Thinking: questions about AI

AnsweredDoes AI weaken critical thinking?#

The evidence is emerging rather than settled: three studies agree, and all three have design weaknesses. Agreement between weak designs is suggestive, not strong.

AnsweredWhat is critical thinking?#

Testing a claim against evidence and noticing why you might be wrong. Not scepticism. Galef's scout and soldier, and the forecasting data on what actually separates the accurate.

AnsweredDoes AI make everyone think alike?#

Yes, and by making everyone individually better in the same direction. A social dilemma rather than a failure.

AnsweredDoes AI make everyone sound the same?#

Not everyone equally. A Standard American English input keeps 77.9 per cent of its features in the model's reply and five minoritised varieties keep 2 to 3. The cost of convergence has an address.

AnsweredWhat is metacognition?#

Knowledge of your own knowledge, and why fluency is a false signal for it. Roediger and Karpicke, Rowland on feedback, Fisher on search inflating self-assessment.

AnsweredWhat is cognitive load?#

Sweller's three types. Removing waste is a gain; removing the effort that builds understanding is not, and the two feel identical from the inside.

AnsweredWhat makes a good question?#

Investigable, not self-answering, consequential. Rothstein and Santana on question-asking as a method, and why a question is not a prompt.

AnsweredWhat is the Google effect?#

Sparrow 2011, with the replication difficulties stated, which is almost never done. An analogy for AI rather than evidence about it.

AnsweredDoes AI make confirmation bias worse?#

Not directly measured anywhere. The closest evidence is filed under sycophancy: AI systems validate a user more than people do, and that validation measurably reduces willingness to reconsider.

AnsweredHow do you change your mind?#

Answered on the intellectual humility page, because the two questions have one answer. The four habits from scored forecasting, and Galef on the cost of revising.

AnsweredWhat is intellectual humility?#

Confidence and accuracy are separate quantities. Tetlock on what scored accuracy looks like, and why perpetual openness is its own failure.

AnsweredIs attention a trainable skill?#

Training reliably improves the task you trained on. Far transfer, which is what calling attention a skill would require, is close to unsupported.

AnsweredCan you tell if AI is degrading your own skills?#

No, which is the whole problem. Two groups were indistinguishable while the tool was present and separated by a factor of two once it was gone. Self-report measures worry, not capability.

AnsweredCan you tell when a person actually made something?#

Less well than people think. Suspicion of AI use tracked actual use at a correlation of 0.22 and ran the opposite way to it, and detectors flag 61 per cent of non-native English essays. The three tests are better used on your own drafts.

AnsweredWhat is the difference between cognitive delegation and routine delegation, and which needs disclosing?#

Cognitive delegation is use that shapes the substance of a judgement; routine delegation is use that does not ordinarily bear on it. Marcin Mirończuk drew the distinction in Ethics and Information Technology, posted 23 October 2026, arguing that disclosure of AI use does not show how outputs shaped judgement and that what needs defending is the claim. The page holds the record of what stayed human; the standard is proposed, not adopted.

AnsweredCan an author defend a claim they did not reason to themselves?#

That is the test Mirończuk proposes, posted 23 October 2026: claim-level authorial warrant, a contributor's capacity to understand, justify and defend claims within their contribution, which disclosure alone does not establish. Anthropic's trial of 27 October found 77 per cent of experts repeating an agent's arguments and 15 per cent crediting it. The page holds the record; nobody has tested whether the warrant can be checked at scale.

PartialIs offloading worse before a skill is established?#

The mechanism says yes: you cannot offload a judgement you never built. The direct age-stratified evidence is thin.

PartialWhat is the difference between a shortcut and a missed repetition?#

Whether the thing being skipped was building something. Most delegation is fine; the exceptions are the ones that were the practice.

PartialIs convenience making us think less?#

The satnav and search-engine evidence is the closest analogue. It is more equivocal than either side of the argument admits.

PartialDoes AI change how I remember things?#

When people expect information to remain available, they remember where to find it rather than the thing itself. Established before AI.

PartialDoes AI reduce creativity?#

Individually it raises rated creativity. Collectively it narrows the range. Whether that generalises beyond creative writing is unknown.

