London calling / Tools for Thought

An update on my career break, plus a strong endorsement for Advait Sarkar's vision of AI

First, a small update on my circumstances. In September I announced my career break. This week I started a 9 month secondment at the Wellcome Trust, one day a week. Wellcome is one of the world’s largest charitable foundations and it is the largest non-government funder of scientific research in the UK. My new role is part of my ongoing work with the Research on Research Institute (RoRI), the metascience work which I don’t talk about much here, since it is a bit off-topic for this newsletter (but for which there are actually numerous connections with decision making and reasoning).

Aside from excitement of doing something new, while also continuing the thread of work with RoRI which I think is really valuable and interesting, the practical import is that I am going to be in London two days a week for most of 2026. On those days I’ll be at Wellcome, based in Euston, and RoRI HQ at UCL (that is central-north London if you’re not familiar with the geography).

I want to make the most of my time in the capital, so if you’re there, or just passing through, please get in touch. We can talk coffee and cognitive science without the metascience, or coffee and cognitive science without the metascience, or all three concurrent or consecutive. Other topics and drinks are available - reading this newsletter is the self-authorising code for being someone I’d like to chat to.

Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Thought

I’ve followed Advait Sarkar’s academic papers for a while, so I was delighted to find that he’s a compelling public speaker, and nails something profoundly important is his recent TED Vienna talk:

His talk, How to stop AI from killing your critical thinking, eloquently makes the case that for knowledge workers having AI that can perform tasks is as much a risk as a boon. Engaging with the material, exercising critical thinking, discernment and memory, are all skills which need practice for when a pattern-breaking problem comes along. AI which is over eager to do things for you creates the risk that we rely on it rather than exercise our cognitive muscles.

The talk contains some great lines:

Welcome to the age of outsourced reason, where the knowledge worker no longer engages with the materials of their craft. We’ve become intellectual tourists in our own work. We visit ideas. We don’t inhabit them

and

We’ve solved the problem of having to think. Unfortunately, thinking wasn’t actually a problem. It’s like we invented a cure for exercise and then wondered why we’re out of breath all the time.

But it also goes on to demo prototypes from Sarkar’s own work at Microsoft Research, which sketch a different vision of AI. These show an AI which is less compliant, less fixated on completing tasks for you and instead geared to provoking reflection, suggesting directions, providing “productive resistance”, and scaffolding metacognition around the primary task. In short, its a vision of tools which help you think rather than think for you.

I recommend this vision, and Sarkar’s talk to everyone.

More

Talk: How to stop AI from killing your critical thinking

Annotated transcript

Pair with How can we develop transformative tools for thought? Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen, October 2019

More practical: Nine risks caused by AI notetakers Rachel Coldicutt, November 2025

And Oliver Burkeman: Interest is everything

“to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point. “

CATCH-UP

Recently from me:

• Collective intelligence, under the influence. From the annals of “Research it must have been fun to do” - getting people drunk to study the benefits group decision-making.

• Faking survey responses with LLMs Survey research is a key mechanism by which society knows itself, we should all be worried if can’t be trusted.

• When less (communication) is more (collective intelligence): Team work, complex problems, and preserving diversity in the ecosystem of ideas

• Listening to Tommy Robinson: What did I learn by giving the right-wing activist my ears for 90 minutes?

• Helping people spot misinformation: And the greatest gift psychology gave the world

• The Ideological Turing Test: Do you truly understand those you disagree with?

• Community Notes require a Community: How we used a novel analysis to understand what causes people to quit the widely adopted content-moderation system

…And finally

This from Private Eye, via visualisation newsletter quantum of sollazzo

END

Comments? Feedback? Our names shouted in a certain dawn? I am tom@idiolect.org.uk and on Mastodon at @tomstafford@mastodon.online