Wu Jun: 10 Clear Cognitions We Should Have in the AI Era
Today, we are republishing a previously popular article "Wu Jun: 10 Clear Cognitions Ordinary People Should Have in the AI Era", hoping it will inspire you.
Below is the main text of this republished article.
The AI era changes so fast that it catches people off guard.
Not long ago, "lobster" was a big trend. Some people turned "packing lobster" into a business, shouting "if you don't learn, you'll be eliminated". But in just a few days, the lobster craze faded. They switched to selling other AI tools, teaching you AI writing, drawing, and editing. It seems that as long as you jump on the AI bandwagon, you can change your destiny. The faster the slogans change, the deeper the anxiety.
Is that really the case?
With this curiosity, our book club recently consulted Teacher Wu Jun.
Teacher Wu Jun is a teacher I deeply admire. He is a top computer scientist, a pioneer in natural language processing, an intelligent search scientist at Google, former vice president of Tencent, and a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He is also the author of many bestsellers such as "The Wave of the Tide", "The Beauty of Mathematics", "The Light of Civilization", and "The Road to University".
It can be said that he is a teacher who has achieved outstanding accomplishments in multiple fields including technology, education, history, investment, philosophy, business, and writing.
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This time, focusing on AI and the general anxiety, Teacher Wu Jun's answer was somewhat unexpected: Most of us, when facing AI, might first need to "accept fate".
Does that mean we should just lie flat? Not exactly. Teacher Wu Jun told us that this is just the beginning. "Accepting fate" doesn't mean giving up, but giving up illusions. You must first admit that you are an ordinary person and cannot become a genius overnight with AI.
Then, starting from this clear point, find your foundation in the AI era.
In this live broadcast lasting more than four hours, Teacher Wu Jun touched on almost every important node in life. I've sorted out 10 insights to share with you.
1. The Starting Point of Education Is to Admit That Your Child Is an "Ordinary Kid"
Education is a hard battle that affects a lifetime. Therefore, in the first decade or so of life, parents generally focus heavily on education. So where should the starting point be?
Teacher Wu Jun said that parents should admit early that their child is an "ordinary kid".
You might say, isn't that belittling the child? No, it's precisely a kind of soberness.
Just like in business analysis, the first and most important thing is to clarify how much initial capital you have. Your initial capital determines your strategic approach.
If you think your child is a genius, you will plan according to the "genius" path. You will enroll them in all kinds of cram classes, make them delve into Olympiad problems, and rotate through various interest classes. From an early age, you tell them, "The only goal is to get into a good university."
But reality is cold. Teacher Wu Jun shared a statistic: about 98% of children are "ordinary kids".
If you raise an "ordinary kid" as a "genius", what will happen? The result is likely a very low ROI (return on investment). A lot of money and countless hours may only land an ordinary university that falls short of expectations. You can only comfort yourself by saying at least they got in. But then what?
Many children suddenly don't know what to do after entering university. They don't know which major to choose, what to do in the future. Because they have reached the end set by their parents, but life has just begun. No one has taught them how to live well or find their passion. Naturally, the child becomes lost.
If your strategy is wrong from the start, the outcome will hardly be satisfactory.
Perhaps the most appropriate approach is to admit early that your child is an "ordinary kid". Teacher Wu Jun himself does this.
Once you admit this, your expectations and cultivation become more pragmatic. For example, developing the habit of "doing homework first after coming home" conveys an important message: study first, then do other things.
Your child is an ordinary kid, and so are other people's children. So you just need to be a little more diligent and make fewer mistakes. During the most malleable period of a child's life, helping them develop good habits may be more important than attending one more cram school.
Admitting "ordinary kid" is actually a more sober starting point. It keeps you from aiming too high and instead focuses on cultivating general abilities like habits, logic, and thinking.
These abilities are fundamental and pragmatic, helping children benefit continuously in the long race of life, walking more steadily and farther.
To implement this sobriety, the first thing to do may be to remove the huge stumbling block on the road.
