Cognitive Hygiene: Why You Need to Make Thinking Hard Again

reminded me of “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell. Both Westenberg and Orwell argue that bad thinking leads to the deterioration of the individual and society. However, they focus on different origins of bad thinking: Orwell criticizes our bad use of the (English) language. In particular how our use of empty and predefined phrases hides our lack of understanding - both to others, but also to ourselves, leading to stale and lazy thinking, which, in turn, further impedes on our use of language.

Westenberg, on the other hand, focuses on how outsourcing our thinking to AI makes us leads to the deterioration of this skill. This represents the pinnacle of Orwell’s argument. In the past we have been too lazy to think hard, so we have often defaulted to pre-defined phrases and explanations. Now we don’t even bother with that anymore. Instead, we just let AI do all hard thinking for us and just consume the outcome, thinking that, in doing so, we can accelerate our rate of learning.

Both Orwell and Westenberg would insist that the true learning happens from doing the thinking ourselves: holding conflicting concepts in our mind and trying to make sense of them. The difference here is one of repeating an idea or comprehending it. And this is where we come back to Orwell’s vicious cycle: the true problem is that our lack of comprehension will lead to a further deterioration of our use of language and thus our thinking.