5 Things I Read This Week
Week 09/20 - 09/26
Published Sep 29 · 3 min readTable of Contents
- 1. Reading strengthens brain health, lowers dementia risk
- 2. How we’ll fight the platform war against Big AI by Anil Dash
- 3. The Magic of Framing the Message by Judd Antin
- 4. All Those Metrics Bleed Your Obsessions by Aaron Ross Powell
- 5. A writing professor’s new task in the age of AI: Teaching students when to struggle by Kristi Girdharry
1. Reading strengthens brain health, lowers dementia risk
I’m a strong proponent of reading. I think everyone should be reading at least 15 minutes a day, whether it’s comic books, graphic novels, epic fantasy, literary fiction, or even non-fiction. If you need to be convinced to read, let this be it.
2. How we’ll fight the platform war against Big AI by Anil Dash
In an ideal world we can just delete the existence of generative AI. But this is not an ideal world and genAI is not going to put itself back in the bag, so the next best thing is to make sure Big AI and these frontier labs cannot dictate nor monopolize AI tech.
3. The Magic of Framing the Message by Judd Antin
Why and how the secret to influence is framing the message. Interestingly, there’s a bit about the “rule of threes” that recently has been dubbed as one (of many) sign of AI writing—but it could really just be that the rule of threes work so well and is used so widely that AI is bound to have this in its training data. (Yes, I love my em-dashes. No, this was not written by AI.)
4. All Those Metrics Bleed Your Obsessions by Aaron Ross Powell
This is sort of an overview (a reframing?) of what content on the internet has evolved to over the years as metrics and observability data became more available to users. Most of us probably already know most of what’s written here, but it bears repeating that optimizing your numbers can and will eventually make your content bland and your brand will lose its uniqueness. For most of us trying to make a living off of making content, what’s really important is to make sure our content is still representative of what we care or obsess about. But the internet is infinitely more fun if we just authentically make content because we want it to exist.
5. A writing professor’s new task in the age of AI: Teaching students when to struggle by Kristi Girdharry
This is what learning looks like in the age of AI.
There are a number of studies about the effects of AI with regards to our thinking, and most point to eventual cognitive decline due to overreliance and the fact that we don’t actually learn anything by asking an AI chatbot to find the answers for us.
Learning in the age of AI: there is an added overhead of discerning whether we are “shortcutting” our own thinking, and it is up to us as individuals and our education system to adjust our modes and techniques of learning to make sure we don’t regress.