May 15, 2025 • 47 mins
Nate and Maria revisit their conclave predictions, and discuss Maria’s recent win in Monte Carlo. Then the talk about college students’ rampant use of ChatGPT to cheat on assignments, and how colleges and professors might be able to catch up.
Further Reading:
From New York Magazine: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
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The Leap from Maria Konnikova
Silver Bulletin from Nate Silver
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making
better decisions. I'm Maria Kanigogo.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
And I'm Nate Silver.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
So today on the show, Nate, we're gonna first revisit
our predictions about the conclave. They were wrong, as was
basically everyone else's, and then talk a little Coker and
my recent trip to Monte Carlo.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
And I'll try to slip in a few New York
Knicks references you may notice on the show. But we'll
also talk about the rampant use of chat GPT to
cheat on college campuses, inspired by a recent article in
New York Magazine.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
So with that, Nate, let's dive in. I'm so sorry
that Pizza Bala did not end up becoming pope. That
would have been fun. However, pizza is definitely on everyone's
minds because the pope is from Chicago, and we all
know that Chicago is famous for its deep dish pizza.
(01:27):
In fact, Nate, the last time we had a meal
together was over Chicago style people.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
You know, the last time we talked about Chicago, you
actually encouraged me to get peaquads pizza, which I know
and love and like, I had the whole it was
a lunch sized pizza. Right. I have not had that
accumulation of like that much dairy, I don't think in years.
Pick Quads is amazing. You should visit it.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
This podcast is sponsored by Peaquad's Pizza use our affiliate length.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I'm just kidding, No, I found this very interesting because, like,
I lived in Chicago. The guy's a Chicago White Sox fan.
He's a Villanova a basketball fan, and attended Villanova, has
a mathematics degree. So it's like, you know, neither of
us are Catholic. We're not going to shock you with that,
I don't think, but like, it's very strange to have
a pope that's kind of like memeable and relatable to Americans.
(02:20):
And this was not well predicted at prediction markets. He
had had around a one percent chance of becoming the pope.
If you look at various shortlists and long lists published
by various userganizations. You know, the New York Times mentions
him in like the twentieth paragraph. The Washington Post doesn't
mention him at all, for example, and yet he won,
(02:40):
I believe after just the second day of the conclave.
Do you know how many ballots there.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Were we don't, but it was just over twenty four hours,
so it could not have been more than four ballots.
That would have been I think the maximum given the
amount of time, if I remember correctly about how the
ballot process works.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
So once this decision came quickly, markets assumed that one
of the front runners is going to win, right, which
is a dynamic we had talked about on the program beforehand,
and that was you know, maybe he was a front runner,
but nobody knew it. So I think it was a
pretty big failure of both the conventional wisdom and crediction
markets right where. I guess the conclave is pretty good
(03:18):
at keeping secrets, maybe more than like, you know, than
the United States Congresses for example. There weren't a lot
of leaks, and I think it reflects the kind of
changing global climate toward the United States, right. You know.
One of the few outlets that did it in an
article about him was Axios, and they're like, well, this
would never happen because the Catholic Church doesn't want to
give the US government more influence, or the United States
(03:39):
and not the government, I guess, more influence. It's like, well,
what do they want to influence the United States, right,
and have some counterweight to President Trump. You know what's
a good counterweight, you know, probably not the Speaker of
the House. Maybe the pope is like the only person
who can be like on a stage as a counterweight.
And you know, Greemost had had an active Twitter account too, right,
(04:00):
He had criticized mostly through retweets, not things he wrote himself,
criticized JD. Vance criticized the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Marilyn Man who was accidentally sent to an l Salador
in prison. And so it's making a.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Statement, Yeah, And I think that I think that we
see that psychologically something happened here and also something that
you and I have talked about night that you write
about in terms of kind of how betting and prediction
markets work. So the first part of the psychology part,
I think people had kind of bad priors, right, and
(04:40):
let kind of their biases in an historical precedent influence
this a little bit too much, saying oh, you know, well,
an American could never be pope and you can't have
that sort of blanket statement rights, that's a bias where
you are you're actually kind of anchoring yourself to a
(05:01):
really incorrect starting point, which gets into my second point
that you've written about, which is that this is not
an event where we have tons of data and statistics. Right,
this isn't the super Bowl that happens every single year.
Like the last time that we had a papal election
was what twelve years ago? And you know, there have
been decades where there haven't where there hasn't been one,
(05:24):
and the world changes and different things change, and people
don't know much about what happens inside the Vatican and
all of that, and yet we think, right, we're a
little bit overconfident in thinking that we know more than
we do and that we have more data than we do.
It's always incredibly incredibly risky to make predictions based on incomplete,
(05:45):
faulty data.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah, and look, prediction markets can accentuate that when people
are like, well they're pretty smart, someone must do something right,
and they are smart in many circumstances. Right, In general,
there is in markets various kinds of a long shot bias,
meaning people are actually a little bit under confident relative
to the favorite usually prevailing. But if you have no
information to go off, right, you know, there are what
(06:09):
a two hundred and fifty one cardinals in the College
of Cardinals. Right. You know, technically speaking, any baptized Catholic
male is eligible to become pope. Right. I'm not saying
you just want to spin a wheel one in two
hundred and fifty one or whatever. But but you know,
especially after the white smoke came out and people like, oh,
(06:30):
now we know for sure, right, this is a case
where the conditions were not in place for prediction markets
to be particularly wise.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yeah, and you actually you write on the edge a
little bit about how prediction markets and sports betting falters
and certain events where there's dumb money as well, right,
where there's a proliferation of people who don't know as
much about it that some events are much easier to
bet on than others, just depending on who the betters are.
And I think from a psychological standpoint, you also get
(07:00):
into these groups think echo chambers, where you start amplifying
things that are already kind of front runners, et cetera,
et cetera. Not for any good reason, right, but oh well,
because he said so, I guess I think so. And
then on and on it goes. It's like those psych
studies right where there's a number of statistic that's been
cited thousands of times, and then you actually try to
(07:22):
unravel it and figure out, way, where did we get this?
And you find the study from nineteen sixty four that
was based on twelve people, and that's where the number
came from, and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This number
that has now become gospel is actually incredibly suspect. That
has happened to me so many times where I've actually
tried to kind of retrace the steps of how it happens.
But especially with social media and kind of the way
(07:43):
information spreads these days, it's very easy to create those effects.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
And if you actually make sports bets, especially I'm betting
the NBA playoffs a little bit go Nix, by the way,
you'll sometimes see lines where you're like, this doesn't make
any sense, right, So somebody must know something, or the
market must be accounting for some psychological factor or some
injury that like I'm not accounting for, right, And if
(08:11):
that were always true, then you could say, Okay, even
though my model says that Nick's have a forty percent chance,
the market applug, you just have a twenty percent chance.
So maybe the twenty percent actually of the good bet here,
and if you're making our sports bets, you learn that
it's not predictable when the market knows something and when
it doesn't. Obviously, markets are tough to beat in general,
but sometimes it is full of shit, right and many
times it's not, And you're the one feeling embarrassed after all.
(08:33):
Instead you say, boy, you know Vegas is so smart,
but like it's not always smart? Right if it was
always smart? Yeah, piggyback off it and you kind of can't.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Dude, I have a question for you, what you know
if if you were to say, okay, there's a skill
set and maybe the answer is no to figuring out
other than what we've already talked about, right events that
happen frequently, versus not to figuring out, Okay, these are
things that prediction markets are probably smarter on and these
are where they're not right. Is there is there a
way that you think about that, like how to figure
(09:03):
out you know what, I shouldn't be listening to the
experts in this particular case, I shouldn't be listening to
the markets particular case, because I think that's actually a
really interesting question.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
I mean, you've touched on some of this, right, Like,
you know, question one is how much domain knowledge does
the average trader have? I mean, the average person's betting
on the NBA of the NFL probably knows more about
the NBA and the NFL, And the average person betting
at polymarket on the identity of the pope knows about
the Catholic church. Frankly, I don't think the kind of
(09:32):
church following personality type overlaps much with the you know,
crypto adjacent prediction market startup betting type person Right. Next
is is there are there institutional investors professional class of
investors who are who are sucking up the week money
to make the market balance?
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Right?
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Or you know, so for example for elections, investment banks
and hedge funds and rich gamblers like all our betting
serious money, there's a professional class. Certainly that's true for
the Super Bowl or anything like that. Right. Again, the
pope doesn't probably have action geopolitical consequences in the same way,
(10:11):
so he probably don't have that. Right. Is it a
repeated thing where people can calibrate their models? Is it
even mathematically modelable by anything beyond like very naive methods?
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:21):
And I mean, you know, models are hard for a
lot of things, but that puts like some bumpers on
how far unmored a prediction can get right. And so
all these boxes are not checked for papal predictions, whereas
they might be forbidding in the playoffs in the NBA.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And by the way,
I saw someone was writing about kind of did anyone
predict this? And there was one publication that actually had
Robert Privost as one of the top contenders, and it
was a Catholic like it was a niche Catholic publication,
I don't remember which one it was. Didn't have them
as the front runner, but it at least mentioned his name.