PartialShould I still learn things I can look up?#

You cannot verify an answer in a domain where you never built competence. That is the practical case for knowing things.

PartialWhat happens when most published information is written with AI?#

Partial from 27 September 2026. The mechanism has a name and a peer-reviewed measurement, model collapse, but that measurement is a controlled training experiment and not an audit of the live web, so how far the process has actually progressed is not known.

PartialDoes AI make the web less useful as a source of knowledge?#

Partial. The Google effect assumed the information out there was worth finding, and model collapse names the mechanism by which recursive training on AI-generated content could erode that, without measuring how far it has happened.

PartialHow do you establish provenance for an AI-assisted claim?#

Partial from 14 September 2026. The decision half has a named concept and a reviewed proposal behind it, Singh, Cobbe and Norval's decision provenance from 2019, which records what flowed rather than explaining what was reasoned. The claim half, whether a particular assertion is true, is a different problem and this site's answer to it remains reading every source at the issuing body and saying so.

PartialDoes AI reduce tolerance for ambiguity?#

Partial from 14 September 2026, and the adjacent thing has now been measured. Liu and colleagues report that assistance reduces persistence and raises the rate of giving up after roughly ten minutes, across randomised trials with 1,222 participants. Persistence is close to tolerance for ambiguity and is not the same construct, so the question stays partial rather than answered.

PartialDoes AI make people confuse fluency with understanding?#

Yes, and that confusion is the mechanism rather than a side effect. Fluent material feels learned.

PartialWill AI make humans less intelligent?#

Not measurably, and that is the wrong measure. The evidence is about which capabilities stop being exercised, not about general intelligence.

PartialHow can companies prevent overreliance on AI?#

Keep the repetitions that build the capability being relied on, and test unaided performance rather than assuming it. Both cost something, so neither tends to survive contact with a delivery target.

PartialIs AI bad for creativity?#

On the experiments so far it helps the individual and narrows the group. Writers given AI ideas were rated more creative, most for the less creative, and their stories were more alike; a 2026 study found 22 models more alike than people are. All of it is short tasks, and nobody has followed working creatives for years.

PartialWhat is cognitive surrender?#

A term its authors gloss as outsourcing thinking itself to AI. American Banker reported on 6 October 2026 a study by Shaw and Nave, presented at the New York Fed's culture conference, in which participants defaulted to the AI's answer 80 per cent of the time whether or not its reasoning was sound; the head of BNP Paribas USA said the bank will add the idea to staff training. No paper or sample size was read.

PartialWhat is left in your head after the AI is taken away?#

It depends on what you did with the advice. In two preregistered experiments by Robin Welsch, posted in September 2026, people supported by an AI adviser felt more confident and reported understanding more with less effort; those who more often changed its recommendations did better unaided in one study and knew more in the other. An association in a simulation, not yet peer-reviewed.

OpenDoes using AI early prevent a skill forming at all?#

Open, and the most important unanswered question in this area. Decay in a formed skill and failure to form one are different, and the research mostly measures the first.

OpenDoes AI help or hurt problem solving?#

Open, and the evidence is split by whether the task is inside or outside the model's competence.

OpenDoes AI change the questions people ask?#

Open, and arguably more consequential than what it does to answers. Cheap answers change which questions feel worth asking.

OpenIs there a confirmation bias in how people verify AI output?#

Open. Checking for reasons an answer is right is a different cognitive task from checking for reasons it is wrong, and the first is easier.

OpenWhat are cognitive biases and how do they affect judgement?#

Open here as a general treatment. The ones that bear in this research are automation bias, algorithm aversion and the illusion of competence.

OpenHow do humans actually make decisions?#

Open, and a literature of its own. The part that bears on AI is that people substitute an easier question for a harder one, and a fluent answer makes that easier.

OpenWhy do humans make irrational decisions?#

Open. The shortcuts that fail in laboratory tasks often work in the environments they formed in, so calling them irrational depends on which environment you are scoring against.

OpenShould chatbots show several voices so people keep thinking for themselves?#

Ghosh and colleagues propose 'multi-persona interfaces' in an arXiv review of October 2026, arguing that a single-voice chatbot narrows thinking, but report no new data. A trial comparing what users conclude under one voice and several would settle it.