[HN Gopher] Putting Ideas into Words
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Putting Ideas into Words
Author : prtkgpt
Score : 145 points
Date : 2022-02-12 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| goldfeld wrote:
| It seems like a quantum effect of our consciousness, 'putting the
| ideas into words changed them'. It's a perpetual chase after
| wording, and when you reach the post, it's already far-off again.
| This thought sheds some insight not only only on semiology and
| systems of symbols in human language, but into what I've been
| learning writing poems, and why it's so much fun to do it, I
| think, because the goal of the expression is changed, or
| heightened, by the act of reaching or moving to it. So it's
| sometimes, or very often for certain comparisons, more involved
| than programming, in terms of working memory.
|
| On the topic of essay writing, the book Writing Under Pressure:
| The Quick Writing Process is a 60's university professor gem and
| fully informed me as to how I approach writing (and reading)
| nonfiction, anything which has an argument, a thesis, points to
| make. It turns the random churn of paragraphs into a pragmatic
| scientific method.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rschneid wrote:
| >And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about
| anything nontrivial.
|
| I think this argument misses a potentially deeper point about the
| true magical power of reading...
|
| I did resonate with the majority of the piece, however.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Firefox tells me:
|
| "Web sites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does
| not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not
| valid for paulgraham.com. The certificate is only valid for the
| following names: _.store.yahoo.com,_.csell.store.yahoo.net,
| _.store.yahoo.net,_.us-dc1-edit.store.yahoo.net, _.us-
| dc1.csell.store.yahoo.net,_.us-dc2-edit.store.yahoo.net, _.us-
| dc2.csell.store.yahoo.net, store.yahoo.com,
| store.yahoo.net,_.stores.yahoo.net, stores.yahoo.net
|
| Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN"
|
| Does anyone else see this?
| samwillis wrote:
| A little trivia for those that don't know, PGs site is hosted
| on Yahoo Store as that is what Viaweb (his first startup)
| became when it was acquired by Yahoo in the mid 90s.
| aliceryhl wrote:
| You probably have a plugin that translates http links into
| https.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The certificate is untrusted for the domain, but Firefox should
| let you click through the warning screen and view the page. Or
| you can adjust the URL to use http:
| TameAntelope wrote:
| A pg essay is a work of modern art these days; I think he
| distills so much that it ends up taking a real effort to
| reconstruct meaning out of what's left.
|
| Let's see if I got the message:
|
| * writing is difficult.
|
| * writing about a topic forces you to test your knowledge of that
| topic.
|
| * you often learn about the topic, and that often changes how you
| view that topic.
|
| * the reader should write more with the explicit purpose of
| learning about a topic.
|
| And the killer point:
|
| * if you haven't written about a topic, you can't know it well.
|
| I wonder if writing comments on websites counts.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > if you haven't written about a topic, you can't know it well.
|
| Well, writing is encoding of ideas into a semi-precise format
| of written language. The intention is to communicate as
| precisely as you can to other humans. When you have ideas
| brewing in the amygdala + prefrontal cortex, they're hazy.
| Writing them down requires vetting of imprecise aspects of your
| hazy ideas.
|
| Writing can be replaced by any other encoding format (talking
| to a friend, giving a lecture, etc), but that's still, for me,
| in the English language. May be just thinking more precisely
| about it? We still often 'think' in our home language even if
| no communication is involved, some interaction with the
| auditory region of the brain. The human brain is complex. Some
| people also find vizualization of ideas very powerful, probably
| involves activation of some regions of the occipital lobes.
|
| Writing just forces you to be precise, it is not required to
| know something well. That seems like a bold, unsubstantiated
| claim. Very, ahem...modern artsy.
| [deleted]
| tpoacher wrote:
| While your points are absolutely true as well, this is not what
| I got from the essay.
|
| What I got from it, which is subtly different from what you
| say, but resonates with my experience a lot more, is that the
| brain has a habit of assuring itself it has the whole picture
| about a topic, almost to the point of delusion; it's kind of
| how the brain works; it generalises things into abstract
| patterns, and fills in the gaps for you. It's not until you're
| forced to externalise the information, and explicitly face the
| knowledge gaps you didn't even realise your brain had filled-in
| for you, that you realise how many of them there were in the
| first place.
|
| Writing is a great way of a) spotting, b) attempting to fill /
| reflect on the gaps, c) realising you never had the full
| information in the first place, d) consciously deciding to fill
| in these gaps properly.
