What Should Colleges Do about ChatGPT?

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Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Conegovo.

And I'm Nate Silver.

So today on the show, Nate, we're going to 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.

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.

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.

In fact, Nate, the last time we had a meal together was over Chicago-style pizza.

You know, the last time we talked about Chicago, you actually encouraged me to get Pequad's Pizza, which I know and love.

And like I had

the whole, it was a lunch-size pizza, right?

I have not had that accumulation of like that much dairy, I don't think in years.

Pequad's is amazing.

You should visit it.

This podcast is sponsored by Pequad's Pizza.

Use our affiliate link.

Yeah, 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 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.

And

this was not well predicted at prediction markets.

He had had around a 1% chance of becoming the Pope.

If you look at various shortlists and long lists published by various news organizations, you know, the New York Times mentions him in like the 20th paragraph.

The Washington Post doesn't mention him at all, for example.

And yet he won

on, I believe, after just the second day of the conclave.

Do we know how many ballots there were?

We don't, but it was just over 24 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.

So once this decision came quickly, markets assumed that one of the frontrunners was 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 frontrunner, but nobody knew it.

So I think it was a pretty big failure of

both the conventional wisdom and prediction markets, right?

Where I guess the Conclave is pretty good at keeping secrets, maybe more than like, you know, than the United States Congress is.

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 a dedicated article about him was Axios, and they're like, well, this would never happen because the Catholic Church doesn't want to give the U.S.

government more influence or the United States, not the government, I guess, more influence.

It's like, well, what if 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 on

a stage as a counterweight.

And, you know, Grebost had had an active Twitter account too, right?

He had criticized mostly through retweets, not things he wrote himself, criticized J.D.

Vance, criticized the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was accidentally sent to an El Salvadoran prison.

And so it's making a 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, Nate, that you write about

in terms of kind of how betting and prediction markets work.

So the first part, the psychology part, I think people had kind of...

bad priors, right?

And let kind of their biases in 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, right?

That's that's a bias where you are, you're actually kind of anchoring yourself to a 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, 12 years ago?

And, you know, know, there have been decades

where there hasn't been one.

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, faulty data.

Yeah.

And look, prediction markets can accentuate that when people are like, well they're pretty smart someone must know something right and they are smart in many circumstances right

in general there is

in markets of various kinds a long shot bias meaning people are actually a little bit underconfident relative to the favorite usually prevailing but if you have no information to go off right um you know there are what is it 251 cardinals in the college of cardinals right um

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 251 or whatever,

but

especially after the white smoke came out, people are like, oh, now we know for sure, right?

This is a case where the conditions were not in place for prediction markets to be particularly wise.

Yeah, and you actually, you write in On the Edge a little bit about how prediction markets and sports betting falters in certain events where there is 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 bettors are.

And I think from a psychological standpoint, you also get into these groupthink echo chambers where you start amplifying things that are already kind of frontrunners, 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 statistics that's been cited thousands of times, and then you actually try to unravel it and figure out, wait, where did we get this?

And you find this study from 1964 that was based on 12 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 information spreads these days, it's very easy to create those effects.

And if you actually make sports bets, I've actually been betting the NBA playoffs a a little bit, go Nicks, by the way.

Yes, go Nicks.

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 that were always true, then you could say, okay, even though my model says the Knicks have a 40% chance, the market implies just have a 20% chance.

So maybe the 20% is actually the good bet here.

And if you're making enough 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.

Instead, you say, boy, you know, Vegas is so smart, but like, it's not always smart, right?

If it was always smart, you just piggyback off it and

you kind of can't.

Dude, I have a question for you.

What, you know, 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 a way that you think about that, like how to figure out, you know what, I shouldn't be listening to the experts in this particular case.

I shouldn't be listening to the markets in this particular case.

Because I think that's actually a really interesting question.

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, mean, the average person who's betting on the MBA of the NFL probably knows more about the MBA and the NFL than 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 church following personality type overlaps much with the 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 weak money to make the market balance, right?

Or,

you know, so for example, for elections,

investment banks and hedge funds and rich gamblers like all are 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 actionable geopolitical consequences in the same way.

So you 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 right i mean you know models are hard for a lot of things but that puts like some bumpers on how how far unmoored 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 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 him as the frontrunner, but it at least mentioned his name.

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.

Yeah, look, if anything, you think there might be a bias towards saying, oh, here's a Chicago guy, might become Pope, right?

You think there might be more coverage.

