Writing > Reading > Listening > Speaking > Screen Time
The Hierarchy of Thought in an Artificially Intelligent World
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
—Rudyard Kipling
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well. And if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
—George Orwell
Above: Sad, but increasingly true.
Earlier this year I posted a stray thought that became a kind of calling card, emphasizing the importance of thinking, reading, and writing in a world where too many outsource that work to machines.
Screen time has swallowed the hierarchy of human thought. Scroll long enough and you forget what it feels like to think with sharpness, direction, or purpose.
If screen time is the sword, AI is the machine gun, and we are staring down its cold, metallic barrel.
But there is a ladder of cognition—some rungs higher than others—and we ignore it at our peril.
Writing > Reading > Listening > Speaking > Screen Time is the order and formula for preserving the human mind in an age where AI threatens to lobotomize us with our willing consent.
Writing: Ready, Aim, Fire
Writing is not communication, but cognition crystallized. It is the holy discipline of ready, aim, fire. You pause, you sharpen, you commit.
When we write, we not only record thoughts, but also create them. As I’ve long said, the written word is a scalpel that works to trim loose, flabby thinking.
The Chicago Formula for Good, Impactful Work
I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail. —H. L. Mencken
Conversation and speech are loose, improvisational, and messy. That looseness can be valuable, but it is not precision. Writing forces the half-formed hunch into the discipline of an argument.
As a recent Nature study put it, writing transforms neural pathways differently than speech. It goes on:
Writing scientific articles is an integral part of the scientific method and common practice to communicate research findings. However, writing is not only about reporting results; it also provides a tool to uncover new thoughts and ideas. Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner. By writing it down, we can sort years of research, data and analysis into an actual story, thereby identifying our main message and the influence of our work. This is not merely a philosophical observation; it is backed by scientific evidence. For example, handwriting can lead to widespread brain connectivity and has positive effects on learning and memory.
This is a call to continue recognizing the importance of human-generated scientific writing.
The gym is to your body what the blank page is to your mind: a tool to use daily.
How To Write Anything
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. —Ernest Hemingway
Reading: Aim, Ready, Fire
Reading is second best: it’s aim, ready, fire. The target is already chosen; you line yourself up with it. It sharpens intake, even if it doesn’t demand output. Reading fills the reservoir but doesn’t build the pump.
The Need to Read
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. —Oscar Wilde
Yet it is still leagues ahead of podcasts and social feeds. Reading imposes pace and silence. It forces the eyes and the mind to sync in rhythm. It asks us to linger. Even when we skim, reading is at least a dance with the text, not a slide into passive consumption.
Reading disciplines attention. It is a rehearsal for thought.
Listening: Fire, Aim, Ready
Podcasts have become the modern university, but they are mostly fire, aim, ready—immediate, improvisational, unrevised. Listening can be useful, but it is too often noisy (pun very much intended).
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was conflating education with entertainment. That’s exactly what podcasts do.
We listen while we commute, while we cook, while we scroll—multitasking the message into mush. The shot is fired before it’s even aimed, and we’re left trying to backfill the meaning afterward.
Speaking: Ready, Fire, Aim
Speaking is ready, fire, aim. It has a little preparation, then the shot goes off, and aim comes as an afterthought. Words evaporate as soon as they’re uttered. They can be persuasive, yes, but rarely durable.
Say Less, Think More
We have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak. —Diogenes Laertius
We only have the Bible and The Iliad and The Odyssey and The Aeneid because, thankfully, someone thought to write down the words ancient bards and prophets once spoke to crowds in far-off lands.
Spoken thought is smoke; written thought is steel. Civilization is built on texts, not TED talks.
Screen Time: Fire, Fire, Fire
And then there’s the bottom rung: screen time. Endless feeds, algorithmic dopamine, the drip-drip-drip of what I’ve called Dopamine Abuse Resistance Education:
Screens are fire, fire, fire. No ready, no aim. Just endless shooting into the void. Each swipe is unthinking discharge, a little lobotomy in motion, scorching attention into ash by means of algorithms.
Again, what Google Maps did to our sense of direction, AI will do to our capacity to think. Hand over your navigation, and you’ll forget how to orient yourself on a map.
Hand over your thinking to ChatGPT, TikTok, or whatever comes next, and you’ll forget how to orient yourself in the maelstrom that is your own mind.
Screens scatter thought and splinter attention in a world where each is fast becoming an intellectual luxury.
Lamarckism in the Time of AI
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed acquired traits could be passed down: giraffes stretched their necks, so their offspring reached higher leaves.
Now think about AI. If we train ourselves to think less—outsourcing writing, reading, and reasoning—what are we passing down?
Not longer necks, but shorter attention spans. Not resilience, but fragility.
We are teaching ourselves—and those who come after us—that the mind doesn’t need to stretch.
That’s degeneration, not evolution.
The Choice Before Us
We have a choice: climb the ladder or hit every rung as we slide down it:
Write: ready, aim, fire
Read: aim, ready, fire
Listen: fire, aim, ready
Speak: ready, fire, aim
Screen time: fire, fire, fire
If we don’t keep climbing, AI won’t have to take over our minds. We’ll have already given them away with nary a thought.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
Excellent.
Excellent Tom. Your posts continue to keep me grounded in an increasingly weightless world