(10:57):
You and I, by the way, didn't even mention his name. Right,
he wasn't on our radar because he wasn't on the
radar of any of the sources that we actually well.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
If anything, you think there might be a bias for
we're saying, oh, there's just cogo guy might become pope, right,
you think there might be more coverage and moves might be,
Oh you got to short him, They're gonna, you know,
not pick an American guy. But I he just kind
of didn't really enter the conversation very much, except you know,
I did be done a see article, you know for
like a Catholic source. They kind of said, oh, it's
(11:27):
interesting that people are betting on the pope. We're not
sure how we feel about that as Catholics, but they're
way over confident because nobody knows anything right and that
proved to be prescient.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, absolutely, all right, so so let's let's see how
he ends up doing and let's see how how this
all ends up going.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
So America is winning, Maria. Uh the Knicks are winning.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Which makes it I'm doubly happy because as an ex Bostonian,
I hate Boston sports fans. Really, they just suck, and
so I'm i anti sweat the Celtics, and as a
New Yorker, I'm pro next. So I'm just I'm deliriously happy.
I'm actually interested in the outcome of these games today.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
But you're winning too, So tell me about, uh our
telling me and the audience about this win you had
in Monte Carlo.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yeah, So I just came back from EPT Monte Carlo,
which is the Poker Stars signature stop on the European
Poker Tour. Beautiful venuinate. I hope you come next year.
But I had not been having a good trip at all.
I've never cashed in the main event there. I still
did not cash in the main event, ended up playing
(12:39):
a twenty five K, did not cash in that. When
you don't cash those big events, it doesn't feel good,
and just was running horribly right. I kept getting two
out at three out and four outed. For our non
poker playing fans, that means, you know, improbable combinations of
cards kept getting there against me, and so I was
(12:59):
just very discouraged. And I ended up winning the final event,
which was a really really nice way to end the trip.
And the final that was actually a turbo structure, which
is very different from kind of your standard tournament. It
means that the blind levels aren't increasing quite quickly, and
(13:19):
so your strategy actually has to change a little bit, because, yes,
you might start with two hundred big blinds, and whereas
you know, in a normal tournament you might have that
for forty minutes, half an hour, an hour, whatever it is.
Here like suddenly, if you don't do stuff in twenty minutes,
you look and you have thirty big blinds left, right,
(13:40):
Because the blind structure is moving so quickly. It's such
a dynamic tournament, and so in situations like this, you
need to be first of all, more aggressive, right. You
need to play. You can't just sit around waiting for
good hands, because otherwise you will blind out. This is
one of those cases where doing nothing is doing something,
and it's not a good thing, and you have to
(14:01):
actually be a little bit different with the hand combinations
that you choose to play because very quickly, this is
not deep stacked poker, this is short stacked poker. So
the value of hands changes. So you need to play
high card hands much more, low suited connectors much less,
because you'll get into situations where people are going to
(14:23):
get very short, especially people who didn't play correctly right
and who now find themselves with very few chips, and
they're going to shove on you, which means they're going
to put all their chips in the middle. And you
have to know that in advance and know how you're
going to respond and be in a situation where you
can have a hand that can call those shoves, because
otherwise you're also going to bleed chips right if you
(14:44):
open too much and then keep folding when people are
aggressive against you, and so it's a slightly different mindset,
and it does require I think a lot of preparation
ahead of time because you don't have much time to think.
You just need to know your range as well. You
need to know your cards well, you need to know
your response as well. We had a ten second shot
clock in this tournament, so you had ten seconds to
(15:04):
make every single decision, no matter what street you were on.
And we had a few time banks, and each of
those time banks and it was ten seconds. So it's
actually kind of beautiful. It's a very it's fun because
it's so dynamic and so much happens, but there's also
an element of luck when you get into a fast
structure like that.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
This is a one day tournament or yes, okay, yeah, Look.
The other thing that's tricky about these events I want
to ask you about is like, Okay, typically if you
have a big tournament series, you're toward the end of
the series and you have these turbos for people that
you know have busted out of the big events they're
hoping to play. There's also typically a lot of tilt, right,
(15:44):
people are trying to place very high to make up
for their entry fees. Right, we're getting the plane and
go home. So how do you balance that? I mean, again,
I'm not saying you have tilt. You can tell us
about that if you do right. I'm saying the fact
that like people are maybe calling down lighter and bluffing
a little bit more. At the same time, with a
(16:06):
turbo structure, you do need to widen your rain, which
is quite a bit, right, So how do you how
did you manage that?
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, so you have to widen your ranges, but also
widen them correctly, so I you know, raggedy aces go
up in value, et cetera, so you need to kind
of know also what hands people will be undervaluing. So
I got quite lucky early on where I ended up.
(16:34):
Someone opened and I called a pocket pair. I call it,
you know, it was a pair of deuces, a tiny
pocket paar and someone else called and the flop came
with a deuce in it, which means that I had
flopped a set. But there was also an ace, and
there was one guy who was clearly very tilted. Because
this for older French gentleman who just wanted chips right,
(16:55):
he clearly just was frustrated. This was very early on
in the tournament, so we still had a lot of
chips and no one had busted out yet, right, like
this is how early we are. I think we're level one,
maybe level two. And you could tell that like he
just like he had been playing every hand, like he
just really wanted chips, and so he bet, I raised,
(17:17):
he called, and anyway, he ended up losing right and
busting and was the first player to bust out of
the tournament to me. And he had like I don't
even remember, it was like ace three off suit, right,
he didn't even have a good ace. It was a
shitty ace, but he just didn't believe me, and I
think he was tired of people picking on him. And
(17:37):
he was definitely tilting. And I've played with him before,
like he's not that bad of a player, but it
was just an awful play and he just gave me
all his chips, which was a great start obviously to
the to the tournament. But I think that you need
to look for spots like that and be willing to
kind of take full advantage of them. So like, for instance,
(17:58):
some people would say, oh, you know, don't get greedy
on the river, don't go all in because he's not
gonna call I was like, no, actually he will. You know,
do get greedy because in those in those spots, you're
going to get lucky against people who are just done
right and they don't want you to bully them. And
so especially because I'm female, that dynamic is very strong.
(18:20):
People don't want me to bully them.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah. Look, and to the older frenchmen out there, I'd say,
you know, we understand that you're not always going to
play your A game and when you're tired in a
long series, even the B game can be asking a
lot avoiding the f game right where you you know, look,
I'll be honest, right, you know, I think I know
my range is pretty well in a lot of spots, and
I'll know when I can like loosen up just slightly,
(18:45):
you know, be a little bit more aggressive. You can
bluff sometimes, but like the multi street desperate call downs
are like the most easy way to like literally burn money.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
And you know, by that stage in the in the
tournament series, when it is kind of one of the
last events this happened to be the last event, but
when it is kind of one of the last events,
people are tired and a lot of people are playing
their C game their D game, and if you're one
of the people who's not and who can actually take
advantage of that, I think that can be a huge
advantage if you're willing to be aggressive in the right
(19:20):
spots and also don't have ego and willing to fold
right in the right spots. So like be willing. I
did this as well to kind of throw your cards
away in a heartbeat. So I had a few very
successful bluffs that got through, and then I got very
lucky at the final table. When we got to the
final table, I had a good amount of chips, but
(19:41):
the chip leader, so the person with the most chips
was to my immediate left, and we got into a
big hand. So this was it's not good ICM. So
ICM is we've talked about this on the show. It's
the independent chip model. So basically, you know when they're
big pay jumps and when you're down to the final table,
you don't really want to tangle with the chip leader
(20:03):
when there are lots of people who are shorter than you,
because you could be committing ICM suicide. But in this
particular case, someone had opened, someone else had flatted, and
I had pocket jacks and like thirty big blinds something
like that, and so I jammed right because there was
dead money in the pot and I had you know,
I had a very strong hand, and I didn't want
(20:25):
that many people in the in the pot because pocket
jacks are a strong hand. But you don't want it
five way pot with pocket jacks because you know, Ace
King queen. There are lots of things that can happen.
And then the chip leader rejammed over me and I
was like, oh no, right, that's the one person that
you want to fold, and he had Ace King and
(20:46):
I ended up holding and winning that race, and so
he was still in, but that put me into the
chip lead and that's huge, right that hand.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
You're praying for the ace King there. You're not going
to see pocket tens. I don't think or anything anything.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
No, no, I'm praying for the ace King once he
once he went all in, I was like, oh no,
I am going to be out and whatever it is,
you know, eighth place and I that would have been horrible,
but yeah, the Ace King is the best case scenario.
And luckily my handheld. So I think that that's those
(21:21):
spots like you have to get lucky right, and I
was technically a little bit ahead. But it's really a
flip when you have a pocket pair against ace King.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
So how much did you win?
Speaker 1 (21:31):
So I didn't you know, it wasn't it. It wasn't
a huge win. It was around twenty thousand, so not
definitely not one of my you know, biggest scores, but
it was a small buy in and it was a
really nice way to uh to end the end the week. Well,
congratulations Maria, Thank you so much, Nate, And yeah, I
look forward to uh playing with you in the world
(21:53):
series that's coming up in just a few weeks.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
It's shockingly soon. I mean I'm not playing until like
the second or third week of the series.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
There am I Neither am I? But I hope that
I hope that we both win all of our flips,
or at least most of our flips, that we run
better than music a less. Yeah, let's take a quick
break and then let's talk a little bit about chat GPT.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Nate.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
So, there was a big piece in New York magazine
last week about cheating on college campuses and chat GPT,
and I know that you are writing about this for
your Substack Silver bulletin. So do you want to just
set the scene a little bit and tell us kind
of about some of the concerns here.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Yeah. I mean, look, if you have any friends who
are college professors of any kind, they'll probably tell you
the same concerns, right, which is that, you know, a
lot of classes rely on a model where students have
homework they can do at home. And for a long time,
obviously you can, you know, you can go on the
internet and look up information that way. There have always
(23:12):
been services that would offer to do your homework for you.