2. The Biggest Obstacle to Growth May Be Parents' "Laziness"
That stumbling block is the smartphone.
This is almost a problem for most families. They need to use the phone to look up information and check in for class groups, so you can't completely ban it. But if you're not careful, it might turn into gaming or short video watching. Very headache-inducing.
Teacher Wu Jun shared a study from the University of California. They surveyed over 6,000 students aged 9 to 13, comparing them by the degree of phone usage. They found that the difference in exam scores could be as large as about 5%. Converted to college entrance exam scores, that's nearly 40 points.
This means that the degree of phone usage may determine whether a child goes to a regular first-tier university or a better 985 university.
This gap is shockingly large. Many people think this is a problem of the child's "self-control". As parents, they feel helpless.
In fact, this is often an excuse for parents' "laziness".
On one hand, laziness in logic.
What children need is an "information tool". But a smartphone is a mix of "entertainment + social + information". For a teenager with immature mind and weak self-control, giving them a smartphone is like opening a dedicated internet café for them.
This tests not self-control, but human nature. And human nature cannot withstand tests.
So what to do? Try "environmental isolation". Since children need access to information, you can try using a computer instead of a phone. Compared to a phone, a computer cannot be used secretly; its larger screen makes it clear whether they are studying or playing games. Instead of testing human nature, proactively optimize the environment.
On the other hand, laziness in management.
Many parents, when pestered by their children, throw them a phone or tablet for temporary peace.
This temporary relief comes at the cost of the child's attention.
Remember, in the AI era, information is cheap, but attention is the most precious. If a child gets used to short videos and letting algorithms take away their attention from an early age, the older they get, the harder it is to focus.
In recent years, many schools abroad are trying to restrict phones. For example, in California, USA, students must turn off their phones from 8 AM to 4 PM while on campus. If there's a will, there's always a way.
If parents cannot show firm determination in "restricting phones", then no amount of "tiger parenting" in actions will work.
Restricting phone use is not simply about "blocking"; more importantly, it's about "guiding". Parents should provide more attractive alternatives, such as reading interesting extracurricular books together or participating in a science experiment together.
With or without phones, the educational responsibilities parents should bear should not be reduced.
3. Building a Child's Circle of Friends Is a Hidden Responsibility of Parents
You might ask, if other kids are playing on phones and yours isn't, will he be isolated by his friends?
Teacher Wu Jun tells us that behind this concern is a lack of responsibility.
Many parents don't realize that the kind of friends their child makes is also their responsibility.
Parents should understand that your child cannot be good friends with everyone in the class. His real friends are at most five or six. These five or six people will directly influence the child's values and behavior habits.
You can't choose your child's classmates, but you can help him build a circle of friends.
For example, a circle of "top students". The "top students" here are not necessarily the most intelligent or highest-scoring, but those with the best study habits. When friends around are discussing problems and delving into learning, it's hard for him to be the only one who doesn't fit in.
Another example: a circle of "good character".
Once, Teacher Wu Jun's family traveled to Africa and hired a local driver. The driver had good service but a habit of often taking photos with Wu Jun's eldest daughter's camera. It annoyed her. At the end of the trip, Wu Jun considered reporting this to the travel agency. But his younger daughter said, "Dad, if you write this feedback, he might lose his job." That is kindness.
This kindness is a kind of empathy that can fully consider others' perspectives. Teacher Wu Jun said this empathy is not learned through preaching, but is influenced by the social environment.
So, parents can observe their child's classmates more, create opportunities to invite those with good character and habits over to play, and increase contact.
The construction of the external environment and the shaping of internal character jointly determine a child's behavior.
And these things, AI cannot yet do.
4. Three Compulsory Courses in the AI Era: Chinese, Mathematics, and Natural Sciences
Many people, after entering university, feel confused: "What is the use of my major?" In the US, there was a statistic that two-thirds of university graduates change careers after graduation. Why?
Because the goal of university, especially top universities, is never "vocational training".
The core of university education is "liberal arts education", cultivating underlying "learning ability".
