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What are the central biases of today’s digital tools? There are many, but I see three big ones that have a huge impact on our cognition. First, they allow for prodigious external memory: smartphones, hard drives, cameras, and sensors routinely record more information than any tool before them. We’re shifting from a stance of rarely recording our

Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think

Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us

Carl Hendrick carlhendrick.substack.com

Tyler Cowen: What I Read

Ryan McClafferty theatlantic.com

“First, the physical machinery necessary to participate in information and cultural production is almost universally distributed in the population of the advanced economies,” he writes. “Second, the primary raw materials in the information economy, unlike the physical economy, are [freely available] public goods—existing information, knowledge, and

Nicholas Carr • The Big Switch

Notice, this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention.

Cal Newport • Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

But the choice of a main programming language is the most important signaling behavior that a technology company can engage in. Tell me that you program in Java, and I believe you to be either serious or boring. In Ruby, and you are interested in building things quickly. In Clojure, and I think you are smart but wonder if you ship. In Python, and I... See more

PAUL FORD • Paul Ford: What Is Code? | Bloomberg

And at the same time, I think that the group of people who, by luck or by temperament, proved very, very good at using the internet, to some degree, distracts from the many, many, many people for whom the internet is fundamentally a distraction machine, or for whom the internet is creating, because of what we built on it. You know, shorter... See more

Ezra Klein • Opinion | We Know Shockingly Little About What Makes Humanity Prosper

The demise of writing matters, because writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. This is as true for professionals as it is for students... If reading and writing “rewired” the logic engine of the human brain, the decline of reading and writing are unwiring our cognitive superpower at the... See more

The Age of Books and the Age of Brainrot

AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.

The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write... See more