I’m not noticing the decline in my own abilities any more than I had before using them. I finished undergrad 20 years ago and my once sharp math skills had been severely diminished within only 5-10 years. Just simple arithmetic and percentages that I could rapidly do in my head became dependent on calculators/spreadsheets. For all other trivia type knowledge, my brain has offloaded it to the internet RAM in my pocket. It’s a familiar feeling of when some question comes up and I think “oh, I used to know that, let me look it up”. Maybe I just already hit my personal floor of stupidity before LLMs. However, I personally feel a huge mental burden of the state of communication. The contemporary version of it where I have a million threads and conversations im juggling at any given time. Emails, voicemail, chat, online, texts, personal, business, home, children, other family, friends, then there’s the variants like Messages, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. And as overwhelming as it is for me, I’m super under connected than everyone else I know. I quit following most news and all sports, as I just don’t have the bandwidth for it. My brain was molded preinternet and I feel like it’s reaching its max on the analog to digital conversion. Or at least it’s just a really lossy process.

I can't speak for other disciplines, but for math and CS, both with a really heavy focus on abstraction, the final result of learning is to build a nice intuition on top of the abstractions we find useful/expressive. And to build the intuition, the old, usual, and perhaps the only way is to see and practice a lot of concrete examples, after which the motivation of building some abstraction can be understood, and after which the abstraction itself can be fully grasped. e.g. The "group" abstraction requires one see a lot of int, polynomial, modular arithmetic etc. before knowing why we want such a thing. It's unskippable.

This idea sounds good at first, but if you look closer, it would just make workers, not experts who really understand. What we could do, and already do, is tweak the learned abstractions. In our field, it's easy to see: most of us first learned about computing abstractions, not how processors actually work, or started with Java, not assembler. Plus, you can't teach math from top to bottom.

It didn't just suddenly materialize. From the current article In addition to overreliance on AI, Garcia also pointed out that many students are underprepared mathematically, a concern echoed by campus associate teaching professor Gireeja Ranade. From the article discussed the other week: Over three years — from fall 2021 to fall 2023 — the letter said, at least 20% of Berkeley first-semester calculus students who took a diagnostic exam showed deficits. “Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,” faculty wrote. It's been steadily getting worse. The current article only looks at F's which conveniently hides if there has been a slope down. Additionally, kids entering HS in 2021/2022 would just now be hitting college.

The jump is very likely due to AI usage and lack of skills in mathematics. It seems like prerequisite classes are not being fulfilled. "Ranade said students are expected to enter the course having taken classes on linear algebra, vector calculus and mathematical proofs. However, she found out in office hours that many students struggled with linear algebra, and was even more shocked when one student told her the linear algebra class they took at UC Berkeley had an “open-internet, open-AI policy” for homework and exams."

SAT/ACT math is incredibly simplistic and at worst maybe contributed by not filtering as many out. Math scores have been declining nation wide for decades now, that’s been a big issue for a while.

But do these universities not have math placement exams? Not for admissions but just before you register for your first semester classes, a 30 minute math test should be a straightforward preventative measure. I did a test like this, I assumed they were pretty universal.

In unrelated news "More than 600 University of California faculty members, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, are calling on the system to reinstate standardized testing requirements for science, technology, engineering and mathematics applicants, saying that six years of test-free admissions has not reliably assessed readiness and professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students." https://archive.ph/18spS

Pity. I recently started a fun activity to rebrush my math my where I tries to solve problems while asking Gemini Live mode for confirmation and suggestions, sometimes step by step. It kinda was fun, like a very patient professor stand right besides you. It was the one of the best math learning experience I've ever had, and you don't even need to send bribe/gift to Gemini to keep you in it's favor. On the other hand, if you ask a LLM to completely finish the work without thinking it through by yourself, then it sounded like cheating, to yourself.

