I’ll have my undergrad thesis defense next week and finally [unofficially] graduate. Which means I’m going to have to decide what to display on my portfolio in order to apply for a Master’s degree and jobs. It’s quite worrying. I feel like I need to be in the top 1% of certain skills in order to be seen. But today, watching Prof. Po-Shen Loh, a math professor from Carnegie Mellon University, opened up my mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can be the smartest guy in the room, but I also have to be truly communicative and kind. I’ve met a lot of genius engineers who are too smart but so unpleasant to work with. In my college I found many cases where certain smarter students didn’t get accepted to certain labs or projects because they were simply too arrogant or rigid, while the “lesser” smart students with a pleasantly good vibe were more welcomed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is why kindness and cleverness should be balanced. And this is why nowadays we are so dissatisfied with ourselves, because we try to be the best at everything while forgetting our basic relational nature. We need to sustain our civilization. We need to work with others. Be competent, but also be kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is my YouTube watching notes from that video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Source:<\/strong> YouTube \u2014 Carnegie Mellon University \/ Po-Shen Loh<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prof. Po-Shen Loh initially traveled the country telling people that creativity would be humanity’s last edge over AI. He doesn’t say that anymore. Last year, Google’s AI solved four out of six problems at the International Math Olympiad, problems so original that national coaches verify nothing similar has ever appeared anywhere in the world before. If AI can do that, the creative gap may already be closing. His new conclusion is that “the only unique thing about human intelligence is that we hopefully care that humans still exist.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The dominant commercial AI right now is the large language model, and the biggest place students use it to cheat is writing. This is a problem because the power of the LLM is<\/em> the L: language. We need to understand that writing doesn’t only mean delivering ideas, but by engaging in the process of writing we are also exercising the process of logical thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Loh’s analogy is sharp. Using AI to do your writing homework is like driving a car one mile for exercise. The destination looks the same, but you get none of the benefit. The output might be a disposition, but the process is what builds the mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what actually matters going forward? Not just creativity, but the genuine desire to create value for other people. As AI takes over more and more tasks, the only reason someone will want you on their team is because they believe you’ll make things better for them, and they’ll sense whether that’s authentic. “If you are not that way, you are a bad partner and people will not want to team with you.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n On using AI well, Loh’s example is instructive. Spotting a talented singer in Nashville, he used AI not to write a report about her, but to build the logic in his own head. How competitive is that scene? How did she end up here? What does this tell me? He calls this simulating the world, using AI as a tool to sharpen your own mental model rather than replace it. That capacity to imaginatively play out scenarios before committing to action is, for him, the core superpower of a successful entrepreneur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Loh spent years as the national coach of the US Olympic Math Team and watched something troubling. Deeply clever people graduating high school with no idea what to do next, because their operating philosophy was to prove they were better than everyone else. That philosophy, he argues, guarantees dissatisfaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The alternative is to make it your goal to delight other people. It turns out this is also addictive in the best way, five people then five hundred then a thousand, and it correlates with conventional success too. You provide genuine value and people may be willing to pay for it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n His educational program (named LIVE) is built on this insight. Mathematically strong high schoolers (15\u201318) coach middle schoolers (10\u201313) in critical thinking and math. Professional comedians and actors watch every session and give real-time feedback to help the high schoolers become more charismatic and empathetic. The high schoolers gain communication skills and confidence; the younger kids get genuine intellectual mentorship. Everyone teaches in pairs, which means all these kind, clever young people get to know each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why does that last part matter? Because Loh is thinking at a civilizational scale. “I don’t know what kind of challenges we’re going to face in the future… we need a big network of kind people who are clever, who know each other, and who have trust.”<\/em> Thoughtfulness is the foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taste and Truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taste.<\/strong> Personal expression, fashion, drawing, flavor, your own twist on things, is genuinely fun. It’s part of what makes life feel like yours. If you outsource every choice to an AI that tells you how to dress, what to write, how to think, that self-expression quietly disappears. Loh wants people to rediscover that it’s fun to think and to have your own idea that you inject inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Truth.<\/strong> Lose the ability to think critically and you become easy to deceive. Any situation in the world can be narrated truthfully and still mislead, depending on which truths get selected and how the story is told. Loh is frank about this. “I have an agenda. I’m trying to build a more thoughtful world.”<\/em> Everyone has an agenda. The only protection is being able to think for yourself, because an AI that sounds completely reasonable can give you a story that feels complete and still isn’t. He actively reads both CNN and Fox News, tunes his X feed right-leaning and his Facebook feed left-leaning, and compares them daily, not to find The Truth, but to locate where the disagreement actually lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The deeper worry is that with only a handful of major AI providers (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek), we risk condensing 7.5 billion human viewpoints into five. Instead of a marketplace of ideas, it’s a short menu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Loh is an optimist, and the reason is empirical. He’s watched the kids he’s worked with grow up, and they’re kind, clever, and they know each other. That community makes him believe more communities like it exist elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His practical model is social entrepreneurship that actually sustains itself. The trap is finding a real problem but having no one who’ll pay you to solve it. His fix is to identify who is already paying the cost of that problem and offer to solve it for them. His program charges families for enrichment math classes, runs profitably, and uses that margin to subsidize students from lower-income backgrounds. The actors, the math stars, the kids, everyone wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His creative process follows a simple rhythm. Generate the new idea with excitement, then try to destroy it. “99% of the ideas I generate are fundamentally flawed. But 1% are good.”<\/em> Keep asking whether there’s another way, and eventually a diamond surfaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ll have my undergrad thesis defense next week and finally [unofficially] graduate. Which means I’m going to have to decide what to display on my portfolio in order to apply for a Master’s degree and jobs. It’s quite worrying. I feel like I need to be in the top 1% of certain skills in order […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-on-things"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arsvitae.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arsvitae.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arsvitae.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arsvitae.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arsvitae.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1922"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/arsvitae.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1935,"href":"https:\/\/arsvitae.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1922\/revisions\/1935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arsvitae.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arsvitae.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arsvitae.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Intro<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Ch. 1 \u2014 What Matters More Than Creativity<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Ch. 2 \u2014 The Next Stage of Education<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Ch. 3 \u2014 Two Things AI Steals<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Ch. 4 \u2014 How to Stay Hopeful<\/h3>\n\n\n\n