Writing & Thinking
“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.” – Mortimer Adler
The point of writing all those papers in school isn't to generate more prose, it's to get you to slow down and think deeper, cogitate and marinate on something, and then craft a clear explanation or response to it. Basically; think! Writing will cause you to realize that you don't know something as well as you thought you did, and thus cannot communicate it in writing.
Our fragmented attention now only wants to respond to things not reason about them so we need to create intentional space for allowing that reasoning to happen. And to make the reasoning happen is work!
I've used GPT to gen up stuff for me already, I do it almost daily in an effort to be more efficient. Certain things though should BE less efficient so they can be MORE effective. AI is a shortcut to so many things but don't let it shortcut your reasoning, and certainly your writing, as it will make you a less effective thinker. And while I believe AI can help us and augment what we do, I don't believe we should rely on it for what we think. There's a significant advantage to those of us who maintain our human aptitude for clear thinking and insights that come from writing.