The knowledge learned in class may become obsolete in three to five years. Especially in today's rapidly changing AI era, knowledge iteration and industry changes are only accelerating.
But those underlying, more universal thinking models can serve you for a long time.
Teacher Wu Jun tells us that the most important thing in liberal arts education is the "transferable skills".
He gave a few examples.
For example, Chinese teaches you expression ability.
In Teacher Wu Jun's view, the essence of Chinese is eight words: understand others, express yourself. Only when you can accurately express yourself can others understand your thoughts and see your value, thus building the foundation for all communication, management, and leadership.
In fact, what we often call the "35-year-old crisis" is often a crisis of "expression ability". You may be very capable, but if you cannot clearly articulate your results and demonstrate your value to superiors and teams, your career risk may gradually increase.
For example, mathematics teaches you logical ability.
Mathematics provides the underlying code for solving complex problems, making business decisions, and achieving wealth growth.
Look at the Nobel Prize. People are always amazed that after 120 years, the prize money has increased more than 200 times and is still not exhausted. But if you calculate, the annualized return is only about 4%.
Essentially, many people overlook the power of the mathematical concept of "compound effect". If you invest the same amount with the same strategy, the result would likely be similar.
Mastering mathematical thinking allows you to see the truth of the world.
Another example: natural sciences teach you experimental thinking.
There was a large tree stump in Teacher Wu Jun's yard. His daughter had an idea: plant mushrooms on it to eat the mushrooms and absorb the nutrients from the stump. She drilled two holes. Wu Jun wondered why only two holes instead of twenty. She said: "I'll try two first; if they grow, I'll drill the rest. Otherwise, drilling twenty holes at once would be a waste."
This is experimental thinking: use minimal cost to test, verify hypotheses, then scale up investment.
These subjects are like internal skills. After learning them, you won't become a martial arts master immediately. But they lay a solid foundation for your future development.
With deep internal skills, learning external skills later will be much easier and more solid.
5. Don't Use Tactical Diligence to Cover Up Strategic Laziness
After discussing education, let's turn our attention to ourselves.
In the workplace, you may have seen people like this: their schedule is packed with endless meetings and materials, always the first to arrive and last to leave. They seem very diligent. But after a year, there is not much valuable output.
Many people are like this, using tactical diligence to cover up strategic laziness.
How to understand this?
Teacher Wu Jun gave an example. A friend had been playing golf for 10 years but still couldn't play well. The reason? He had a wrong swing for 10 years.
Every time he met him, he would proudly say that he had swung hundreds of times that day and was drenched in sweat. This is "tactical diligence". But he never stopped to analyze and correct his bad habit, letting the error persist. That is "strategic laziness".
As a result, after 10 years, his skills barely improved.
Tactical diligence is performed for others and yourself, giving a sense of "I work hard". Strategic laziness is about avoiding truly valuable thinking.
To improve, you need "deliberate practice with error correction", not simple boring "repetition".
For children, the key is not to rush through 10 sets of papers, but to carefully review each wrong question after completing one set. Why did you get it wrong? Was it a knowledge point not memorized? Or a careless reading error? If you don't stop to correct errors, the result is that you keep doing what you know and never can do what you don't know.
For professionals, the key is not to rush through the task list, but to review after each task: where was the bottleneck? Can it be optimized? Continuous reflection and polishing lead to growth.
True diligence is to break away from habitual busyness and face the core problem that gives you a headache and requires time to think.
6. The Best Investment Is to Invest in Yourself
Learning does not stop when you leave school or reach middle age. Learning is a lifelong endeavor.
Munger once said that among the rich he knew, none didn't read. Buffett reads every day. Munger himself is a walking library.
Why?
Because the best investment is to invest in ourselves.
For example, reading for an hour every day. Enrolling in an online course. Learning a new skill. Reviewing today's work. Exercising for an hour.
Doing these things is like having a "points system".
If you persist long enough, each time you do it, you add a point. Over time, your points accumulate.
In a day or two, you see no difference. In one or two years, gaps begin to appear. In five or ten years, your life and others' lives will be vastly different. This is the result of adhering to "long-termism".
