The Red Queen Effect: Running as Fast as You Can Just to Stay in Place

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” This quote, spoken by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), became one of the most influential metaphors in evolutionary biology—and increasingly, in technology. Origins: From Victorian Nonsense to Scientific Theory Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was a mathematics lecturer at Oxford when he wrote Through the Looking-Glass. The Red Queen scene depicts Alice running hand-in-hand with the chess piece queen across a landscape that moves beneath them. Despite exhausting effort, they remain in the same spot. ...

December 4, 2025 · 6 min · Joor0x

Critical Thinking in the Age of AI: Why Your Brain Is Your Last Competitive Advantage

The Calculator Effect, Amplified Remember when calculators became ubiquitous? Teachers worried we’d forget how to do mental math. They were right—but it didn’t matter much. The trade-off was acceptable. Generative AI is making the same bargain, except this time we’re not trading away arithmetic. We’re trading away thinking itself. A Swiss Business School study surveyed over 600 participants and found something uncomfortable: there’s a significant negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical thinking ability. The more we lean on AI, the less sharp our own reasoning becomes. This isn’t speculation—it’s showing up in the data. ...

January 2, 2025 · 9 min · Joor0x