Cognitive Gym

• Better thinking through writing [Draft]

Better thinking through writing [Draft]

• What is Writing
  • writing is any deliberate activity to externalise the thoughts which can later be manipulated  
  • I want to separate writing for work vs writing for thinking
  • the obv analogy is fitness for manual labour vs fitness for better health
  • writing is fitness for your brain, writing taking time and effort is a feature not a bug
  • Writing helps organize your thoughts, in fact for any serious thinking writing becomes absolutely critical
    • thinking is hard and takes time 
    • the objective is not to share something with the reader but rather a canvas for your own brain to wrestle with your thinking
• why not just think on your mind
  • working memory is limited, hence you are artifically limiting yourself when thinking. This leaks through the quality of thoughts and consequently the actions you take in the world. 
  • you can't keep track of your thoughts historically across long durations of time
  • you can easily lie to yourself
  • emotions can get in the way
  • you cant get feedback from others
• what do I use writing for
  • informal notes for learning new concepts
  • organizing my thoughts to make an important decision, listing out the pros and cons and the tradeoffs involved before making a decision. this enables a few 
  • convey my thought process 
  • a theraputic device to let out my emotions - helps when you feel overwhelmed
• my writing algorithm
  • it depends on the use case, but it roughly boils down to the following
  • loosely based on babble prune. 
    • explore first, then cut off as much as possible. 
    • in explore phase dont care about semantic or syntactical correctness 
  • mental dump of various tangents that are fresh on my mind
  • load as much higher order bits of context into my working memory before starting to write
  • try to get a rough shape of what I am trying to convey
• tools
  • the simpler and robust the system the better. What you think/write is more important than how, but with technology you can use them to aid your writing
  • aim for minimal distractions
  • the tool should not hinder your progress or flow state
  • tool should help you collaborate without friction when needed [trivial inconviniences] 
  • my way of writing/thinking involves using an outliner heavily (eg. workflowy, dynalist)
• is there a difference between
  • writing by hand and typing? 
    • there are some studies which 
  • writing vs dictating to an AI
• AI x writing
  • people get an illusion of understanding when they dicsuss ideas with an LLM
  • there is a huge epidemic of people offloading their writing, thereby thinking to llms hence leading to atrophy of thinking in general. Similar to how muscles atrophies without resistance. 
  • people who are serious about thinking, would guard and notice this subtlety. 
  • like others, I substituted discussions with llms and using the generated text as a product of my thinking. In come 
• what does a good AI human symbiosis look like? 
  • you need to own the scaffolding and the though vectors
  • a vector has a magnitude and direction - use llms for magnitude and not for direction
  • own the direction and dont take the magnitude gain from the llm at face value
  • use the llm for critique without being influenced as much as possible
  • an ideal usage would be something like a compiler. Similar to how a C compiler compiles high level code to assembly, a good llm based workflow ought to preserve the semantics of your writing. 
  • the more I think about it, I feel convinced that wielding llms would require ICs to develop some managerial/executive thinking
    • as much as I abhor the M word, we can study an activity without falling for the ugh field beliefs that we have associated to it based on our experience. 
    • how do small group of  humans run large corps, governments, armies, etc. where they dont have the full context of everything that's happening?