Ran Prieur

February 7.

2026-02-07T19:10:56Z

February 7. One more link on the below subject, a PsyPost article on cognitive debt:

Electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring revealed that participants in the ChatGPT group showed substantially lower brain activation in networks typically engaged during cognitive tasks. The brain was simply doing less work. More alerting was the finding that this "weaker neural connectivity" persisted even when these participants switched to writing essays without AI.

February 6.

2026-02-06T18:00:29Z

February 6. Some links about technology and human cognition. Outsourcing thinking is a Hacker News thread with a linked blog post, a careful analysis of the many ways that our own thinking is compromised, if we let LLMs do our thinking for us.

Wirth's Revenge is another Hacker News thread with a linked blog post, this one about programming, and how exactly AI is good and bad at it. From the post: "LLMs don't do reliable, they don't do repeatable.... You don't ask the LLM to perform a repetitive and precise task, you ask it to build a script that performs that task. Except in rare cases, this script does not itself use LLMs."

An archive of a piece from the Atlantic, The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films

A deleted Reddit comment, with a long thread below it, about the vanishing middle among grade school students, how there are a few who are really smart because their parents got them reading at a young age, and then a whole bunch who are functionally illiterate because their parents parked them in front of screens.

Also from Reddit, an explanation of P = NP. Basically, even though we can't prove it, we know that P does not equal NP, because coming up with a solution is in a different mind space than figuring out whether a solution is correct, and the more complex the problem, the greater the difference. There's a long comment thread including some stuff about teaching, and how someone who is naturally good at something is the worst teacher, because they can't get in the mind space of someone who finds it difficult.

For me, the difference between finding a solution, and recognizing a solution, bears directly on AI images. If I want a good image on a given theme, it's much easier to have an AI generate a bunch of images and pick the best one (the below image was picked out of about 40) than it is to actually draw an image that's that good. So I save a lot of work, but by taking that road, I am failing to gain an understanding of how to draw. Life is short, and I'd rather not know how to draw than not know how to think.

February 3.

2026-02-03T15:30:22Z

February 3. I don't want to write about Trump and just say the obvious stuff. So here's something you don't hear every day: Trump is a scientist, and a good one. For his entire career, not just the presidency, he has been methodically doing experiments on human institutions and the human psyche, to see how they stand up to raw power. The most honest thing he ever said was during a debate with Hillary Clinton, where she accused him of tax evasion and he said something like "It was your job to stop me." That was Trump announcing to the world that he is beyond good and evil. He has the ethos of a fire or flood. ICE is not arresting the most dangerous immigrants, but the most compliant, for the same reason a flood fills in the lowest places first.

If it's our job to stop Trump, how are we doing? Imagine you're a teacher giving out letter grades. Around 30 percent of Americans are currently riding an F. With the long memory of the internet, it's going to be hard for anyone openly supporting the Minneapolis killings to walk it back. (And how weird is it that their names are Good and Pretti?) Europe gets a C for eventually standing up for Greenland. Congress and the Supreme Court might yet squeak out a D. If anyone gets an A it's the people quietly fighting in the courts.

The American media get a flat F. The experiment is how much naked power does it take for them to report it as naked power, and the answer is we don't know yet. Their expectation of normalcy has been Trump's number one ally, the fog of war of the supposedly unthinkable. They swallowed Trump's tale that Greenland is a buffer against Russia, when his actions have made it clear that Europe is his adversary and Russia is his uneasy ally. I used to think propaganda meant lying. Now I know that propaganda is saying stuff that's technically true while never saying the most obvious and important stuff.

Trump's obvious electoral strategy is to stir up enough trouble in the cities to cancel midterm elections. If he tries, the states will turn the tables: We're still having elections, try to stop us. MAGA will have to defend federal power over states rights, further pushing the experiment of how much cognitive dissonance the human brain can tolerate. We don't know yet.

Domestically, Trump doesn't have a lot of cards left to play, which is why he's focusing on Iran, and I appreciate the honesty of his foreign policy. No more iron fist in velvet glove, it's all iron fist, fuck you. If somebody goes nuclear, all bets are off. If not, I expect this to be over soon. Historians will surely say that America caught the same disease as Nazi Germany, but that we resisted it better. I know there are full-on concentration camps right now, but I am confident that Trump's eventual death toll will be less than one percent of Hitler's death toll, unless you count the global poor killed by canceling USAID.

I'm confident because I live in the city. If you don't live in an American city, you might have the idea, from the news, that we're all delicate intelligentsia and gutter trash. What I see are tens of thousands of competent, determined, and cheerful people. Even the homeless are tougher than ICE, give them guns and you'll find out. This feels to me like a very slow mass shooting. The shooter is inside the building, he has the upper hand at the moment, and he's not finished. But he can't win, that's not how this works.