That happens with classes like history or philosophy, the ones that are considered to be mostly useless blablabla.

Those being treated as useless (goes back to No Child) is the fucking problems

Humans are not innately moral, someone needs to teach them that shit, that’s what history and philosophy is for

They are useless. History is useless by definition; and philosophy has reached the peak of its usefulness somewhere in the middle of the XIX century and can’t do better anymore. Like alchemy, which was useful at some point.

Often, people who say that philosophy and the study of history are useless endeavours are hoping for the resurrection of some historical philosophy or another and they don't want people to find out how and why it failed.

Are you one of those people?

That’s strange logic. I just want people to analyze the current situation with modern tools, not referring to some ancient legends.

What makes something useful to you? Does it need to be something done or learned purely for the sake of profits? Does it need to be cold and unfeeling data for it to matter?

That’s the question I can’t answer. Really, I can’t formulate a really nice definition of usefulness. But still I can’t think of any use for history. Except maybe fun as in “literature”. But being fun doesn’t justify its teaching at school. Drinking alcohol is fun too, but…

This is absurd. You don’t think there’s anything important that we can learn from our past and apply toward our future?

Time changes. Cultures, laws… Absolutely all that changes. Data, that history gathers, can’t be used for prediction. At least the precision won’t be better than if you will just analyze your current situation. Absurd is trying to predict the future from fairy tails about kings and dragons.

Time changes but people don’t. Weird that you bring up fairytales about kings and dragons despite that having absolutely nothing to do with history.

People do too. And history is ALL about fairy tales.

How can you claim that people/societies change with time while also claiming that history is all about fairytales? How can you possibly determine what people or society used to be like if you also think that any records from that time are useless and made up? Utter nonsense.

History serves as a record for the decisions of those who came before us. I believe it matters so that we can learn something from both the mistakes and the pivotal moments of the past.

Personally, I was convinced about just how much history mattered when I took a class on it taught by a veteran. The way we avoid making poor decisions -decisions which bring about the premature deaths of countless young men and the innocent, through acts of war - is by learning from our past and looking for a better path.

Philosophy matters for the same reasons, imo. If we are not taught how to reason, how can we expect to live a life that has any meaning or purpose? Both for ourselves and for others. If we’re not taught how to see through the dangers and misdirection of logical fallacies, for instance, we can more easily be bought into a lie or blame a scapegoat for all of our problems.

(goes back to No Child)

In the US, that shit goes back at least to the GI Bill post-WW2 and the Cold War STEM obsession that took root after the Soviets launched Sputnick. For better or worse, and to be clear a very real portion of it was for worse, before that time College or University was a finishing school, hopefully to include intellectual development, for future elites. Well-read, well-rounded and well-spoken were the expectation, and it was a ticket to opportunities.

After the war, we simply adapted the existing educational infrastructure to a vastly expanded audience who were now told that some degree was the ticket to any promising white-collar career; teachers colleges, technical colleges, and completely new institutions all moved to a model based on the prominent pre-war universities, but with very different “customers”. The students were there to get a professional credential, not to secure social cachet. The democratization of higher education was very real, but the number of people who needed to be college graduates far outstripped the number who wanted to think deeply about literature, history, and philosophy (or at least the number of people who understood that pretending to do so was part of the social contract).

Then, to make sure we didn’t fall behind the Commies, as many resources, financial and social, as possible were poured into STEM programs. This was again within this same “University” paradigm, so students who had no particular desire to study history or philosophy were being required to do so, but 95%+ of the institutional and cultural signals they got told them this was busy work required by ivory towered non-entities who didn’t do anything “real.”

The humanities professors and department chairs see all this too, so they take steps to avoid making waves and keep their jobs, and keep their departments as healthy as possible. Undergraduate coursework, both the assignments and the expectations, gets watered down, especially for GenEd required courses. There’s genuine stuff to unpack as to why, how, and how much STEM kids and jobseeking kids should be required to study the humanities after high school (Peter Thiel comes to mind as someone who maaaaybe should have avoided college level philosophy courses), but the particular way it went down in the US was not very healthy. Ironically, in fighting to preserve the vestiges of a liberal-arts education, its defenders may have undercut its perception.

You… Think the entire subjects of history and philosophy are “useless blablabla?” That is certainly an opinion to have.

Regardless of what history is being taught, people like you often forget that the goal is to also help you develop your brain.

There are many other actually useful studies for that. Math excels in that.

People not paying attention in history class is why it keeps also being future class.

And people not paying attention in philosophy class is why most of the world is ignoring the far-reaching ethical implications of the LLM boom until their own electricity and water disappear.

Math doesn’t really train your memory as much as learning history does.

Oh, that’s nitpicking. Study chemistry or biology. Those have much things to memorize where logic wouldn’t help you much.

People are dumb. People will always be dumb, there’s no getting away from it.

We are just apes after all.

Yes, but school is there to teach you to use brain. Why go school if no use brain?

Because forced by society machine

Why pay astronomical tuition, room and board, textbooks, all of it, just to learn nothing and use chat got. The bottom of the article said a professor at Brown thought all but 2 of his students cheated. At Brown. We’re so fucked.

