. Afterward the  researcher informed all the children of their scores, adding a single six-word sentence of praise. Half the kids were praised for their intelligence (“You must be smart at this”) and half were praised for their effort (“You must have worked really hard”).

The kids were tested a second time but this time they were offered a choice between the harder test and an easier test. Ninety percent of the kids who’d been praised for their effort choice the harder test. A majority of the kids who’d been praised for the intelligence, on the other hand, chose the easy test. Why? “When we praise children for their intelligence.” Dweck wrote, “we tell them that that's the name of the game: look smart, don't risk making mistakes.”

The third level of tests was uniformly harder; none of the kids did well. However, the two groups of kids--the praised-for-effort group and the praised-for-intelligence group--responding very differently to the situation. “(The effort group) dug in and grew very involved with the test, trying solutions, testing strategies,” Dweck said. “They later said they liked it. But the group praised for its intelligence hated the harder test. They took it as proof they weren’t smart.

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code

15 Quotes about Teaching & AI

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While it’s not necessary in every discipline, there are certain ones — like computer science or writing — where colleges will need to prepare their students for a future with AI in it. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

The advice that I gave to faculty was that you need to be trying this out. You need to at least be conversant in what your students are able to do, and think about your assignments and what this tool enables. What policies or what guidance are you gonna give students in terms of whether they are allowed to use it? In what way would you be allowed to use it? MIT Tech Review

There’s more of a danger in not teaching students how to use AI. If they’re not being taught under the mentorship of scholars and experts, they may be using it in ways that are either inappropriate or not factual or unethical. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

I am no less human because I received help in thinking about things. All AI is, when understood, is a little help, a guide on the road to insight. I hope we continue to teach our students, using all tools available, and not deter them from the pursuit of knowledge and experience. Washington Post

If you’re teaching, you need to realize that the world has AI now. And so students need to be prepared for a world where this is going to be integrated in industries in different ways. MIT Tech Review

Learning how to engineer prompts is likely to be a transitional skill. Soon more sophisticated programs with specialized uses will be on the market. Faculty members would be better off focusing less on prompt engineering and more on determining the problems they would like to solve. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Bruno Ribeiro, an associate professor of computer science at Purdue, gives students unique coding problems that seem simple on the surface but have slight variations that often trip AI up. He then has students identify where the program went wrong and fix the code. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Students can, for instance, analyze a conversation with ChatGPT as an assignment and identify signs of fabrication, biases, inaccuracies, or shallow reasoning. Or faculty members can have students use AI to write a first draft of an essay and show what they might change. Or instructors could include AI as a contributor to group discussions. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Some professors think we should carry on as before, assigning take-home essays but writing ever-more-artful questions that GPT-4 or some other form of AI can’t answer. I’m dubious whether that can be done. Even if it could, I’m not interested in making my questions elusive enough to outsmart a machine. At a certain point, it risks demanding too much of the students: expecting a superhuman effort on their part, just for the sake of proving their humanity. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Something has gone very wrong when the advent of a machine that can produce merely competent essays is causing intelligent and committed educators to give up on assigning substantial student papers, which, as Robin acknowledges, are central to the educational enterprise as we have long conceived it. Chronicle of Higher Ed

A survey of students in grades 6-12, released by the nonpartisan think tank Center for Democracy & Technology, found that students with special needs are more likely than their peers to use generative AI and be disciplined for doing so. Center for Democracy & Technology

Some professors think that it’s the pressure and “high stakes” of our grading and assessment regimes that produce those feelings of discomfort in our students. I think it’s intrinsic to the work, if you’re doing it right. Our goal shouldn’t be to eliminate this discomfort. We need to teach students that it’s part of the process, and develop strategies for coping with it. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Bridging the gap, and easing fears, will lie in getting educators acquainted with AI — a training need underscored by the fact that 96 percent of the 1,000 educators said they have not received professional development on the topic. Schools have recognized these needs, although training of generative AI specifically is still nascent. EdSerge

As teachers grapple with these big questions about what AI means for their profession, they need to have access to frequent training about it. “You need to give teachers time to experiment with it, and preferably learn in small cohorts, where they can share what they’re discovering.” EdSurge

Like a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner, ChatGPT automates drudgery so we can focus on something more important. The promise of AI is, that by freeing us from the values of mere competence, we can focus more intentionally on cultivating distinctively human values. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

11 Recent Articles about the Dangers of AI

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Embracing Rituals

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Rituals help people transition through what would otherwise be a tumultuous period of their lives. And they let people savor the milestone they have just reached.

