In this case, abundance of cognitive ability.
We say that our food sucks. Yet, our elite athletes would crush Hercules or other God-like figures from our mythology. At the same time, we suffer from obesity.
The answer to the paradox comes from abundance. I don’t know why it happens, but I’ve noticed it on food, information retrieval, and now cognitive capacity.
Think about what happened to our capacity to search information on books. Librarians are masters of organizing chaos and filtering through information. But most of us don’t know a tiny fraction of their knowledge because we grew up with Google.
My hope is that, just like eating healthy is not as pleasurable as processed sugars but it’s necessary for a fit life, we will need to go through the process of thinking healthy even though is not as pleasurable as tinkering with LLM prompts.
This doesn’t mean escapism however. Modern athletes take advantage of the industrial world too, but they’re smart about it. I don’t think thinking will be much different.