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 [1]cliophate.wtf [2]Start Here [3]Reading [4]About Me [5]Now
 
 How to think
 
 When I originally saw this tweet, I chuckled.
 
 [bsky-1200x]
 
 Then I realized: I do the same thing, and so do the people around me. That is,
 we outsource our thinking to a machine, which can’t think in the first place
 (though that fact is a whole separate piece I am working on).
 
 Since the rise of Generative AI, what I caught myself doing is using tools like
 ChatGPT or Claude to go through problems. Not as a help, but instead had it
 spit out an answer that I then (at times blindly) adopted as my own solution.
 
 And going by that post above, and the anecdotal evidence I have, I am not alone
 in this.
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 This is not thinking. Again, the machine cannot think. It can only match
 patterns and emulate writing. But thanks to increasingly sophisticated models,
 the solution the machine gives us seems like the solution we were looking for.
 
 But if I am not the one thinking, and thus not the one solving the problem
 (because problem-solving is what thinking ultimately is), I have learned
 nothing. I have just taken another one's thoughts (and again, the machine
 cannot think) as my own. I see little value in this.
 
 This phenomenon is, however, not a recent problem, even though Generative AI
 has exacerbated it. Outsourcing our thinking to other things, or people, is
 something humanity has been doing forever.
 
 Before Generative AI, we outsourced our thinking to influencers and whatever
 the algorithmic timelines fed us. Before that, it was to politicians,
 celebrities, and other people in power. Before that, it was the churches. And
 before that, it was the shamans. (To be fair, people still do this.)
 
 But at least in these examples, the thinker we outsource to is human. We can,
 most often, deduce what their agenda is. But what is the agenda of a machine
 that has been trained by a group of people who probably don’t even understand
 how that machine works in the first place?
 
 I believe that in this age, at a time when we get inundated with information
 from all directions, the ability to think is the most important skill we have.
 
 I expect that when, and if, the AI revolution arrives, people who have the
 ability to think are the ones who will not be left behind. Thinkers will be the
 ones who will thrive in these uncertain times.
 
 And this is how to think:
 
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 I see four parts that are necessary for thought. You need to cultivate all
 four, because one or two alone may not be enough to form your best thinking.
 
 These are:
 
   • Thinking in silence;
   • Thinking through inspiration;
   • Thinking by writing;
   • Thinking by not (actively) thinking.
 
 Thinking in silence
 
 AI, algorithmic timelines, and generally just the noise^[6]1 we live in, don’t
 give us the space to think. They hijack our attention and concentration.
 
 This is our fault. Whenever we have the slightest moment of silence—and we call
 that boredom—we try to fill the void with whatever we can find.
 
 But there is a reason you have your best thoughts under the shower, or as soon
 as your head hits the pillow. These might be the only moments you experience
 true silence and boredom.
 
 When we manage to turn off the outside world, we are able to listen to our
 inner voice. That is thinking. That voice that speaks to you, at times maybe
 roughly, though that is for another essay, is what thinking is.^[7]2
 
 By listening and talking to the inner voice, we can give it problems to solve.
 We can mentally go through the steps and let our minds untangle whatever we are
 currently working on. If we feed it with the correct pieces, and let it do its
 job without interruption, it’ll allow us to solve the puzzle.
 
 This is hard. Thinking is an active skill (though there is a passive element to
 that, more soon) that burns a lot of energy. The brain alone consumes, on
 average, around 400 calories per day. To give you an idea: 30 minutes of
 running burns the same amount. (So feed your brain the nutrients, exercise, and
 rest it needs.)
 
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 I am a strong believer in cultivating silence to let our minds go wild and
 start forming thoughts. It is not easy, though, modern civilization likes to
 flood us with distractions. Therefore, I try to find moments throughout the day
 where I embrace silence. (And I am not talking about absolute silence like you
 have in outer space. You don’t need 0 decibels; rather, what you need is to not
 have inputs. White noise is completely fine and might even be beneficial to
 some. If I struggle with sounds, I listen to a mix of white noise and
 thunderstorms.)
 
 But embracing silence is hard for me. I struggle with this because I have the
 tendency to fill the silence with... something. Anything. Not necessarily
 because I’m afraid of the silence, but because boredom is at times painful.
 Boredom is just so... boring.
 
 I’m not used to it anymore, so I have to force myself to accept it. And only
 then can I sit in silence and let my mind work. And every time I give it the
 space it needs, I am surprised by what that squishy thing in my skull is
 capable of.
 