And the conventional Muslim might be, oh, you got to short him.

They're going to not pick an American guy.

But he just kind of didn't really enter the conversation very much.

Except, you know, I did read down at the same article, you know, from like a Catholic source.

They kind of said, oh, it's interesting that people are betting on the Pope.

We're not sure how we feel about that as Catholics, but they're way overconfident because nobody knows anything.

Right.

And that proved to be prescient.

Yep, absolutely.

All right.

So

let's let's see how he ends up doing and let's see how

this all ends up going.

So

America is winning, Maria.

The Knicks are winning.

Yes, which makes it, I'm doubly happy because as an ex-Bostonian, I hate Boston sports fans because they just suck.

And so

I anti-sweat the Celtics.

And as a New Yorker, I'm pro-Knicks.

So I'm just, I'm deliriously happy.

I'm actually interested in the outcomes of these games.

But you're winning too.

So tell me about.

Or tell me and the audience about this win you had in Monte Carlo.

Yeah.

So I just came back from EPT Monte Carlo, which is the poker star signature stop on the European Poker Tour.

Beautiful venue, Nate.

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 a 25K, did not cash in that.

When you don't cash those big events, it doesn't feel good.

And just was running horribly.

I kept getting two outed, three outed, 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 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 event was actually a turbo structure, which is very different from kind of your standard tournament.

It means that kind of the blind levels are increasing quite quickly.

And so your strategy actually has to change a little bit because, yes, you might start with 200 bit blinds.

And whereas in a normal tournament, you might have that for 40 minutes, half an hour, an hour,

whatever it is.

Here, like, suddenly, if you don't do stuff in 20 minutes, you look and you have 30 bit blinds left, right?

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 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 low suited connectors much less because you'll get into situations where people are going to 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 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, right?

You just need to know your ranges well.

You need to know your cards well.

You need to know your response as well.

We had a 10-second shot clock in this tournament, right?

So you had 10 seconds to make every single decision, no matter what street you were on.

And we had a few time banks, and each of those time banks, Nate, was 10 seconds.

So it was 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.

So 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?

People are trying to place very high to make up for their entry fees, right?

Or get in 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 the turbo structure,

you do need to widen your ranges quite a bit, right?

So, how do you, how did you manage that?

Yeah, so you have to widen your ranges, but also widen them correctly.

So, I, you know,

raggedy aces go up in value, etc.

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, someone opened and I called a pocket pair.

call you know it was a pair of deuces a tiny pocket pair

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.

It was this older French gentleman who just wanted chips, right?

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, he called.

And anyway, he ended up

losing, right?

And busting and was the first player to bust out of this tournament to me.

And he had like, I don't even remember, it was like ace three offsuit, 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 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 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, some people would say, oh, you know, don't get greedy on the river.

Don't go all in because he's not going to call.

And I was like, no, actually, he will.

you know, do get greedy

because

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.

People don't want me to bully them.

Yeah, look, and to the older Frenchmen out there, I'd say, well, you know, we understand that you're not always going to play your A game.

And when you're tired at the end of 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?

I, you know, I think I know my ranges pretty well in a lot of spots, and I'll know when I can like loosen up just slightly, you know, be a little bit more aggressive.

You can bluff sometimes, but like the, the, the multi-street desperate call-downs

are like the most

easy way to like literally burn money.

And, you know, by that stage 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 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 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 for ICM.

So ICM is, we've talked about this on the show, it's the independent chip model.

So basically, you know, when there are big pay jumps and when you're down to the final table, you don't really want to tangle with the chip leader 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 30 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 that many people in the, in the pot, because pocket jacks are a strong hand, but you don't want a 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 re-jammed 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 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.

You're praying for the Ace King there.

You're not going to see Pocket Tens, I don't think, or anything.

No, no, I'm praying for the Ace King.

Once he went all in, I was like, oh no, I am going to be out in whatever it is, you know.

eighth place.

And

that would have been horrible.

But yeah, the Ace King is the best case scenario.

And luckily, my hand held.

So I think that that's those 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.

So how much did you win?

So I didn't, you know, it wasn't a huge win.

It was around 20,000.

So definitely not one of my, you know, biggest scores, but it was a small buy-in and it was a really nice way to

end the end the week.

Well, congratulations, Maria.

Thank you so much, Nate.

And yeah, I look forward to playing with you in the World Series.

That's coming up in just a few weeks.

It's shockingly soon.