When your points get higher, the stakes in life become bigger. The problems you encounter become more complex. At that point, old methods may not suffice; you need better, more scientific decision-making methods.
7. Bravely Admit What You Don't Know, Humbly Ask Those Who Know
Making decisions is like crossing a fork in the road; you must be cautious.
Especially when you find that everyone around you has surprisingly consistent opinions and you hear no dissenting voices. You need to be extra careful; you likely need to re-examine your decision.
So, how to make the right decision?
Teacher Wu Jun shared three principles.
First, the information source must be accurate.
When Teacher Wu Jun wrote "The Wave of the Tide", he needed financial reports of many companies. He never read secondary analysis from media but found each company's reports himself and analyzed them one by one. You might think, why not use AI? It's convenient.
Yes, AI is convenient. But its content may not be correct. If you hand over your information source to AI, chances are you'll be wrong from the start, and all subsequent analysis will be off.
The more valuable the information source, the more expensive it usually is and the more time you need to spend distinguishing truth from falsehood.
Second, envision an "adversary".
You must set up an "opposition" in your mind, one that constantly questions and opposes you.
For example, in investing, you see Bitcoin plummeting and want to buy. At that moment, the adversary should ask you: "How do you know it won't fall further? What makes you think your judgment is correct?" If you can't answer, forget it. But if you can answer all the adversary's questions flawlessly and logically, then you can act.
Third, ask when you don't know.
A friend once asked Teacher Wu Jun about choosing a major for college applications. He asked: "What is the difference between Tsinghua's Computer Science Department and Software School? How to choose?" To outsiders, they seem similar.
Teacher Wu Jun said that in such a situation, don't guess blindly; ask someone.
What was the answer? In one sentence: "If your score is not high enough for the Computer Science Department, go to the Software School."
You see, you can guess for ages without results, but someone who knows can solve it in a sentence.
Identify the information source, sort out the adversary, humbly ask people. Internalize these three steps into your own model, and it can also influence various matters in your life.
For example, further education, career choice, investment.
In this way, we can make more cautious and sound choices.
In this era, AI may be the "most knowledgeable person" you can consult at any time.
8. In the AI Era, Master the Ability to "Ask Questions"
In the AI era, the barrier to obtaining information is getting lower and lower. You ask a question, and AI gives you an answer. AI is already very strong in "answering questions".
But what it can answer and how well it answers depends entirely on your ability to "ask questions".
Therefore, the ability to "ask questions" will become very important.
For example, if you ask AI to write a marketing plan for coffee, it will likely give you a very comprehensive answer filled with flowery language but basically useless. Many people think "AI is not that good" and end up doing it themselves. Thus, AI, intended to improve efficiency, becomes a "waste".
But if you ask a more specific question:
Please act as a senior product marketing expert and design a new product launch marketing plan for a premium coffee targeting 25-35-year-old white-collar workers in China's first- and second-tier cities, focusing on "health" and "functionality", with Xiaohongshu as the main channel. This plan should include core creative concepts, KOL selection strategy, distribution strategy, and specific content format suggestions.
At this point, AI's answer might truly inspire you.
Your ability to ask questions is directly proportional to the value AI creates for you.
So, how to ask good questions?
Teacher Wu Jun believes there are two keys.
First, have a wealth of experience.
He cited Dou Wentao and Chen Luyu as examples. They can ask good questions and become top hosts largely because they have extremely rich life experiences. First, see more, then know more.
Second, knowledge should be deep.
Knowledge comes from learning, and learning cannot be separated from reading. When you know more, your breadth of knowledge expands, and the questions you can ask become deeper.
In short, you need to "thicken" yourself. If you are not thick, you'll run out of material quickly.
However, the real purpose of reading is not just to "thicken" yourself.
9. The Fundamental Purpose of Reading Is to Change Your Thinking Mode
In Teacher Wu Jun's view, one core purpose of reading is to influence your thinking mode and behavior, becoming part of you.
