Substrate

Substrate

A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.

reflections updated

Eyes on the prize

Let it be clear to you that the peace of green fields can always be yours, in this, that, or any other spot; and that nothing is any different here from what it would be either up in the hills, or down by the sea, or wherever else you will. You will find the same thought in Plato, where he speaks of living within the city walls ‘as though milking his flocks in a mountain sheepfold’.

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notes updated

Actually, it isn't what it is

My fascination with ambiguity goes back beyond even my doctoral thesis, although it was only between 2016 and this year (2026) that I had a dedicated blog on the topic.

Whether or not we choose to admit it, most of life is ambiguous. The main way this comes up for us as social animals is intra- and inter-personal communication: what does that mean. We're constantly second-guessing ourselves and others, searching for ever-better heuristics to help understand the world.

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notes

Need for cognition

Writing in The Atlantic, David Brooks discusses how, as a technology, AI is used differently depending on predispositions:

The general pattern that the research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks. AI also seems to shift workers’ expectations, and their boss’s expectations, about how much they should accomplish in a day. Every hour feels more crowded, but also more frazzled. The ActivTrak researchers found that the time people spent on focused, uninterrupted work fell by 9 percent. There’s even a name for this mental state: “AI brain fry.”

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notes updated

Toward a spectrum of AI trust

What I like about this post is that it brings a bit of nuance to proceedings.

Not every audience group or individual user will care about the provenance of the content they’re consuming. It also depends on a case-by-case basis; sometimes AI-assistance changes everything versus other times, it barely registers.

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