I mean, I'm not playing until like the second or third week of the season.

Neither am I.

Neither am I.

But I hope that we both win all of our flips, or at least most of our flips, that we run better than

the best.

Let's take a quick break and then let's talk a little bit about ChatGPT.

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Nate, 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?

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 been

services that would offer to do do your homework for you, right?

There are,

you know, ancient and modern versions of Cliff's notes and things like that.

If you,

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 ChatGPT makes it 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 so, yeah, I tried to actually,

I imagine that I had given myself an assignment.

You know, the philosopher,

Michel Foucault?

Of course.

French guy, weird, into S ⁇ M, into lots of stuff, ball, you know, but like very famous philosopher.

My whole MO in college was to always mention, always name drop Foucault, right?

And every time I name dropped Foucault, 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 where there's like a guard tower in the center, right?

It was Bentham's idea.

Foucault wrote a lot about this as 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 Foucault or whatever else, right?

And like, you know, first of all, if you ask ChatGPT to

cheat for you, it doesn't push back at all, right?

And you can say things, can you like, please remove any traces that this is ChatGPT?

You know, please make the essay a little rough around the margin, but have one or two good points of insight, right?

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.

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, it's very hard to have an assignment now that you can confidently predict was not written by ChatGPT, 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 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 90% sure that a student cheated, but 90% is probably not good enough to flunk someone or to kick them out of college or things like that.

But like, I will say,

to me, it seems like there are some methods that you could use to prevent this, which require more work.

So, you know, you know, when I went, my junior year abroad at London School of Economics in the UK system, you just take one big exam at the end of the year, and that's your whole grade.

And that's in person.

Back then we used notebooks.

I'm sure you can use, you know, iPads or something like that now, right?

But that's quite hard to cheat.

If you want students to have the internet, you could say you can have the internet, but we're monitoring your internet access, right?

And so like if you use ChatGPT, 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 15-minute conversation with you about the paper.

I imagine it would be hard to fake your way through even like five or 10 minutes if you 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.

And anyway, what are your thoughts here, Maria?

Yeah, well,

I have a number of thoughts.

First of all, I mean, obviously, you know, students have been cheating for a long time.

And you were saying 90% isn't enough.

And I will actually go further and say 100% isn't enough to fail someone oftentimes.

So

when I was teaching back in my grad school days, I had a student hand in a paper that just looked suspicious, and it was a Word document.

I 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 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,

that is like the people who these days hand in essays that start with as an AI.

And I brought this, you know, to the department and said, you know, 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 dispiriting to me, right?

It was one of the things that, one of the reasons, there were 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, 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 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 interviewed.

It's very stressful for a lot of people, right?

There are people who ask you questions.

When you defend your dissertation, you have an entire committee, right, who's peppering you with questions about your work and about your research.

And if you're not the one who knows the data and who knows 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, dissertation dispenses.

People have failed oral exams.

People, you know, fail these types of assessments all the time.

And so 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 well-rounded who know about you know history and and all of these different things how do you make sure that they're actually learning well you change the you change the way 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 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, Nate, in that New York Mag piece, 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 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.

Yeah, look, I mean, students learn from, well, anyone learns from like deterrence, right?

That if you do see a student who is kicked out of college for cheating, then that's 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?

Which sets 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 staffs a lot of the time,

that the kids are coddled, that there is a ton of grade inflation,

that during the pandemic, that colleges were so concerned about 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 game.

And so, yeah, I don't know.

I also think that like

you wind up with students in a kind of prisoner's dilemma type situation where it's arguably 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 ChatGPT questions, right?

I

will run my copy through ChatGPT and say, do you correct any typos or

errors, right?

And things like that, right?

Sometimes it'll flag errors that are fake because it can't believe how dumb things are.

It's like, we can't really have 130% tariff on China, right?

People might take that exaggeration seriously, Nate.

So you have to remove that from your essay.

I'm like, no, things are really that dumb.

But like,

and working with AI is important.

I mean, it's counterintuitive.

I mean, I also think that like interpersonal skills become more

important in a world where ChatGPT does 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 bring you the services that you could probably do yourself with ChatGPT, your group assignments and things that people feel charmed by humans.

So, but yeah,

I think colleges are on the way to being less relevant and 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 ChatGPT?

If you, let's say, let me set this up for you, right?

Let's say you know for a fact that 80% of the students in your class are using ChatGPT.

I'm trying to make a sympathetic set of facts, right?