 Thinking through inspiration
 
 While the building block above shows how to create space for thinking, it’s
 inspiration, I believe, that sparks thought in the first place.
 
 Not every thought is worth something. I doubt this is a surprise to you, but if
 we’d follow every thought we’d ever have life would be pretty fucking weird.
 
 To succeed at thinking, we need to feed our minds the necessary material to
 refine what happens up there.
 
 This happens through a process I (and I probably stole it) call
 cross-pollination.
 
 Cross-pollination is when you take a whole bunch of Lego bricks from all kinds
 of different sources to build your own castle in your mind.
 
 You achieve this by consuming broadly.
 
 But not all consumption is equal.
 
 There is a reason everyone talks about [8]brain rot currently, because
 mindlessly scrolling through TikTok and watching people do whatever the
 algorithm gets them views, is not the type of consumption I am talking about.
 
 Rather, we’re talking about content (and it can still happen on TikTok, the
 medium is NOT the problem) that challenges you.
 
 For me, this content primarily exists as the written word. It is the reason [9]
 why I read as much as I do. But I also find it in blog posts like these, or
 newsletters, or at times even on text-based social media like Bluesky or
 Threads (though let me be real, this is the exception, most content on there is
 mediocre).
 
 If this resonated with you, there’s more.
 Subscribe to get future posts delivered to your inbox. No spam.
 And if you want to support my writing, [10]click here.
 
 You can find that content also in multimedia formats, be it podcasts, YouTube
 videos, or (good!) TikTok shorts. Or you find it as a little nugget in some
 random TV show or movie. Or while talking to other people, or observing nature.
 
 What is important here is that you consume actively. Not necessarily to learn
 every time you look at something, but by spending focused time with the media.
 
 And yes, for that, you need to put away your phone, turn off your gaming
 console, or whatever else you are currently doing. NO multitasking. We all know
 by now that [11]multitasking doesn’t exist. Sit with the material, consume it,
 and let it feed your thoughts with new Lego bricks.
 
 One very important thing, however, is this: don’t only consume things with
 which you agree or that you already believe. All this does is feed your idiocy
 (and we are all idiots) and enforce negative cycles.
 
 Consume stuff you hate. Consume what the enemy created, whoever that enemy is
 (and then ask yourself, why do you have enemies?). Consume things that are
 uncomfortable because they might show you truths you want to hide from. Consume
 broadly and widely, and outside of your comfort zone, because it gives you
 perspective and shows you things you may not have known.
 
 I am not saying you need to adopt these views. Not if you fundamentally
 disagree with them, and especially not if they are just plain wrong. Bigots are
 bigots (and I believe they are bigots because they do not consume what their
 “enemies” create). But this at least shows you what not to think about.
 
 This is crucial, too. This is anti-thinking, another part of having “good”
 thoughts. But how do you know what to anti-think if you don’t know what is out
 there?
 
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 Thinking through writing
 
 Yes, I am biased. But I believe that writing is the other necessary skill to
 succeed in our current times.
 
 Because what writing allows is to sort and distil the thinking you do, break it
 down into pieces and recombine it with other stuff.
 
 As long as the thinking just stays in your mind, I’d argue that it is
 worthless. This is especially true for ideas. Everyone has ideas. The world
 certainly does not lack ideas.
 
 Ideas are not worth anything if they do not lead to future steps.
 
 The first step is to write it down. Because writing is the one other magic
 trick humans possess.
 
 And before you tell me that Generative AI is taking this from us: LLMs do not
 write.
 
 What they do might look like writing, it might feel like writing, but it is not
 writing. Instead, GenAI outputs text, syntactically flawless text, yes, but
 devoid of any substance. The machine just breaks down writing into a
 mathematical formula^[12]3, robbing writing of all that makes it magical. (And
 a lot of us lack the necessary taste to understand that this writing is simply
 not good. Grammatically correct ≠ good.)
 
 So you need to write yourself. And as the screenshot at the beginning of this
 essay ironically shows, even writing down your problem as an AI prompt
 clarifies your thought.
 
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 There are two ways to solve problems through writing, and I alternate between
 the two of them: they are writing slowly, and writing fast.
 
 Writing slowly
 
 I’d argue that to write slowly you have to write by hand. Be it on a piece of
 paper, or like I do, on [13]one of these fancy e-ink devices.
 
 But through writing by hand, you are forced to slow down, simply because your
 hand cannot catch up to the speed of your thinking. And this allows you to
 “de-jumble” the mess in your head before you put it down on paper.
 
