Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.
In this week's newsletter, we'll explore what happens when AI breaks the link between the quality of the work and the competence of the person who produced it, why writing is still a miraculous technology, a philosophy professor's clever workaround for AI in the classroom, a better way to delegate, how your brain finds evidence for whatever you already believe, and the simplest way to protect your time from your own reflexive "yes."
Plus, a mix of fun finds, inspiring quotes, and a "newspaper test" question to help guide your decision making.
As always, I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here!
My Favorite Find:
I read hundreds of blogs and dozens of newsletters every week, and I always find more ideas than I can share. The one that I'm still sitting with is this essay about what instantaneous "expertise" really does to work:
In any previous era, the quality of a piece of work was a more or less reliable signal of the competence of the person who produced it. A novice essay read like a novice essay; novice code crashed in novice ways. AI has severed that relationship. A novice now produces work that does not betray the novice, because the competence the work reflects is not the novice’s competence at all. It is the system’s. The person, in the transaction, becomes a kind of conduit, capable of routing the output to a recipient and incapable of evaluating it on the way through.
The skills of producing work and judging it were deliberately distinct, but accomplishing the work itself used to teach the judgment. The first skill now belongs, in large part, to the machines. The second still belongs to us, though fewer are bothering to acquire or utilize it.
The slowness was not a tax on the real work; the slowness was the real work. It was how the work got good, and how the people producing the work got good, and how the firm whose name was on the work could promise the client that what they were buying was a particular kind of thing rather than a generic one.
A Few More Things Worth Your Time:
Writing is a miraculous technology:
You make tiny improvements, over and over. It may be a word or phrase you throw out and replace with a better; it may be an entire book. Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have thrown the first draft of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" into the fire. You write down your confusions, your discomforts, your exceptions, your crazy ideas. And slowly, you agglomerate improvement. You can keep improving for years.
This simple AI prompt is a question you should ask every time you delegate something to a "real" team member, too:
Can you repeat back to me the outcome that I am expecting?
I really love this new kind of essay assignment from a philosophy professor:
In an attempt to reimagine the essay assignment, I asked my students if they would want to write an essay together, with me. My thought was that I would take the place of AI. We’d be in a continuous conversation, bouncing ideas off one another, seeing our theory grow sentence by sentence. Students would have to properly engage in every class to understand where the essay was going. And they’d constantly have to defend their own writing, not just to me but to their fellow students.
They might still use AI, but I hoped it would be sufficiently inconvenient to do so. At the very least, they’d have to participate in class, communicate and defend their contributions, and collaborate with me and their fellow students to revise their writing.
I saw the classroom transformed into a self-organizing collaborative space… Stop having your students write for you, and have them write with you.
Whatever the Thinker Thinks, the Prover Proves:
Your mind has two parts: a Thinker that creates beliefs and a Prover that finds evidence to support them. If you think the world is hostile, your Prover will find endless proof. If you think people are kind, your Prover finds that too. This is why people with opposite beliefs both feel completely certain — their Provers are working perfectly. Understanding this mechanism is the first step to freedom.
For one week, assume the world is conspiring to help you. Notice how your Prover finds evidence for this belief.
- Identify a strong opinion you hold. Spend 15 minutes deliberately arguing the opposite position to yourself, as convincingly as possible.
- Notice when you say “is” statements (”He is lazy,” “That is wrong”). Rephrase them: “He seems lazy to me” or “I perceive that as wrong.” Feel how this loosens your certainty.
- Pick someone whose worldview differs radically from yours. Instead of dismissing them, try to understand the reality tunnel that makes their beliefs make sense to them.
My grandkids are in town, so I really want to try this idea:
For my Dad's birthday, I took a cute picture of my almost 2-year-old son and my dad in a canoe together, and had AI convert it into a coloring page. I started with ChatGPT (free account) to engineer the prompt, then moved over to Gemini to use Nano Banana for image generation to create the coloring page.
After a couple of back-and-forth iterations, I had something perfect. Simple bold lines, but the faces were still recognizable! Printed it out and had my toddler go to town on it with his crayons. My dad loved the simple gift, and my whole family was impressed with the result, saying, ‘Wait, how did you do that?’ A very cute way for little ones to give special gifts to grandparents and family members.
Need more time to work on what matters? Jettison your Reflexive Yes:
- Define your current priorities. Before setting boundaries with other people, get clear on what actually matters to you right now. This will make it much easier to recognize which requests genuinely align with them and which ones just consume your energy.
- Pause before responding. Create a small gap between the request and your answer instead of responding automatically. Even a simple “let me check and get back to you” gives you space to decide what to take on with intention.
- Practice saying no briefly. You don’t need a long explanation or a perfectly crafted excuse in order to protect your time. Short, honest responses are often enough, and the discomfort tends to shrink the more you practice.
- Stop managing other people’s reactions. Boundaries are not about managing how others feel, and someone feeling disappointed doesn’t mean you made the wrong decision.
This Week's Question:
Will your next big decision pass The Newspaper Test?
When making a decision, ask yourself whether you'd be comfortable with the decision being published on the front page of your local newspaper. Would you be happy to have your neighbors, family, friends, and children read about the decision you made?
Random Things for Smart People
- Cosmos is a visual search engine like Pinterest, except it’s ad‑free
- Tuesday Night Movie Night is a weekly newsletter with a hand-picked list of fun movies to watch.
- What can a person learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for life?
- Searching your inbox for the word “unsubscribe” will therefore turn up a list of every company that’s sending you bulk mail. (You can also try searching for other terms like “opt out” or “manage your preferences.”) Click on the sender’s message, scroll to the bottom, and click the unsubscribe link to opt out.
- Mazeball is a relaxing screen-saver-ish "game" that's great on a big screen.
Words of Wisdom
It’s possible that a not-so-smart person who can communicate well can do much better than a super-smart person who can’t communicate well. That is good news because it is much easier to improve your communication skills than your intelligence. – Kevin Kelly
Really pay attention to your attention. Where is it? What's it doing? How often in the day do you actually have time when your attention is not being taken up by somebody else or by something else? – Brian Eno
Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more. – Louis L'Amour
Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active — of those who can correct their mistakes and put them right. – Ingvar Kamprad
Men are so glad to fight for religion and so reluctant to live according to its precepts. – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg