Thoughts on thinking

People realize this at various points in their life, and some not at all.

In terms the author might accept, the metaphor of the stoic archer comes to mind. Focusing on the action, not the target is what relieves one of the disappointment of outcome. In this cast, the action is writing while the target is having better thoughts.

Much of our life is governed by the success at which we hit our targets, but why do that to oneself? We have a choice in how we approach the world, and setting our intentions toward action and away from targets is a subtle yet profound shift.

A clearer example might be someone who wants to make a friend. Let's imagine they're at a party and they go in with the intention of making a friend, they're setting themselves up for failure. They have relatively little control over that outcome. However, if they go in with the intention of showing up authentically - something people tend to appreciate, and something they have full control over - the changes of them succeeding increase dramatically.

Choosing one's goals - primarily grounded in action - is an under-appreciated perspective.

Almost. Similar. I still make things because sometimes what I find online (and what I can generate from AI) isn't "good enough" and I think I can do better. Even when there's something similar that I can reuse, I still make things to develop my skills for further occasions when there isn't.

For example, somebody always needs a slightly different JavaScript front-end or CRM, even though there must be hundreds (thousands? tens-of-thousands?) by now. There are many programming languages, UI libraries, operating systems, etc. and some have no real advantages, but many do and consequently have a small but dedicated user group. As a PhD student, I learn a lot about my field only to make a small contribution*, but chains of small contributions lead to breakthroughs.

The outlook on creative works is even more optimistic, because there will probably never be enough due to desensitization. People watch new movies and listen to new songs not because they're better but because they're different. AI is especially bad at creative writing and artwork, probably because it fundamentally generates "average"; when AI art is good, it's because the human author gave it a creative prompt, and when AI art is really good, it's because the human author manually edited it post-generation. (I also suspect that when AI gets creative, people will become even more creative to compensate, like how I suspect today we have more movies that defy tropes and more video games with unique mechanics; but there's probably a limit, because something can only be so creative before it's random and/or uninteresting.)

Maybe one day AI can automate production-quality software development, PhD-level research, and human-level creativity. But IME today's (at least publicly-facing) models really lack these abilities. I don't worry about when AI is powerful enough to produce high-quality outputs (without specific high-quality prompts), because assuming it doesn't lead to an apocalypse or dystopia, I believe the advantages are so great, the loss of human uniqueness won't matter anymore.

* Described in https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

I bring up my studies because what the author is talking about strikes me as not having been ambitious enough in his thinking. If you prompt current LLMs with your idea and find the generated arguments and reasoning satisfactory, then you aren't really being rigorous or you're not having big enough ideas.

I say this confidently because my studies showed me not only the methods in finding and contrasting evidence around any given issue, but also how much more there is to learn about the universe. So, if you're being rigorous enough to look at implications of your theories, finding datapoints that speak to your conclusions and find that your question has been answered, then your idea is too small for what the state of knowledge is in 2025.