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Socratic Tutor
562 points129 comments2.3 average comments/hourSubmitted by tosh
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I've been experimenting with a lot of these learning skills (see also, e.g., https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/blob/main/skills/produc..., which I think addresses the progress tracking part better than this skill) and they're great for getting simple answers, getting unstuck on exercises, getting some intuition through simulations, etc, but I still feel some more structure is needed for effective self-teaching. Has anyone tried using a hard book as a sort of course structure and asking the LLM to teach you through it? You could of course just read the book, but a lot of advanced subjects don't have great learning materials.
Comment on Hacker News · 7 direct repliesThis is really cool. I think we will see more of these, inching towards 'refined' thought and expression percolating from AI models into human minds. I noticed that the quality of email text has gone up around my work these days. everyone is sounding like a master of drafting emails. Ofcourse Ai has a role in it. But real cool thing about this is, this is pulling up people's thinking to have a structure, minimalism and sequencing of expression. Same as how textile industry has enabled people to have an style and expression in clothing.
Comment on Hacker News · 12 direct repliesSocratic tutoring is the first thing I did when ChatGPT first shipped. Your liberal arts education is a "huge unlock" if you just apply it. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning Make your own custom skinner boxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
Comment on Hacker News · 2 direct repliesIs it only me who's thinking what's so special about this and whys everyone oohing and aahing over this? Afaik, people I know (and me) we've been doing this ever since LLMs became capable enough.
Comment on Hacker News · 7 direct repliesSocratic questions are not asked blindly. They are meant to help the student to realize the incompleteness or falsety of what they think they know. That us, to realise they do not actually know something and thus put them into a position of not knowing, which is the only way to gain understanding. One man said, that enlightement (as in Zen) cannot be faked. Whoever had it, will be able to tell if someone else had it or not. There is no way to merely sound like it. Socratic method is like enlightement.
Comment on Hacker News · 5 direct repliesI’ve struggled to get AI to teach me things well without spilling hints or giving answers away. Assuming this was built on some solid evals this could be awesome. > When the user is wrong, do not give the answer. Ask a narrower question that exposes the contradiction in their reasoning
Comment on Hacker News · 2 direct repliesOh this is so good. I asked it to teach me programming in Logo; though the model is not the best (GLM 4.7, on pi), the tutor is asking very good questions and is not too pedantic about exact answers. For those new (beginners), install pi from pi.dev and then your favorite AI model (ask your model how to set up pi and it). Then ask your pi-based AI how to set up the tutor (just give it this link, it will set it up for you). Then start pi by typing pi in the terminal; and to launch the tutor preface your question with: /skill:socratic-tutor. Like so: /skill:socratic-tutor teach me Python.
Comment on Hacker NewsThis is a cool idea. Though trying this out using the claude CLI is kind of funny because by default it's suggestion for the next prompt is the answer to the question.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesI don't think a simple prompt will exceed any kind of memory system. Nothing fancy, but you need the agent to tune to your quirks; I find that a prompt to try and distill everything a priori is too annoying. Been just using less of chat recently and using more codex for learning - a direct shared interactable terminal is nice, it's still relatively cheap, and importantly you can log specific thoughts to say a git repo for memory. It's not attempting to be some kind of knowledge ontology graph like many businesses want - you just want it to understand the specific quirks of your specific learning path, which may not be formalizable or worth be spending time to step back and formalize every little thing.
Comment on Hacker NewsI've written an entire Socratic AI based office suite with project management and media creation, current count over 1500 agents: https://midombot.com/b1/home It's comprehensive, it was written at an immigration law firm, so it has all kinds of language and other perspective understanding tools, as well as a complete media suite to aid in the creation of visual explainers, courseware, and marketing media. https://midombot.com/b1/blog/MI/method-intelligence-presents...
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