Manolis Kellis

Was I giving different types of advice?

Has my philosophy about how to write papers or how to present data or anything like that changed?

And in academia and in mentoring, a lot of the interaction is my knowledge and my perception of the world goes to my students.

but a lot of it is also in the opposite direction.

Like the other day I had a conversation with one of my postdocs and I was like, hmm, I think, you know, let me give you an advice.

You could do this.

And then she said, well, I've thought about it.

And then I've decided to do that instead.

And we talked about it for a few minutes.

And then at the end, I'm like, you know, I've just grown a little bit today.

Thank you.

Like she convinced me that my advice was incorrect.

She could have just said, yeah, sounds great and just not do it.

But by constantly teaching my students and teaching my mentees that I'm here to grow, she felt empowered to say, here's my reasons why I will not follow that advice.

And again, part of me growing is saying, whoa, I just understood your reasons.

I think I was wrong.

And now I've grown from it.

And that's what I want to do.

I want to constantly keep growing in this sort of bi-directional advice.

So again, we're discussing a lot about these large language models and we're sort of projecting these cognitive states of ourselves on them.