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It was my brother, the lawyer, who pointed out that what I had experienced sounded a lot like a coerced confession. “I read enough transcripts of bad interrogations in law school to understand that anyone can be convinced that they have a very narrow set of terrible options,” he said. When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed.

“If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.” And when you haven’t done anything wrong, the risk of cooperating feels minimal, he added. An innocent person thinks everything will get sorted out. It also mattered that I was kept on the phone for so long. People start to break down cognitively after a few hours of interrogation. “At that point, they’re not thinking straight. They feel the need to put an end to the situation at all costs,” Kassin said.

classics scholar Craig Williams writes that Romans didn’t use terms like “just friends” or “more than friends” to refer to spouses because “the implicit devaluation of friendly as opposed to romantic or married love would have struck most Romans as perverse.” At that time, he asks, “what could be more than friendship?”

Imagine being able to see through walls, or to understand the strength of radio waves emanating from you Wi-Fi router. You'll be able to see which piece of furniture or wall is blocking the signal from getting a reliable connection to that one device in your home constantly getting disconnected.

Imagine never losing your keys or wallet ever again. Like a hint in a video game, the headset will simply highlight its exact location in the house for you through the walls.

Not many people realize Vision Pro’s visual augmentation in passthrough mode is actually a step backward from human vision in many respects. Perhaps that’s part of the reason so many people greet this technology as dystopian? After all, who wants to volunteer to have degraded eyes on the real world? Even for floating windows or the promise of cool virtual worlds to visit, that’s a tall order

Android phones still don’t have this effect. It’s not because they don’t have high-enough frame rates or low-enough latency for touch input. It’s just that the math is off for putting everything together to create the illusion of direct manipulation. The physics aren’t quite right. It’s no longer about hardware specs (although that was a factor working against Android in the early years). It’s about craftsmanship

Strong technologies capture the imaginations of technology enthusiasts. That is why many important technologies start out as weekend hobbies. Enthusiasts vote with their time, and, unlike most of the business world, have long-term horizons. They build from first principles, making full use of the available resources to design technologies as they ought to exist.

Thinking in dialogue is easier and more entertaining than struggling with feelings, letters, grammar and style all by ourselves. Using AI as a writing dialogue partner, ChatGPT can become a catalyst for clarifying what we want to say. Even if it is wrong.6 Sometimes we need to hear what’s wrong to understand what’s right.

Seeing in clear text what is wrong or, at least, what we don’t mean can help us set our minds straight about what we really mean. If you get stuck, you can also simply let it ask you questions. If you don’t know how to improve, you can tell it to be evil in its critique of your writing

Just compare usage with AI to how we dealt with similar issues before AI. Discussing our writing with others is a general practice and regarded as universally helpful; honest writers honor and credit their discussion partners We already use spell checkers and grammar tools It’s common practice to use human editors for substantial or minor copy editing of our public writing Clearly, using dictionaries and thesauri to find the right expression is not a crime

Using AI in the editor replaces thinking. Using AI in dialogue increases thinking. Now, how can connect the editor and the chat window without making a mess? Is there a way to keep human and artificial text apart?

It seems like you almost have to say, "Look, you can't have rules about these general patterns of masculine and feminine without dishonoring those who don't fit those binaries." I think that's completely wrong. I think in the real world, we're perfectly capable of saying, "Yeah, this is the norm. This is how things usually are. There are some people who's not like that, and we can equally respect each other."

And I'll tell you that my gay friends, but also my trans friends, they're not asking me to be less masculine. They're asking me to respect them for who they are. And they'll do the same in return to me. And so in the real world, we don't live in these zero-sum games and we don't — and we refuse this admonition that we can't think two thoughts at once.

preserving the book’s spirit was paramount. “I was trying to be, as a filmmaker, as invisible as possible. I tried my best to keep the poetry of the book, the atmosphere, the colors, the smell, everything that I felt when I read the book. I tried.”

in Herbert’s Dune, computers and artificial intelligence have been banished. Humans try to develop the potential of the human brain, “which is actually the opposite of what we’re trying to do right now,” Villeneuve says.

he worries less about AI “than the fact that we behave like algorithms, as filmmakers. We’re in a very conservative time; creativity is restricted. Everything’s about Wall Street. What will save cinema is freedom and taking risks. And you feel the audience is excited when they see something they haven’t seen before.”

