Less Input [en]

In the spirit of shortening things, I’m taking a few moments during my lunch break to share some thoughts I’ve been having recently. Various things have contributed to these thoughts:

• my permanent struggle with “too many ideas” and “too many things I want to do” (which predates my accident, but is now exacerbated given my reduced energy)
• pondering on how to manage my energy (already underway since my accident, but now fed by the occupational therapy programme for energy management that I’m in the middle of)
• my training at IGB, and the two-day course I just did in Paris (the recurring focus is “how something that works for the person at some point becomes the thing that feeds the problem”)
• my exploration of AI and in particular the framework/project/took that was previously called PAI (now LifeOS) (output is cheap now: feed a genAI model a few lines and it can spit out thousands of words for you).

I’m not going to be able to reconstruct how my ideas around this have shifted in a chronological or well-organised way, but here’s more or less where I’m at: I’m somebody who believes that “knowledge is power”, that “more information is better”, that by learning and analysing and understanding, I can find answers.

That works a lot of the time, for me. It has worked very well for me. But I’m starting to see how this is part of what is trapping me, right now.

At some point in my struggles with my AI infrastructure (trying to get the PAI Digital Assistant up and running correctly, fixing bugs, making sure it learns correctly, setting up workflows for the things I want it to do for me) I realised that it had a built-in bias (the model, most probably) towards “producing more is better”. LLMs are verbose, we all know that by now. The more you feed them, the more words they spit out – but not necessarily the more useful information.

I kept giving instructions for concision. I would provide examples of how to write things up. I would set up guardrails, have it self-correct, hunt for fluff and filler content. At some point I realised that “the system” was just growing and growing in terms of content (the number of words and files that contained the instructions), and the output was not improving – more like the contrary. This is nothing new, right. We know that complex systems balloon up and lose efficiency. And I’ve seen more than once in my dealings with AI that I pretty much always end up spending more time “fixing the system” than actually using it. This, actually, is something I’d noticed about myself in general; but it’s easier for me to rein in when I don’t have an LLM at the other end of the keyboard. So here, it became even more visible.

So here it is. The mantra I keep repeating to people in all sorts of context: “less is more”; “better is the enemy of good” (that’s what we say in French). If I feed my AI system less input, I get less bloated output in the system. I read somewhere (can’t remember the source, probably have it stashed away somewhere) that in the age of generative AI, the bottleneck was shifting from content production to content consumption. What we can “ingest” is the limiting factor, now that we have machines that can spew out words and sentences and paragraphs and essays and reports like there’s no tomorrow. But it’s worthless unless we can read it and understand it and do something with it. Just feeding that AI output to another AI is just going to magnify errors and biases and produce more slop, unless there is a humain mind in charge that understands what it’s doing and what it’s asking.

Early on, in 2024, I remember reflecting at some point that the AI I was using seemed “more ADHD than me”. And what my more recent experiences have helped me understand about myself is this:

1. My problem, my “slop/bloat” is ideas and things I want to do. I am somebody for whom ideas are cheap. I have ideas all the time. I can come up with stuff I’d like to do all day. My problem (bottleneck) lies in selecting what I run with, and that is a difficult exercise – even more difficult since my accident.
2. The more “input” I get, the more – just like the LLM – I produce ideas and desires. I read an article, there are 5 more I want to read. I have a discussion on a topic, I want to read more stuff or write articles or create a community around it. I learn about something new, oooh it’s nice and shiny and I want to do it.

Having a large capacity for input and lots of ideas, followed by enough energy to take a handful of them and run with them (OK, frustrating to have to leave so many aside, but at least I’m busy doing something useful/interesting with some of them) has, as I said above, served me very well in life. But trees don’t grow to the sky. At some point, what has worked well becomes the source of the problem.

And I’m realising that the way out of this, at least now, is not better prioritising. First of all, it’s reducing input.

Less input, less ideas, less “oh I want to do this thing”, less slop to sort through, less frustration with everything I’m not doing.

Exactly how to achieve that is still a thought in progress. But that’s what I’ve been thinking of this last week or so.