Good Thinking Isn't Efficient

Something of a Screed

Here’s a little screed on thinking and faux-intelligence machines. You can listen to a slight more hinged version in my latest ParkNotes video here:

Efficiency is not a thinker’s friend. Thinking well is often not an efficient endeavor.

First comes the initial thought.

When? I don’t know, they just pop in, often unbidden.

From where? The muse—obviously! No. I don’t know—probably from the subconscious stew of preloaded concepts, fuzzy beliefs, archetypes, the collective unconscious, personal memories, coincidental connections, and divine encounters.

But that’s just the beginning.

Once a thinker has a thought, the process of taking that burgeoning thought to its maturity can be a very long, circuitous odyssey.

Of course, this long-haul can be circumvented by a flash of insight, an eidetic intuition, or some other beatific-vision-adjacent epiphany when the whole thing is downloaded right into your mind. But these flashes of lightning insight are unpredictable.

My point is that good ideas aren’t fruitfully pursued in efficient ways. It takes lots and lots of time, lots and lots of mental effort, and even lots of intellectual dead ends before finding, propagating, and cultivating good ideas. It’s often the dead ends and so-called ‘wasted’ efforts which end up producing new ideas in the future.

The thing about thoughts is that you don’t know what they’re going to be before you excavate them, so you don’t know what’s a wasted motion and what’s the swing that finallt strikes gold.

Thinking well takes lots of mental effort—or almost none at all in the case of those weird flashes of insight. Either way, thinking well is not efficient.

But even if thinking well could be treated more as a science to be worked out in rigorous detail than an art to be frantically grasped as it streaks past your bedroom at 2 am, offloading your thought process to an artificial intelligence wouldn’t be the way to think well… at all. It’s the antithesis of thinking.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about what AI is doing, and is going to do to our mental lives. Its siren song promises ease and efficiency but I’m afraid it takes more than it gives.

There’s a pragmatism at the heart of AI use in cognitive work which has always occupied an outsized portion of the American psyche. But now its being fed by the quick fix, instant gratification bullshit machines in a positive feedback loop causing that pragmatism to grow by the query.

I guess ‘Luddite’ is supposed to be a dirty word today, but I think it’s actually becoming an honorific.

I think that people will eventually turn back from the efficiency sirens and the faux-intelligence machines, but not without causing lots of grief for themselves along the way.

I don’t know that I have the authority for a clarion call of any import, but if you’re reading this, please do your thinking and don’t offload your reason and volition to a corporatistic-psychosis-bot.