Harshini Madhan

Socrates once said: The unexamined life is not worth living. But the overexamined life is not worth living either. The Watts trap: “A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So they lose touch with reality and live in a world of illusions.”

But in a ​recent podcast appearance​, James Mariott, a critic and columnist for The Times of London ,summarized a hypothesis that has been gaining traction: as we switch our information consumption from print to digital devices, our ability to think deeply degrades.

Technical skill is your chosen craft. Product thinking is knowing what’s worth doing. Project execution is making sure it happens. People skills are how you work with and influence others.

Thus, Digital Social Reading serves as a timely defense (and instruction manual for the academic study) of joyfully reading fiction in one’s free time: “more than worrying about saving literature,” Pianzola writes, “I think it is important to grant people the right to be saved by the stories they need.”

And maybe prompt engineering isn’t the invention of the AI age at all. It may be a return to something Confucius already intuited: that the form of a question is not overlooked but carries within it the power to direct thought, constrain possibility, and prescribe a certain horizon of answers.

All this raises a provocative question: when we spend hours refining prompts, correcting outputs, and coaxing ChatGPT to deliver our ideal responses, does that make us the teachers of value? Specifically our moral values?

Confucius believed that language does not merely reflect society but manifests it. Words commit us to courses of action; misnaming distorts not only what we say but also what we do. This is why people in his time, and often in China still, are careful with speech in a way that contrasts with Western free expression.

about Confucius: he often adjusted his answers depending on who was asking

I have more exciting ideas when I don’t feel shame about what excites me, when I allow myself to be stupid and naive and boring. I try not to judge myself in the act of giving birth to ideas.