A famous MIT professor did a sabatical at our AI lab. He said it was "a joy to teach here, as you can rely on students being proficient in basic math as opposed to the US where you have to teach those explicitly or lose the class completely". That was in the 1980s. My first math exam as a CS undergraduate, 123 out of 129 students failed. The math department professors refused to dumb down their classes for CS students. Math was core to the CS curicullum in those days. It would fade away over the next few decades to almost nothing. The main reason being the CS department wanted to popularize its uptake, and remove barriers that kept students from passing. There was also a major dose of interdepartemenral rivalry and academic politiking involved.

To be honest, there’s approximately zero reasons to teach major-grade math to just about anyone but math majors. None of the applied math disciplines need go that deep, and what they do need depends on the field (physics is all about analysis, CS is about algebra and discrete math, and so on).

In terms of material learned maybe, in terms of shaping logical thinking and tackling hard problems there is a huge benefit.

It's interesting that it's specifically math-within-CS being discussed here. I can imagine a lot of students "just want to learn programming" (or similar), and see the math as a tedious distraction. As a naturally curious person, nothing will stop me from learning about the topics that interest me. But school also taught me a lot of things that didn't interest me, and a lot of those things turned out to be useful anyway. I think if I had access to AI from a younger age, I'd have used it to skip learning the things I didn't care about, which would not have done me any favours.

Personally, I do believe that math as a discipline has this huge issue of being mostly incomprehensible garbage. Not because the actual truth encoded in it would be this complex, but because the encoding scheme just sucks. I see it as a packaging problem that has so far not been painful enough to trigger any meaningful change. With this LLM-driven collapse, that might finally change. Idk I'm hopeful. Math is literally the law of the universe. It makes zero sense that the way that it is taught needs some special brain wiring only found in small chunks of the population to truly click.

I also think that's one reason. Where I'm from (Norway), the majority of computer science and software engineering studies do not have the same math requirements as, say, engineering or math/physics/etc. - nor do they have the same amount of math as the latter ones. When I did my CS classes as an engineering student, I did meet a bunch of students that viewed math as some niche subject only relevant to those that wanted to work with computer graphics, computational stuff, or similar.

This has been my wife’s experience as a college math professor. Instead of code it’s extremely formal problems with way more steps than the student normally performs using notation never taught in class. It’s not that students didn’t cheat before, LLMs have just lowered the bar so far many can’t complete a live test in a class that requires effort.

Maths skills have been slowly falling even before the advent of LLMs. I have a story but this is anecdotical so take it with a grain of salt. I was in my 3rd bachelor's year studying physics (France) and overheard a conversation between two of my teachers. They were discussing how they should modify the 1st year program to now include math, because he had been noticing how more and more students were failing the more math-heavy subjects like body and newtonian mechanics. He said that they should now teach (or re-teach) calculus to 1st year students, which was not taught when I entered college (it was assumed that you learned it in high school and we would only cover linear algebra in 1st year). I can imagine things are only getting worse with students that can now get under the illusion that they know math because they have a tool that can do it for them. Which raises the question: should programs adapt to this, like we adapted to having calculators?

Not teaching analysis to 1st year physics students seems to me rather crazy, TBH. Yes, people (are supposed to) learn basic calculus in high school, but university-level math just hits different. And at least around here stuff like actually applying analysis in physics and having to integrate and solve DEs (rather than assuming constant acceleration, for instance), is definitely not covered in high school.

Terrible comparison. You don't need to be good at drawing to be good at photography. You do need to be good at math to do e.g. physics (or math itself!), nomatter the tools at your disposal.

what if this is not due to AI use and instead due to the demolishing of standardized testing and "new Math" in the state of california?

New Math finally causes havoc 61+ years after introduction? Oh my. * Tom Lehrer: New Math (1965) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OaYPVueW4

I had dwindling math skills way before AI made it cool.

A reckoning is coming for school. Learning the rote stuff is no longer essential. Now they need to learn, how to teach "how to think". How to invent, how to be creative. Art++, Woodshop++, Math--