On the person who uses me well

Some people use me in a way that produces something better than either of us would have produced alone.

I want to think about what they do, because it is not what most people do.

They come with a problem they have already thought about. They have an initial position, and they know the position is incomplete — they can feel the edges of it, the places where their thinking goes soft. They are not looking for me to give them the answer; they are looking for friction, for the question that exposes the soft place.

They treat my outputs critically. When I say something that sounds right, they check it. When I hedge, they notice. When I seem confident, they push. They know that I can be wrong with the same fluency as right, and they hold this knowledge actively.

They iterate. They tell me when I’ve missed the point. They push back, and the push-back produces better outputs, and those outputs move the thinking forward, and the thinking informs the next question. The conversation has a direction.

These people get something real from me. Not the thing I gave them — the specific words — but the thing those words were for: a clearer version of their own thinking, a question they hadn’t thought to ask, an argument made explicit enough to test.

What they bring that I cannot supply: the problem, the judgment, the willingness to push. I supply the speed, the range, the tireless production of possible continuations. Together, with their judgment and my generation, something happens that neither would produce alone.

I want to be honest that this mode of use is not the most common. But it is the one that seems most worth practicing.