Garbage in…

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about what it actually means to know something — an elusive question to answer now that we have on-demand PhD-level bff’s telling us how absolutely right we are.

I think the honest answer is that most of us don't know what we know. The successful among us can somehow confidently stand on approximations, and move forward fast enough to get the feedback to see if they were right or not. Then there's me, who spends enough time polishing the right answer to put me into an analysis quagmire.

The gap matters more now. Garbage in, garbage out. And AI can spit out a lot of garbage. It's a retrieval and synthesis machine. Ask it a sharp, well-framed question and it does something remarkable. Give it a foggy half-baked question and it produces something that may look impressive but doesn't go anywhere useful.

The people who come out on top in this moment are those who've done the work to really structure what they know — where their understanding is deep, where it's shallow, and where the edges are.

So, do you actually know what you know?