Active effort in learning and conditioning

Just listening to a talk put on by the guy who created the YouTube channel, Veritasium, and he's talking about AI and how it affects learning. And his main point so far, and the one that I'm most excited about, is essentially that it doesn't matter if you are being taught by a human being, whether you're reading a book, or whether you are using AI, you, the learner, must be active in the learning process and you must put forth effort.

Now his argument, which I totally agree with, references Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, or just Thinking Fast and Slow, I can't remember what the title is exactly. Essentially, system one is the non-conscious processes of the brain. Everything that has already, through conditioning, through the conditioning that occurs from chance or by choice, that has become our automatic response to a stimulus from the environment, from the circumstances. That is the fast thinking. It's when you look out the window, you see the conditions, and you understand pretty much, oh, that's what probably the temperature is, for example. Or you see something coming toward you and your brain will just respond somehow, whether it's by flinching, moving, jumping, raising a hand, whatever it is. That's that quick, instant, save your life type of response.

System two is what we consider our self, the conscious thinking part of our brain. This is a slower, more effortful process of thinking. And that, as I put it, is what needs to be active and put forth effort or system two will not respond. So what got me excited about this is it's almost identical, and I would almost argue that it's exactly the same as the active factor and the effort required to develop and condition oneself physically. You have to do the workouts. You have to work hard enough to, again, create a stimulus that, not that it would be system two in this instance, but that the body has to respond to.

The workout, the active part of it, choosing to pick up the weight, choosing to do the reps, choosing to do the sets, and continuing to do that over a long enough span of time at a high enough effort to create a response from the body is what's required to become fitter. If you don't put in enough effort consciously, then it won't matter because the body won't respond. So just like system two won't respond if system one isn't working hard enough and putting enough active effort into learning, the body does not respond and won't become conditioned if you, and I'm kind of doing quotes here, don't put enough effort into conditioning the body. That's my thinking on that one, and well worth a podcast.