Writing To Reclaim Independent Thought

I wasn't the best writing student in grade school. Recently, I've felt like I've lost my opinions to social media. I've spent hours scrolling on YouTube, without spending the warranted time forming proper opinion on them. I catch myself reaching for summaries before struggling with the ideas myself. I have spent too long consuming without digesting. Too long reacting without choosing. As I sit down to write this, I notice how fragmented my thought process is. An emotion here, a thought there. I believe the quality of our thinking is deeply tied to how well we write.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, more people are offloading an increasing variety of cognitive tasks to LLMs. In tandem to this, there is an increasing pressure to optimize and deliver results fast. In the speed, we lose our depth, intentionality, and autonomy. We lose the capacity to form hypotheses and glean the meaning of content within the context of our own experiences and bring a new idea into the world. Together, they quietly erode our agency as thinkers.

Writing may be the thing that shields me from this. It's a practice that rewards coherence, novelty, authenticity, and the courage to hold an opinion. So often as an engineer I tend towards optimization. I would like to lean into meaning.

What about the plot of Dune 2 had me sitting on the edge of my seat, anxious about the timing of my restroom visit? Why do I feel a sense of dread for the next generation in the midst of AI? What does ethical AI behavior look like? Who gets to decide? I don't actually know why I love certain stories. That bothers me.

I want this blog to be the place where I interrogate the opinions I've protected but never tested. I want to exercise my writing and honor my interests by giving them a proper medium. I want it to be the place where I am proven wrong. If I have given myself confidence in my opinions, knowledge, way of living, and values, this blog will have been a success.