Right there are you know, ancient and modern versions of
cliffs notes and things like that, if you uh, you know,
the line between working with a friend on a problem
set and copying your friend's answers has always been blurry,
I think, but like but now chat chipetem makes it
(23:33):
very very tempting to cheat, and especially for like written essays,
but also you know problem sets for economic classes and
things like that, and and so yeah, I tried to
actually I imagine that I had given myself an assignment.
You know, the philosopher Michelle Fuco. Of course, French guy
(23:55):
weird into s and m into lots of stuff ball
you know, but like very famous philosopher. My whole mo
in college was to always mention, always named up Fuco right,
And every time I named up put then I would
get at least an a minus on the paper. Right,
But like I gave myself an assignment to compare the
concept of the panopticon, which is this all seeing prison
(24:19):
where there's like a guard tower in the center. Right,
it was Bentham's idea who co wrote a lot about
this is a metaphor for modern surveillance states. And to say,
how does this apply to like modern day China? Right,
it seems like the kind of prompt that a student
might be asked in a class about China or a
class about pukou or whatever else. Right, And like, you know,
(24:40):
first of all, if you ask chat ChiPT to cheat
for you, it doesn't push back at all, Right, and
you can say things, can you like, please remove any
traces of this is GPT, you know, please make the
essay a little reugh around the margin, but have one
or two good points of insight.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
At one point in the version I eventually ended up with, Right,
it's like, you know, my Chinese friend, so it made
up a fake Chinese friend to testify to a point
that it was making, and I have no idea da
quite how detectable this would be. But you know, but
the students can kind of take that as an intermediate
point and then remove further traces of it. But anyway,
(25:19):
it's it's very hard to have an assignment now that
you can confidently predict was not written by chat GPD,
any type of written homework assignment that's not kind of
done with active supervision, and the article is very gloomy.
A lot of students are pretty open about their cheating
and say, hey, this is great, right now, I can
(25:40):
save a lot of time. Right. A lot of professors
are very despairing of it. Right, you know, you were
in an era where because it's hard to prove, like
you might be ninety percent sure that a student cheated,
but ninety percent is probably not good enough to flunk
similar to kick them out of college or things like that.
But like I will say to me, it seems like
(26:01):
there are some methods that you could use to prevent this,
which require more work. So you know, you know, when
I went, I took my junior year abroad at one
school economics in the UKSES, and you just take one
big exam at the end of the year and that's
your whole grand and that's in person. Back then, we
use notebooks. I'm sure you can use you know, iPads
or something like that now, right, but that's quite hard
(26:22):
to cheat. If you want. Students have the internet. You
could say you can have the Internet, but we're monitoring
you're internet access, right and so, like if you use chatchipt,
we will know, right. Or you can say, okay, well
we're going to have you submit a paper and I'm
going to have a fifteen minute conversation with you about
the paper. I imagine it'd be hard to fake your
way through even like five or ten minutes if you
(26:44):
really didn't know the subject matter at all, if you're
being quizzed about your own paper, right and so, But
professors don't seem to want to do it in anyway.
What are your thoughts here, Maria, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Well I have I have a number of thoughts. First
of all, I mean, obviously you know students have been
cheating for a long time, and that you were saying
ninety percent isn't enough. And I will actually go further
and say one hundred percent isn't enough to fail someone
off times. So when I was when I was teaching
back in my grad school days, I had a student
(27:17):
hand in a paper that just looked suspicious, and it
was a word document that was kind of scrolling down
and all of a sudden, my, you know, the cursor
changes to kind of a you know, the way that
the cursor changes when there's a hyperlink. And so he
had copied and pasted directly from Wikipedia, and he had
(27:38):
removed the visual hyperlink, but he hadn't actually removed the hyperlink,
so I could actually click on the text to get
to the Wikipedia article. And I was like, wow, right,
like that that is uh, that is like the people
who these days hand in essays that start with as
an ai I And I brought this, you know, to
(28:01):
the department and said, you know this, this kid cheated.
I want to fail him. And they didn't let me
because they said that, you know, there were parent issues
and all these things. And I was allowed to give
him a D minus, but I could not give him
an F because that's not how Columbia did things. And
it was very disparaiting to me. Right. It was one
of the things that one of the reasons there were
(28:22):
lots of reasons I didn't want to go into academia,
but I was like, fuck this, right, like, you need
to have consequences for cheating, so that it has happened
for a long time and it's obviously only getting worse.
But I completely agree with you, Nate, that you should
change in response to this, how you grade and how
you create assignments. When I went even kind of as
(28:45):
an undergrad, we had so many in class exams right
where you had to write essays in class. And then
when I was a grad student, we had oral exams
where you know, as part of your degree you have
to pass orals where you are interviews. It's very stressful
for a lot of people. Right. There are people who
ask you questions. When you defend your dissertation. You have
(29:07):
an entire committee, right who's pepper you with questions about
your work and about your research. And if you're not
the one who knows the data and who knows what
you did, then you're going to get screwed, right, You're
not going to pass. And people have failed, by the way,
different dissertation defenses. People have failed oral exams. People you know,
fail these types of assessments all the time, and so
(29:28):
I think what we need if we want to actually
first of all, like what's the point of higher education?
I would say, you know, to create critical thinkers and
people who actually are educated human beings and have well
rounded who know about you know, history and all of
these different things. How do you make sure that they're
actually learning what? You change the You change the way
(29:50):
that you that you have your class. You change the
incentives right so that they can't cheat their way through it,
because it's not going to go away. It's only going
to get worse. And so you can't just pretend that
it doesn't happen. And you can't rely on cheating detection
software because it doesn't matter anyway. Instead, you need to
kind of create an environment where your students learn and
(30:13):
I would say, you know, are motivated to learn, right,
So make it worth their while, like make them understand
why this is important. One of the students, Nay, in
that New York magpiece. He first he got into Harvard,
then he said they rescinded his admission and he ended
up transferring to Columbia and was kicked out within a
year because he cheated on everything and he openly admitted
(30:36):
it and created cheating software and said, well, I don't care, Like,
I don't care about actually any of this. The only
reason I want to go to a good school is
to meet my future spouse and co founder.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, look, I mean students learn from well, anyone learns from,
like to Terrence, right that if you do see a
student who was kicked out of college for cheating, then
as going to have a much bigger deterrent effect. Right,
But like, yeah, look, I mean I was going to say,
you know, is the purpose of higher education really learning?
Because you can obviously take a much more cynical approach, right,
(31:10):
which is that it's a factory to produce degrees and
to kind of, you know, make a lot of money
running these very expensive institutions that have now very large
non academic stabs. A lot of the time that the
kids are coddle, that there is a ton of great inflation,
that during the pandemic, that colleges were so concerned about
(31:33):
angering highly neurotic moms and dads and maybe professors to
some extent, right, and so they're totally undermining the educational experience, right,
But like, it doesn't stop the factory from like churning
out degrees, even if classes are easier and easier to gain,
and so, yeah, I don't know. I also think that
like you wind up with students in a kind of
(31:54):
prisoner's dilemma type situation where it's a really pretty rational
to cheat if everyone else is cheating and it can't
really be detected. And by the way, like I think that,
you know, when I write essays for Silver Bulletin, then
I ask chech GPT question, right, I will run my
copy through j just P and say do you correct
any typos or errors? Right? And things like that. Right,
(32:18):
Sometimes it all flag errors that are fake because I
can't believe how dumb things are. It's like we can't
really have one hundred and third percent tariff on China, right.
People might take that exaggeration seriously, Nate, So you have
to remove that from your estley. I'm like, no, things
are really that dumb. But like so and working with
AI is important. I mean, it's kind of intrude to
I mean, I'll stay that like interpersonal skills become more
(32:41):
important in a world where CHECHPD do is kind of
like the cognitive tasks easier. It's probably more about sales, right,
who are you going to hire to be the nice
person to brought you the services that you could probably
do yourself with chet GPT, your group assignments and things.
People feel charmed by humans. So but yeah, I think
colleges are on the way to being less relevant and
(33:02):
that they seem not to have particularly much urgency for
This is kind of lame. But like I said, if
you were a student, would you use chet cheapet if
you Let's say you let me set this up for you. Right,
Let's say you know for a fact that eighty percent
of the students in your class are using chat cheapt.
I'm trying to make a sympathetic set of facts. Right,
Let's say you don't think the class is well taught,
(33:26):
and so you don't think you're really getting that much
out of it. Let's even say that you kind of
done half the reading and so you're kind of using
cheapt chechpeeding way. It's like clearly over the line, but
you're adding some original inputs and insight yourself. But it
goes against the nominal recommendations of the professor. Would you
(33:46):
cheat in that circumstance or use chec ChiPT or not?
Speaker 1 (33:50):
I would like to think no, because I never I
was someone who could have always took that pretty seriously.
And for me, like my incentives were like most of
my classes I was really interested in, Like I wanted
to learn, right, Like I went to a school that
I thought would teach me things that I realized. You know,
I sound like a very you know, uh do ie
(34:14):
bushy tailed student, but like to me, that was that
was the whole point. Like I wanted to read these books.
I want to think through you know, I wanted to
be kind of a better, you know, a better person,
someone who who has that knowledge, you know. I wanted
to kind of have it in my head, like if
(34:36):
you're on a desert island right with no CHATPT and
you just have kind of the stuff that's in your head.
I wanted to kind of have good things in there.
