Bonus Blog: Is AI Harmful to Students?

Readers of my blog may be interested in this recent event from Valparaiso University’s Christ College, where students debated the proposition “on balance, the rise of Artificial Intelligence harms students more than it helps them.” (So the “pro” team was arguing against students using AI, and the “con” team was arguing that it’s OK). If you work in education, or are just an interested observer, you might be intrigued by what these bright students thought were the most compelling reasons for and against their own use of emerging artificial intelligence technologies. I should note that both sides were explicitly instructed not to bring up the issue of reliability or AI-generated “hallucinations,” because it was felt that this would distract from the main question. That’s probably fair, as hallucinations have gotten a lot of press yet are also decreasing in frequency and severity with each new iteration of the technology. My daughter Ruth was one of the speakers for the “pro” side, but I won’t spoil this by telling you who won! https://www.youtube.com/live/iZ0FKG_O4LU?si=TZFmf1lnpubwh_Im

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Why Does Psychotherapy Work? Look to the Intuitive Mind for Answers

Jerome Frank's 1961 book Persuasion and Healing popularized the idea of "common factors" that explain the benefits of psychotherapy, building on ideas that were first articulated by Saul Rosenzweig in 1936 and again by Sol Garfield in 1957. Frank's book emphasized the importance of (a) the therapeutic relationship, (b) the therapist's ability to explain the client's problems, (c) the client's expectation of change, and (d) the use of healing rituals. Later theorists emphasized other factors like feedback and empathy that are sub-components of the therapeutic relationship, and that can be clearly differentiated from specific behavior-change techniques like cognitive restructuring or behavioral reinforcement . Additional aspects of therapy that are sometimes identified as common factors include the opportunity to confront difficult past experiences, the opportunity for a "corrective emotional experience" with the therapist, and the chance t...

Trump vs. Truth: the Whorfian Hypothesis Revisited

Image of protest against the 1918 Sedition Act during World War I. That act was repealed in 1920. Many concerning things have happened in the United States over the past month, but the one I'd like to write about today is an effort to win arguments by redefining terms. In a recent article titled "In Trump's Washington, Words Become Weaponized," the New York Times presents a variety of examples in which the White House's recent Executive Orders use terms in ways that are unusual, or in some cases literally opposite from the term's plain-language meaning. Here are some notable instances (if you're up on all the news, you can skip to the part after the bullets, but I do like to document my sources): The term "DEI" (for diversity, equity, and inclusion ) was used as a pejorative in President Trump's press conference after a January 30 airplane crash, in which he said that "we need to have our smartest people" as air traffic controll...

Chatbot Changes and Challenges in 2023

I wrote last summer about artificial intelligence tools that are increasingly able to approximate human speech in free-form conversations. These tools then burst onto the public stage with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT at the end of November last year. As you probably know by now, the acronym "GPT" stands for "generative pre-trained transformer," which highlights the three most important aspects of this technology: (1) it generates novel responses that aren't based on an a specific algorithm or decision rule, but instead rely on pattern recognition; (2) it has been pre-trained by consuming massive amounts of writing from the Internet -- much more than a human could read in several lifetimes; and (3) it transforms those prior writing samples using a trial-and-error process that predicts the next phrase in a sequence until it has come up with a response that seems intelligible to humans. ChatGPT works much like the auto-complete feature in your email or ...

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