Thoughts on thinking

Homo sapience had a long period of its history when it was crucial to have a well developed body. Today we need to perform useless exercises just to maintain our bodies in somewhat acceptable shape. This might be applied to intellect as well.

In the coming era of unnecessary intellectual power we might need to do thinking exercises as something that helps maintaining a healthful (and beautiful) mind though our core values would shift towards something else, something that is regarded as good but not mandatory for personal success today.

Intellectual power is more and more necessary, on the input side if for no other requirement than to evaluate each piece of media and writing and figure how reliable it is. And on the output side to figure out how much of the LLM output you want to put out in the world under your name is BS.

Video games come to mind

I thought of the same parallel when reading the post.

I've recently read Outlive for health advice. On its recommendation, I've taken up regularly walking with a loaded backpack of 20-30kg ("rucking").

The basis for this recommendation is that until recently, people would have been exposed to carrying weight in day to day life, but an increase in our daily convenience has reduced this more and more.

I can see that there would be benefits in doing the equivalent thing mentally as physically. "Rucking" for the mind.

Outlive also recommends mental exercises like learning an instrument or new language as potential ways to stave off neurodegeneration.