How To Think Better in the Age of AI (From the Stoics)
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. So people are talking about everything that AI is going to replace. And it is true that these technologies are going to make a lot of kinds of expertise. expertise obsolete. But I would argue that this incredibly powerful and groundbreaking technology, what it actually does is make thinking even more important.
You're gonna have to be able to interpret what AI spits back at you. You're gonna need to be able to craft insightful, intelligent queries to be able to get what you want out of it. And you're also gonna need the wisdom and the experience to be able to spot nonsense and bullshit, to be able to know when it's Hallucinating when it's going in the wrong direction. You could say that the irony of AI, this cutting-edge technology, is that it actually makes some really old stuff incredibly relevant again.
In short, we're talking about how to be a discerning critical thinker. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode: some timeless lessons from the ancients to make you a better thinker, to help you adapt and make the most out of this watershed technological moment that we are in. What all new technologies, all changes, all new situations demand is that we do something that Aristotle talked about over 2,000 years ago, which is this idea of going to first principles. Don't just accept where things are, what people are saying, what people are thinking, the way they are being done or have been done. You go to first principles.
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