Taken at face value, the phrase tool for thought doesn't have the word 'computer' or 'digital' anywhere in it. It suggests nothing about software systems or interfaces. It's simply meant to refer to tools that help humans think thoughts; potentially new, different, and better kinds of thoughts than we currently think.

Most of the examples I listed above are cultural practices and techniques. They are primary ways of doing; specific ways of thinking and acting that result in greater cognitive abilities. Ones that people pass down from generation to generation through culture. Every one of these also pre-dates digital computers by at least a few hundred years, if not thousands or tens of thousands. Given that framing, it's time to return to the question of how computation, software objects, and note-taking apps fit into this narrative.

If you look around at the commonly cited “major thinkers” in this space, you get a list of computer programmers: Kenneth Iverson, J.C.R. Licklider, Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Bob Taylor, Douglas Englebart, Seymour Papert, Bret Victor, and Howard Rheingold, among others.

This is relevant because it means these men share a lot of the same beliefs, values, and context. They know the same sorts of people, learned the same historical stories in school and were taught to see the world in particular kinds of ways. Most of them worked together, or are at most one personal connection away from the next. Tools for thought is a community scene as much as it's a concept. This gives tools for thought a distinctly computer-oriented, male, American, middle-class flavour. The term has always been used in relation to a dream that is deeply intertwined with digital machines, white-collar knowledge work, and bold American optimism.

Englebart was specifically concerned with our ability to deal with complex problems, rather than simply “amplifying intelligence.” Being able to win a chess match is perceived as intelligent, but it isn't helping us tackle systemic racism or inequality. Englebart argued we should instead focus on “augmenting human intellect” in ways that help us find solutions to wicked problems. While he painted visions of how computers could facilitate this, he also pointed to organisational structures, system dynamics, and effective training as part of this puzzle.

There is a rich literature of research and insight into how we might expand human thought that sometimes feels entirely detached from the history we just covered. Cognitive scientists and philosophers have been tackling questions about the relationship between cognition, our tools, and our physical environments for centuries. Well before microprocessors and hypertext showed up. Oddly, they're rarely cited by the computer scientists. This alternate intellectual lineage is still asking the question “how can we develop better tools for thinking?” But they don't presume the answer revolves around computers.

Proponents of embodied cognition argue that our perceptions, concepts, and cognitive processes are shaped by the physical structures of our body and the sensory experiences it provides, and that cognition cannot be fully understood without considering the bodily basis of our experiences.

Philosopher Andy Clark has spent his career exploring how external tools transform and expand human cognition. His 2003 book Natural-born Cyborgs argues humans have “always been cyborgs.” Not in the sense of embedding wires into our flesh, but in the sense we enter “into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props, and aids”. Our ability to think with external objects is precisely what makes us intelligent. Clark argues “the mind” isn't simply a set of functions within the brain, but a process that happens between our bodies and the physical environment. Intelligence emerges at the intersection of humans and tools. He expanded on this idea in a follow-on book called Supersizing the Mind. It became known as the extended mind hypothesis. It's the strong version of theories like embodied cognition, situated cognition, and enacted cognition that are all the rage in cognitive science departments.

There's a scramble to make sense of all these new releases and the differences between them. YouTube and Medium explode with DIY guides, walkthrough tours, and comparison videos. The productivity and knowledge management influencer is born.[ giant wall of productivity youtube nonsense ]The strange thing is, many of these guides are only superficially about the application they're presented in. Most are teaching specific cultural techniques

Zettelkasten, spaced repetition, critical thinking.These techniques are only focused on a narrow band of human activity. Specifically, activity that white-collar knowledge workers engage in.I previously suggested we should rename TFT to CMFT (computational mediums for thought), but that doesn't go far enough. If we're being honest about our current interpretation of TFT's, we should actually rename it to CMFWCKW – computational mediums for white-collar knowledge work.

By now it should be clear that this question of developing better tools for thought can and should cover a much wider scope than developing novel note-taking software.

I do think there's a meaningful distinction between tools and mediums: Mediums are a means of communicating a thought or expressing an idea. Tools are a means of working in a medium. Tools enable specific tasks and workflows within a medium. Cameras are a tool that let people express ideas through photography. Blogs are a tool that lets people express ideas through written language. JavaScript is a tool that let people express ideas through programming. Tools and mediums require each other. This makes lines between them fuzzy.