The Last Alpha: Being Unapologetically You

Note: This started as Twitter thread, that I’m cross-posting here.

In the age of A.I. slop, having a real genuine personality + real genuine interests a.k.a. being unapologetically YOU has never been more of an advantage.

Developing genuine authenticity and real depth is 1000x harder if your source of information is mostly from social media or is predominantly A.I. generated.

People take what they see in social/LLMs as fact, yet nuance & complexity are stripped away and A.I. still very much hallucinates (PSA to always check your sources; like literally go and find out what and where something is pulled from).

Just like a map, it’s a high-fidelity and realistic view but very much an incomplete model of the world.

Everyone is susceptible to this conditioning because our tools make it too easy. And now, social and A.I. are creating loops, where A.I. slop spreads in social and social media feeds A.I. models, depicting an evermore opaque view of reality.

People think they’re building domain expertise by looking at 1000 TikToks or prompting A.I. endlessly. These are powerful starters and you can get far really fast but it’s not enough.

The allure and omnipresence of the hive mind has never been more powerful. All the more reason to develop your own hard-won, homegrown, organically-curated perspective of the world.

It makes sense to pull back from the hive mind and build your own earned knowledge + wisdom and have this habit into your own routine.

In short, earned knowledge/wisdom = you worked for it.

Examples

• Primary sources like books, reports, movies especially ones that did not get algorithmically recommended to you. I’m more fascinated by someone’s unique and eclectic cacophony of stuff they like than regurgitating something recommended by everyone else. You can still absorb those sources but it’s far better to develop your own take on it and not just a generated summary.
• Talking to people who are domain experts. I haven’t found a replacement for this. You just get so much rich information from someone who has done the work before (aka earned knowledge) than anything else. More than what they say, they can show you things they themselves would have a hard time articulating. You also get things like emotion, passion, pain, vibe, and detail you won’t get from lossy and lazy sources.
• Doing the actual work. Nothing teaches you like real world feedback. The A.I. slop world has smoothened out the capacity for “mistakes” but trying things is how you create new combinations and approaches (aka innovation). Real expertise is built through having tried a ton of things yourself, and real taste is only developed by deciding for yourself what works and building an intuition about it only possible by trying out for yourself what doesn’t work.

What I find most interesting about this is doing the hard work (earned knowledge) has never been more of an advantage.

Why would anyone do the hard work when you can just type a few words and get something good enough back?

Because if everyone is doing the easy work, few are building the real skill and real intuition and real perspective. Put another way: what can you do and what do you intuitively know without social media/LLMs? How deep and how far can you really go? What can you do if you have to start from scratch?

This is not a condemnation of A.I., but it’s a reminder that true creativity and depth is still built outside the prompt window. You can use the training wheels, but at some point, you have to go on the ride yourself.