|
| So yes, the process also helps you learn as a side-effect, but
| the point is not learning per-se; after all there are other
| ways to learn 'properly', where writing things down isn't
| strictly necessary. For me the main point of the article is the
| shock of how much implicit knowledge turns out to simply not be
| there when you try to prod it explicitly, and why writing
| things down is therefore such a good exercise/habit to
| cultivate in the first place, since trying to verbalise things
| explicitly on paper is an effective technique that forces you
| to 'prod' areas you didn't know needed prodding.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| What you wrote is my takeaway from the article as well.
| There's an expression "if you can't do, teach!" which can be
| interpreted in different ways, but I would say it means you
| get much better at something when you are forced to write,
| re-read/interpret and explain it.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Is there a requirement for this effect to work that you
| publish your writing, exposing it to external scrutiny?
|
| Neither you nor pg explicitly say this, but it feels
| important.
| goldfeld wrote:
| When exposing makes you consider the audience thoughtfully,
| yes, it's a whole other game then. It's so common for me
| that I think some part or a piece of writing is fine. But
| when I consider posting it, or submitting to a literary
| contest, suddenly I see that piece, naked, before the
| panelists, and it's a poor show. Not until I make that
| decision does my brain stop furninishing mental decorators
| to dress up the rags which I'd been subconsciously
| overlooking, or was simply worried about other more
| pressing issues elsewhere.
| prtkgpt wrote:
| You got this right. I also think of PG very highly for his
| ability to communicate with words. His video interviews might
| not be this deep & thoughtful but he definitely mastered the
| art of writing.
| gashmol wrote:
| If you substitute writing with developing software (or
| prototyping) and ideas with requirements then you get great
| advice for making something users want. It even suggest the
| practice of checking requirements to be precise and complete.
| Intersting.
| dybber wrote:
| No HTTPS?
| jwogrady wrote:
| It's a yahoo cert. The padlock says "certificate is not valid"
| while the cert details says "This certificate is valid".
|
| I guess that means... "Technically it's good cert, but the
| Google Chrome dev team doesn't like Yahoo."*
|
| *not that I disagree..... but who is making these judgement
| calls?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It'a a valid certificate for a bunch of Yahoo domains, but
| its use on paulgraham.com is not trusted. It should throw up
| a warning screen and let you click through to the site,
| either temporarily or permanently on a TOFU basis.
| kashyapc wrote:
| I find this much better than PG's previous essay, "write
| simply"[1], even if I don't agree with all of it (e.g. see
| _jasode_ 's comment[2]).
|
| Meanwhile, at work I've been trying to encourage the habit of
| writing a 2-4 page "memo" when conveying critical decisions. It's
| proving difficult to root out the impulsive habit of "let's put
| together a shoddy slide deck with broken thoughts, and hurry
| through it on a call".
|
| When we're all remote, whether you like it or not, people _will_
| judge you by your words. And when you 're not writing code, most
| of what you do is writing: design documents, proposals for
| budget, Git commit messages, feature requests, usage guides,
| investigative reports, synthesizing complex discussion threads
| into useful summaries, technical presentations, email, and
| synchronous chat. Not least of all, robust writing skills allow
| you to "defend" your arguments with nuance and concede with
| grace.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26427773
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30314144
| robrenaud wrote:
| > And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about
| anything nontrivial.
|
| This is harsh. As someone who struggled with writing text a lot,
| I seriously considered dropping out of state U and going to Devry
| for an IT degree freshman year to avoid mandatory writing
| classes. I still graduated with a 3.9 as I was able to focus on
| CS/math and get passed the writing pre-reqs. I thoroughly enjoyed
| the more advanced math and theoretical CS classes, where I was
| spending good chunks of the weekend writing proofs. I can imagine
| that one gets a similar kind of understanding and joy from
| writing a good textual argument as writing a good proof.
| persona wrote:
| > Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of
| course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my
| experience, writing is the stricter test.
|
| As pg brings it up, writing is one of the many ways to shape
| ideas and even change them. But I wouldn't go so far to say it's
| the stricter test.
|
| Each way of expressing and sharing ideas will test it in
| different ways. Writing may look for conciseness, flow and
| completeness while talking about it can validate ideas for
| collaborative building.
|
| Going a step forward, I'd suggest that putting Ideas into Action
| IS the stricter test.
| mikewarot wrote:
| >In precisely defined domains it's possible to form complete
| ideas in your head. People can play chess in their heads, for
| example. And mathematicians can do some amount of math in their
| heads, though they don't seem to feel sure of a proof over a
| certain length till they write it down. But this only seems
| possible with ideas you can express in a formal language.
|
| For me, at least, programming falls into this category of
| writing. The difference, however, is that when you're
| programming, you have _three audiences_ to satisfy. They are, the
| _compiler_ (or interpreter), the _problem_ to solve, and other
| _programmers_. Over time, the writing becomes part of a
| conversation, as I 'll explain below.
