Cat HicksFeb 4

So many developers have sent me that Anthropic skills/mastery case study that I realized I should ungate what I *already wrote* about this whole topic back in October: beginning principles to design workflows that work *with* your mind, not against it, & protect your problem-solving

https://www.fightforthehuman.com/cognitive-helmets-for-the-ai-bicycle-part-1/

Cognitive Helmets for the AI Bicycle: Part 1

I hear people name these three fears: will developers lose their problem-solving skills, learning opportunities, and critical thinking? One science-backed area can help: better metacognitive strategies.

Fight for the Human
Show threadCat HicksFeb 4
We use a lot of simple analogies for learning that are subtly misleading. Like reducing all of complex behavior down to simplistic "dopamine loops", it's inaccurate. Good learning is not really about whether things are "always hard" or "always easy," it's about whether we're being strategic overall
Show threadCat HicksFeb 4
That focus on strategy will help you.
- sometimes you are doing things in maladaptive hard ways because they FEEL right (cramming, grinding, hustle culture)
- sometimes you are doing things in maladaptive easy ways because they FEEL right (skipping active learning, shying away from practice)
Show threadCat Hicks
There is a TON of context and nuance to this. It is not about winning against another participant in an abstract lab task. It is about your real life, and your real life is a complex set of decisions, strategies, goals and needs against context and environment.
Feb 4 at 6:20pmWeb
Show threadCat HicksFeb 4
That's why as someone with many years of experience in learning and in the organizational and psychological affordances that software teams need, it took me an entire book to write down what I thought; because it's not actually about just AI it's about how we let people think and what we support
Show threadCat HicksFeb 4
But I hope this one piece gives you some pointers, and will keep working, because there's a lot more here. There is a LOT we can do and tech products are not usually built with true learning and skill building in mind. But they could be! And I've measured the effects when they are.
Show threadCat HicksFeb 4
These are the principles *I myself am using* when I work with technology, whether it's doing cognitive scaffolding by using an R statistics package that other people packaged up for me so I could spend my limited time thinking about the hard domain problems I'm applying it to, or whether I am consulting with edtech apps that encourage children to practice math problems even when they get discouraging failure.
Show threadCat HicksFeb 4
We will always face questions about cognitive scaffolding and human problem-solving, and so understanding the basics of our own minds is a tremendous advantage no matter what intersection of technology and human behavior you are working in.