And so I never I mean I never even like
gray Zone cheated when I was in college, Like I
didn't collaborate on assignments. I didn't do anything like that.
(34:56):
That said, like I never told on anyone either, right,
Like I was not someone who would be like Nate
use chat GPT, right, Like, if you want to use
chat rept, fine, but even if everyone was using it,
like I I think I wouldn't I wouldn't feel right
about myself if the teacher actually said, do not use
(35:18):
chat GPT. And like I said, for most of the
classes I took, a huge chunk of the grade was
in class, in class, exams and assignments, and so that
was something where you know, chat GPT wouldn't be helpful.
But I also I wanted to be a writer, Nate, like,
I wanted to learn how to write well, and I
wanted one of the reasons that I wanted to go
(35:38):
to Harvard was to study with very specific writers. I
wanted their feedback on my writing. It would just completely
defeat the purpose, right if I took a fiction writing
seminar and had chat GPT write my short story, Like,
what am I even doing? Well?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
What if you sound stupid? What if it's a let's
say that you're taking a physics class and it's part
of a requirement for some hard sciences, right, and the
professor is unintelligible and boring, and these assignments are unnecessarily
hard for students who are not going into the science concentration. Right.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, So I think that I can see using chat
GPT to help me explain to help explain stuff, right,
use other aids outside of class to try to get
to try to get oriented and try to figure it out.
But I would still, I think, do my own final
assignment in the end, like there was one class. This
is one of my biggest regrets, and so I don't
(36:36):
want students to have regrets like this. One of my
biggest regrets from undergrad was I took this course AX ten,
which was you know, your introductory economics class my senior year,
because I needed it as a requirement, and I took
a pass fail because I could write and I didn't.
At that point, I thought that I didn't really care
(36:57):
about economics, want to know any of this. And it
was really early in the morning. I think it was
like at nine am or something, you know, a time
that was just ungodly for me even today, but as
a college student like, no, no way, And so I
ended up skipping a ton of lectures and almost fail
the class. I really regret that because, first of all,
(37:17):
the class was taught by legendary professor, and the speakers
we had in that class were insane, right, We had
like secretaries of State, We had the things that I
missed right now, when I look at our syllabus, I'm like,
what an idiot?
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Right?
Speaker 1 (37:32):
I wish I could go back in time and actually
learn this information. So the one time where like I
obviously wasn't cheating or using chat gibta, I almost failed,
for God's sake, the one time I tried to like
glide through a class because I didn't think it was
irrelevant or interesting. I really really regret it because I
realized now just how relevant and interesting it was and
(37:55):
how much I missed. So kind of looking back at
college me, I want to shake myself and say, hey,
you know, take advantage of this. There is not going
to be another time where you get like an hour
one on one with Larry Summers to ask him quite
about the economy.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
You know. I asked my Twitter followers did they cheat
even a little tiny bit in college? And it was
almost exactly fifty fifty yes and no, which means on
the show, if you are avowing Maria never to have
even a tiny bit cheated, does that imply that I
therefore did cheat.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
I wouldn't. I wouldn't say that. I would say that
you probably did not.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
I think I did. I think this counts. So I
was in an econometrics class, and ironically, econometrics is like
actually pretty relevant to my day to day work now, right,
But the class was taught terribly. The professor was a
good scholar who was very disengaged in University of Chicago
(38:59):
was maybe more tolerant of that than they should have been, right,
and you know, my very good friend, I mean, I would,
you know, ask to copy off a couple of those
problem sets with his mission sometimes? Right, that's cheating, isn't it,
I think, Solia, Yeah, it's funny because like if you're
doing the homework together, it's probably not. But like I
think it's cheating. And I don't regret it because the
(39:19):
class sucked and and still most of the grades based on
on the end of the year, right you still, I mean,
you know, so if I fucked myself over, then that's fine,
But I don't I think that was a rational decision.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
You know what, now that you say that, I realized
that I did cheat.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
If in school, so when I was in eighth grade,
I had this science teacher who liked to basically we
had our science curriculum and then he also taught birds
and stars, so basically we would get pop quizzes all
the time where he would play bird calls and we'd
(39:56):
have to say what bird it was. However, as part
of the bird stuff, he would give us these basically
you know, like coloring book sketches of birds, and we
had color them in for homework and we were graded
on how well we colored them in. And I was like,
this is bullshit. I have zero artistic ability, like I
(40:19):
hate you know, I can't draw, stick figure, I can't color.
I was like, this has nothing to do with science, right,
this has nothing to do with what I'm learning. This
is insane. And my sister is a beautiful artist. So
she actually, first of all, I had she had taken
the class, you know, six years before I did, so
she gave me her birds to like help me figure
out how to how to color them in, and then
(40:41):
when she had time, she would color them for me.
And then I had another friend who was who loved drawing,
and she would color my birds for me. And I
hardly ever did my bird coloring in myself because I
just thought it was the.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Most too cheaters mister business here.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
So now that you now that I think about it,
that was that was definitely problem not above board, but
it was just because I made the decision that this
was an incredibly bad use of my time. And I
stand by that just like thank you. I have no regrets.
I do not care that I don't know how to
color in a downy woodpecker or whatever. It was toughted mouse.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
And we'll be right back after this break. I mean,
there's an argument against assigned homework in general, and do
the readings you can participate in class right and or
(41:44):
past your final at the end of the year. Right.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yeah, I'm actually I'm actually very sympathetic to the no
homework type of thing because you know, if you, I
think homework often incentivizes cheating, right when people feel like
like the homework assignment is stupid or dumb, or you
have too much of it, like there the incentives for
homework are not often the correct incentives. And when you
(42:11):
have those exams so I had, I took a lot
of seminars where class participation was a huge part in it, right,
and if you are one of the people who did
not do the reading that week, it becomes very clear
pretty or pretty soon in the discussion that, like you,
you are not adding much value and that like this
was just this is a week that you were mentally
(42:34):
not there. And if the purpose of learning is to
create individuals who have deeper knowledge, critical thinking abilities, kind
of the ability to synthesize information, to analyze information, the
types of skills that we want right in our citizens,
I would hope then homework assignments are much worse at
(42:56):
assessing those than your ability to kind of have a
class discussion, your ability to kind of think through things
and reason through things. So I think that we need
to figure out how do you kind of create an
education system that incentivizes the sorts of thinking and behaviors
that you want your students to emerge with.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah, look, I think you know maybe as solicials, you
actually need more actual classroom hours. Right. I had a
friend who used to work at Amazon, and the culture
there is that if there's a meeting where there's a
briefing to read, right, they assume that you did not
take the time out to read that briefing, right, So like,
(43:34):
take twelve minutes now and read this briefing and then
we'll talk about it, right, And it's like kind of
a part of the meeting, you know, obviously, like I'm
a big fan of reading in general, but maybe it
doesn't have to be as Zidak to like prove that
you read this, Like no, I mean, look, can you
hold intelligent discussion in class? And then I don't know.
People always talk about the EDU cases of students who
are introverted or neurodiversient or English is a second language,
(43:56):
and yeah, it sucks, but life isn't always fairer, you
know what I mean? And if colleges become less effective
at differentiating which students were more effective and when we're
on it, I mean, you know, then the whole signal
becomes less valuable and college degrees become worth less, particularly
the most elite degrees. Right, all of a sudden's just
(44:17):
now basically like a signal that four years ago you
were considered a talented student by an emissions committee. Right, yep,
I completely agree with you.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
I think that this is a very very urgent question
and one that has huge implications for the future of
our society, right, because what kind of adults are we
creating with? What kinds of skills, what kinds of ability,
what kinds of actual background and knowledge? I think these
are really important questions we do not want to be
creating a functionally illiterate society, which is what's going to happen.
(44:50):
By the way, if you don't actually do any learning
and instead outsource everything all the time and using.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Chat, GPT or other LM's other AI tools, well, is
actually a pretty important life skill. I can imagine some
assignments where and say yes, we not only you know, allow,
but maybe encourage you for this particular assignment to do
this right. And so I mean the other irony I
think this is becoming true and more and more domains
evolving AI is that like, if you are pretty smart,
(45:17):
then your productivity is enhanced by the AI, Whereas if
you don't know what you're doing then and maybe you
can kind of fake your way through it up to
a point, but you may be more fooled by the hallucinations,
You may be susceptible to misinformation, you may just not
have any retention for the things that you're having it
do right. And so, like, you know, if I were
using chat schipt to write a paper or I could
(45:39):
I don't know. I think I can write better than
chet chip Bet by a long shot still, but like,
but I could figure out ways if I were allowed
to that to make my work to summarize long reading
like that seems like a potentially legitimate use for a student. Right,
here's this very long reading that you have to pay
way too much for the fucking textbook anyway, Right, can
(45:59):
you extract the important parts from this? And guess what
you can do if you're Chinese, Nat, and now you
can have it translate to Chinese. Right, you can up
and down the world level of complexity. Right, you can
say this point might seem obvious to you. Can you
explain this point another way? Right? So, like, you know,
there are a lot of ways that llm's II tools
(46:21):
could be quite helpful for the educational process. But I
just think academia is moving too slow. You know, the
opportunity costs of four years in college given how the
world is changing. I mean, there's a cohort of students
for which it might not be the right decision.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
I completely agree with that, and I do think that
academia needs to just wake up to what's happening and
figure out how to stay relevant. Risky Business is hosted
by me Maria Kanakova.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
And by me Nate Silver. The show is a co
production of Pushkin Industries, and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced
by Isabelle Carter. Our associate producer is Sonya Gerwitz. Sally
Helm is our editor, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.