|
| The compiler, the first audience, is the one that beginning
| programs bang their heads against the most. It can have any
| number of arcane and complex rules and interactions to learn
| about, and practice, before you can reliably get the compiler to
| accept your work as valid.
|
| The problem is the audience we're paid to satisfy. It requires
| that you end up with a workable answer given workable inputs.
| Satisfying it requires getting to know it a bit, then reaching
| back into your toolkit of tricks to get just the right set of
| algorithm and code. It's more of a conversation, that settles
| down into an agreed upon text. As time goes on, the details
| become nuanced, and the corner cases handled.
|
| The third audience is the humans who read the program, and those
| in the future (including yourself!) who might want to join the
| conversation. All of these people need to be able to read, and
| adjust, the agreed upon text, or copy it to use for some other
| problem. As you go, the more you keep this third audience in
| mind, the easier it is for them to join or even rejoin the
| conversation.
|
| Reviewing, there are aspects of these audiences to note:
|
| The compiler is fairly easy to satisfy, you can bang away at
| possibilities and tweak the code until it agrees that your words
| are valid. Then you can keep tweaking until you make it happy.
|
| Note however, that the compiler can be capricious, it can
| radically change it's opinion of your work over time. Many a
| story as been written here about the shock of finding that
| certain words or phrases are newly irritating to the compiler, or
| just plain unacceptable. Python is said to have gone through this
| phase between v2 and v3.
|
| The problem can change as well. New requirements of a wide
| variety can result in the need to revise the agreed upon text.
|
| The third audience can vary widely. It can be just yourself for a
| very short time in response to a homework or programming contest
| problem. It can be your coworkers, past present and future. It
| can be the world, if the work is open source and widely useful.
| It can be the users of a library, who will focus narrowly on the
| interface you provide, while only some dare to peek at the
| implementation.
|
| I find that the more I keep all three audience in mind, the
| better the outcome. Thank you Paul for the writing prompt. 8)
| akprasad wrote:
| As someone who writes, I can relate to a lot of this, but there
| are aspects that aren't true to my experience.
|
| > If you make an effort, you can read your writing as if you were
| a complete stranger
|
| Somewhat. Through effort I can take on a more objective
| perspective, but there is no platonic stranger I could pick out.
| Everyone has his own context and his own needs. What I try to do
| instead is visualize people I know who are not close friends. I
| think "What would X think if she were reading this?"
|
| > If he's not satisfied because you failed to mention x or didn't
| qualify some sentence sufficiently, then you mention x or add
| more qualifications
|
| I think this game is endless. There will always be a nitpicker
| (Hello!). I try to say enough to show that I know what I'm
| talking about, but beyond that I find that it chokes the broader
| point that I want to make.
|
| ~
|
| For me, the real value is that writing makes language almost
| physical. What would normally vanish in a moment in speech
| becomes something you can touch, sculpt, and rearrange. And in
| doing so you're forced to contend with the form of it and really
| think through every word, and every train of thought ("Is this
| really what I want to say? Is this really how I should say it?").
| I think this can be done in speech as well if you're in a true
| debate with someone who cares about language, but it's much
| harder.
|
| And depending on your temperament, there's a "those who can't do
| teach" problem where writing about something makes you feel like
| an expert on it. As always, the important thing is to act.
| dbrueck wrote:
| On a small scale, this is exactly why when I'm stuck on a
| development problem (an elusive bug or trying to hammer out a
| good design), a thorough email about it to a colleague often
| provides the breakthrough. Because you're taking up a co-worker's
| time & energy, it motivates you to lay out the problem with the
| right amount of context, walk through some of the tradeoffs or
| things you've considered, etc.
|
| And it's not unusual at all for the email to never get sent -
| among my closest co-workers we'll often tell each other something
| like, "I couldn't figure out how to fix XYZ so I wrote you a long
| email about it, fixed the problem, and deleted the email".
|
| (the downside is that once you've experienced this a few times,
| crummy problem reports from others kind of drive you crazy)
| default-kramer wrote:
| I agree with a lot of it, except for this: "And someone who never
| writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial." I
| guess it depends your definitions of "nontrivial" and "fully
| formed idea". But consider all the experienced auto mechanics in
| the world. Few of them have written anything about it, but I'm
| sure I would judge most of them to have fully-formed ideas about
| a nontrivial topic. To generalize, I'm claiming that experience
| can give you fully-formed ideas whether you write or not
| (although writing will probably help).
| blcArmadillo wrote:
| He touches on that in the paragraph
|
| > I'm not saying that writing is the best way to explore all
| ideas. If you have ideas about architecture, presumably the
| best way to explore them is to build actual buildings. What I'm
| saying is that however much you learn from exploring ideas in
| other ways, you'll still learn new things from writing about
| them.
| quesera wrote:
| > I agree with a lot of it, except for this: "And someone who
| never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything
| nontrivial."
|
| This is just a rephrasing of the old adage that ~"to truly
| understand something, you must be able to teach it to others".
