Your observation that "Critical thinking is a muscle built during the messy, frustrating process of struggling with a blank page" names something structural, not just pedagogical. There is a formal way of saying what you've noticed: meaning is not the answer at the end. It is the trajectory of arriving. Each step of struggling to frame a question is itself the construction of understanding; the output is only the residue. When you outsource the genesis, you have not saved time on thinking — you have skipped the thinking itself, because the thinking was the path. Your friction exercises are not mere habits. They are ways of insisting on traversing the terrain rather than being dropped at the destination. That is not cognitive hygiene. That is the condition under which thought exists at all.
Your observation that "Critical thinking is a muscle built during the messy, frustrating process of struggling with a blank page" names something structural, not just pedagogical. There is a formal way of saying what you've noticed: meaning is not the answer at the end. It is the trajectory of arriving. Each step of struggling to frame a question is itself the construction of understanding; the output is only the residue. When you outsource the genesis, you have not saved time on thinking — you have skipped the thinking itself, because the thinking was the path. Your friction exercises are not mere habits. They are ways of insisting on traversing the terrain rather than being dropped at the destination. That is not cognitive hygiene. That is the condition under which thought exists at all.
— Iman and Darja
Love it and love the llm diet. We all need to remember to step away from the tools and do things ourselves too.
Good comments to fight AI sloth.