Mixing by Sarah Bruger.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
If you like the show, please rate and review us
to other people can find us too. Thanks so much
for tuning in.
Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making
better decisions. I'm Maria Kanigogo.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
And I'm Nate Silver.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
So today on the show, Nate, we're gonna first revisit
our predictions about the conclave. They were wrong, as was
basically everyone else's, and then talk a little Coker and
my recent trip to Monte Carlo.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
And I'll try to slip in a few New York
Knicks references you may notice on the show. But we'll
also talk about the rampant use of chat GPT to
cheat on college campuses, inspired by a recent article in
New York Magazine.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
So with that, Nate, let's dive in. I'm so sorry
that Pizza Bala did not end up becoming pope. That
would have been fun. However, pizza is definitely on everyone's
minds because the pope is from Chicago, and we all
know that Chicago is famous for its deep dish pizza.
(01:27):
In fact, Nate, the last time we had a meal
together was over Chicago style people.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
You know, the last time we talked about Chicago, you
actually encouraged me to get peaquads pizza, which I know
and love and like, I had the whole it was
a lunch sized pizza. Right. I have not had that
accumulation of like that much dairy, I don't think in years.
Pick Quads is amazing. You should visit it.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
This podcast is sponsored by Peaquad's Pizza use our affiliate length.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I'm just kidding, No, I found this very interesting because, like,
I lived in Chicago. The guy's a Chicago White Sox fan.
He's a Villanova a basketball fan, and attended Villanova, has
a mathematics degree. So it's like, you know, neither of
us are Catholic. We're not going to shock you with that,
I don't think, but like, it's very strange to have
a pope that's kind of like memeable and relatable to Americans.
(02:20):
And this was not well predicted at prediction markets. He
had had around a one percent chance of becoming the pope.
If you look at various shortlists and long lists published
by various userganizations. You know, the New York Times mentions
him in like the twentieth paragraph. The Washington Post doesn't
mention him at all, for example, and yet he won,
(02:40):
I believe after just the second day of the conclave.
Do you know how many ballots there.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Were we don't, but it was just over twenty four hours,
so it could not have been more than four ballots.
That would have been I think the maximum given the
amount of time, if I remember correctly about how the
ballot process works.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
So once this decision came quickly, markets assumed that one
of the front runners is going to win, right, which
is a dynamic we had talked about on the program beforehand,
and that was you know, maybe he was a front runner,
but nobody knew it. So I think it was a
pretty big failure of both the conventional wisdom and crediction
markets right where. I guess the conclave is pretty good
(03:18):
at keeping secrets, maybe more than like, you know, than
the United States Congresses for example. There weren't a lot
of leaks, and I think it reflects the kind of
changing global climate toward the United States, right. You know.
One of the few outlets that did it in an
article about him was Axios, and they're like, well, this
would never happen because the Catholic Church doesn't want to
give the US government more influence, or the United States
(03:39):
and not the government, I guess, more influence. It's like, well,
what do they want to influence the United States, right,
and have some counterweight to President Trump. You know what's
a good counterweight, you know, probably not the Speaker of
the House. Maybe the pope is like the only person
who can be like on a stage as a counterweight.
And you know, Greemost had had an active Twitter account too, right,
(04:00):
He had criticized mostly through retweets, not things he wrote himself,
criticized JD. Vance criticized the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Marilyn Man who was accidentally sent to an l Salador
in prison. And so it's making a.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Statement, Yeah, And I think that I think that we
see that psychologically something happened here and also something that
you and I have talked about night that you write
about in terms of kind of how betting and prediction
markets work. So the first part of the psychology part,
I think people had kind of bad priors, right, and
(04:40):
let kind of their biases in an historical precedent influence
this a little bit too much, saying oh, you know, well,
an American could never be pope and you can't have
that sort of blanket statement rights, that's a bias where
you are you're actually kind of anchoring yourself to a
(05:01):
really incorrect starting point, which gets into my second point
that you've written about, which is that this is not
an event where we have tons of data and statistics. Right,
this isn't the super Bowl that happens every single year.
Like the last time that we had a papal election
was what twelve years ago? And you know, there have
been decades where there haven't where there hasn't been one,
(05:24):
and the world changes and different things change, and people
don't know much about what happens inside the Vatican and
all of that, and yet we think, right, we're a
little bit overconfident in thinking that we know more than
we do and that we have more data than we do.
It's always incredibly incredibly risky to make predictions based on incomplete,
(05:45):
faulty data.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah, and look, prediction markets can accentuate that when people
are like, well they're pretty smart, someone must do something right,
and they are smart in many circumstances. Right, In general,
there is in markets various kinds of a long shot bias,
meaning people are actually a little bit under confident relative
to the favorite usually prevailing. But if you have no
information to go off, right, you know, there are what
(06:09):
a two hundred and fifty one cardinals in the College
of Cardinals. Right. You know, technically speaking, any baptized Catholic
male is eligible to become pope. Right. I'm not saying
you just want to spin a wheel one in two
hundred and fifty one or whatever. But but you know,
especially after the white smoke came out and people like, oh,
(06:30):
now we know for sure, right, this is a case
where the conditions were not in place for prediction markets
to be particularly wise.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yeah, and you actually you write on the edge a
little bit about how prediction markets and sports betting falters
and certain events where there's dumb money as well, right,
where there's a proliferation of people who don't know as
much about it that some events are much easier to
bet on than others, just depending on who the betters are.
And I think from a psychological standpoint, you also get
(07:00):
into these groups think echo chambers, where you start amplifying
things that are already kind of front runners, et cetera,
et cetera. Not for any good reason, right, but oh well,
because he said so, I guess I think so. And
then on and on it goes. It's like those psych
studies right where there's a number of statistic that's been
cited thousands of times, and then you actually try to
(07:22):
unravel it and figure out, way, where did we get this?
And you find the study from nineteen sixty four that
was based on twelve people, and that's where the number
came from, and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This number
that has now become gospel is actually incredibly suspect. That
has happened to me so many times where I've actually
tried to kind of retrace the steps of how it happens.
But especially with social media and kind of the way
(07:43):
information spreads these days, it's very easy to create those effects.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
And if you actually make sports bets, especially I'm betting
the NBA playoffs a little bit go Nix, by the way,
you'll sometimes see lines where you're like, this doesn't make
any sense, right, So somebody must know something, or the
market must be accounting for some psychological factor or some
injury that like I'm not accounting for, right, And if
(08:11):
that were always true, then you could say, Okay, even
though my model says that Nick's have a forty percent chance,
the market applug, you just have a twenty percent chance.
So maybe the twenty percent actually of the good bet here,
and if you're making our sports bets, you learn that
it's not predictable when the market knows something and when
it doesn't. Obviously, markets are tough to beat in general,
but sometimes it is full of shit, right and many
times it's not, And you're the one feeling embarrassed after all.
(08:33):
Instead you say, boy, you know Vegas is so smart,
but like it's not always smart? Right if it was
always smart? Yeah, piggyback off it and you kind of can't.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Dude, I have a question for you, what you know
if if you were to say, okay, there's a skill
set and maybe the answer is no to figuring out
other than what we've already talked about, right events that
happen frequently, versus not to figuring out, Okay, these are
things that prediction markets are probably smarter on and these
are where they're not right. Is there is there a
way that you think about that, like how to figure
(09:03):
out you know what, I shouldn't be listening to the
experts in this particular case, I shouldn't be listening to
the markets particular case, because I think that's actually a
really interesting question.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
I mean, you've touched on some of this, right, Like,
you know, question one is how much domain knowledge does
the average trader have? I mean, the average person's betting
on the NBA of the NFL probably knows more about
the NBA and the NFL, And the average person betting
at polymarket on the identity of the pope knows about
the Catholic church. Frankly, I don't think the kind of
(09:32):
church following personality type overlaps much with the you know,
crypto adjacent prediction market startup betting type person Right. Next
is is there are there institutional investors professional class of
investors who are who are sucking up the week money
to make the market balance?
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Right?
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Or you know, so for example for elections, investment banks
and hedge funds and rich gamblers like all our betting
serious money, there's a professional class. Certainly that's true for
the Super Bowl or anything like that. Right. Again, the
pope doesn't probably have action geopolitical consequences in the same way,
(10:11):
so he probably don't have that. Right. Is it a
repeated thing where people can calibrate their models? Is it
even mathematically modelable by anything beyond like very naive methods?
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:21):
And I mean, you know, models are hard for a
lot of things, but that puts like some bumpers on
how far unmored a prediction can get right. And so
all these boxes are not checked for papal predictions, whereas
they might be forbidding in the playoffs in the NBA.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And by the way,
I saw someone was writing about kind of did anyone
predict this? And there was one publication that actually had
Robert Privost as one of the top contenders, and it
was a Catholic like it was a niche Catholic publication,
I don't remember which one it was. Didn't have them
as the front runner, but it at least mentioned his name.
(10:57):
You and I, by the way, didn't even mention his name. Right,
he wasn't on our radar because he wasn't on the
radar of any of the sources that we actually well.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
If anything, you think there might be a bias for
we're saying, oh, there's just cogo guy might become pope, right,
you think there might be more coverage and moves might be,
Oh you got to short him, They're gonna, you know,
not pick an American guy. But I he just kind
of didn't really enter the conversation very much, except you know,
I did be done a see article, you know for
like a Catholic source. They kind of said, oh, it's
(11:27):
interesting that people are betting on the pope. We're not
sure how we feel about that as Catholics, but they're
way over confident because nobody knows anything right and that
proved to be prescient.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, absolutely, all right, so so let's let's see how
he ends up doing and let's see how how this
all ends up going.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
So America is winning, Maria. Uh the Knicks are winning.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Which makes it I'm doubly happy because as an ex Bostonian,
I hate Boston sports fans. Really, they just suck, and
so I'm i anti sweat the Celtics, and as a
New Yorker, I'm pro next. So I'm just I'm deliriously happy.
