If jobs demand a degree more often, then more people go to college.

If more and more people go to college then everyone is pushed towards the mean in order to account for lower standards.

The brilliant now need to justify themselves to lower and lower denominators, their idiosyncrasies quelled in favour of the strict legibility standards academia now requires.

This is called "audit culture," a phenomena where as standards lower and institutional trust erodes, everything academia puts out requires more and more effort to be put into methodological legibility. Everything needs to be fully auditable and strictly defendable, and the default stance is one of harsh skepticism towards one's peers. Procedure reigns above all else.

This is the exact type of thinking that llms excel at and humans are weak at. The greatest thinkers are the greatest because they have a killer intellectual instinct, their intuition guides them to insights nobody else can reach, like their mind guiding a thread through the pinhole of an invisible needle, and the more legible part of the intellect serves brings it back to the rest of the world, in whatever reduced imperfect form they can. This is natural, this is the way of things, this is how every great finds their place in the world.

If we value the opposite, if we value the justifications of legible intelligence in favour of the brilliance of a geniuses intuition, then people are forced to use the part of their brain that is more machine than man, and we can never compete with an llm in that arena, we simply don't have the ability to correlate and parse that much data in a way that we can cleanly put into words. So why wouldn't every single student just use ChatGPT for every assignment? They're expected to think and speak like ChatGPT anyway, why not take the final leap and just deploy ChatGPT?

If you want people to stop cheesing their way through college with AI, the only thing you can do is return to a higher common denominator academic culture, but this is inherently at odds with a world where every decent job is locked behind a degree. You cannot have both.

Universities are also on their own terms already seeking ways to "AI proof," their assignments, but this is hopeless unless the external culture can match it. Perhaps 20 years from now the degree requirement will be replaced with an "Expertise In Prompting" Cert from llm-tech™️, and then academia can take a different role in society, but for now this is what we're stuck with, and there's no obvious way out.

Many people on the internet are already trying to solve this, but the internet is nowadays the pinnacle of a common denominator free for all, so it's doomed to fail to produce something lasting unless someone has the vision to carve out their very own very exclusive gated community.

Of course, there are many lone brilliant thinkers who come out of ephemeral cultural scenes or their own hermitages! Geniuses who leave a seed planted in passing—the internet has and will organically produce many—but it has historically been academia itself that brought these people into the cultural foreground in the first place; there is no more accredited engine of posterity. And so, as fringe outsiders who seek to carry the torch, I view our duty above all else to be to find, preserve, and embolden those who tend the flame, just as much as it is our duty to tend the flame ourselves. We cannot let the fire turn to ashes, and fade into the night.