Cognitive Gym A dojo for sharpening my thinking through active learning 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?