I’ve loved browsing Zhihu since middle school. In a year, I would read tens of millions of Chinese characters there.
Zhihu often presents one long essay after another, letting us see how different people approach a social issue from different angles.
But gradually, I realized I had become too dependent on its recommendation system, and the answers I was reading were becoming increasingly emotional. That made me wonder whether there was a better way to find information.
This month, I subscribed to ChatGPT Pro. I’ve actually been using AI for a long time, asking it countless questions every year and gradually relying on it more and more. But I’ve noticed a problem: the amount of information in an AI answer can be quite limited. Sometimes I wait several minutes for a whole response, only to come away with one small point, without understanding what lies behind it.
AI is good at solving problems, but less good at laying out all the steps and context that make different kinds of information rich and meaningful.
How could I solve this problem?
I thought of a very old solution: blogs.
I write a blog myself, as I’m doing right now, though perhaps not all that often.
There are many valuable blogs on the internet. Since most are each author’s own little corner of the world, AI-generated content is relatively less prevalent. You get to read what the authors themselves really want to say: their stories, backgrounds, moods, and so on.
So I found an approach that works really well for me:
Find something you really want to understand, and say to ChatGPT: Please think deeply and research this topic. Find high-quality blogs or videos. I prefer blogs, so ideally, make them all blogs. Please don’t recommend any books.
Why no books? Because books can be too systematic to quickly address the question you have right now. They may also make it difficult to open up a view of the whole picture.
I really like learning from the top down. It’s like looking at a landscape: we start with the broad view, then gradually make our way into the finer details.
These are some of my thoughts for now.
Have fun.