I came across this essay by Neal Stephenson about self-reliance and teaching kids in the age of large language models. Self-reliance caught my attention because I'm looking for excuses for why I'm still doing many silly things that others find foolish (I value knowing how to work on my house, work on my car, teach my own kids, make my own food, grow at least something, and clean up my own messes -- all of which takes up rather a lot of time).
The first part of Stephenson's essay is really just a throwaway, I'd skip right to the section called AI and Education.
Stephenson observes that self-reliance is good for someone who has a skilled, sturdy self on which to rely:
So, yes, when an idea popped into Emerson’s head, chances are it was a pretty damned good one. His own advice about self-reliance was actually worth taking in his own case. And I’d guess that the audience for this essay was similarly well educated. By the time any young person happened upon Self-Reliance, they were probably 99% of the way to being an intellectually mature, highly capable person, and just wanted a bit of self confidence to follow through on good ideas that were coming into their heads—as a result of being that well educated and trained.
But the situation isn't quite the same for someone who hasn't spent any time developing skills or gaining wisdom. Apparently, the viber-ethos was alive and well in the 1970s:
There’s a pivotal moment in that film when Luke Skywalker is piloting his fighter through the trench on the Death Star, making his bombing run against impossible odds, and he hears Obi-Wan Kenobi’s voice in his head telling him to use the Force. Luke switches off his targeting computer to the consternation of the brass in the ops center. We all know the outcome. It’s a great moment in cinema, and it perfectly encapsulates a certain way of thinking emblematic of the 1970s late hippie scene: the seductive proposition that no one needs a targeting computer, that all we need to do is trust our feelings. Who doesn’t love to hear that? I loved hearing it from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and spent a couple of years of my life building a terrible novel on that foundation.
So then we come to the point that I found helpful: when concerned with teaching our children to be successful and happy in life, perhaps the best thing we can do for them is help them get into situations where they fail so that they learn how to keep working on solving their problems even when the Force fails them and the photon torpedoes just impact on the surface.
Going back to that fictional conversation in The Diamond Age, I think that the answer—the thing that Finkle-McGraw acquired during his upbringing, that he failed to confer on his children, and that he wants to give his granddaughter—isn’t simply a body of knowledge to be memorized or a set of skills to be mastered. It’s a stance. A stance from which to address the world and all its challenges. A stance built on self-confidence and resilience: the conviction that one has a fighting chance to overcome or circumvent whatever obstacles the world throws in one’s path. The way you acquire it is by trying, and sometimes failing, to do difficult things.
Nobody likes constant failure, though, so probably we need to help our children find places where they are likely to succeed or at least it's reasonably possible they will succeed and just not shield them from failure when it does happen.
From that standpoint, the most insidious thing about AI is that it solves problems for the user and never places them in a situation where they have to overcome failure. Problems might get solved in the end, which sounds good, but the “prompt engineers” who cajoled the AIs into solving them don’t understand how those solutions were produced, since it all happened inside a black box, and didn’t acquire the kind of self-reliance that matters.
And this is the catch of using chat to answer all your questions: it makes it too easy to solve those training circumstances so that kids aren't confronted with the situation where they can possibly fail until the stakes are very much higher than is good for learning how to fail.
This makes me -- who is a person who detests testing and most formal learning environments -- wonder if there isn't a value in all the schoolroom testing afterall: a test is an opportunity to fail with fairly low stakes. The modern schooling process (at least in the '90s) was to repeatedly give kids a chance to fail and thereby develop some grit. Perhaps this is giving the school system too much credit, though.
So: how do you develop grit in your children (or yourself)?