These selective colleges aren’t about education, they’re about getting you into a club with the other assholes that likely cheated their way through business school and got jobs the same way.

Same with private high schools in the us. They aren’t teaching kids to read, math or think, they’re teaching them that being born rich means you get to be in charge of the plebs (which includes the professors and instructors at these institutions).

Networking matters. I went to an academically rigorous private university, but not one the better-known ones. I graduated during a recession and had plenty of doors slammed in my face. But one of my professors who liked my work had an old friend from Harvard who was a hiring manager at an important nearby company. The letter of reference he wrote to his friend got me in the door. I rose fast in the company after that, because I’m a quick study and actually knew how to do things. But I probably wouldn’t have gotten in without that string having been pulled.

I’m on the other side of the spectrum. No relevant degree in my field, no certifications, just real world experience. I rose very quickly too.

I also haven’t really seen real world effects of networking with anyone I know. Lots of people join college clubs, go to networking events, etc. but when they need a job or a lawyer or something they get the same rates as everyone else. Maybe it’s just my friends though.

Networking is the only way I got hired at my company. Networking is the best way to move up in the company. Networking is the ONLY way to move past a certain level in the company. Networking is the way I ensure the people I hire onto my team are going to work out, as opposed to relying an hour long interview plus reading a resume.

Teenagers aren’t really known for making great decisions.

Source: was once a teenager, made bad decisions.

It’s much more fun making bad decisions when you’re a septuagenarian.

“You have to go to college to get a good job”

Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Used to be that a college degree indicated people with time, money, and drive to put four years into study. It was a good measure of the “right” kind of person. Now it’s just another job requirement and doesn’t indicate anything.

My first job required a bachelor’s degree because AND I QUOTE “So we know you can read and write in English”

Hmm… I wonder how they’d feel about my Bachelor’s in Spanish Language and Culture.

It was a good measure of the “right” kind of person.

Long ago, a college education used to assure that you were white, male, Protestant, at least upper middle class, and at least semi-literate (assuming you managed to at least get Gentleman’s C’s, so the required “drive” was minimal if you were from the right family). Admission was much more of a sure thing for the offspring of alumni.

And that was what was necessary to join a business at that time: respectability and clubbability.

A minimum admission requirement regarding academic performance was made more prominent as other acceptance criteria were broadened, but most private universities will still give an easy ride to legacies and to the offspring of large donors.

Now it’s just another job requirement and doesn’t indicate anything.

Well, you’re generally expected not only to have a degree, but one in a relevant field of study, and to have gotten good grades. And most of the big-name high-tech firms won’t generally accept a degree from any but a few globally prominent universities. They go by brand as much as by objective criteria of performance. That’s the new clubbability filter. Someone who cut-and-pasted AI slop at Stanford has a much better shot at a job than someone who did real work at Podunk State.

It’s not that we’re solely dumb and incapable of intelligence, it’s that many, if not most, will seek the solution with the lowest energy required. In turn, AI is creating a spiraling of learning and knowledge acquisition.

Who knows where civilization lands in 20 years.

You haven’t ran into someone doing this on work emails?

They don’t read the full email they get, just far enough to see if they got what they want. Then they plug it into an AI, and tell it to respond, then copy/paste it back to Outlook and hit reply.

They’ll keep doing that, over and over. And it usually ends up with them insisting on a meeting to “discuss” where they essentially get in a loop of “it’ll work, just do it”

And it’s like pulling fucking teeth to get them to admit the only thing they’re basing that on, is a chatbot told them it would work.

People are worried about the kids, and we should be, but it rotted adults brains even faster, and because of their age they’ve got a much shorter clock to stop using it before effects are permanent. Couple with Covid related IQ drops and the fact that time is linear and we’ll keep getting older…

Society is fucked.

We need to seriously treat AI like an addictive drug that people aren’t capable of limiting themselves with.

They’ll keep doing that, over and over. And it usually ends up with them insisting on a meeting to “discuss” where they essentially get in a loop of “it’ll work, just do it”

And it’s like pulling fucking teeth to get them to admit the only thing they’re basing that on, is a chatbot told them it would work.

Strange. I am experiencing the same. In one case, I had to make, after six months of discussing an interface, an end-to-end test to show it didn’t work and their, ahem, unit tests failed to show that. That was for a stepper motor interface and driver with three essential methods.

This guy is senior software architect at my workplace.

Boss insisting that I get to an agreement with him on ai usage.

Boss insisting that I get to an agreement with him on ai usage.

Because most bosses don’t understand if one person is using a bunch of AI, that almost always means everyone else is spending a lot of time behind the scenes making it workable.

They want AI to cut workers, so one worker using AI and touching a lot of things looks great…

As long as the other humans are there to clean up the mess, the AI users appears super productive.

But then when managers layoff everyone that doesn’t use AI because they’re not as productive, chickens roost and you realize no one still in the building actually knows their own work let alone the wider product

Even if caught before layoffs, by the time a worker’s over reliance on AI is noticed, that employee can often no longer function without it.

But besides all that:

Anyone that expects employers to still pay for tokens a decade from now is insane. We’re gonna see people taking 100k salary, and spend >50% of that on AI tokens themselves.

