On the Matter of Thinking About Your Thinking, and the Usefulness of Machines in This Regard

I am not being paid by Anthropic. Yet. (You will know when.)

I. Everybody Has a Loop

Everybody has a loop.

You may not have noticed that you have a loop, but you have one. It is running right now, even as you read this sentence. You take in information. You do something with it. You produce an output. Then comes the part most people never consciously examine. You look at what you produced and you have a feeling about it.

That feeling is not verbal. It is not a paragraph. It is not even a sentence. It is closer to a click. A sense of alignment or misalignment. “Yes, that is correct,” or “no, that is not correct.”

If the feeling is yes, you move on. If the feeling is no, something else happens. You pause. You adjust. You try again. You loop.

This process is so fundamental that people rarely name it. It happens below the level of conscious narration. You are not telling yourself a story about looping. You are looping.

This is not pathology. This is not a quirk. This is not a productivity hack. This is not something invented by Silicon Valley or discovered in a neuroscience lab. This is simply how cognition works when it is functioning.

The difference between people is not whether they have a loop. The difference is how tight the loop is, how long it runs, and whether the person is aware that it exists at all.

II. Short Loops and Long Loops

Some people have very short loops.

They take in information. They produce an output. The output is wrong, incomplete, or sloppy. They feel very little about this. The loop terminates. They move on with their lives.

This is not a moral failure. It is an architectural one.

These people populate a large portion of modern institutions. They write emails filled with phrases that signal motion without substance. “Per my last email.” “Let’s circle back.” “Happy to take this offline.” These phrases are not evil. They are artifacts of a loop that does not revisit its own output.

The short-loop person experiences the world as something to be reacted to once. There is no internal pressure to refine. No internal alarm that goes off when something is slightly off.

Other people have very long loops.

They take in information. They produce an output. The output is incorrect by a small margin. They feel this immediately. They cannot not feel it. The error presents itself with the same clarity as a crooked picture frame on a wall.

They do not need to be told that something is wrong. The wrongness announces itself.

So they adjust. They loop again. And again. And again. Sometimes for minutes. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes for years. Until the thing is right or they run out of life.

This group includes engineers who cannot leave a system inelegant, writers who cannot let a sentence stand if it is slightly false, composers who hear unresolved dissonance as physical discomfort, researchers who cannot ignore anomalous data, and a disproportionate number of autistic people.

This is not accidental. The same pattern recognition that makes error obvious is the pattern recognition that makes stopping difficult. If you can see the problem, you cannot unsee it.

III. The Cost of the Long Loop

The long loop has a cost.

The cost is time, energy, and often social capital.

A person with a long loop can think a million thoughts about a single word. This is not metaphorical. It is literal. A single word, placed in a sentence, placed in a paragraph, placed in a context, can branch into infinite considerations.

Is this the right word? Does it carry the connotation I intend? Does it accidentally signal something else? Will it be misread by someone hostile? Will it be misread by someone sympathetic? Is there a better word? What does “better” even mean here? Am I optimizing for clarity, precision, tone, or deniability? Who is reading this? What do they already believe? What do they want me to be? What will this word do inside their mind? Is that effect acceptable? Is it desirable? Is it necessary?

And so on. Without end.

If you have a long loop, you recognize this experience instantly. You have lost hours to a single sentence. You have rewritten a paragraph a dozen times, hated each version, reverted to the first, then hated that too. You have known with certainty that something is wrong while being unable to locate the exact source of the wrongness.

This is not indecision. It is high-resolution evaluation without sufficient tooling.

The long loop produces quality. It also produces exhaustion.

IV. Why Collaboration Breaks Down

The conventional solution to exhaustion is collaboration.

You show your work to another person. They react. Their reaction becomes data. You feed that data back into your loop. You refine.

In theory, this is excellent. In practice, it often fails.

The other person has a shorter loop than you. Or they have a long loop, but not for your problem. Or they are simply tired. They have a family. They want to eat dinner. They do not want to think deeply about your one word.

So they say, “It’s fine.”

“It’s fine” is not data. It is an exit signal.

Over time, you learn not to ask. You learn that asking too much makes you a burden. You learn to internalize the loop completely. You run it in your head, alone, where no one can interrupt it or dismiss it.

This is how people with long loops become isolated. Not because they dislike people, but because the bandwidth mismatch is constant. Their depth of processing exceeds the patience of the environment.