 This blog post was first brainstormed on the equivalent of two sheets of A4
 paper, and what came out was basically a completely finished post that just
 needed a bit of polishing (to transform bullet points into proper prose, for
 example).
 
 I write most of my blog posts this way. I also write my journal by hand every
 morning, and most of my notes are handwritten, too.
 
 Again, this is to make sense of what is in my head, by giving me the space (and
 the silence, there are no inputs when I do this) to think through things.
 
 (In theory, you could also use an old-school typewriter. Because if you type
 too fast on that thing, you jam the keys. This is a great analogy because if
 you write too fast by hand, you jam your brain.)
 
 Writing fast
 
 Another practice I follow is what I call the brain dump. This has to happen on
 a computer, either by typing if you are a fast typist or maybe by recording a
 voice note.
 
 The value of the brain dump is by “emptying” your mind. The goal is not to form
 perfectly finished nuggets of thought but instead to unload all that is in your
 mind, all that is taking up your mental bandwidth.
 
 Often, what comes out of a brain dump session is not truly valuable if looked
 at through a vacuum. It is important that you don’t filter and instead write
 everything down that comes up, unedited and raw.
 
 When you look at this brain dump, you’ll realize that most of it is trash. That
 is ok, that is the point of the exercise. You want to get the trash out of your
 head.
 
 But with a certain distance (I never read the brain dumps the day I wrote
 them), you may find certain specks of gold. Here and there, you see a nugget
 that, if you disassemble it, might lead to something. And then I’d suggest you
 take that nugget and go through it by writing by hand.
 
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 Thinking by not (actively) thinking
 
 Because thinking is problem-solving, in theory, the result of thought is a
 solved problem.
 
 Sometimes you can’t solve the problem when you actively think about it. You
 just can’t find the solution, no matter how much time you spend on it.
 
 In these cases, stop. Take some distance. Let it rest, do something completely
 different, and ignore it for a few hours or days.
 
 You may have experienced this before. You struggled for hours to come up with a
 solution, kept failing, and ultimately gave up.
 
 But then, in the unlikeliest of situations, you had the epiphany you waited
 for. The complete solution to your problem suddenly came up in your mind as if
 planted there by some alien life form when you were not paying attention.
 
 This is thinking by not thinking. It is passive. It happens without you forcing
 it, in the subconscious, while you do other things. I don’t know why it
 happens. I don’t understand what processes run in our subconscious mind in the
 background, I only know that I’ve experienced this before.
 
 As a writer, the way I use it is to never hit publish on bigger pieces (like
 this one) the day I wrote them. I often let them sit and ripen in the back of
 my mind. When I sit down with them again, I often perceive things I hadn’t
 before.
 
 The same goes when I struggle to fix a problem at work. Giving myself the space
 to not think about it is apparently what I need to solve the toughest of
 problems.
 
 So sometimes, don’t think. Some people seem to be really good at this.
 
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 Tools for Thinking
 
 I’m planning to expand this section into a separate post in the future, but
 here are a bunch of tools and tricks I rely on to help my thinking.
 
 While the above steps are the basis needed to think in the first place, the
 tools below are what help me have “better” thoughts.
 
   • Mental models: You may have heard of Pareto’s principle, aka the 80/20 rule
     , or Occam’s Razor, or Compounding. These are mental frameworks that might
     not always be true, but that allow you to see things in different lights.
     There are a lot of them. In theory, all that follows below could be
     considered a mental model.
   • First principles: Break your thoughts down to the most basic truth. Dig at
     it for as long as you can until you discover the one raw fact that must be
     true. Strip away assumptions. Build from there.
   • Socratic Questioning: Ask layered, open-ended questions to clarify, probe,
     explore and question.
   • 5 Whys: Ask why until you discover the root cause behind a problem. The
     first, second or even third level is often not the true reason a problem
     appeared.
   • Inversion: Do the opposite of what you were planning to do. Instead of
     asking how to succeed, ask yourself how to fail. Then avoid that.
   • Reverse-engineering: Start from a finished system. Deconstruct it to see
     how it was built, then replicate (and improve) it with your own toolset.
   • Feynman Technique: That’s what I am doing here. I want to learn how to
     think, so I teach it in simple terms to the reader. When I struggle to
     explain a part, I find gaps in my knowledge. I go back and improve.
 
 There are many more tools in my toolset, but these are the ones I (try to) rely
 on the most. I’ll expand this into a separate post down the line, so [14]
 subscribe to the newsletter or [15]RSS feed to get notified when it goes live!
 
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 Thinking is the most crucial skill we need to develop amidst our current,
 uncertain times. It will help us make sense of the mess of the world, and
 especially of the mess in our minds.
 
