Exposing AI is my favorite entertainment, fashionable and dishonest. A colleague who vows not to use ChatGpt is as confined to the matrix as teenagers are obsessed with video games.
Google races to catch up. Asking a question will give you multiple answers beyond the question, including a sufficient summary for the essay. And it’s becoming like us. Our lives, online and off, public, private, rock concerts and living rooms are scrapped to help everyone’s interests. This promotes extreme claims like these and sharpens the gap between technological optimists and technosceptics.
It is correct to be skeptical of those claims, including the threat of AI to education and originality. You might ask by cutting the drama before worrying about the machine. What does it mean to think about it? What are you really learning? What is originality? And who is the hallucination?
Critics have long warned of the erosion of critical thinking. Traditionists condemn the negligence of great books. Reformers, especially those of postmoderns, question the authority of traditional thinking, as if skepticism itself was not biased. Thought, learning, and originality proceed accordingly, until discussions posting ten commandments steal the show.
What’s missing today is what was once called “rhetoric.” Inner logic and grammar: what we are doing, how we say it, what voice we are, ourselves, our audience, our teacher, or now, ChatGpt? The first university course should be critical thinking 101: How to think clearly and communicate effectively.
Plato said he spoke as if we were in a cave, mistook the shadows for reality and spoke so that the light behind us could not be seen. St. Victor’s medieval master Hugh writes, “The whole education of man will be guided from the outside to the invisible from the inside out.” And Wittgenstein said, “The limits of our language are the limits of our world.”
The first lesson may be how true this is. Forget your big name for a while. The conversation alone reveals it – especially about jumping to conclusions, and begging for questions, being briefly explained. The second lesson might be a simple puzzle: “Is that your voice?” Who are you talking for? And when you say “self,” where did it come from? Then there’s playful but sharp: “What do you think this table feels?” Are you lonely? Do you need to be careful? Joke – But how to notice how we project into things and how we think about people: is ai sensory?
This may sound abstract or overly clever. But in reality, it is a way to start any course or era, and thinks about what it means to think. Just as people question artificial intelligence, we can ensure that we understand ourselves. What does I mean? How can I hear it? Can you change someone’s mind? me too?
Written by behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman Think about it, fast and slow“We can blind things that are obvious. We are blind to blindness.” In many cases, we need to override our intuition.
From Sherlock Holmes to Sam Altman, the lessons are the same. I miss what’s right in front of me. Holmes said “the world is full of obvious things that no one can observe.” The proverb rhyme, a favorite of Benjamin Franklin, says, “The battle was lost, the kingdom was lost. Altman, founder of Openai (ChatGpt), might say that everything “fails to act on what was already there.”
Instead of casting AI as a Savior or a threat, we can start with how to realize we We are not thinking about what is in front of us. A way to jump, cling, and ignore things that change. The real problem is not the machines that fool us. It is easy for us to deceive ourselves. We often confuse confidence with clarity, speed with insight, understanding and recognition, and originality and novelty.
In the classroom, it is not a task to deduct machines. It’s about realizing what students already know, trusting their voices, and thinking together more carefully to let the teacher hear how those voices sound. Sometimes, it means calling them randomly to invite them to talk about what they have written or believe, rather than surprise them. Real Learning is asked to think loudly and listen carefully.
The real challenge is not artificial intelligence, whatever its control is. It is whether we still teach the kind of human beings. It’s a way to think independently, speak with confidence, and listen with caution. And somehow, we regain some basics, such as rhetoric and critical thinking.
As world work is digital, and as humans become less important than what they know, Critical Thinking 101 may become the only course.
Notes and reading
[The three suggested “lessons” are drawn from my own teaching and reflection; they aren’t taken from any particular source. Somewhere, others must have said as much.]
Platon – RepublicBook VII, all stories about the cave.
St. Victor’s Hue – 12th century theologian and educator, St. Victor’s Hugh shaped medieval learning didascalicon (Learning research), he presents knowledge as an advancement from sense to intellectual and spiritual insight. He outlines the main areas of research as integrated and essential to both human performance and spiritual purpose.
Wittgenstein – “The limits of our language are the limits of our world.” – Tractatus logico-PhilosophicusProposition 5.6. In his most cited remarks, he says that “my” language shapes (and limits) “my” reality. “My” becomes “us” in his later works, as Wittgenstein moves from seeing language as a private reflection of the world to understanding meaning based on shared life and public use.
Sam Altman – Rather than chasing the novelty, Altman asked: what if you push what already works to that limit? He favored longer training runs, wider deployments and faster feedback. It is an ambitious implementation of infinite theorization. Technically, his method combines Bayesian logic with Renegirard’s theory of imitation. This is the influence he shares with his friend Peter Tiel, who he once called “an incredible communicator, super impressive.” To win big, you have to be happy to lose big. Altman’s approach is intuitive, but rigorously tested. The Empire of AI: Sam Altman’s Openai Dreams and Nightmares Karen Hao (May 2025). Hao is a longtime AI insider with intimate access to Altman’s world, a balanced criticism and not an exposing. Really colorful.
Daniel Kahneman – Think about it, fast and slow (2011). Behavioral psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Kahneman explains how two mental systems shape our thinking. Fast and intuitive system 1 and slow and intentional system 2.
Tyler Cowen – “How does AI change the meaning of being human?” Limited revolution (May 14, 2025). Economist and public intellectual, Cowen is chairman of George Mason University’s economics department and directs the Mercatus Center’s emerging venture program.
Luke Bourgis“The Dao of Technology: Between Scylla and Digital Life’s Charybdis” (Newsletter – July 13, 2025). Today, Bergis stands out as a leading interpreter and teacher in René Girard’s theory of imitation, combining technical depth with conversational clarity.
Watch Today Live: Trump reveals the “AI Action Plan” shaped by high-tech supporters after revoking Biden policy on Wednesday, July 23rd at 4:30pm. PBS Newshour. (Or “Trump reveals his plan to win with AI: remove Silicon Valley’s “red tape”” – CNN.))
Tip #219 – Holy holy
story – The God of the Oil Field
Approx. 2 + 2 = 5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
