• by Cat Hicks

  • source https://www.fightforthehuman.com/cognitive-helmets-for-the-ai-bicycle-part-1/

  • … designed world can be bad for us

  • every psychologist knows all fears point to something real

  • … technology is real and can be traumatizing.

  • … stressors in technology is real and can be traumatizing.

  • … solution, is on the level of collective human behavior and our sociotechnical structures …

  • … bad … recipient of one-way information …

  • … protect your mind when you’re a problem-solving-focused knowledge worker …

  • … job that requires lifelong

    • learning and wrestling with change, edge cases …
    • … job default is unpredictability and volatility.
  • Regardless of where you fall on agreeing or disagreeing with AI tools, you’re going to encounter them.

  • … psychologist … my responsibility to work more on this gap between what we’re watching AI do and what we’re worrying about for our minds.

  • … need to deal with abstraction and automation isn’t going away.

  • … work out our vision for changing workflows without

    • damaging your hard-won problem-solving skills,
    • cutting yourself off from learning opportunities,
    • mitigating critical thinking.
  • … metacognition as understanding your own mind at work.

  • creativity-stifling traps …

    • narrowing down on a solution too early,
    • accepting solutions without properly validating them.
  • Metacognition about these tools …

    • making your not-AI time more valuable: …
      • pre-plan for rote tasks may end up having more time for their own creativity and exploration.
  • … we’re often wrong about what actually helps us learn better.

  • …becoming truly effective as a learner entails

    • functional architecture
    • activities and techniques
    • monitor the state of one’s learning
    • understanding certain biases
  • … confuse the experience of effort with actual learning.

  • … works better than cramming is spacing,

  • … AI agent is that it could push you into a massing strategy …

  • … ways to build back the spacing effect?

    • Return to the same problem …

    • Avoid … parallel tasks …

    • … align breaks with natural workflow phases like changing from the generation to the evaluation of code.

    • … specific times in your job when you feel pressure to cram?

  • … pretesting.

    • … prompt ourselves to try to generate an answer for something we don’t know before we go try to learn it, we learn better.
      • … direct our attention to where the gaps are in our previous knowledge.
  • you learn best by doing.

  • … our minds love the generation effect:

    • we encode information better when we produce it,
      • rather than passively consume it.
  • … minds like being creative and generative.

    • They like to do things.
  • How do we center on what we’re actively generating ourselves?

    • … quick pre-testing. … quick sketch or guessing at the solution. … primed your mind to learn more when you read through a machine-generated solution.
    • … building in novel skill areas, … even if you’ll eventually move into automating it in your daily workflow.
  • Generating

    • … slow down.
    • explanations,
    • documentation,
    • and other ways of explaining your thinking
    • also count.
      • … era where you are writing less code … creative energy to a different domain …
  • Predict the performance of your AI … before it completes a task, and evaluate it afterward.

  • … researchers argue that interventions to help people learn better metacognitive strategies have one of the biggest effect sizes of any achievement-oriented intervention.

  • The Metacognitive Demands and Opportunities of Generative AI