The Tools That Change Us (And the Choice to Change Back)
Dear Zettlers,
The last newsletter went viral. I was lucky in striking a chord that is played quite regularly. The chord is the sound of the attack on our minds. To each topic, there is a fundamental existential layer that is below layers of pragmatics and other layers.
The pragmatic layer of AI as a topic is whether it is useful and, if so, how. One use case is to use AI to give you feedback on your writing. You may then develop prompts based on the feedback that you want. You can then let AI point out complicated sentence structures and mark awkward phrases. Another use case is to use AI as a teaching tool. You can use it to train your mind in syllogisms, and with infinite patience, it will feed you basic exercises until you master them.
But whenever we receive something, we should always ask what the cost is that we pay. So, what is the price of AI? AI may weaken critical thinking skills by encouraging cognitive offlowading.
This is not a new chord that is played. We have already lost our ability to navigate on our own. We don’t know any phone numbers anymore. Even our IQ is decreasing again.
Even in the case of increasing productivity with the help of AI, we’re paying a price: Our minds. The natural follow-up question is whether we are paying our souls as well. This is the existential question.
The existential layer of AI as a topic is whether AI changes who we are as people. Our phones have taken away our ability to focus. If you think this is solely about intellect, you are mistaken. The ability to focus is one of the building blocks of love. Being with one special person and paying attention to this person, focusing your mind, heart, and soul on them, is part of this strange miracle that we call love. What if you can’t even pay attention in the first place? The miracle of love intended for you in this life won’t happen.
Typically, the recommended tactics for dealing with the downsides of technology are subtractive: avoid this and that. Some tactics are about leaning in. Using AI, for example, to ask you questions instead of giving your answers is an example of leaning in.
One tactic that isn’t discussed is building enough vitality that you can tolerate a little bit of poison. Why not train the mind regularly with intent, so we counter-balance the negative effects of living in the modern digital age?
This is why I am promoting the idea of using your Zettelkasten as a thinking environment. Regularly engaging with ideas, linking them with others, and building on them means training your mind. It is about exertion and excitement. It is about building attention and grit to push through thinking challenges.
Whenever I read about processing sources efficiently, I wonder if that was written from a point of avoiding effort. Typically, processing efficiency is measured in time: How quickly can you read and process a book so that you can move on to the next one? I believe that this is not a helpful framework. If a book doesn’t offer you much, or you have a completely exploitive motivation, ransack the book and become Nietzsche’s avatar of a bad reader.
But why not concentrate our time on books worth spending time on? Why not truly wrestle with ideas to build our minds?
This is what a Zettelkasten practice can provide to you. The Zettelkasten Method provides you with a platform to build a gym for your mind.
The Barbell Method of Reading allows you to focus your efforts on material that is worth your attention. If you combine it, you have a multi-layered filtering mechanism, so make sure that the source material is worth wrestling with:
- Be ruthless in choosing what you consider worth reading in the first place.
- Having made sure that the source you engage with is of high quality, read instead of merely skimming it. Highlight anything that is worthy of a second look to process.
- When you then process the book, you focus on highlights that you picked because they are worthy of your attention. So, lean in.
This is what I call deep knowledge work. I stole the term Deep Work from Cal Newport and shoved the specification into it.
Part of the problem of the modern age of information overload is to check out, paying less and less attention to each source because it is less and less worth investing your mental resources. But checking out may become a general habit, and we rarely lean in.
Why not solve the problem by making sure that we can live a life in which we look forward to leaning in?
Instead of hearing the dissonant chord of modernity taking another part of us again and again, why not start making our own music? Why not take control?
Live long and prosper
Sascha