“11 things only left-handers know.”
Ezra Klein on the podcast Blocks with Neal Brennan
Tag: Literacy
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If an em dash fits into one’s writing but they avoid using it out of fear, our AI overlords have won.
I feel like I have to “dumb down” aspects of writing to convince readers that the words they are skimming were, in fact, written by a human.
I Miss Using Em Dashes by Michael Bassili
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Grinding, repetitive friction built something no language model can download into you: muscle memory for excellence.
In his essay (ok, Substack) “The defense against slop and brainrot“, Paul Jun describes a writing exercise lifted from Hunter S. Thompson: He’d grind away through writer’s block, typing The Great Gatzby word-for-word until,
By the final page, something had shifted—I could sense how clean sentences snap into place, the way a pianist’s fingers know where middle C lives without looking.
He continues on this path, comparing cognitive workload to resistance training:
When friction disappears, so does a hidden form of conditioning. Consider what happens when you remove resistance from any training: your muscles atrophy. The same principle applies to mental capabilities. Every hard task you delegate is a rep you didn’t do, a pattern your neurons didn’t carve deeper.
His thesis is that a barely literate country To borrow from Chat: He’s not just writing—he’s dropping knowledge bombs. Highlights:
Anyone can look capable; fewer people can be capable.
When everyone else’s focus fragments, mine compounds.
If you can think well, AI becomes a multiplier. If you can’t, AI just amplifies your mistakes.
The people who skipped the fundamentals become dependent on tools they don’t understand, producing work they can’t evaluate, making decisions based on outputs they can’t verify.
Absolutely worth reading, and maybe transcribing, whenever you’re tempted to take the path of least resistance.