Comment by preston-kwei 9 hours ago
The “lump of cognition” framing misses something important. it’s not about how much thinking we do, but which thinking we stop doing. A lot of judgment, ownership, and intuition comes from boring or repetitive work, and outsourcing that isn’t free. Lowering the cost of producing words clearly isn’t the same as increasing the amount of actual thought.
I'd argue that choosing words is a key skill because language is one of our tools for examining ideas and linking together parts of our brains in new ways.
Even just writing notes you'll never refer to again, you're making yourself codify vaguer ideas or impressions, test assumptions, and then compress the concept for later. It's an new external information channel between different regions of your head which seems to provide value.
Looking at the words that get produced at this lowered cost, and observing how satisfactory they apparently are to most people (and observing the simplicity of the heuristics people use to try to root out "cheap" words), has been quite instructive (and depressing).
I'm grateful that I spent a significant part of my life forced to solve problems and forced to struggle to produce the right words. In hindsight I know that that's where all the learning was. If I'd had a shortcut machine when I was young I'd have used it all the time, learned much less, and grown up dependent on it.