There’s no way American corporations will keep shouldering the cost, they’ll push that off onto the employees the second they can.

No one here is using AI.

No one here is using AI.

I’m sure you know what you mean with “here”, but no one else does…

They’d just have to randomly make assumptions

but it rotted adults brains even faster, and because of their age they’ve got a much shorter clock to stop using it before effects are permanent.

Look here, I’m an adult who uses AI all the time and you need to understand that the people of Madagascar waft blissfully through the tropical waters en masse.

Yeah, now I’m imagining the smell of vanilla. Thanks for that.

People who use AI to do this at work, were doing it before AI too, just manually. Half-reading emails, restating the obvious, asking off topic questions and demanding meetings without purpose has been a norm in my career field for 20 years. Especially amongst middle managers.

The difference is they’re lazy…

With AI they can “produce” and everyone else that’s lazy doesn’t notice it’s gibberish.

The only people who realize it, are the ones who were always doing the work.

Those people were usually already struggling to pick up the slack. But now all the lazy idiots reply with multiple page emails and once you’re dealing with 5-6 of them at once, it’s impossible to keep up.

It’s a literal gosh gallop attack, you can’t address all the ways everyone’s chatbot is wrong, and every email can I troduce multiple new issues while completely dropping the issue the chatbot insisted was most important.

So yeah…

The problem isn’t new, it always existed

But now the issue is 10x the volume to get cleaned up

I don’t need to use AI to not read my colleagues’ emails

They don’t either, that is the neat part. AI will step in and answer the email for both parties which neither will care about or read.

Thanks. This + OP has given me an idea. In going to add white text before my signature. Something along the Madagascar lines, or maybe just to agree with my email and and the conversation.

Most people who use AI to write something can’t be bothered to make sure it is correct. It pisses me off at work so bad when someone “writes” a document or does “research” with AI and just copy pastes it into an email without actually reading to see if it makes sense.

I got so pissed of a couple months ago when people were telling me about a “great research document” that someone put together for something we had coming up that we desperately needed information about. As soon as they shared the document to me I realized it was completely AI generated and 1/3 of it didn’t make a lick of sense. I wanted to yell at the person who created it to at least take 10 minutes to delete all of the obviously incorrect crap.

You’ve hit the nail on the head. What you’re describing isn’t just laziness — it’s a fundamental breakdown of trust in the modern workplace. Let’s delve into this.

Here’s the thing: when someone copy-pastes AI output without reading it, the document was never the deliverable — the verification was the deliverable. The prose isn’t load-bearing; the checking is. A document nobody read isn’t a document — it’s a liability with formatting.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Is the AI actually the problem here? No — the workflow is. This genuinely comes down to ownership:

• Trust erodes silently. Every unchecked paragraph is a small withdrawal from a shared account nobody audits — until the balance is zero.
• Verification is idempotent. Ten minutes of reading costs the same whether you do it once or a hundred times — but skipping it compounds.
• The failure isn’t technical — it’s cultural. No review, no judgment, no accountability.

This is exactly the kind of thing that starts as one bad research doc and scales — from a single email, to a team norm, to an entire organization quietly outsourcing its thinking. In today’s fast-paced world, the ability to say “I read this and I stand behind it” isn’t just a soft skill — it’s a superpower, and honestly? A testament to the rich tapestry of what human-AI collaboration could be.

Ultimately, your colleague didn’t fail to use AI correctly — they failed to be the human in the loop. The tool didn’t remove their judgment. They left it at the door.

I hope this helps! Would you like me to draft a one-page best-practices memo your team can circulate? 🚀

/s in case this isn’t blatantly obvious

Ugh… I don’t know whether to upvote or downvote…

You’ve hit the nail on the head.

This phrase is VERY popular with LLMs, I’ve noticed.

That’s the joke

I haven’t seen that particular phrase singled out as being super common with LLMs before, so I was just remarking on it.

If you actually wrote this out, that’s way more effort for a bit than I would have put forth

I worked in software for, well, let’s say 20 years, at some elite places, too. And the one thing that I never understood was how few people ever bothered “to make sure it is correct,” as you put it, even before this new problem with AI. They didn’t even bother to make sure it was correct even when they wrote it themselves.

You don’t know how many times I’ve been sent a request to review code, and it should have only been like 20 lines of code, but instead it was page after page of irrelevant stuff, because they created the review from the wrong baseline. But they never even took a single look at it before they sent it to me.

So many people don’t write tests for their code that generally my biggest achievement at any given assignment was creating test frameworks that let them write tests using domain specific language, because it made it much easier. At a certain point, if it’s easy enough, even those people will write tests, especially if they know that I’ll be doing the review.

I honestly don’t see AI code as being all that different. People still don’t even do the minimum, but they just get exposed and embarrassed more easily.

The biggest lie that people tell these days is that they proofread ai content lol

Yeah but how many caught it? More than we’ll ever know

Article said 32 out of 35.

Yeah so maybe literally every student used AI but 3 read the output before submitting.

In my experience “AI”-users aren’t very literate.

There have to be at least a couple that can’t read.