Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
How to think well with AI: signals, quietness, and the argument engine
13 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: Is AI worsening our thinking?
AI is not telling me what to think about, mostly it's telling me what I don't need to think about. Cognitive surrender is an uncritical abdication of reasoning itself.
Chapter 2: What does Ezra Klein say about AI and original thought?
It reflects not merely the strategic delegation of deliberation, but a relinquishing of cognitive control. There is something about AI, about its allure, about its potency, that could make cognitive surrender more and more widespread.
Chapter 3: What is the difference between cognitive offloading and cognitive surrender?
The way in which I think has changed much more than I expected. And I'm still figuring out what it means. The argument engine is built from about 100,000 words of my writing. House Views runs an argument against our established positions. Stylometer. And of course, we still have the golden thread check. Great thinking.
Chapter 4: How do I use AI personas to gain insights?
traditionally happens with care and self-reflection and in a world where there are all these tools around me, am I still doing that quality of thinking? Am I doing the quality of thinking that I could do with 10 uninterrupted days?
What I want to do today is talk about something that I've been circling around for a few weeks, perhaps even months, which is about the way in which our thinking processes change during this period where we're using AI. Is our thinking getting better? Is it getting worse?
Chapter 5: What role does quietness play in effective thinking?
This matters more than it ever does before. I mean, AI is inside all of the processes that I use. It's not a tool that I pick up and down.
Chapter 6: How do small notebooks influence my ideas?
It's a tool that's there the whole time. It's become completely ambient. You've seen us and heard us talk about this. We've struggled with this issue. We've tried to expose it to our readers and our listeners. What is AI doing to that process of thinking? How can you use it well? Where does it harm rather than help.
Chapter 7: How do I stress-test my arguments before publishing?
Just a couple of weeks ago, we had the first of our AI Vistas conversations where we sat down and discussed this question, do we use our tools or do they use us? And I think that really gets to the heart of this question. And having had that discussion with Vistas, I wanted to come back to all of you and
show to some extent how my thinking process has evolved and what it looks like now in a world where I'm using a lot of AI, the 100 million tokens a day that I currently use to support my activity. Of course, we're not the only ones to be asking this question.
Chapter 8: Did AI improve my thinking process?
The New York writer and podcaster Ezra Klein was on a podcast with Dave Perrell last year, and he was talking about this very issue and I'll quote Ezra here. So I'm just going to read from my notes. Having AI summarize a book or a paper for me is a disaster. It has no idea what I really wanted to know. It would not have made the connections I would have made.
I'm not interested in the thing I will see that other people would, pardon me, I've messed that up. I'll try that again. I'm not interested in the thing. I'm interested in the thing I will see that other people would not have seen. And I think AI typically sees what everybody else would see. So that's what Ezra said.
And actually what just happened there with my fluffing my lines twice is a perfect example of thinking. Ezra has his own interiority, his own world model, his own way of speaking. And so me reading out his words was difficult. I've practiced them, of course, and there you saw me fluff them up twice. That is the heart of the question of thinking. And of course, we're concerned about
becoming intellectually lazy as well. And there was a paper in earlier this year available on the SSRN network by two academics, Shaw and Knave, and they draw a distinction between cognitive offloading and cognitive surrender. So cognitive offloading is a strategic delegation of deliberation. For example, I used to remember all my friends' phone numbers.
It was all actually their parents' numbers because we didn't have phones because that was in the days before the mobile phone. And now we've offloaded that. Nobody really remembers any numbers. And it's not really a problem. Cognitive offloading is a tool to aid one's reasoning in one way or another. But what Shaw and Knave describe is they describe also cognitive
cognitive surrender, which is an uncritical abdication of reasoning itself. It reflects not merely the use of external assistance, but a relinquishing of cognitive control. So cognitive surrender is rather more pernicious as a practice because we uncritically abdicate our reasoning. And I think a AI will lead to widespread cognitive surrender, and for good reason.
I suppose one thing I would add to that is we probably do all exhibit some cognitive surrender just in our day-to-day. We can't be critically reasoning about everything that we deal with in life, and there are systems and structures that we simply have to accept because it just makes life easier.
But there is something about AI, about its allure, about its potency that could make cognitive surrender more and more widespread. So let's come to how I think about thinking itself. My work, my job is anchored around research, around analysis, around communicating those ideas. Ultimately, it's really anchored around thinking. And I think that's true, of course, for many jobs.
But you can say that a job like mine, which deals with ideas and data and connecting them together, is really all about that. And if I don't think new things, things that are challenging to you, things that perhaps you agree with, things that perhaps you don't agree with. Well, I'm not doing my job at all. Thinking is the essence of it. Now, I've been doing this since well, well before ChatGPT.
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