In my workplace I’m seeing more and more cases where people are turning to AI to deal with tough problems they don’t want to think about. Problems such as formulating goals, writing memos, drafting proposals.

The danger here is that they are not writing these things themselves, meaning they are not truly thinking them through. Writing is thinking.

If I have an LLM write the goals for my team, I’ll get a list of objectives that have a reasonable probability of being a good match, but they won’t be tailored for the individuals.

I think that using AI to do your problem-solving carries an even greater risk because it can bypass your own sense of knowing, at the center of your being, what is true.

One of the fundamental methods for designing structures and processes that “have good fit” and “feel alive” is to use the Mirror of the Self Test. This is a learned skill that takes practice but produces excellent results by tailoring design solutions to perfectly match the problem space.

I consistently find that AI results often sound good, even insightful. They might trigger a positive gut reaction, such that I feel that they are true. But when I genuinely study the problem space I see that the LLM is lacking context and the solution really doesn’t fit. The only way I can reach that conclusion is to map out the space using what I know in my Self, or my whole experience of life.

And AI generated answers interfere with that Self-evaluation process, making it less human and less reliable..

• Via Mashable

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Niklas Luhmann – Impossible to think without writing

Imposed structure hinders thinking

Ask your notes, not ChatGPT

And I’m stuck.

My document has all kinds of structures and centers and boxes and arrows. But I don’t think it has enough of me in it. Or the categories I’m using don’t resonate. Or the relationships I’m building between notes is off. But it simply doesn’t have a good feeling which was one of the main things Alexander looked for in living structure.

Now I’m using Tinderbox with an MCP connection to Claude, so it would be very easy for me to fire up the LLM and try to use it to diagnose some of my problems. But I found myself hesitating on this.

Recalling that sociologist Niklas Luhmann interacted with his extensive collection of notes as if he were having a conversation, I decided to ask my notes to find an answer.

And the results were pretty interesting. I started with notes about Alexander’s use of feeling and introspection to identify “centers.” This lead me to Alexander’s thoughts on Self, which in turn lead me to a quote from Howard Thurman suggesting we are not single persons, but contain many persons, and the Self is a rallying point. From here I jumped to a note about the Internal Family Systems model which seeks to use the Self to mediate and heal the various parts of our persona.

Spending an evening in a bar alone with my notes turned out to be extremely worthwhile. Now I’m adding small notes for “parts of me” that I can identify – Curiosity Seeker, Smart Ass, Imposter, Care-Giver and the like. I don’t quite understand how this integrates with the “done-list” section of my life garden, but it has a better feel to it.

I think the answers that I got from my own notes are much more contextualized to my life and interests than anything I might have gotten back from Claude. Not that Claude is bad or AI is evil. It still doesn’t know me as well as I know myself, apparently.

Now what if I hadn’t taken such a bonanza if tiny notes about Self? I was actually expecting that would be the case. In that event, I planned to go straight to Christopher Alexander and have a conversation with him.

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Hmmm…looks like I wrote a very similar post here: Why You Shouldn’t Ask ChatGPT about Information Architecture (or Anything Else You Want to Learn) in this case the LLM delivered precisely the wrong information. The models have improved considerably in three years. They are remarkably good at finding what you’re looking for. My notes, on the other hand, delivered something unexpected, topically unrelated but remarkably relevant.

Is Your Zettelkasten Alive? How Structure Impacts the Life of Your Notes

Links to notes should be unexpected

Reading Dillard I became aware that, far from being conservative…selecting for the least amount of energy consumption…the creative forces that bring us life are wildly playful, exuberant, and wealthy.

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In the end you don’t measure life by what you experience. It is measured by the time you spend.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life.

(Via The Marginalian)

It’s a pithy little volume, packed with tiny bits of wisdom. It’s like a cross between the best package of fortune cookies you’ll ever find and the Biblical book of Proverbs.

Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better.

In so many ways, a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.

Kelly doesn’t make any claim to originality – in fact I found this paraphrase of Dan Schiller’s advice about buying gear from the Last Whole Earth Catalog:

At first buy the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot.

If you wind up using some tool for the job, buy the very best you can afford.

What makes the book remarkable is that it contains so many bits of wisdom…and every one is worth contemplating and acting upon.

Advice like these are not laws. They are like hats. If one doesn’t fit, try another.

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The problem is that elevator operators delivered other services besides being sure the lift was level with the floor. They acted as greeters, baggage handlers, provided directions, and offered information about the building and businesses inside.

Apparently these ancillary services are so valuable that upscaleshopping centers are now hiring people to provide exactly these services that elevator operators once did for free.

Douglas Rushkoff has long argued that ever since the invention of the printing press, people are valued more for their ability to crank widgets than they are for any skill or mastery. Workers are every bit as interchangeable as the typeset letters on the press.

Even the most creative endeavors you can imagine, such as making music, become deskilled as vinyl albums and Top 40 radio turned songs into commodities. Record producers have much more say about a song’s success than do the individual artists — a point that echoes a very similar observation made by Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word.

This relentless mechanization of every type of skill and trade, leaves Rushkoff…and all of us most likely…wondering what happens to humanity when AI takes the wheel.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei speculates that artificial intelligence could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.

