A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

I'm really curious to see where higher education will go now that we have LLM's. I imagine the bar will just keep getting higher and more will be able to taught in less time.

Are there any students here who started uni just before LLM's took off and are now finishing their degrees? Have you noticed much change in how your classes are taught?

After calculators were invented basically no one can can do math in their head.

I’d argue the bar will be lower and lower. Yeah those who want can learn more in less time. But those who don’t - will learn much less.

I've noticed that people who rely on calculators have great difficulty recognizing when their answers are off by a factor of 10.

I know a hiring manager who asks his (engineering) candidates what is 20% of 20,000? It's amazing how many engineers are completely unable to do this without a calculator. He said they often cry. Of course, they're all "no hire".

How did they get a degree, one wonders?

This is a sort of mental math trick that isn’t incredibly useful in day to day engineering. Now if they say 16,000 or something then maybe there’s an argument against them, but being able to calculate a tip on the fly isn’t really something worth selecting for imo

It's not a "mental math trick", it's a straightforward calculation you should be able to do in your head.

I don't know if this is a trick but the fast way I did that problem quickly in my head is 20% = (10% X 2) i.e calc 10% of the number then double it.

To quickly calc 10% just multiply the number by 0.1 which you can do by moving the decimal point one place 20,000.00 => 2,000.000 then it is easy to double that number.

to get 4,000.

17% for example is 1.7 x 10%

in this case 1.7 x 2,000 = 3,400