I'm actually interested in the outcome of these games today.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
But you're winning too, So tell me about, uh our
telling me and the audience about this win you had
in Monte Carlo.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yeah, So I just came back from EPT Monte Carlo,
which is the Poker Stars signature stop on the European
Poker Tour. Beautiful venuinate. I hope you come next year.
But I had not been having a good trip at all.
I've never cashed in the main event there. I still
did not cash in the main event, ended up playing
(12:39):
a twenty five K, did not cash in that. When
you don't cash those big events, it doesn't feel good,
and just was running horribly right. I kept getting two
out at three out and four outed. For our non
poker playing fans, that means, you know, improbable combinations of
cards kept getting there against me, and so I was
(12:59):
just very discouraged. And I ended up winning the final event,
which was a really really nice way to end the trip.
And the final that was actually a turbo structure, which
is very different from kind of your standard tournament. It
means that the blind levels aren't increasing quite quickly, and
(13:19):
so your strategy actually has to change a little bit, because, yes,
you might start with two hundred big blinds, and whereas
you know, in a normal tournament you might have that
for forty minutes, half an hour, an hour, whatever it is.
Here like suddenly, if you don't do stuff in twenty minutes,
you look and you have thirty big blinds left, right,
(13:40):
Because the blind structure is moving so quickly. It's such
a dynamic tournament, and so in situations like this, you
need to be first of all, more aggressive, right. You
need to play. You can't just sit around waiting for
good hands, because otherwise you will blind out. This is
one of those cases where doing nothing is doing something,
and it's not a good thing, and you have to
(14:01):
actually be a little bit different with the hand combinations
that you choose to play because very quickly, this is
not deep stacked poker, this is short stacked poker. So
the value of hands changes. So you need to play
high card hands much more, low suited connectors much less,
because you'll get into situations where people are going to
(14:23):
get very short, especially people who didn't play correctly right
and who now find themselves with very few chips, and
they're going to shove on you, which means they're going
to put all their chips in the middle. And you
have to know that in advance and know how you're
going to respond and be in a situation where you
can have a hand that can call those shoves, because
otherwise you're also going to bleed chips right if you
(14:44):
open too much and then keep folding when people are
aggressive against you, and so it's a slightly different mindset,
and it does require I think a lot of preparation
ahead of time because you don't have much time to think.
You just need to know your range as well. You
need to know your cards well, you need to know
your response as well. We had a ten second shot
clock in this tournament, so you had ten seconds to
(15:04):
make every single decision, no matter what street you were on.
And we had a few time banks, and each of
those time banks and it was ten seconds. So it's
actually kind of beautiful. It's a very it's fun because
it's so dynamic and so much happens, but there's also
an element of luck when you get into a fast
structure like that.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
This is a one day tournament or yes, okay, yeah, Look.
The other thing that's tricky about these events I want
to ask you about is like, Okay, typically if you
have a big tournament series, you're toward the end of
the series and you have these turbos for people that
you know have busted out of the big events they're
hoping to play. There's also typically a lot of tilt, right,
(15:44):
people are trying to place very high to make up
for their entry fees. Right, we're getting the plane and
go home. So how do you balance that? I mean, again,
I'm not saying you have tilt. You can tell us
about that if you do right. I'm saying the fact
that like people are maybe calling down lighter and bluffing
a little bit more. At the same time, with a
(16:06):
turbo structure, you do need to widen your rain, which
is quite a bit, right, So how do you how
did you manage that?
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, so you have to widen your ranges, but also
widen them correctly, so I you know, raggedy aces go
up in value, et cetera, so you need to kind
of know also what hands people will be undervaluing. So
I got quite lucky early on where I ended up.
(16:34):
Someone opened and I called a pocket pair. I call it,
you know, it was a pair of deuces, a tiny
pocket paar and someone else called and the flop came
with a deuce in it, which means that I had
flopped a set. But there was also an ace, and
there was one guy who was clearly very tilted. Because
this for older French gentleman who just wanted chips right,
(16:55):
he clearly just was frustrated. This was very early on
in the tournament, so we still had a lot of
chips and no one had busted out yet, right, like
this is how early we are. I think we're level one,
maybe level two. And you could tell that like he
just like he had been playing every hand, like he
just really wanted chips, and so he bet, I raised,
(17:17):
he called, and anyway, he ended up losing right and
busting and was the first player to bust out of
the tournament to me. And he had like I don't
even remember, it was like ace three off suit, right,
he didn't even have a good ace. It was a
shitty ace, but he just didn't believe me, and I
think he was tired of people picking on him. And
(17:37):
he was definitely tilting. And I've played with him before,
like he's not that bad of a player, but it
was just an awful play and he just gave me
all his chips, which was a great start obviously to
the to the tournament. But I think that you need
to look for spots like that and be willing to
kind of take full advantage of them. So like, for instance,
(17:58):
some people would say, oh, you know, don't get greedy
on the river, don't go all in because he's not
gonna call I was like, no, actually he will. You know,
do get greedy because in those in those spots, you're
going to get lucky against people who are just done
right and they don't want you to bully them. And
so especially because I'm female, that dynamic is very strong.
(18:20):
People don't want me to bully them.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah. Look, and to the older frenchmen out there, I'd say,
you know, we understand that you're not always going to
play your A game and when you're tired in a
long series, even the B game can be asking a
lot avoiding the f game right where you you know, look,
I'll be honest, right, you know, I think I know
my range is pretty well in a lot of spots, and
I'll know when I can like loosen up just slightly,
(18:45):
you know, be a little bit more aggressive. You can
bluff sometimes, but like the multi street desperate call downs
are like the most easy way to like literally burn money.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
And you know, by that stage in the in the
tournament series, when it is kind of one of the
last events this happened to be the last event, but
when it is kind of one of the last events,
people are tired and a lot of people are playing
their C game their D game, and if you're one
of the people who's not and who can actually take
advantage of that, I think that can be a huge
advantage if you're willing to be aggressive in the right
(19:20):
spots and also don't have ego and willing to fold
right in the right spots. So like be willing. I
did this as well to kind of throw your cards
away in a heartbeat. So I had a few very
successful bluffs that got through, and then I got very
lucky at the final table. When we got to the
final table, I had a good amount of chips, but
(19:41):
the chip leader, so the person with the most chips
was to my immediate left, and we got into a
big hand. So this was it's not good ICM. So
ICM is we've talked about this on the show. It's
the independent chip model. So basically, you know when they're
big pay jumps and when you're down to the final table,
you don't really want to tangle with the chip leader
(20:03):
when there are lots of people who are shorter than you,
because you could be committing ICM suicide. But in this
particular case, someone had opened, someone else had flatted, and
I had pocket jacks and like thirty big blinds something
like that, and so I jammed right because there was
dead money in the pot and I had you know,
I had a very strong hand, and I didn't want
(20:25):
that many people in the in the pot because pocket
jacks are a strong hand. But you don't want it
five way pot with pocket jacks because you know, Ace
King queen. There are lots of things that can happen.
And then the chip leader rejammed over me and I
was like, oh no, right, that's the one person that
you want to fold, and he had Ace King and
(20:46):
I ended up holding and winning that race, and so
he was still in, but that put me into the
chip lead and that's huge, right that hand.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
You're praying for the ace King there. You're not going
to see pocket tens. I don't think or anything anything.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
No, no, I'm praying for the ace King once he
once he went all in, I was like, oh no,
I am going to be out and whatever it is,
you know, eighth place and I that would have been horrible,
but yeah, the Ace King is the best case scenario.
And luckily my handheld. So I think that that's those
(21:21):
spots like you have to get lucky right, and I
was technically a little bit ahead. But it's really a
flip when you have a pocket pair against ace King.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
So how much did you win?
Speaker 1 (21:31):
So I didn't you know, it wasn't it. It wasn't
a huge win. It was around twenty thousand, so not
definitely not one of my you know, biggest scores, but
it was a small buy in and it was a
really nice way to uh to end the end the week. Well,
congratulations Maria, Thank you so much, Nate, And yeah, I
look forward to uh playing with you in the world
(21:53):
series that's coming up in just a few weeks.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
It's shockingly soon. I mean I'm not playing until like
the second or third week of the series.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
There am I Neither am I? But I hope that
I hope that we both win all of our flips,
or at least most of our flips, that we run
better than music a less. Yeah, let's take a quick
break and then let's talk a little bit about chat GPT.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Nate.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
So, there was a big piece in New York magazine
last week about cheating on college campuses and chat GPT,
and I know that you are writing about this for
your Substack Silver bulletin. So do you want to just
set the scene a little bit and tell us kind
of about some of the concerns here.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Yeah. I mean, look, if you have any friends who
are college professors of any kind, they'll probably tell you
the same concerns, right, which is that, you know, a
lot of classes rely on a model where students have
homework they can do at home. And for a long time,
obviously you can, you know, you can go on the
internet and look up information that way. There have always
(23:12):
been services that would offer to do your homework for you.