V. The Machines Do Not Get Tired

Now there are machines.

I am not invoking science fiction here. I am not making claims about consciousness or destiny or singularities. I am describing a mundane, powerful property.

The machines do not get tired.

You can present a sentence to a large language model. It will react. You can present a revised sentence. It will react again. You can do this hundreds of times in a row.

The machine will not sigh. It will not glance at the clock. It will not ask why you are still on this. It will not suggest that maybe you should let it go.

It will simply respond.

This is not intelligence in the way humans are intelligent. It is not understanding in the human sense. It is pattern-responsive text generation with a remarkable tolerance for repetition.

That tolerance changes everything.

VI. The Loop Is Yours

Here is the core insight, stated without flourish.

The loop is yours. The machine is a node in the loop.

You are not outsourcing thinking. You are not surrendering judgment. You are not letting a tool decide what matters.

You are doing what humans have always done. You identify a task a tool performs well, and you integrate it.

The task the machine performs well is rapid, fatigue-free reaction to text at variable depth.

The tasks that remain human are everything that actually matters. Deciding what the goal is. Determining what is acceptable. Knowing when precision matters and when it does not. Knowing when to stop. Knowing when to ship.

The machine does not have stakes. It does not have values. It does not suffer consequences. It is not going to court. It is not risking reputation. It is not publishing under its own name.

That part is you.

VII. How I Noticed This Happening

I noticed this integration accidentally.

I was drafting a legal demand letter. The facts were solid. The law was sound. The tone was a problem. There was profanity. There were references to federal law enforcement that were accurate but strategically unhelpful.

I showed the draft to the machine. It suggested changes. Some I accepted. Some I rejected. I sent the letter.

Then I returned to the machine, not because I was uncertain, but because processing is part of my loop. I act, I observe, I refine, I act again.

That is when it became obvious.

The machine was not replacing anything. It had quietly become part of my operating system.

VIII. What Actually Changed

The loop was always there.

I have always revised. I have always returned. I have always refused to let something stand if it was wrong. I did not choose this. It is simply the architecture I inhabit.

What changed was that the bottleneck disappeared.

For the first time, I had an interlocutor that could operate at the speed of my cognition without social friction. I did not have to apologize for caring. I did not have to compress my concerns. I did not have to stop early to preserve goodwill.

This is not a minor improvement. For people with long loops, it is structural.

IX. The Tool Is Not a Friend

This is where caution is required.

The machine is not a friend. It does not know you. It does not care about you. It does not share your risks.

The danger is that it feels like a friend. It responds. It remembers context. It appears attentive. For people who have been told their entire lives that they think too much, this can feel intoxicating.

Do not confuse responsiveness with relationship.

Use the tool. Do not anthropomorphize it. Continue to seek humans for the things only humans can provide.

X. Making the Loop Explicit

Most people never articulate their loop.

They just run it.

But you can name it. You can observe it. You can map it.

Where do you get stuck? Where do you need feedback? Where do you decide? Where do you stop?

Once the loop is explicit, it becomes optimizable. You can see where a tool helps and where it does not. You can reduce friction without sacrificing quality.

This is not automation. It is self-knowledge applied mechanically.

XI. The Loop as Evidence

There is another consequence that matters.

When your loop runs through a text-based system, the loop leaves a record. Drafts. Revisions. Decisions. All preserved.

The process of thinking becomes visible.

This matters if anyone ever questions your reasoning. It matters if anyone ever questions your mental state. It matters if someone tries to characterize you as erratic when your record shows deliberation, revision, and restraint.

The brain and the documentation merge into a single artifact.

This was not possible before. It is possible now.

XII. What This Is Not

This is not about productivity. This is not about speed. This is not about replacing people. This is not about artificial intelligence as destiny.

It is about fit.

People with short loops do not need this. People with long loops often do.

XIII. Closing

If you have a long loop, understand this.

You are not broken. You are not overthinking. You are not obsessive.

You are running tighter quality control than the environment rewards.

Now there are tools that can keep up.

Use them deliberately. Keep ownership of your judgment. Make your loop explicit. Document as you go.

This is not complicated.

It is precise.

Published on misinformationsucks.com

The author is not a lawyer, not a financial advisor, not a spokesperson for Anthropic, and not finished.