prepare your mind

Today I learned about the Prepare your Mind concept from Sebastian Wallaby, writer of the Infinity Machine (DeepMind story). He was asked by Tim Ferriss, what would he put on a billboard. He said, “prepare your mind”.

“Chance favors the prepared mind.” If you’re ready for things, you can make the most of the opportunity that comes your way. And the amazing thing about this saying is that it’s come up randomly in different contexts in different books I’ve done.

And the other reason, last thing I would put on the billboard, prepare your mind, is that for the age of Artificial Intelligence, this is what we need to hear and this is a serious point, right? The risk with large language models is that we just get lazy, and whenever we need to know something, we just get it to tell us what to think. That is not the route to happiness or satisfaction or anything.

We need to continue to do the hard work of preparing our minds, because that’s what makes us people. I think therefore, I am. And so I think, prepare your mind, is entering a time when it becomes a more important slogan than ever.

Asked by Tim Ferriss, how would he prepare his mind he said:

The point of offloading something should be, you get to focus your mental energy more on the other stuff that you really get satisfaction and meaning from. And so for me, what that means is that I’m very happy to use large language models to learn about the scientific output of somebody I’m going to interview next week.

And you learn a lot from the system, really bootstraps you to learn faster. So that’s helping me to think more, not to think less. It’s cutting out the time it would take me to go find all the papers by myself and then labor through them. I

What I would never do is get the AI to write, because frankly, it’s not very good at long form. In fact, it really sucks. It’s fine for writing an email, although I don’t do that either, because I like writing, but it really is. I’ve tried it once. It’s terrible for anything longer than about 800 words.

But even if it could do it, I don’t think I would ever outsource that, because that’s me. This is what I do. This is the thinking process. I think through my writing. I come to understand what I understand and think what I think and believe what I believe through writing, and I’m not going to give that up.

Which asks us, what areas am I outsourcing that give me joy and satisfaction. What areas do I want to prepare my mind on. This question only becomes more relevant as AI does more things really well…