or: how to be actually well-educated, a continued roast of some AI writing, advice about how to wander forever in the world of human thinking. part 2 of 7.
I love this with all my heart. I use the FT Weekend like this, trying to read everything (even HTSI, which this weekend had a great piece on Lucy Boston, whose Knowe series a) I have never read and b) was set in the village next to the one I grew up in). I also just read a (probably AI-derived) line in Instagram, that said our brains are tired from ‘too much knowing’ as in endless news cycles, the non-stopness of the internet. And it struck me, in the context of your piece, that it’s not too much knowing that’s really an issue; it’s being bombarded with the ‘wrong’ (and I use that word with hesitation) type…lots of very shallow AI-driven snapshots and soundbites, that float over us but fill our brains, rather than giving our attention to, and deliberately choosing a few things, like a book, or an album, or a film, one at a time and getting to know them and learn from them.
100% agree. It's not too much knowing; it's too much stimulation all at once. Reading a long article, a magazine, or a book does not produce the same feeling of being overwhelmed as scrolling for half an hour does. We're basically staring at a bunch of flashing lights!
Thank you for the shoutout :) I absolutely loved this piece! The whole wanting to be “disgustingly well-educated” has been rubbing me the wrong way and you made it make sense. This need to adopt an image without actually putting in the work, the time, and the depth required within them speaks a lot to where we stand at the moment.
There has also been a lot of discourse lately regarding a sort of class division between people that can think critically and the ones who can’t. I do believe this gap will become more and more evident moving forward—especially with AI running rampant—but I find it really interesting how knowledge is turning into status more evidently than it has before. Status symbols always turn into aspirational behaviors, which is exactly what I’m seeing with this superficial need to appear well-educated.
ah thank you! Yes, in my non-Substack life I'm a novelist and that is the ultimate magpie-mind profession. Following up whatever intrigues or stimulates me is my job.
And thank you for your great Substack, which I really enjoy! I am so 100% on the side of people who are sick of the feeling of scrolling scrolling scrolling and want to dig their teeth into something *real*. And so it infuriates me when I see advice that is allegedly about how to do that but will just lead people to more rubbish.
I think it's true that a big divide in the era of AI will be between people who have really learned how to use their minds - in as many different ways as possible - and those who have settled for whatever the 'averaging machine' has delivered to them down the slop chute. I have this horrible feeling that in future you'll be talking to a person like you read text with a question in your mind "is this a real person's thoughts or have they just been fed stuff by the AI?"
Anything that has status to it, yes, will get people to try to pretend they are doing the thing, just to get the status. But the real thing is the work of a lifetime, a whole lifetime spent thinking and reading and learning and putting ideas together and discussing them. I mean to me, that is heaven.
Thank you for your book (which I read over Christmas) and the work you share here. It is much appreciated. I moved to Sweden nearly five years ago and had my daughter there. We’re now in a peculiar position where she is entering the Swedish education system via preschool and I am at the other end of it doing an A-level equivalent in Swedish as a foreign language as part of the integration process. That means I use learning material/videos created for teenagers. We spend a LOT of time learning about “källkritik” or learning to be critical about our information sources. It feels like a substantial part of the curriculum. And my daughter has also had her first lessons in this, aged four. Her teachers sent a description of how they went about this. There’s also a Swedish Psychological Defence Agency: https://mpf.se/psychological-defence-agency I definitely wouldn’t say that all this works flawlessly and we’re all going to be fine and dandy in the new information age BUT I am so glad to be in a place where it is at least officially taken seriously.
I love this with all my heart. I use the FT Weekend like this, trying to read everything (even HTSI, which this weekend had a great piece on Lucy Boston, whose Knowe series a) I have never read and b) was set in the village next to the one I grew up in). I also just read a (probably AI-derived) line in Instagram, that said our brains are tired from ‘too much knowing’ as in endless news cycles, the non-stopness of the internet. And it struck me, in the context of your piece, that it’s not too much knowing that’s really an issue; it’s being bombarded with the ‘wrong’ (and I use that word with hesitation) type…lots of very shallow AI-driven snapshots and soundbites, that float over us but fill our brains, rather than giving our attention to, and deliberately choosing a few things, like a book, or an album, or a film, one at a time and getting to know them and learn from them.
100% agree. It's not too much knowing; it's too much stimulation all at once. Reading a long article, a magazine, or a book does not produce the same feeling of being overwhelmed as scrolling for half an hour does. We're basically staring at a bunch of flashing lights!
Oh, that is a good description. We all need more time for dark solid thoughts and less intermittent strobing!
Thank you for the shoutout :) I absolutely loved this piece! The whole wanting to be “disgustingly well-educated” has been rubbing me the wrong way and you made it make sense. This need to adopt an image without actually putting in the work, the time, and the depth required within them speaks a lot to where we stand at the moment.
There has also been a lot of discourse lately regarding a sort of class division between people that can think critically and the ones who can’t. I do believe this gap will become more and more evident moving forward—especially with AI running rampant—but I find it really interesting how knowledge is turning into status more evidently than it has before. Status symbols always turn into aspirational behaviors, which is exactly what I’m seeing with this superficial need to appear well-educated.
We need as much depth as we need width!!!
ah thank you! Yes, in my non-Substack life I'm a novelist and that is the ultimate magpie-mind profession. Following up whatever intrigues or stimulates me is my job.
And thank you for your great Substack, which I really enjoy! I am so 100% on the side of people who are sick of the feeling of scrolling scrolling scrolling and want to dig their teeth into something *real*. And so it infuriates me when I see advice that is allegedly about how to do that but will just lead people to more rubbish.
I think it's true that a big divide in the era of AI will be between people who have really learned how to use their minds - in as many different ways as possible - and those who have settled for whatever the 'averaging machine' has delivered to them down the slop chute. I have this horrible feeling that in future you'll be talking to a person like you read text with a question in your mind "is this a real person's thoughts or have they just been fed stuff by the AI?"
Anything that has status to it, yes, will get people to try to pretend they are doing the thing, just to get the status. But the real thing is the work of a lifetime, a whole lifetime spent thinking and reading and learning and putting ideas together and discussing them. I mean to me, that is heaven.
Thank you for your book (which I read over Christmas) and the work you share here. It is much appreciated. I moved to Sweden nearly five years ago and had my daughter there. We’re now in a peculiar position where she is entering the Swedish education system via preschool and I am at the other end of it doing an A-level equivalent in Swedish as a foreign language as part of the integration process. That means I use learning material/videos created for teenagers. We spend a LOT of time learning about “källkritik” or learning to be critical about our information sources. It feels like a substantial part of the curriculum. And my daughter has also had her first lessons in this, aged four. Her teachers sent a description of how they went about this. There’s also a Swedish Psychological Defence Agency: https://mpf.se/psychological-defence-agency I definitely wouldn’t say that all this works flawlessly and we’re all going to be fine and dandy in the new information age BUT I am so glad to be in a place where it is at least officially taken seriously.
This sounds AMAZING and I would love to read more about it and see some of the materials!