I have to agree with this. Completely relying on LLM for all your learning needs is a disaster. But being absolutely against use of LLMs isn't doing you any favors. This is where you don't have a formula but rely on you judgement and evidence of your having learnt something.

For example having an LLM summarize a dense topic and to find books so that you can filter faster and spend time reading those books works way better than having the LLM summarize the books or the topic (or even relying on second hand information). Another one is having the LLM quiz you on your topics of interest. With questions tailored to attack specific areas that you struggle with. Its wonderful at this, nothing I've used comes close to what an LLM can do here.

You define for yourself what your goals are, slowly refining them as you learn more, and use LLM as a tool. This ,I find works best for learning.

Even with the latest models today, the hallucination rate is absurdly high on anything deeper than surface level knowledge or something that can be directly scraped from reddit.

And you notice when it's a topic you know well or something like software where you can immediately tell the options it's giving you don't exist on the page. Leading to the amusing statement "LLMs are bad at what I do but great at everything else".

I came across the socratic method recently, and have used it to learn a couple of topics that I was having trouble getting to stick. There are some SKILL.md's available for it. It works for concepts as opposed to facts, and causes the model to guide you to answers through your own reasoning, which is both much more engaging than reading a wall of LLM text and helps the information stick.

Whats funny about LLMs is they are trained from books, but they are also trained to not output books, so how much of an LLM skews its output because a perfectly normal sentence could be a quote in like 300 different books?

I also agree with this. LLMs are a great companion when reading a book to clarify things and dive into specific topics.

I'd imagine an application that uses LLMs will be created that better manages learning. It's just not clear what that UX is yet- it's obviously not just a chatbot

i threw the entire sanderson cosmere into a RAG graph sorta deal just to see how it would do if i questioned an mcp server for it about a universe i know decently well. it was actually astoundingly good. was able to find easter eggs acrossed different books and answer dumb questions like "why is kaladin emo"

I prefer to have the LLM ask me the questions

dumb question, but what is the best way to feed the book to the llm?

i run into context window limits, or practical limitations of digitizing the book

This. Ask it to quiz you if you are feeling it.

LLM is still too verbose, a real person Socratic conversation can interact a couple sentences at a time, not spew 1-3 windowfuls of low density bullet points.

I even wonder if this behavior is due to next-token prediction architectures, somehow.

This. This is exactly how I use them and I have had no issues so far. I read the book myself, then I point the LLM at it to ask questions about notions I might be struggling with.

I'm sorry, but why not just read the fucking book if you're interested?

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