[ExI] Polanyi's Personal Coefficient

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2026 at 7:50 AM MB via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> Thank you for this.  It sounds rather like what people are worrying
> about when having kids use AI in the classroom.  Will they learn the
> subject or only learn how to make the prompts?  I've heard that teachers
> already see a lack of ability to research anything... just ask the
> phone/computer.

Ah, but what and how to ask?  I encountered this personally in the
1990s in college, when the ability to research online was new, and I
somewhat specialized in it.

No one called my research fake or lazy.  It held up enough to support
my Master's thesis.  Yes, it had blatant tells of being Web-supported
- I didn't even bother to exclude the URLs from online sources.

But I didn't just parrot what I found online.  I got those thoughts
and restated in my own words.  That was sufficient.

One can imagine a lesson on this where one is supposed to use an AI,
and half the assignment is to copy and paste what you prompted and
what it said.  The other half is to restate it in your own words:
talking just like the AI in that section will get negative marks.
(One could perhaps ask the AI to state it in your voice, but I'm not
sure how well that would usually work.)