Here’s my question, if we stop hiring entry-level workers, where are we going to find people with the skills to become mid-level employees, supervisors, and managers?

Over the course of the series Brand looks at the ways that buildings can change and adapt, the pace at which they change, and why some structures, constructed mainly to make a statement, refuse to adapt well.

This is an absolutely essential series for anyone who has a building in their lives, or plans to create structures of any sort. While the documentary follows the central tenants of the book, it doesn’t cover everything. So you’ll want to get your hands on the book as well.

Via Open Culture check out their links on related topics, including Brian Eno who created the excellent soundtrack for the 1997 BBC series.

• Part 1: Flow
• Part 2: The Low Road
• Part 3: Built for Change
• Part 4: Unreal Estate
• Part 5: The Romance of Maintenance
• Part 6: Shearing Layers

Hear me out. Two weeks ago we had a Google rep come to our workplace to demo some of Gemini’s agentic capabilities. She gave us links to some sales data, inventory stats, a code block, and a prompt.

Everything was precooked, and I entered it in the sequence she prescribed…and my results were completely different from hers.

I mean, the facts were the same. All the sales numbers, costs, and inventory figures were the same. But the sections were formatted differently, the tables were set up differently. They weren’t the same document.

This generation of variant texts is exactly what happens in Jorge Luis Borges story, the Library of Babel. The library is a vast network of honeycombed cells, filled with books containing all the world’s recorded knowledge, along with an infinite number of variations. In fact, every possible combination of every letter and word, exists somewhere within the library’s structure.

Borges never says how the infinite texts are generated, just that their nature causes deep problems for people who want answers.

For librarians searching for the “truth” on any topic, these variations soon cancel each other out.

Its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite)-that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All-the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.

When Borges published this in 1941, it was hyperbole. Yes the academic pursuit of knowledge seemed to be producing contradictory texts in approximately equal proportions. But it wasn’t until Google Gemini came along long that we could produce the lost books of Tacitus with the simple press of a button.

You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have something to live for. Ted Turner.

There’s a problem with “reaching for the stars” that self-help brokers won’t tell you. Beyond the star you’re reaching for, there’s always another star.

It’s not that goals are bad. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi noted that having a clear goal state is one of the essential components of Flow– the state of mind where you get caught up in an experience and lose track of time.

But applying goals to your life as a whole can backfire very fast. Having a goal for the year, or even for the fiscal quarter, can set you up for fear, hesitation, and failure. For instance, if your goal for the year is to sell 2x more widgets than last year, but the invention of the snarfblat dramatically undercuts demand for widgets, then you are headed for failure, no matter how hard you work on your goal.

According to neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff, large-scale personal goals require controlled, linear outcomes to succeed. But everyday life is anything but linear. In her book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World Le Cunff argues that curiosity combined with a steady routine of small trial-and-error experiments will get you closer to satisfaction and accomplishment faster than any goal.

The repeated trials of your pact provide you with more reliable information to make decisions. Furthermore, each iteration is likely to be more successful, fueling growth in its own right regardless of whether you opt to extend your pact beyond its initial period.

In the end you might discover that you’re just not interested in stars after all. You’d rather nurture small plants and help things grow. Getting your hands dirty is where it’s at. And a series of tiny experiments will get you there faster than “setting goals beyond your reach.”

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The Garden and the Mind Anne-Laure Le Cunff and shaping your interior garden

This week I found something that put it all together for me.

Luke, a commenter on the GTD website writes:

It’s not a parking lot for unprocessed stuff; never take something from your IN basket and slap it on this list…If you do you’ll get allergic to this list really fast, then you’ll stop reviewing it, then the domino effect that ends with falling off the GTD wagon begins. Luke on gettingthingsdone.com.

In order for something to qualify as a “Someday/Maybe” it needs to be actionable. Just not today.

My own horrendous Someday/Maybe pile is a collection of links and bookmarks such as “this comic strip is funny” or “I like these songs.” It’s all stuff that feels resonant, that stirs something inside me. But it needs to be processed…either that or stuffed in a reference folder somewhere.

For example “I like this comic strip” could become “print this out and frame it,” or “send this comic strip to Steve.” This way, when you do the Someday/Maybe part of your weekly review, you can easily say, ah, I can do that on Monday.

Anything else, anything that’s just an idea and not an action, goes in a big DOOM pile called “Reference.”

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When you can’t decide, make a list

Are the two in any way connected? Is going head-to-head with a robot collaborator leaving me feeling weary and hopeless at the end of each day?

Possibly. A study titled “When AI Leads to Brain Fry” in the Harvard Business Review does seem to show that certain ways of using AI are driving employees into cognitive overload and decision fatigue.

A finance director wrote: “I had been back and forth with AI reframing ideas, synthesizing data, forming and organizing the flow of pillars and work…I couldn’t even comprehend…if what I had created even made sense…just couldn’t do anything else and had to revisit the next day when I could think.”

In my case I had a document that I wanted Claude to review for overlap with existing documents. The AI returned a two-page philosophical discourse on “the two spines problem.” It suggested I use option B. When I asked for clarification, it found new information and reversed its recommendation. Both bits had parts of the answer I needed, but it was exhausting teasing it out.

That alone doesn’t seem to explain the deep moral weariness that slams me at the end of each workday. Unless—it does.