How to Think Clearly in an Age of Distraction | Sam Harris

Humans have never been particularly good at facts, uh, memory.

Hmm.

That's why we developed writing in the first place, right? Uh, first writings weren't stories, they were accounting and things like that.

Hmm.

So I don't feel like it's a particularly large problem that we're gonna start to outsource that even more.

Do you agree? Do you disagree? Uh, are there certain cognitive capacities that we're obviously going to lose that, that you're okay with or not okay with?

Well, I think certain technology is, um, cognitively competitive with us, and then there, there's other technology that, that, uh, is cogs- is cognitively enhancing.

And, um, this is actually a distinction that, um, the, the biologist David Krakauer at the Santa Fe Institute ha- has made and talked a lot about.

The classic example, you know, albeit one that doesn't really matter to most of us, is, uh, uh, there's a, um, a, a c- a clear cognitive enhancement is something like the abacus.

I mean, you, you-

Yeah.

Yeah

... you can learn to do an abacus, and people who get good at it apparently can actually do it in their mind, right? So they can do calculations that, that somebody couldn't do before because they've internalized this meth- methodology, which was, you know, which is, uh, just a physical tool.

Um, whereas when you think about our relationship to something like the GPS on our phone, you know, now many of us are having the experience of, you know, if you ever had a good sense of direction, you're, you, you, it's been a long time since you've used it, and you, you know, you might be in some foreign city and you've walked away from your hotel, and, and you realize you, you know, but for your phone, you've made so little effort to track where you've wandered in this tow- town that you just have no idea, you know, uh, how to get back to the hotel.

I think we're, we're losing a certain kind of cognitive muscle tone w- ba- based on, on certain, our use of certain tools.

Whether that matters or not, I don't know.

I mean, I th- I think, uh, on balance, we're all benefiting from the, the, the GPS on our phones.

I mean, the, the, basically no one is, virtually no one is ever getting lost again.

We could certainly w- uh, the, the way AI is being deployed and people are using it to, to write and to, you know, it's like, uh, like, uh, I can, you know, I'm a, I'm a writer.

The temptation to, to have AI produce a first draft of the thing that I now want to work on, um-I could see that being, you know, cognitively competitive in a way that's not great because part of it, what, what is good about writing isn't just the final product, it's actually y- you know, you taking the, the time to think through what you think.

And, and, and in fact, discover what you think o- over the course of, of, you know, confronting a blank page and, and actually writing.

So, um, you know, I'm using, you know, I'm, I'm using the tools, uh, uh, s- you know, st- still somewhat circumspectly.

But, um, for research, you know, leaving aside the hallucination problem and some other things-

Yeah

... that we, that, that we, we know about, you know, and those loopholes are getting closed presumably, it is just amazing to be able...