Tag: critical thinking
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AI and judgement: Cultivating taste in an age of capability
Content creation is trivially easy now. Curation—selecting what to make—is also becoming easier as AI learns your patterns. What remains is taste: evaluative judgement about what should exist in the first place. AI can be descriptive but not evaluative. It can learn your preferences but cannot judge whether they’re worth amplifying. That’s your responsibility.
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A better game: Choosing what to amplify with AI
I keep seeing posts cataloguing AI’s failures and questioning tech companies’ motives. That’s one way to engage. Here’s another: demonstrate thoughtful use, critique from practice, and amplify what matters to you. The question is what you choose to amplify as a practical alternative to performative critique.
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Avoiding AI platform dependency by controlling your context
Google’s free Gemini Pro access seems valuable, but using these platforms extensively creates AI platform dependency through contextual capture. Your unique thinking patterns, intellectual connections, and research approaches become integrated into their ecosystem. After the 15-month trial period ends, you’re cognitively locked in, trading intellectual independence for convenience, all while the platforms reshape how you…
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Being inaccurate isn’t the same as being useless
New research on AI model factual accuracy shows that while language models struggle with certain difficult questions, this doesn’t diminish their value as thinking partners. Like human conversations, where perfect accuracy isn’t required for productive discussion, AI’s occasional inaccuracies don’t prevent it from being a useful collaborative tool.
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Frameworks GPT helps you think through problems
Ethan Mollick’s Frameworks GPT helps you work through difficult problems by suggesting suitable frameworks to help structure your thinking.
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OpenAI releases their ‘Strawberry’ language model
OpenAI releases OpenAI o1, codenamed ‘Strawberry’, in response to common reasoning problems inherent in language models.
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Don’t plan on a career in prompt engineering
I’ve said before that prompt engineering is a dead end, and here’s further support, for similar reasons. A more “enduring and adaptable skill is problem formulation — the ability to identify, analyze, and delineate problems.” I agree, although even this may only be true in the relative a short-term. I’ve mentioned before the work being…
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Giving algorithms a sense of uncertainty could make them more ethical
The algorithm could handle this uncertainty by computing multiple solutions and then giving humans a menu of options with their associated trade-offs. Say the AI system was meant to help make medical decisions. Instead of recommending one treatment over another, it could present three possible options: one for maximizing patient life span, another for minimizing…
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Algorithmic de-skilling of clinical decision-makers
What will we do when we don’t drive most of the time but have a car that hands control to us during an extreme event? Agrawal, A., Gans, J. & Goldfarb, A. (2018). Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Before I get to the takehome message, I need to set this up a…
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Proposal abstract: Case-based learning in undergraduate physiotherapy education
Abstract for a project I submitted earlier this week for ethics clearance. During 2012 – 2014 we converted one of our modules that runs in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th year levels from a lecture-based format to a case-based learning format. We are now hoping to have a closer look at whether or not the…
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Problem based learning: transitioning to an online / hybrid learning environment
A few weeks ago I attended a short presentation by Prof. Meena Iyer from Missouri University. Prof. Iyer spoke about how she moved her PBL module from using a traditional, mainly face-to-face approach, to an online / hybrid approach. Here are my notes. —————————- “All life is problem solving” – Karl Popper How do we…
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Developing clinical reasoning and critical thinking
“Clinical reasoning is a process in which the therapist, interacting with the patient and significant others (e.g. family and other health-care team members), structures meaning, goals and health management strategies based on clinical data, client choices and professional judgment and knowledge (Higgs & Jones, 2000). Clinical reasoning is difficult, if not impossible to “teach” (if…