Right there are you know, ancient and modern versions of
cliffs notes and things like that, if you uh, you know,
the line between working with a friend on a problem
set and copying your friend's answers has always been blurry,
I think, but like but now chat chipetem makes it
(23:33):
very very tempting to cheat, and especially for like written essays,
but also you know problem sets for economic classes and
things like that, and and so yeah, I tried to
actually I imagine that I had given myself an assignment.
You know, the philosopher Michelle Fuco. Of course, French guy
(23:55):
weird into s and m into lots of stuff ball
you know, but like very famous philosopher. My whole mo
in college was to always mention, always named up Fuco right,
And every time I named up put then I would
get at least an a minus on the paper. Right,
But like I gave myself an assignment to compare the
concept of the panopticon, which is this all seeing prison
(24:19):
where there's like a guard tower in the center. Right,
it was Bentham's idea who co wrote a lot about
this is a metaphor for modern surveillance states. And to say,
how does this apply to like modern day China? Right,
it seems like the kind of prompt that a student
might be asked in a class about China or a
class about pukou or whatever else. Right, And like, you know,
(24:40):
first of all, if you ask chat ChiPT to cheat
for you, it doesn't push back at all, Right, and
you can say things, can you like, please remove any
traces of this is GPT, you know, please make the
essay a little reugh around the margin, but have one
or two good points of insight.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
At one point in the version I eventually ended up with, Right,
it's like, you know, my Chinese friend, so it made
up a fake Chinese friend to testify to a point
that it was making, and I have no idea da
quite how detectable this would be. But you know, but
the students can kind of take that as an intermediate
point and then remove further traces of it. But anyway,
(25:19):
it's it's very hard to have an assignment now that
you can confidently predict was not written by chat GPD,
any type of written homework assignment that's not kind of
done with active supervision, and the article is very gloomy.
A lot of students are pretty open about their cheating
and say, hey, this is great, right now, I can
(25:40):
save a lot of time. Right. A lot of professors
are very despairing of it. Right, you know, you were
in an era where because it's hard to prove, like
you might be ninety percent sure that a student cheated,
but ninety percent is probably not good enough to flunk
similar to kick them out of college or things like that.
But like I will say to me, it seems like
(26:01):
there are some methods that you could use to prevent this,
which require more work. So you know, you know, when
I went, I took my junior year abroad at one
school economics in the UKSES, and you just take one
big exam at the end of the year and that's
your whole grand and that's in person. Back then, we
use notebooks. I'm sure you can use you know, iPads
or something like that now, right, but that's quite hard
(26:22):
to cheat. If you want. Students have the internet. You
could say you can have the Internet, but we're monitoring
you're internet access, right and so, like if you use chatchipt,
we will know, right. Or you can say, okay, well
we're going to have you submit a paper and I'm
going to have a fifteen minute conversation with you about
the paper. I imagine it'd be hard to fake your
way through even like five or ten minutes if you
(26:44):
really didn't know the subject matter at all, if you're
being quizzed about your own paper, right and so, But
professors don't seem to want to do it in anyway.
What are your thoughts here, Maria, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Well I have I have a number of thoughts. First
of all, I mean, obviously you know students have been
cheating for a long time, and that you were saying
ninety percent isn't enough. And I will actually go further
and say one hundred percent isn't enough to fail someone
off times. So when I was when I was teaching
back in my grad school days, I had a student
(27:17):
hand in a paper that just looked suspicious, and it
was a word document that was kind of scrolling down
and all of a sudden, my, you know, the cursor
changes to kind of a you know, the way that
the cursor changes when there's a hyperlink. And so he
had copied and pasted directly from Wikipedia, and he had
(27:38):
removed the visual hyperlink, but he hadn't actually removed the hyperlink,
so I could actually click on the text to get
to the Wikipedia article. And I was like, wow, right,
like that that is uh, that is like the people
who these days hand in essays that start with as
an ai I And I brought this, you know, to
(28:01):
the department and said, you know this, this kid cheated.
I want to fail him. And they didn't let me
because they said that, you know, there were parent issues
and all these things. And I was allowed to give
him a D minus, but I could not give him
an F because that's not how Columbia did things. And
it was very disparaiting to me. Right. It was one
of the things that one of the reasons there were
(28:22):
lots of reasons I didn't want to go into academia,
but I was like, fuck this, right, like, you need
to have consequences for cheating, so that it has happened
for a long time and it's obviously only getting worse.
But I completely agree with you, Nate, that you should
change in response to this, how you grade and how
you create assignments. When I went even kind of as
(28:45):
an undergrad, we had so many in class exams right
where you had to write essays in class. And then
when I was a grad student, we had oral exams
where you know, as part of your degree you have
to pass orals where you are interviews. It's very stressful
for a lot of people. Right. There are people who
ask you questions. When you defend your dissertation. You have
(29:07):
an entire committee, right who's pepper you with questions about
your work and about your research. And if you're not
the one who knows the data and who knows what
you did, then you're going to get screwed, right, You're
not going to pass. And people have failed, by the way,
different dissertation defenses. People have failed oral exams. People you know,
fail these types of assessments all the time, and so
(29:28):
I think what we need if we want to actually
first of all, like what's the point of higher education?
I would say, you know, to create critical thinkers and
people who actually are educated human beings and have well
rounded who know about you know, history and all of
these different things. How do you make sure that they're
actually learning what? You change the You change the way
(29:50):
that you that you have your class. You change the
incentives right so that they can't cheat their way through it,
because it's not going to go away. It's only going
to get worse. And so you can't just pretend that
it doesn't happen. And you can't rely on cheating detection
software because it doesn't matter anyway. Instead, you need to
kind of create an environment where your students learn and
(30:13):
I would say, you know, are motivated to learn, right,
So make it worth their while, like make them understand
why this is important. One of the students, Nay, in
that New York magpiece. He first he got into Harvard,
then he said they rescinded his admission and he ended
up transferring to Columbia and was kicked out within a
year because he cheated on everything and he openly admitted
(30:36):
it and created cheating software and said, well, I don't care, Like,
I don't care about actually any of this. The only
reason I want to go to a good school is
to meet my future spouse and co founder.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Yeah, look, I mean students learn from well, anyone learns from,
like to Terrence, right that if you do see a
student who was kicked out of college for cheating, then
as going to have a much bigger deterrent effect. Right,
But like, yeah, look, I mean I was going to say,
you know, is the purpose of higher education really learning?
Because you can obviously take a much more cynical approach, right,
(31:10):
which is that it's a factory to produce degrees and
to kind of, you know, make a lot of money
running these very expensive institutions that have now very large
non academic stabs. A lot of the time that the
kids are coddle, that there is a ton of great inflation,
that during the pandemic, that colleges were so concerned about
(31:33):
angering highly neurotic moms and dads and maybe professors to
some extent, right, and so they're totally undermining the educational experience, right,
But like, it doesn't stop the factory from like churning
out degrees, even if classes are easier and easier to gain,
and so, yeah, I don't know. I also think that
like you wind up with students in a kind of
(31:54):
prisoner's dilemma type situation where it's a really pretty rational
to cheat if everyone else is cheating and it can't
really be detected. And by the way, like I think that,
you know, when I write essays for Silver Bulletin, then
I ask chech GPT question, right, I will run my
copy through j just P and say do you correct
any typos or errors? Right? And things like that. Right,
(32:18):
Sometimes it all flag errors that are fake because I
can't believe how dumb things are. It's like we can't
really have one hundred and third percent tariff on China, right.
People might take that exaggeration seriously, Nate, So you have
to remove that from your estley. I'm like, no, things
are really that dumb. But like so and working with
AI is important. I mean, it's kind of intrude to
I mean, I'll stay that like interpersonal skills become more
(32:41):
important in a world where CHECHPD do is kind of
like the cognitive tasks easier. It's probably more about sales, right,
who are you going to hire to be the nice
person to brought you the services that you could probably
do yourself with chet GPT, your group assignments and things.
People feel charmed by humans. So but yeah, I think
colleges are on the way to being less relevant and
(33:02):
that they seem not to have particularly much urgency for
This is kind of lame. But like I said, if
you were a student, would you use chet cheapet if
you Let's say you let me set this up for you. Right,
Let's say you know for a fact that eighty percent
of the students in your class are using chat cheapt.
I'm trying to make a sympathetic set of facts. Right,
Let's say you don't think the class is well taught,
(33:26):
and so you don't think you're really getting that much
out of it. Let's even say that you kind of
done half the reading and so you're kind of using
cheapt chechpeeding way. It's like clearly over the line, but
you're adding some original inputs and insight yourself. But it
goes against the nominal recommendations of the professor. Would you
(33:46):
cheat in that circumstance or use chec ChiPT or not?
Speaker 1 (33:50):
I would like to think no, because I never I
was someone who could have always took that pretty seriously.
And for me, like my incentives were like most of
my classes I was really interested in, Like I wanted
to learn, right, Like I went to a school that
I thought would teach me things that I realized. You know,
I sound like a very you know, uh do ie
(34:14):
bushy tailed student, but like to me, that was that
was the whole point. Like I wanted to read these books.
I want to think through you know, I wanted to
be kind of a better, you know, a better person,
someone who who has that knowledge, you know. I wanted
to kind of have it in my head, like if
(34:36):
you're on a desert island right with no CHATPT and
you just have kind of the stuff that's in your head.
I wanted to kind of have good things in there.
And so I never I mean I never even like
gray Zone cheated when I was in college, Like I
didn't collaborate on assignments. I didn't do anything like that.
