the power of a blue book
Use AI to write boring emails and vibe code as much as you want, but spend at least a couple of hours crafting text by hand before you forget how.
In the Times, NYU professor Clay Shirky, one of my favorite experts on the intersection of tech and humanity, weighs in on the effect of LLMs on university learning:
We cannot simply redesign our assignments to prevent lazy A.I. use. (We’ve tried.) If you ask students to use A.I. but critique what it spits out, they can generate the critique with A.I. If you give them A.I. tutors trained only to guide them, they can still use tools that just supply the answers. And detectors are too prone to false accusations of cheating and too poor at catching lightly edited output for professors to rely on them.
Once you accept that the fight against LLM abuse by students is already lost, the only path forward for academic learning becomes clear:
Now that most mental effort tied to writing is optional, we need new ways to require the work necessary for learning. That means moving away from take-home assignments and essays and toward in-class blue book essays, oral examinations, required office hours and other assessments that call on students to demonstrate knowledge in real time.
Not a perfect solution but a necessary one. From now on, students will do their learning on the spot, live, with a pen and at a desk. Scribbling in a blue notebook like it’s 1980 all over again. Learning as collaborative, site-specific performance art.
Obviously, what applies to college students applies equally, if not more so, to us grown-ups, for whom learning absolutely must remain a lifelong pursuit. Use it or lose it. Just as our tendons and muscles weaken in zero gravity, it’s inevitable that relying on LLMs to do the hard work of manufacturing sentences will leave us with soft, gooey minds. The comfort crisis now extends to how we think.
Since this isn’t going to happen automatically anymore—LLMs are super convenient—we require a deliberate approach to remembering how to write. We can’t let our ability to think out loud or on paper wane. You can debate the essential human value of other lost skills, from touch-typing to penmanship, but not so the ability wrestle with ideas and form them into words sentence by painful sentence.
If the kids are going to write in blue books, so must we.
Bluebooking: Write something completely on your own. Do it regularly. Make it public. For me, it’s this newsletter, which I’m going to continue writing without LLM support and, sigh, even without Grammarly and spell-check.
The constraints are excruciating but hey, no pain, no gain. Writing is thinking. Experience has taught me that I never know what I think about a given subject if I don’t go to the trouble of explaining it, to another person or in words on a page. If I abandon this crucial part of my identity, the part that knows how to develop ideas, write and revise text, and push through self-doubt to hit publish, I wouldn’t have much confidence in the person left behind. Frankly, I need to remember how to find definitions in a dictionary and synonyms in a thesaurus.
Frank Herbert warned us about this insidious danger back in the 1960s with Dune and its sequels. In Herbert’s universe, humanity relied on machines, became enslaved by them, and only won its freedom by re-learning these crucial mental skills. That’s how you get Mentats, human calculators who replace computers in Herbert’s imagined universe.
Go and do likewise, Mentat. Bluebook with short stories, Substack essays, LinkedIn posts, or even TikTok or YouTube scripts. The requirement is that you do it alone, without that comfy and convenient second brain. It’s common sense, isn’t it? You go to the gym to train physically. You may even meditate to train emotionally. Bluebooking is the third leg of that foundational tripod, the mental training that keeps your brain fit for active duty.