Let's say you don't think the class is well taught 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 GPT, ChatGPT in a 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 of the professor.

Would you cheat in that circumstance or use ChatGPT or not?

I would like to think no, because I never, I was someone who kind of 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, and I realize, you know, I sound like a very, you know,

doe-eyed, 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 you're on a desert island with no chat GPT 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.

That said, like I never told on anyone either, right?

Like I was not someone who would be like, Nate used chat GPT, right?

Like, if you want to use ChatGPT, fine.

But even if everyone was using it, like, I think I wouldn't, I

wouldn't feel right about myself if the teacher actually said, do not use ChatGPT.

And like I said, for most of the classes I took, a huge chunk of the grade was in class, right?

In class exams and assignments.

And so that was something where, you know, ChatGPT 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 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 ChatGPT write my short story, like, what am I even doing?

Well, what if the assignment's 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 a science concentration, right?

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 that this is one of my biggest regrets.

And so I don't want students to have regrets like this.

One of my biggest regrets from undergrad was

I took this course EC10, which was your introductory economics class my senior year because I needed it as a requirement.

And I took a pass-fail because I could, right?

And I didn't, at that point, I thought that I didn't really care about economics or want to know any of this.

And it was really early in the morning.

I think it was like at 9 a.m.

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 failed the class.

I really regret that because first of all, the class was taught by a 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, right?

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 GPT, 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 relevant or interesting, I really, really regret it because I realize now just how relevant and interesting it was and 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 questions about the economy.

You know, I asked my Twitter followers,

did they cheat even a little tiny bit in college?

And it was almost exactly 50, 50 yes and no, which means on this show, if you are avowing, Maria, never to have even a tiny bit cheated,

does that imply that I therefore did cheat?

I wouldn't say that.

I would say that you probably did not.

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 and University of Chicago was maybe more tolerant of that than they should have been, right?

And my very good friend, I mean, I would, you know, ask to copy off a couple of his problem sets with his permission sometimes, right?

That's cheating, isn't it?

I think so, yeah.

Yeah.

It's funny because like if you're doing the homework together, it's probably not, but like, I think that's cheating.

And I don't regret it because the class sucked.

And I still, and still most of the grades based on the end of the year, right?

You still, I mean, you know, so if I fuck myself over, then that's fine.

But I don't, I think that was a rational decision.

You know what?

Now that you say that, I realize that I did cheat

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 we 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 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 uh

sketches of birds and we had to 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 hate, you know, I can't draw a 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 I, 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 when she had time, she would color them for me.

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 most important thing.

You got two cheaters on Miscon Business here.

So, so now that you, now that I think about it, that was that was definitely

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 you.

I have no regrets.

I do not care that I don't know how to color in a downy downy woodpecker or whatever it was, tufted tut mouse.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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I mean, there's an argument against

assigned homework in in general.

I mean, do the readings so you can participate in class, right, and or pass your final at the end of the year, right?

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 the homework assignment is stupid or dumb or you have too much of it, like they're the incentives for homework are not often the correct incentives.

And when you 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 soon in the discussion that like you are not adding much value and that like this was just, this is a week that you were mentally 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 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.

Yeah, look, I think,

you know, maybe the solution is 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, take 12 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, look, I'm a big fan of reading in general,

but maybe it doesn't have to be as didact 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 edge cases of students who are introverted or neurodivergent or English as a second language.

And yeah, it sucks, but life isn't always fair.

You know what I mean?

And if colleges become less effective at differentiating which students

were more effective and were more honest, 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, it's just now basically like a signal that four years ago you were considered a talented student by an admissions committee, right?

Yep, I completely agree with you.

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, by the way, if you don't actually do any learning and instead outsource everything all the time.

And using ChatGPT or other LLMs, other AI tools well is actually a pretty important life skill.

I can imagine some assignments where I'd say, yes, we not only

allow, but maybe encourage you for this particular assignment to do this, right?

And so, I mean, the irony, I think, this is becoming true in more and more domains evolving AI is that like, if you are pretty smart, then your productivity is enhanced by the AI.

Whereas if you don't know what you're doing, then 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 ChatGPT to write a paper, I could,

I don't know, I think I can write better than ChatGPT ChatGPT 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 to me 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 you extract the important parts from this?

And guess what you can do?

If you're Chinese native, now you can have it translate to Chinese, right?

You can upper down the 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 IAI tools 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.

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 Konakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

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Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

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