(34:56):
That said, like I never told on anyone either, right,
Like I was not someone who would be like Nate
use chat GPT, right, Like, if you want to use
chat rept, fine, but even if everyone was using it,
like I I think I wouldn't I wouldn't feel right
about myself if the teacher actually said, do not use
(35:18):
chat GPT. And like I said, for most of the
classes I took, a huge chunk of the grade was
in class, in class, exams and assignments, and so that
was something where you know, chat GPT wouldn't be helpful.
But I also I wanted to be a writer, Nate, like,
I wanted to learn how to write well, and I
wanted one of the reasons that I wanted to go
(35:38):
to Harvard was to study with very specific writers. I
wanted their feedback on my writing. It would just completely
defeat the purpose, right if I took a fiction writing
seminar and had chat GPT write my short story, Like,
what am I even doing? Well?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
What if you sound stupid? What if it's a let's
say that you're taking a physics class and it's part
of a requirement for some hard sciences, right, and the
professor is unintelligible and boring, and these assignments are unnecessarily
hard for students who are not going into the science concentration. Right.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, So I think that I can see using chat
GPT to help me explain to help explain stuff, right,
use other aids outside of class to try to get
to try to get oriented and try to figure it out.
But I would still, I think, do my own final
assignment in the end, like there was one class. This
is one of my biggest regrets, and so I don't
(36:36):
want students to have regrets like this. One of my
biggest regrets from undergrad was I took this course AX ten,
which was you know, your introductory economics class my senior year,
because I needed it as a requirement, and I took
a pass fail because I could write and I didn't.
At that point, I thought that I didn't really care
(36:57):
about economics, want to know any of this. And it
was really early in the morning. I think it was
like at nine am or something, you know, a time
that was just ungodly for me even today, but as
a college student like, no, no way, And so I
ended up skipping a ton of lectures and almost fail
the class. I really regret that because, first of all,
(37:17):
the class was taught by legendary professor, and the speakers
we had in that class were insane, right, We had
like secretaries of State, We had the things that I
missed right now, when I look at our syllabus, I'm like,
what an idiot?
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Right?
Speaker 1 (37:32):
I wish I could go back in time and actually
learn this information. So the one time where like I
obviously wasn't cheating or using chat gibta, I almost failed,
for God's sake, the one time I tried to like
glide through a class because I didn't think it was
irrelevant or interesting. I really really regret it because I
realized now just how relevant and interesting it was and
(37:55):
how much I missed. So kind of looking back at
college me, I want to shake myself and say, hey,
you know, take advantage of this. There is not going
to be another time where you get like an hour
one on one with Larry Summers to ask him quite
about the economy.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
You know. I asked my Twitter followers did they cheat
even a little tiny bit in college? And it was
almost exactly fifty fifty yes and no, which means on
the show, if you are avowing Maria never to have
even a tiny bit cheated, does that imply that I
therefore did cheat.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
I wouldn't. I wouldn't say that. I would say that
you probably did not.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
I think I did. I think this counts. So I
was in an econometrics class, and ironically, econometrics is like
actually pretty relevant to my day to day work now, right,
But the class was taught terribly. The professor was a
good scholar who was very disengaged in University of Chicago
(38:59):
was maybe more tolerant of that than they should have been, right,
and you know, my very good friend, I mean, I would,
you know, ask to copy off a couple of those
problem sets with his mission sometimes? Right, that's cheating, isn't it,
I think, Solia, Yeah, it's funny because like if you're
doing the homework together, it's probably not. But like I
think it's cheating. And I don't regret it because the
(39:19):
class sucked and and still most of the grades based on
on the end of the year, right you still, I mean,
you know, so if I fucked myself over, then that's fine,
But I don't I think that was a rational decision.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
You know what, now that you say that, I realized
that I did cheat.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
If in school, so when I was in eighth grade,
I had this science teacher who liked to basically we
had our science curriculum and then he also taught birds
and stars, so basically we would get pop quizzes all
the time where he would play bird calls and we'd
(39:56):
have to say what bird it was. However, as part
of the bird stuff, he would give us these basically
you know, like coloring book sketches of birds, and we
had color them in for homework and we were graded
on how well we colored them in. And I was like,
this is bullshit. I have zero artistic ability, like I
(40:19):
hate you know, I can't draw, stick figure, I can't color.
I was like, this has nothing to do with science, right,
this has nothing to do with what I'm learning. This
is insane. And my sister is a beautiful artist. So
she actually, first of all, I had she had taken
the class, you know, six years before I did, so
she gave me her birds to like help me figure
out how to how to color them in, and then
(40:41):
when she had time, she would color them for me.
And then I had another friend who was who loved drawing,
and she would color my birds for me. And I
hardly ever did my bird coloring in myself because I
just thought it was the.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Most too cheaters mister business here.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
So now that you now that I think about it,
that was that was definitely problem not above board, but
it was just because I made the decision that this
was an incredibly bad use of my time. And I
stand by that just like thank you. I have no regrets.
I do not care that I don't know how to
color in a downy woodpecker or whatever. It was toughted mouse.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
And we'll be right back after this break. I mean,
there's an argument against assigned homework in general, and do
the readings you can participate in class right and or
(41:44):
past your final at the end of the year. Right.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yeah, I'm actually I'm actually very sympathetic to the no
homework type of thing because you know, if you, I
think homework often incentivizes cheating, right when people feel like
like the homework assignment is stupid or dumb, or you
have too much of it, like there the incentives for
homework are not often the correct incentives. And when you
(42:11):
have those exams so I had, I took a lot
of seminars where class participation was a huge part in it, right,
and if you are one of the people who did
not do the reading that week, it becomes very clear
pretty or pretty soon in the discussion that, like you,
you are not adding much value and that like this
was just this is a week that you were mentally
(42:34):
not there. And if the purpose of learning is to
create individuals who have deeper knowledge, critical thinking abilities, kind
of the ability to synthesize information, to analyze information, the
types of skills that we want right in our citizens,
I would hope then homework assignments are much worse at
(42:56):
assessing those than your ability to kind of have a
class discussion, your ability to kind of think through things
and reason through things. So I think that we need
to figure out how do you kind of create an
education system that incentivizes the sorts of thinking and behaviors
that you want your students to emerge with.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah, look, I think you know maybe as solicials, you
actually need more actual classroom hours. Right. I had a
friend who used to work at Amazon, and the culture
there is that if there's a meeting where there's a
briefing to read, right, they assume that you did not
take the time out to read that briefing, right, So like,
(43:34):
take twelve minutes now and read this briefing and then
we'll talk about it, right, And it's like kind of
a part of the meeting, you know, obviously, like I'm
a big fan of reading in general, but maybe it
doesn't have to be as Zidak to like prove that
you read this, Like no, I mean, look, can you
hold intelligent discussion in class? And then I don't know.
People always talk about the EDU cases of students who
are introverted or neurodiversient or English is a second language,
(43:56):
and yeah, it sucks, but life isn't always fairer, you
know what I mean? And if colleges become less effective
at differentiating which students were more effective and when we're
on it, I mean, you know, then the whole signal
becomes less valuable and college degrees become worth less, particularly
the most elite degrees. Right, all of a sudden's just
(44:17):
now basically like a signal that four years ago you
were considered a talented student by an emissions committee. Right, yep,
I completely agree with you.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
I think that this is a very very urgent question
and one that has huge implications for the future of
our society, right, because what kind of adults are we
creating with? What kinds of skills, what kinds of ability,
what kinds of actual background and knowledge? I think these
are really important questions we do not want to be
creating a functionally illiterate society, which is what's going to happen.
(44:50):
By the way, if you don't actually do any learning
and instead outsource everything all the time and using.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Chat, GPT or other LM's other AI tools, well, is
actually a pretty important life skill. I can imagine some
assignments where and say yes, we not only you know, allow,
but maybe encourage you for this particular assignment to do
this right. And so I mean the other irony I
think this is becoming true and more and more domains
evolving AI is that like, if you are pretty smart,
(45:17):
then your productivity is enhanced by the AI, Whereas if
you don't know what you're doing then and maybe you
can kind of fake your way through it up to
a point, but you may be more fooled by the hallucinations,
You may be susceptible to misinformation, you may just not
have any retention for the things that you're having it
do right. And so, like, you know, if I were
using chat schipt to write a paper or I could
(45:39):
I don't know. I think I can write better than
chet chip Bet by a long shot still, but like,
but I could figure out ways if I were allowed
to that to make my work to summarize long reading
like that seems like a potentially legitimate use for a student. Right,
here's this very long reading that you have to pay
way too much for the fucking textbook anyway, Right, can
(45:59):
you extract the important parts from this? And guess what
you can do if you're Chinese, Nat, and now you
can have it translate to Chinese. Right, you can up
and down the world level of complexity. Right, you can
say this point might seem obvious to you. Can you
explain this point another way? Right? So, like, you know,
there are a lot of ways that llm's II tools
(46:21):
could be quite helpful for the educational process. But I
just think academia is moving too slow. You know, the
opportunity costs of four years in college given how the
world is changing. I mean, there's a cohort of students
for which it might not be the right decision.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
I completely agree with that, and I do think that
academia needs to just wake up to what's happening and
figure out how to stay relevant. Risky Business is hosted
by me Maria Kanakova.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
And by me Nate Silver. The show is a co
production of Pushkin Industries, and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced
by Isabelle Carter. Our associate producer is Sonya Gerwitz. Sally
Helm is our editor, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.
Mixing by Sarah Bruger.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
If you like the show, please rate and review us
to other people can find us too. Thanks so much
for tuning in.
Hosts And Creators
Maria Konnikova
Nate Silver
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