Gurteen Knowledge Letter: Issue 299 - May 2025

Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 299 – May 2025

I’ve discovered another intriguing way to use ChatGPT: I ask, “Given what you know about me, what do you think my opinion on this would be?” It’s a surprisingly effective way to reflect on my values and perspectives—sometimes it echoes things I’ve said, other times it surfaces insights I hadn’t quite put into words myself.

What’s interesting is how much it gets wrong about me—but then, it doesn’t know me that well. It’s responding more to my public persona than to the full complexity of who I am. Still, that in itself can be revealing. Perhaps it reflects how others perceive me, or what parts of myself I’ve made most visible.

If you have a substantial amount of material about yourself online, try it for yourself—it can be unexpectedly insightful.

1. Learning with Openai Academy
   Exploring how ai works through free online lessons
2. What’s the Vibe?
   Merging vibe writing with vibe coding
3. Rethinking Political Talk
   A new ai tool offers left, right and common-ground views
4. Rethinking How We Learn
   Text Is killing learning
5. Daniel Kahneman’s Final Decision
   Choosing to die the way he lived—thoughtfully
6. In Conversation Podcast
   David Gurteen and John Hovell "In Conversation"
7. Help Keep My Work Alive
8. Unsubscribe
9. Gurteen Knowledge Letter

I’ve been exploring OpenAI Academy, a free learning platform that offers short, practical courses on how AI works and how to use it effectively. It’s a helpful way to get up to speed on topics like prompt design, model behavior, and responsible AI use—no tech background needed.

You can try it yourself at academy.openai.com.

Recently, I came across a concept that immediately caught my attention: vibe writing. Vibe writing takes two forms: one is improvisational—like coding without a spec—messy, iterative, led by intuition. The other aims to evoke a feeling, using rhythm, fragments, and tone to create resonance rather than argument.

Since I've been exploring vibe coding—a more intuitive, conversational way of programming with AI—the connection was clear. So I decided to try something: what if I could code a little "vibe" into every post on my blook?

The Experiment

Now, at the top of every post on my site, you’ll see a button labeled “What’s the Vibe?” When clicked, it triggers some code that sends the post’s content to ChatGPT via the API and asks it to generate a vibe writing-style summary. The result appears instantly (well, almost—more on that in a moment) in a pop-up window on the page.

And yes, you guessed it: I used vibe coding to create vibe writing.

Under the Hood

Here’s the original prompt I used (but I have tweaked it several times since then):

“Summarise the following web page content in 'VIBE style': bold, fresh, playful, insightful, and emotionally resonant. Use clean HTML formatting with short paragraphs, bullet points, or headings to enhance readability in a popup window. This should feel alive, inviting, and like it was written to spark curiosity and connection.”

First-time generation can take up to a minute (as it calls the API and processes the response), but I’ve implemented caching to keep things fast on future visits—usually just a few seconds.

Try It Out

Want to see it in action? I’ve already generated and cached a vibe summary for most of my gateway pages. Here’s one with caching turned off: Podcast in the Age of AI. Click the "What’s the Vibe?" button a few times—you’ll notice the summary differs each time. Same content, new vibe. That’s part of the fun.

Still in Progress

I’m still experimenting with formatting—icons, fonts, and colors may evolve. The tone of the summary is also influenced by how I craft the prompt, so there's room to adjust that too.

This idea only took a couple of hours to develop, but it’s opened up all kinds of questions about writing, tone, automation, and reader experience. For now, it’s just a playful addition—but one that might grow into something more.

My friend Bruce Lloyd introduced me to a fascinating new AI tool called DepolarizingGPT. It’s designed to make political conversations less divisive by offering three different responses to any political question—one from the left, one from the right, and one that aims to find common ground. Created by data scientist David Rozado and philosopher Steve McIntosh, it’s a thoughtful attempt to bridge the growing political polarization.

In my work on Conversational Leadership, I keep coming back to a simple idea: real learning happens through interaction, not isolation. That’s why Rod J. Naquin’s article Text is not Dialogue resonated with me. He points out how education has become overly dependent on text—worksheets, textbooks, written assessments—while neglecting the deeper ways humans naturally learn: through imitation, embodied practice, and dialogue.

We didn’t evolve to learn primarily by reading and writing. We evolved to learn by observing others, participating in communities, and engaging in open-ended conversation. Naquin draws on research by Merlin Donald and Dmitri Nikulin to show that text-based education often bypasses these fundamental learning processes.

In Conversational Leadership, conversation is not just a tool but a way of thinking and learning together—an ongoing, unfinalized exchange that builds understanding over time. Classrooms and organizations that rely too heavily on text risk losing this living dimension of learning.

Naquin’s article reminds us that if we want to nurture real learning—whether in schools, workplaces, or communities—we need to balance text with dialogue, demonstration, collaboration, and shared inquiry. It’s not about abandoning text but about restoring a fuller ecology of human learning.

Read the full article.

I was surprised to read recently about how Daniel Kahneman died. He chose assisted dying at 90, while he was still able to enjoy life, but had started noticing mental lapses and physical decline. It’s striking—and kind of admirable—that he made that decision so thoughtfully, in line with his lifelong belief in reason and autonomy. He didn’t want to go through the slow loss of clarity he spent his career studying. Even in death, he followed his own thinking. It’s a powerful reminder of how deeply he lived what he believed.

I’ll have to face my own death in the not-so-distant future, and I can’t help but wish this kind of dignified end was more accepted, more possible.

John Hovell and I share a deep interest in Conversational Leadership, and we have been meeting on Zoom every Thursday to explore the topic for several years.

From now on, we will open part of our conversation as a live podcast on YouTube.

If you would like to join us, we meet almost every Thursday at 9:15 AM Washington DC time (2:15 PM London time) for 20 minutes. We should be online every Thursday in May.

You can tune in live or catch up with the recordings. You will find the channel here along with two back videos from April. https://www.youtube.com/@ConversationalLeadership

Help Keep My Work Alive
For almost 25 years, I’ve been sharing the Gurteen Knowledge Letter each month, and many of you have been reading it for five years or more. My Knowledge Café also reached a milestone, celebrating its 20th anniversary in September 2022.

If my work has made a difference to you, I’d be grateful if you could consider supporting it. A small monthly donation or any one-off contribution would greatly help cover some of my website hosting costs.

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Gurteen Knowledge Letter

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David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom