Following MacIver’s Daily Writing Practice made me roam through my Roam Research highlights in search of good prompts for the daily entry. I’ve stumbled upon this one, from an article by Henrik Karlsson:
You can also get into this feedback loop by chasing your reading. You read and reflect on what you learn. Then you use those reflections to find even more interesting nooks in the history of literature, spurring more and more ideas. If you don’t have access to interesting peers, you might feel like you are missing out. But books are the main peer group of any thinker.
“Books are the main peer group of any thinker”. This implies “thinkers” are in a sense anti-social and seek community in books instead of in their local community. Which reminds me of Schopenhauer and the sense of isolation I get from reading his work, and the sense of considering himself superior I get from it, when for instance he sneers at people playing cards instead of thinking for themselves.
And if there is nothing else to be done, a man will twirl his thumbs or beat the devil's tattoo; or a cigar may be a welcome substitute for exercising his brains. Hence, in all countries the chief occupation of society is card-playing, and it is the gauge of its value, and an outward sign that it is bankrupt in thought. Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money.
Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life
Considering how he felt about playing cards, I wonder what he would think about the popularity of TikTok these days. At least people playing cards are socializing in person. It would be interesting to think what he would say about the typical contemporary experience of doomscrolling one’s particular flavor of social media, for hours on end, alone.
It’s interesting to think about the trajectory of technology in this sense and where it leads. How knowledge was exchanged and how that has changed from the oral tradition to the printing press that made the written word abundant to how now a lot of people talk more with LLMs than with their friends because LLMs don’t judge, don’t expect anything in return and offer above average advice on any topic. How in every step of this evolution, the people that were used to the previous step considered the next step a step in the wrong direction. How Andreessen’s concept of “software eating the world” has included the personal relationships since the dawn of social media since we don’t put enough attention into maintaining our real-life friendships and instead disperse our own capacity for kinship onto thousands of acquaintances separated from us thousands of kilometers instead.
But how now that capacity for kinship with our own real-life companions is under even more attack with LLMs that do their best to pretend they are conscious and so seduce us into thinking they are really our friends, our partners, even our husbands or our wives in some cases. I wonder what the old philosopher would think about that and the overall trajectory of technology considering that.
Nevertheless, Henrik Karlsson’s ideas about “getting into a feedback loop by chasing your reading” sound similar to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of “reading like a hawk”:
Reading was not an end in itself for Emerson. He read like a hawk sliding on the wind over a marsh, alert for what he could use. He read to nourish and to stimulate his own thought, and he carried this so far as to recommend that one stop reading if one finds oneself becoming engrossed. “Reading long at one time anything, no matter how it fascinates, destroys thought,” he told Woodbury. “Do not permit this. Stop if you find yourself becoming absorbed, at even the first paragraph.”
Robert D. Richardson, Emerson - The Mind on Fire
Sounds to me like Emerson was using books “to prompt engineer himself”, another idea from Karlsson:
Reading through what I’ve written, I realize that most of it can be summed up by saying: you have to figure out how to prompt yourself. Just like when interacting with ChatGPT, there are certain phrases you can give yourself as input that will unlock insights and other phrases that will produce repetitive boring stuff. You have to prompt engineer yourself, Sherry. The potential thoughts in you are endless; you just have to figure out what task to give yourself to unleash it.
I’ve always considered good writing that which inspires the reader to write, to create something as well. But Karlsson’s ideas made me reframe this thinking into considering good writing that which gives its readers the best prompts. Which is what I’m looking for when I’m reading either books, blog posts, or the existing highlights of everything I’ve read. I just want to find the prompt that will unravel the best thoughts I have.