Creating stability at times of chaos: Though people associate events like graduations and weddings with joy, these moments also represent chaotic, potentially frightening life transitions. A wedding brings together two people to start a new, interdependent life. Graduation marks leaving the familiar world of school for the unknown world of work and grown-up responsibilities. Funerals and birthdays are two more examples.

In all four cases, there is a before and an after, as people leave their old world and enter into a new, uncertain one — and those transitions can breed anxiety.

It's easy to think that rituals like weddings are pointless and overdone. But that big cake, sparkling white dress or bouquet toss are helping us move through life in a positive and healthy way. There's no need to apologize for embracing it.

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in Mic

Embracing the Life forced upon You

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From the beginning you are in the victim of circumstances. You're born, kicking and screaming, into an unknown family. As a child, you soak up influences that mold your mind in certain ways. When you finally get a driver’s license and move out of the house, you think, you’re free—but you marry someone who looks like your mother and drinks like your father. By the time you figure out who you are or what you want, a life has already been forced upon you. But it’s never too late to change. Although you can’t begin again from scratch, you can make a splendid ragout from the mishmash of damaged goods in your cupboard.

I choose how to live a life I didn’t choose.

Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflications

14 Articles about the Limitations of AI

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The Individual Journey

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As an adolescent I used to thrill to the words of love the early American poet Ann Bradstreet spoke to her husband: 'If ever two were one, then we.'

As I have grown, however, I have come to realize that it is the separateness of the partners that enriches the union. Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals who are terrified by their basic aloneness, as so commonly is the case, and seek a merging in marriage. Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone.

Significant journeys cannot be accomplished without the nurture provided by a successful marriage or a successful society. Marriage and society exist for the basic purpose of nurturing such individual journeys.

But, as is the case with all genuine love, “sacrifices” on behalf of the growth of the other result in equal or greater growth of the self. It is the return of the individual to the nurturing marriage or society from the peaks he or she has traveled alone which serves to elevate that marriage or that society to new heights.

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Generative AI Models are "trained to hallucinate"

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It’s important to remember that generative models shouldn’t be treated as a source of truth or factual knowledge. They surely can answer some questions correctly, but this is not what they are designed and trained for. It would be like using a racehorse to haul cargo: it’s possible, but not its intended purpose … Generative AI models are designed and trained to hallucinate, so hallucinations are a common product of any generative model … The job of a generative model is to generate data that is realistic or distributionally equivalent to the training data, yet different from actual data used for training.

UCLA Computer Science Professor Stefano Soatto writing for InsideBigData

13 Recent Articles about How Companies are Using AI

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Life is in the Digging

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Two brothers decided to dig a deep hole behind their house. As they were working, a couple of older boys stopped by to watch.

"What are you doing?"  

"We plan to dig a hole all the way through the earth," one of the brothers volunteered excitedly.

The older boys began to laugh, telling the younger ones that digging a hole all the way through the earth was impossible.

After a long silence, one of the diggers picked up a jar full of spiders, worms, and a wide assortment of insects. He removed the lid and showed the wonderful contents to the scoffing visitors.

"Even if we don't dig all the way through the earth, look what we found along the way!"

Their goal was far too ambitious, but it did cause them to dig. And that is what a goal is for — to cause us to move in the direction we have chosen; in other words, to set us to digging!

Not every goal will be fully achieved. Not every job will end successfully. Not every relationship will endure. Not every hope will come to pass. Not every love will last. Not every endeavor will be completed. Not every dream will be realized. But when you fall short of your aim, you can say, "Yes, but look at what I found along the way! Look at the wonderful things that have come into my life because I tried to do something!"

It is in the digging that life is lived. And I believe it is joy in the journey, in the end, that truly matters.