Last night I realized my thinking skills had degraded to a point where i couldn't hold onto a thought for more than a few minutes. I had become what i hated. During my bachelor's degree, I read a lot. However , not the textbooks the professors were shoving down our throats but the ones I deemed strange and mysterious. The ones that promised to give me powers. To my dismay , most of them didn't . My grades suffered a bit but I also learned a lot. Being deeply obsessed about the quality of my reasoning I bought several books on logic and critical thinking. "Introduction to logic" by Irving M. Copi amongst many. Deep down though, I knew enough about the IQ literature to know that these books were not going to make me smarter in the fluid intelligence sense. I latched onto them anyways because I believed that even though they wouldn't help me solve problems faster, they would improve my clarity of thought. I was right.
Once done with the books, i started seeing everything as arguments. I began breaking down people's statements and discussions into several premises and evaluating each argument's coherence and validity. I knew every fallacy and cognitive bias. I started becoming annoying to be around. This was happening around the same time I developed a consuming angst towards death and a fatalistic view of life. Everyday in a weird pratice of self-irritation , I imagined the death of everyone i loved in agonizing detail. Every night I fell asleep knowing that there were things i could do nothing about in this life. My mind was a prison.
Over time , given i could seldom get a hold of enough people , I decided to experiment with internal dialogues. I assigned viewpoints to avatars within my mind and let them argue each other out. This in turn , sharpened my thinking even more. The world made sense to me. I also supplemented this regimen with a lot of writing . I didn't just write to argue points. I followed an exact protocol . I would read one page ( ~200-250 words) of a book that was not too dense. then i would put away the book and start writing whatever i could remember from that page in the same order. Something I learned from benjamin franklin's autobiography and how he improved his own writing. I would then compare my writing to the original page and see what I missed and what I got wrong. I would then rewrite the page in my own words and try to make it better than the original. This had remarkable effects on my retrieval abilities. I would start discussions and be able to reference and point to specific details from the arguments which made me look like a lawyer in court.
This continued for a while until it became overwhelming. The rate at which i needed to consume information to be able to perform at work , School and social life was too much for my system. I couldn't apply enough rigor and properly filter ideas. The inability to scrutinize and assess information properly made me prone to bad thinking. I got lazy and careless. I stopped "thinking". My Tendency for black and white thinking didn't help either.
Lately , upon the increasing reliance on LLMs and the so called "productivity boost" , I have been noticing an even more alarming decrease in the quality of my thoughts. I worry that if I don't intentionally work on upping the cognitive friction in my workflow , I will mindlessly accept outputs just because "thinking" is too much work. Retrieval automatically degrades when you don't engage enough with the material as well.
It is not to say that LLMs are bad. The productivity boost is real and they have helped me a lot. At some point in the future, They - or some other architecture - will probably replace us all and make us all obsolete. Until then I think we should keep trying to think better by reintroducing friction into our habits.