The article fallaciously overstates the cognitive significance of shopping lists by misapplying general psychological concepts to a mundane habit. It relies on false cause and appeal to authority, conflating a standard compensatory memory mechanism with inherent intelligence. The author generalizes behavior, ignoring alternative motivators like memory deficits or anxiety. Furthermore, the piece lacks precise citations and improperly retrofits foundational research—such as academic note-taking studies—to fit its narrative. Ultimately, while it references factual cognitive capacity limits, the core claim that list-making signifies "sharper thinking" remains an unsupported editorial opinion rather than empirical science. Any article that contains "Psychology suggests" isn't worth reading.

HN isn't what it once was.

- Chinese Consul-General in Osaka, Xue Jian, addressing Japan

- Chinese Consul-General in Osaka, Xue Jian, in reference to Japan

Is that not a threat?

For example, on YouTube I use twitch slang, and on Reddit I use TikTok slang, and on TikTok I use reddit slang. On hackernews a use a slightly whimsical pedantically-infused undergrad tone.

I've tried completely avoiding comments, and I admit it makes my life less stressful, but it feels like closing your eyes to solve littering.

So now what I do is try to assume every positive commenter is a human and every negative commenter is maybe a LLM/hatebot. This has given me just enough magical thinking to avoid the stress but not so much as to distort my world view... hopefully..

I suppose I have trouble seeing it that way because I view words as pointers to meaning. The word itself holds no intrinsic value; it's the meaning humans attach to it and the context in which it's used that gives it significance.

When we give "thinking" a scientifically testable definition we can reason around it in a more academic way.

I've read psych papers that defined "thinking" as cognition, measured by action potentials. A participant was said to be "thinking more" when their EEG showed increased activity.

It's important to understand that "thinking" here was only defined within the context of the paper.

To use an analogy, many people say their computer is thinking when it's undergoing a heavy processor load. Strictly speaking this is not the case, their computer cannot think, but they aren't wrong or incorrect because in that context 'thinking' literally means 'processing'.

I think I follow better. Thinking doesn't have a rigorous and testable definition, so it isn't scientific. We all have our own colloquial understand. Since it's not testable and the definition varies person to person, it's not useful when reasoning about AI or intelligence.

Also I wanted to say I love how you write!

Or did I miss?

However I don't know anybody these days who would seriously call A* proper AI.

You're creating a definition that doesn't align with the existing definitions for the words you're using.

Which is fine, it happens all the time, though it's less useful.

How do we know if bees understand what they're doing? It's agreed that they display intelligence and intelligent behavior, but not by your definition.

If it's not measurable or testable then it's not useful.

You seem to have doubled down on the is/isn't perspective and demonstrated what I was referring to. The more you reduce the less useful your reasoning becomes.