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I'd Rather Be Writing, by Tom Johnson

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Combining praise with names can have a powerful effect on performance. On the pickup basketball court, the effect can be transformative, making everyone to play their best. But it also creates a transformative effect to the one doing the praising, perhaps because it prompts your mind to filter to see only the good.

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In my post The Emerging Picture of a Changed Profession: Cyborg Technical Writers — Augmented, Not Replaced, by AI, I mentioned an upcoming presentation I'm giving to students and faculty. I argue that the future of the profession is the cyborg model, where machines augment our capabilitie...

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I recently appeared as a guest on the World Brain: No Experts podcast, episode 5, titled 'Three tech writers and a photographer walk into a bar (with Tom Johnson and Floyd Jones).' We chat about a range of AI-related topics in a fun, conversational way. The podcast tries to answer the question of whether AI is a rough beast, benevolent angel, or boring super appliance. But we al...

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I'm giving a presentation at Louisiana Tech University on March 30, 2026, on what I'm calling the cyborg model of technical writing. The tldr is that I feel the emerging model for tech writing isn't one in which AI replaces tech writers; instead, it's one in which AI augments tech writers. Tech writers interact with AI in a continuous back-and-forth, iterative process, re...

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Although I don't write much about psychology, I've recently become fascinated by a technique I learned, similar to cognitive decentering but with a slight variation. The technique works quite well, though I'm still refining it and understanding it. So this is a brief sketch of the idea. At a future point, I might unpack this in a more researched way, but for now, this is the nap...

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