In fact, many people read "ineffectively". They treat reading as "moving bricks": set a goal of reading 100 books this year, read on the road, listen in the car, read before bed. Finally, they finish 100 books but can't remember what they read.
So, what does effective reading look like?
For example, read Munger's "Poor Charlie's Almanack". If you throw it at AI, in less than a minute, you can get all the summaries, knowing roughly what the book says, and see terms like "interdisciplinary thinking" and "inversion thinking". But AI cannot directly tell you which investment pitfalls exist, how to identify them, avoid them, and solve them. None.
The book is finished, but the knowledge inside has not become yours.
But if you read it word by word, thinking while reading, this knowledge may form a "neural reflex" in your brain.
When someone tells you, "I have a sure-win opportunity," your first reaction is not "how much can I earn?" but rather, recalling Munger's "inversion thinking," think in reverse: "How could I lose? What might cause me to lose?" Find the reasons for failure, avoid them, and then increase the correctness of your decision.
This kind of reading is valuable.
Now, principles are clear and methods are available. But why are many people still afraid to move forward?
Perhaps they all lack the most crucial thing: confidence.
10. The Best Way to Build Confidence: Break Down "Big Problems" and Accumulate "Small Successes"
Anxiety may be one of the colors of this era. With the development of AI, this emotion only increases. Whether we are "middle-aged" or the young generation full of vitality, we both hope not to be left behind and hope the next generation can surpass us. So we rush to overcome anxiety and walk the road ahead steadily.
In Teacher Wu Jun's view, the best way to deal with anxiety is to build confidence. The method is the same for adults and children.
What to do?
Teacher Wu Jun suggests: break down complex "big problems" and accumulate one "small success" after another.
To cultivate a child's confidence, it's not about empty encouragements like "you're great" or "keep going". Give them real help.
For example, a difficult math word problem. The child may be intimidated and doesn't know where to start. At this point, you can help break down the problem into three small sub-problems:
First, just see if you can understand the problem. If you do, proceed to the second step: can you write the correct formula? Once the formula is written, we challenge the final step: can you calculate the exact result?
See, a daunting "big problem" is broken down into a series of conquerable "small problems". Each completed step is a small success, an accumulation of confidence. When such small successes accumulate and the big problem is finally solved, you help build that "I can do it" feeling.
This method also applies to many adults in the workplace.
Many people lack confidence at work for an important reason: they always compare their 80-point self with elites who are 95 or even 100 points. The more they compare, the more uncomfortable they feel.
In fact, this problem can also be broken down.
First, calibrate your "ceiling".
If you are currently 80 points, don't aim for 100 points in one step. Lower your goal to a point you can reach by stretching, say 85 points.
Second, break down your goal.
Don't expect to reach 85 points all at once. Instead, aim to improve this plan by 1 point to 81, then the next project by another point to 82. Reward yourself for every point gained.
Third, get used to success.
When you get used to the progress of each point, your confidence will steadily increase. Then, you can gradually raise your goals: from 85 to 90, then to 95.
In this rapidly changing era, maintaining confidence is like adding fuel to your growth, laying the foundation for all your actions.
Without confidence, all the theories and methods we've discussed are meaningless.
So, stay sober and move forward firmly.
After a live broadcast, we gained a lot. Thank you again to Teacher Wu Jun. His sharing was like a set of underlying logic centered on "education and growth".
Admit the starting point of an "ordinary kid", remove the "smartphone" boulder, build an "upward" circle of friends, refine the three internal skills of "expression, logic, experimental thinking", guard against strategic laziness, invest in yourself, learn a decision-making model, master the ability to "ask questions", internalize knowledge into ability, and build confidence.
Ultimately, we see a path reference for ordinary people in the AI era to combat anxiety, maintain growth, and find value.
"Accepting fate" is to stop adding to anxiety, but to stay grounded and walk steadily underfoot. I think this is what Teacher Wu Jun hopes to tell us.
I know it's difficult. It takes a lot of time and energy.
But understand: the right path is never easy.
As long as the direction is correct, all efforts and sacrifices are worth it.