 By becoming better thinkers, I’d argue we become better humans. And by becoming
 better humans, we’ll be able to make the world a better place.
 
 None of this is easy. It requires a vast amount of effort from us, not only to
 take the time to think or improve our thinking, but also to reject what
 interferes with it.
 
 It is probably why a lot of people will not do this. Instead, they might
 complain, shout at the clouds or simply give up. It is, after all, easier to
 feel defeatist than to struggle.
 
 Those of us who hone this skill (and thinking is ultimately a skill) will learn
 a superpower that brings us ahead of the majority.
 
 It’ll make us superhuman, and I strongly believe this.
 
 So, go and practice thinking.
 
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 Some notes on AI: I bashed Generative AI, LLMs and algorithmic timelines a lot
 in this post.
 
 The reason is I strongly believe we should not be offloading the skills that
 make us human to machines.
 
 But I still use ChatGPT on a near-daily basis. The difference is that I (now)
 use it to complement my thinking. I use it for research (and then fact-check,
 because it still hallucinates a lot), I use it as a learning tool, or to see
 things from different angles by actively asking it to do so. It often fails,
 but sometimes it helps me.
 
 Generative AI is a tool we need to learn how to use. I keep comparing LLMs to a
 friend who has a photographic memory and remembers everything. But he is also
 just plain stupid. He makes shit up. He doesn’t know what he is talking about,
 but just parrots what he learned by heart. (And memorizing ≠ understanding.)
 Sometimes he parrots something really intelligent, but that is more a
 coincidence than anything else. We just give this randomness more weight than
 we should, as we find it “magical”.
 
 And as for algorithmic timelines: they are mostly shit. Their only worth is if
 you use them as a marketing tool.
 
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  1. This is not a new development, however. The Stoic philosopher Seneca, back
     in 62-64 AD, already complained about how noisy Ancient Rome was back then
     ([16]On Quiet and Study). And he didn’t even have Instagram, TikTok or
     ChatGPT. [17]↩
 
  2. Some people do [18]not have an inner voice. I cannot imagine what that
     would be like, as mine never shuts up. But I’d love to hear from you. [19]↩
 
  3. The way LLMs “write” is by calculating what word is most likely to follow
     the preceding one. But since it was trained on gazillions of data
     (so-called tokens), it’s rather good at emulating the way humans write. But
     two things: since we’ve just argued that writing is thinking, and thinking
     is a human practice, we cannot call what the machine outputs as writing.
     These machines don’t understand meaning, they excel in (statistical)
     patterns. And second, the creators of these machines want us to believe
     that there is more magic in that output than there is. If they can sell us
     the idea that the machine has created something original by thinking, we’ll
     have more faith in these tools and thus will throw money in their
     direction. [20]And they need a shit ton of money. [21]↩
 
 [22]Clarity
 This is me
 'Sup, I'm Kevin
 [23] [24] [25] [26]
 
 If this resonated with you, there’s more.
 Subscribe to get future posts delivered to your inbox. No spam.
 And if you want to support my writing, [27]click here.
 
 [28]Newer Post [29]Archive [30]Older Post
 
 References:
 
 [1] https://cliophate.wtf/
 [2] https://cliophate.wtf/start
 [3] https://cliophate.wtf/reading
 [4] https://cliophate.wtf/about
 [5] https://cliophate.wtf/now
 [6] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fn:1
 [7] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fn:2
 [8] https://www.calm.com/blog/brainrot
 [9] https://cliophate.wtf/reading
 [10] https://ko-fi.com/cliophate
 [11] https://hbr.org/2010/12/you-cant-multi-task-so-stop-tr
 [12] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fn:3
 [13] https://overkill.wtf/supernote-manta-review/
 [14] https://newslettter.cliophate.wtf/
 [15] https://cliophate.wtf/
 [16] https://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_1.html#L56
 [17] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fnref1:1
 [18] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976241243004
 [19] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fnref1:2
 [20] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-dollars-to-reshape-business-of-chips-and-ai-89ab3db0
 [21] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fnref1:3
 [22] https://cliophate.wtf/archive/topic:clarity
 [23] https://bsky.app/profile/cliophate.wtf
 [24] https://threads.net/@cliophate
 [25] https://overkill.social/@cliophate
 [26] https://instagram.com/cliophate.wtf
 [27] https://ko-fi.com/cliophate
 [28] https://cliophate.wtf/taste-voice-genai
 [29] https://cliophate.wtf/archive
 [30] https://cliophate.wtf/redesign