Why settle for mediocre thinking?
Here are a couple things I've been thinking about a lot lately and some for the past few years since starting (and ending) teaching:
- Practice is the primary means of improving any skill
- Anything that undermines our ability to practice reduces our learning
- We have highly limited bandwidth that is easily disrupted
- The opportunities for us to sabotage our own attention and learning is more prevalent than ever
As I study for my upcoming exam on April 30. I've been more and more protective of my capacity to think and focus. In the recent past I thought that my attention span was fair — not poor — and that my phone was distracting — not too distracting. But I feel now more than ever that I've been holding myself back from having a great attention span. I've had a smart phone ever since my time in high school and I think I've been critically undervaluing how much it has been effecting me.
I've decided to become a bit harder to reach. My phone ringer stays on so loved ones can reach me and but I've decided I will just see text and instant messages when I see them. There isn't a rush and the constant ping of spam, ordinary emails, and other notifications has taken a toll I'm only now beginning to reckon with.
On the AI front, the novelty makes things are a little bit trickier. On the one hand AI as it currently stands is a wickedly good math tutor that will patiently walk me through problems and is always ready and willing (when there isn't a server outage). But what I figure is that if I'm still succeeding at difficult practice problems and passing exams, my interactions with AI will continue to be a net positive, as long as my use is judicious.
For efficient studying, if I have no idea how to do a problem, I look it up the solution, talk to AI about the problem, or dig deeper into source materials. But if I have any idea how to do the problem whatsoever, I think it is imperative that I try the problem. Especially when I have the creeping feeling that I'm going to fail the problem. Those failures are by far the most instructive and I refuse to let AI steal my learning opportunities. Anyone who wants to sharpen their cognitive skills needs to engage with the hard and unpleasant work of thinking.
A lot of this has been floating around in my brain but it has been further clarified for me by this paper has been going around. I have the feeling that results like this pre-print will be repeated over and over and over again. When we over rely on AI, our perseverance for problem solving goes down. It's similar to results I've seen from years ago where if people felt that they could Google a fact, they are were less likely to commit that fact to long term memory. (I vaguely remember this fact coming from a Gladwell book?)
I'm resolving to make my attention span better, keeping my tolerance for solving problems high, even as I may be required to use AI more and more in my chosen profession. Human knowledge isn't going to suddenly become irrelevant. And I'll be able to better put my knowledge to use if my attention span is large and my knowledge is deep. Besides, doing hard math is fun and writing is sort of fun sometimes.