Reconsidering the Role of AI: Valuing Process Over Output

Notes are evidence that thinking happened — but they are not the thinking itself. If you only get the outcome (i.e., a set of notes and connections between them), you haven’t learned

The point of personal knowledge management isn’t capturing and managing information; it’s living better by thinking better. Notes are a medium for thinking, not its replacement. (Another way to put it: the person with the most notes doesn’t “win” at the end.)

Like many other people, I’m grappling with how to best use AI.

In both, many people value the output (product) more highly than the process of getting to the output. That’s a mistake. Often, the process has as much (and in the case of PKM, more) value than the final product. Let’s examine how this applies to each discipline.

The point of personal knowledge management isn’t capturing and managing information; it... See more

We’re far from replacing humans for many tasks now being delegated to large language models. That doesn’t mean LLMs can’t be helpful; it just means they’re being used wrong. The key is applying them to tasks they’re well-suited to, such as analyzing, synthesizing, and manipulating data, and not for making important decisions on behalf of people.

An ... See more