In the age of social media, all we read and see tends to be about “how all is going awesome!”
But academic life quite often gets so busy you can’t even pretend it’s all going just awesome. So let’s talk about being busy and AI today.
Pretty sure those two are familiar guests in everyone’s life right now!
When too Much is Too Much
This should not be a surprise for anyone reading my posts but I’m bit of obsessed over trying to find out how to live a sustained, balanced, even a happy life in academia. At the same time, I have a lot of dreams and aspirations I want to do and achieve: building a business, hitting the gym (a lot), going for walks, reading books, listening to podcasts, writing, shooting videos…oh and I have three kids.
I want to do it all. And, I really do. Curious mind. And in my quest to try to systematise everything toward that, somewhere on the road, I also started to buy in a bit too much to the joys of AI. And I started to go a bit too deep in my (otherwise perfectly fine) joy of doing many things badly.
(NB: I still think many things in academia MUST be done badly, as they don’t deserve your full attention. And if you give them your full attention, you don’t have any time for anything else…)
Slop. Slop. Slop. I like slop. But only in the correct places.
And going a bit too deep in chasing numbers and just getting a lot of output done, my days have been lately looking like checklists…where the checkboxes a bit too often were filled with slop.
And some of those checkboxes were not correct places for slop.
That’s still tolerable. People sometimes don’t even get anything done, so slop could be, in some parallel world, in theory, better than “not done”.
But something worse has been bubbling here…While I got a lot of “things” done, my subjective sense of felt joy has been going down.
Looping back to what kind of academic I want to be, that’s simply and strictly non-acceptable.
Building your own joy in academia is critically important for me. And maybe it should be for you too!
But. if something good can be found in this situation, at least I’m noticing it, thanks to a solid journaling habit… of just sitting down with insane amounts of iced coffee and writing on paper what I really think. And then finding different situations to talk about it. Like this one! See, I’m talking to you! So the question becomes…
Where’s the Joy, Really?
Heh, that’s for you to answer in your life!
For me, the joy has always been in the doing itself: creating things, pouring myself into especially products that are academia-adjacent in nature. Or, sometimes even to funding applications: to writing something that comes from deep within me. With my own words. Creating things that are uniquely Simo. The joy is not in those checkboxes, even though they do give that amazing short-term dopamine boost.
“Now it’s done” is not joy. It’s…just done.
Leaning too much to AI gets things just done. But robbed me of joy.
I see this in my work with students, I see this in the mirror. And it’s time to intervene with violence to what I think is nothing short of…
A Moral Disaster
When we let AI do the thinking we sell as ours, it’s betrayal. It’s not only betrayal of our audiences (readers of academic papers, readers of emails, in social media, anywhere)… It’s also a betrayal of ourselves.
I see this everyday.
“Just use this prompt and (pretend) you edit the output.” But do we really stop and edit? Or, even if we “own” it and agree with it, is the output really the best or most authentic we had to say about any matter?
Or did we just accept the AI’s output as something we, in reality, yes, sure, agree with but just can’t be bothered to think further.
So we sign it off, send it as “ours” and… the poor reader puts in his human hours on this planet whereas you, the creator, just channeled it from the great void of a Large Language Model.
Don’t get me wrong here. I very much love AI tools. I love how LLMs can educate me, and create educational content about even complicated concepts. WAY better than I can or most can. That’s not the point. But we should not pretend the content is ours, even if we sign it.
Because it dulls our brains.
Slowing Down
So it’s time to pull back a bit.
Today’s message is a culmination of some weeks of slowly getting fed up with checkboxes, but totally prompted by stumbling upon the right message at the height of this madness.
This one:
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, by Cal Newport
You don’t need the book though If you like books, it’s a good read. But you can just listen to Prof. Newport’s episode at Tim Ferriss here.
All the main ideas are there, and much more.
I’ll share my main takeaway: The only way to penetrate anything in today’s world where it’s so easy to do mediocre everything, the only way is to be deeply, uniquely you. Everybody can produce mediocre crap with LLMs, in all walks of life. Many influential figures are ringing the warning bells about the death of e.g. publications as a measure of academic contributions for the same reason: Average is so easy. To go deeper, you have to go through the wall of mediocre. To go through anything, you have to be sharp. To be sharp, you cannot outsource your work to an LLM that is by very function average.
Read, take notes, combine notes the way you want them combined. Learn to be creative. Don’t “pretend to be as creative as your favourite LLM can be”.
Sorry, no prescription today. Just wanted to leave you with these words. Selfishly so, as I’m writing these to myself.
Hope you find something in them. If not, you can consider them as warning: You don’t want to end up thinking like this.
Either way, I hope you win.
And you will.