Growing Up Anti-Intelligent

"Anti-intelligence is not stupidity or some sort of cognitive failure. It's the performance of knowing without understanding. It's language severed from memory, context, and and even intention. It's what large language models (LLMs) do so well. They produce coherent outputs through pattern-matching rather than comprehension. Where human cognition builds meaning through the struggle of thought, anti- intelligence arrives fully formed."

"Major theories of cognitive development, from Piaget's stages to Vygotsky's scaffolding, align on a shared assumption that children learn by encountering constraints along a developmental path. And there are critical bumps along the way, as information is incomplete, and mistakes carry cost. In essence, it's the journey of exploration that the Montessori system has so well honed for more than a century. This path doesn't just make thinking harder; it makes thinking possible."

Anti-intelligence denotes performance of knowing without understanding, where language is severed from memory, context, and intention. Large language models generate coherent outputs by pattern-matching rather than comprehension, supplying fully formed answers without the struggle of thought. Adults carry cognitive architectures shaped by scarcity and friction and can adapt or resist. Core theories of development, including Piaget and Vygotsky, assume learning through encountering constraints and errors; Montessori emphasizes exploration under constraint. The vanishing of those constraints during early development is unprecedented. Instant AI answers may prevent certain cognitive capacities from developing, and assessing new minds with legacy instruments may wrongly pathologize adaptive cognitive patterns.

Read at Psychology Today