I attended a fun event hosted by the HOPEful Engineering Collective, where students and faculties discussed “whether ChatGPT is making students dumber”. I shared my opinion to the room, and this blog grew out of it.

One of the chief goals of education is to teach students how to think, not the product of thinking. To begin with, it is inevitable that a student learns how to think by absorbing a lot of others' thinking products. But a transition must happen where the student figures out how to turn the product of thinking that they've absorbed from others into nutrients powering their own thinking, rather than letting their own thinking potential being quenched by what they absorbed from others. This naturally leads to my argument that information overload is the primary cause for missing the ultimate goal. The danger lies in that information overload could delay the timing at which the transition occurs by suffocating sparks of “original thinking”. What is worse, information overload is double vicious because it fuels the insecurity of “I don't know enough about what should be known”.

Situating the discussion about ChatGPT into the historical context of how technology shapes human thinking and affects the human learning process, it can be seen that the root challenge -- transitioning from absorbing the product of thinking into thinking originally -- always persists, but its major obstacle -- information overload -- has witnessed rapidly-shifting manifestations induced by a blossom of technologies.

Along with every wave of technological innovation that impacts our information accessing channels, comes with the question of whether the new technology undermines our thinking ability, i.e. making us dumber.

When Google search was “the trendy thing”, the critical worried that students would be dumber because they would no longer go to the library. How could students properly learn without going to the library??

When streaming and online learning platforms was becoming popular, the critical worried that students would be dumber because they would no longer go to the classroom, and would simply find slides, textbooks, lecture videos, problem sets solutions online. How could students properly learn without going to the classroom??

Now ChatGPT takes the turn. The critical worried that students would be dumber because they would no longer do assignments or generate opinions solely by themselves. How could students properly learn without ____ ?? (My dumb attempt to fill in the blank: without not using ChatGPT?)

I argue that what might make us dumber is not the technologies themselves, but the ever-rising bar for filtering information so as not to be overloaded, confused, or disoriented; so as to timely make it to the transition.

Two decades ago there wasn't much pressure for filtering for what information to consume. The professor assigns readings and the students go to the library to study them. Nowadays, the professor assigns readings and the students turn on Youtube videos which go like “99% of instructors have defective teaching skills. Follow me and I will improve your learning efficiency by 3x”.

The bar is rocketing due to multiple forces with explosive growths in quantity: the explosion of papers appearing on arxiv everyday; the explosion of educational materials online; the explosion of others' opinions expressed online; the explosion of compiled (inevitably distorted) opinions circulating online. I am afraid that the task of sorting through a swamp of information is a uniquely modern struggle faced by students today.

Having stated the nature of the problem, I don't think ChatGPT adds any novel dimension to the problem. It only exacerbates the existing problem by making it more tempting to repeat opinions. But almost everything is making it more tempting to repeat opinions if one does not consciously resist it.

It's easy to repeat a statement in lecture slides.

It's easy to repeat an argument in a published paper.

It's easy to repeat a claim in a discussion forum

It's easy to repeat a belief that your advisor holds

So whatever resistance was necessary before, even more is demanded of us now. Resisting the urge to repeat opinions is necessary for developing authentic opinions. In fact, resisting what is easy is necessary for developing anything authentic.