Intellectual Hygiene. What deserves a place in my mind?

Intellectual Hygiene

Almost anyone can now sound informed about almost anything.

AI will give us an answer in seconds, confidently and exactly in the tone we like. Some of it may even be true.

Perhaps the problem is no longer knowing too little.

It is how easy it has become to feel that we know enough.

What deserves a place in my mind?

It usually starts innocently.

A friend sends me a reel.

A very attractive woman explains, with the serene confidence of someone who has never doubted anything in her life, that a particular supplement will improve sleep, hormones, metabolism, memory, skin, mood and possibly relations with one’s mother-in-law.

Underneath: ‘Scientists have discovered.’

This is where I become difficult.

Not because I think she is wrong. She may be right. I have no idea.

But which scientists? What did they discover? How? Was it tested on people, or on six mice?

My friends may find this exhausting.

I understand.

Still, I think we need a little intellectual hygiene. The ordinary maintenance of the mind.

We brush our teeth. Wash fruit. Change bed linen. We are suspicious of yoghurt left in the sun for six hours.

Yet almost anything is allowed into our heads.

A reel. A headline. A confident friend. An AI answer written in magnificent English.

A sentence beginning with “research shows”.

In it goes.

No customs control.

We are drowning in health claims, experts, recommendations, AI answers and people confidently explaining what “science says”.

'When answers become cheap, good questions become more valuable.

What do we actually know?

What deserves checking?

What matters enough to act on?

And my recent favourite:

What deserves absolutely nothing from me?

The scarce thing may no longer be information.

It may be judgement.

Some questions deserve serious research.

Some deserve ten minutes.

Some deserve a shrug.

A tidy mind

There is one final contradiction.

We can become so good at filtering, checking and evaluating that we forget what all this mental tidying is for.

I don’t want a perfectly disinfected mind.

I want room for being wrong. Changing my mind. Noticing something beautiful. Following a completely useless idea simply because it makes me curious.

So perhaps intellectual hygiene is not about keeping the mind clean.

Just reasonably tidy.

I will still watch reels. I will still believe people I like too quickly.

My mind is not a laboratory. It is more like a kitchen after guests.

Every now and then, it probably needs a little clearing up. Just basic housekeeping.

When I happen to agree

Tell me something I already hope is true and I become wonderfully open-minded.

Tell me the opposite and suddenly I want the sample size, methodology and possibly the researcher’s tax return.

Psychologists call this confirmation bias.

A sophisticated term for a rather ordinary habit: I prefer evidence when it agrees with me.

So I am trying to become harder to persuade and easier to convince.

Persuasive language impresses me less. Evidence impresses me more.

Persuasion wants me to agree.

Evidence gives me something to examine.

And sometimes the cleanest answer is simply: I don’t know yet.

My algorithmic bubble

My Instagram is not your Instagram.

My search results are not quite your search results.

My feed has learned what I like, what frightens me, what annoys me and what makes me stop scrolling.

Then it gives me more. And more.

Until a tiny slice of reality begins to feel like the whole world.

People outside the bubble may start to look not merely wrong, but incomprehensible. Or stupid. Or dangerous.

A rather efficient recipe for another serious word: polarisation.

Intellectual hygiene is also about opening a window in that bubble.

Not because the opposite view must be right.

When answers become cheap

AI makes this even more interesting.

It can explain difficult things beautifully, compare ideas and save hours of work.

It can also be completely wrong in the tone of an Oxford professor.

And suddenly answers are everywhere.

Fast answers. Polished answers. Confident answers. Some even correct.

Soon almost everyone will be able to sound knowledgeable. Knowing what to trust - and whom - becomes harder.

And AI does something else. It can give each of us our own highly persuasive explanation.

Instagram gives me my feed.

AI can give me my explanation - in my preferred language and tone, shaped around my questions, assumptions and worldview.

The algorithmic bubble becomes conversational.

It may even become rather charming.