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| The author is simply projecting their own interest in their
| writing
| cosheaf wrote:
| As an author should.
| jasode wrote:
| _> You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing
| of what's in your head, only what you wrote. [...] If you make an
| effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete
| stranger, and when you do the news is usually bad._
|
| Disagree on that because of _The Curse of Knowledge_ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
|
| The various attempts at explaining _" monads"_, _" web3"_, _"
| Kubernetes"_, etc will still leave many smart readers exclaiming
| _" I still don't get it."_
|
| PG's own essays (e.g. wealth inequality) have been misinterpreted
| in HN threads.
| chunkyks wrote:
| Every time I see some glorious "this explains git in a single
| image", it's usually an interesting image for someone who
| already understands git, yet is entirely, 100%, opaque to
| someone who doesn't yet know git.
|
| [This comment brought to you by a thread [1] from earlier
| today]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311713
| catillac wrote:
| I saw this earlier, and while I've been using git for many
| years, I think this graphic made me understand git less.
| Maybe because most of my usage is committing and resetting
| things and not doing the more wacky git commands?
| asiachick wrote:
| For me this is every youtube math video ... including 3 blue
| 1 brown. They only really work if you already understand
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It would help if PG would learn to write clearly. His LISP
| books are masterpieces. His personal essays are pretty opaque
| unless you've read him consistently. This one reads from the
| outside as pointless techbro navel gazing.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about
| anything nontrivial
|
| _The unintelligible is not necessarily unintelligent_
|
| -Nietzsche
|
| And in this particular piece, Mr. Graham's hyper-intelligibility
| seems to manifest as pseudo-intelligence.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't call names or cross into personal attack
| (regardless of who the person is). It's against the site
| guidelines, and you can make your substantive points without
| it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| smlckz wrote:
| What else can be done about it instead of building things,
| writing down or talking?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Destruction, listening, viewing, understanding, teaching etc.
| ar_imani wrote:
| In my experience, writing down doesn't help me develop new idea,
| but exploring new ways to support it or explain process as
| straightforward as it should be, which I can not do in my head or
| real-time conversation. As the author says, it takes lots of time
| and effort to put yourself in a stranger's mind.
| diego wrote:
| > And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about
| anything nontrivial.
|
| This would imply that Socrates only had trivial ideas. Socrates
| would disagree with this statement, and so would a large number
| of people. This belief seems like a cognitive bias to me. If you
| prefer written ideas, unwritten ideas may seem trivial to you.
| gumby wrote:
| Well, Socrates (to the extent he actually existed) did form
| well reasoned arguments, but I'm sure that was truly laborious.
|
| The generalization of pg's argument is the classic "EDGE"
| method ("Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, and Evaluate"). You don't
| understand something until you can "fully" explain it to
| others.
|
| And note that our understanding of Socrates is a product of
| Plato. Thoughts that might have been half-baked in Socrates'
| telling could be thought through and expanded by Plato through
| the process described in this essay. Or have been formulated
| _de novo_ by Plato and then ascribed to Socrates.
| rrherr wrote:
| Jesus is another example
| redisman wrote:
| Since those two didn't write anything down - how do we know
| we're not just getting their followers ideas written down and
| worked out. Maybe they were just catalysts that kicked off a
| larger scale thinking and writing project of what PG
| describes.
|
| In the end, whatever was written down is what their long term
| effect on the world was.
| hirundo wrote:
| I think people who can compose complete well ordered arguments
| in their head are like those who can play chess well while
| blindfolded. It's an extraordinary talent.
| diego wrote:
| Agree with that. However, in 2022 writing is not the only way
| to order your thoughts outside your head. I for example have
| put together Youtube videos without writing anything down.
| The process is like this:
|
| - Think of a point I'd want to make, perhaps in 20-60
| seconds.
|
| - Do a few video takes until I believe it's good enough.
| Sometimes the first take works.
|
| - Keep doing it until I have enough material, then edit the
| video.
|
| As someone who is in his 50s though, I can understand the
| point of view of someone who grew up in an age in which
| writing was the obvious way. Paul might think differently if
| he tried to start a Youtube channel, but it doesn't seem to
| be interesting to him.
| network2592 wrote:
| Paul does mention talking as an alternative to writing
| though. It is not that talking is not interesting to him.
| Writing is just a more efficient process.
|
| For example, when editing video, there is a lot of friction
| due to the software you are using. Writing can have a lot
| less friction. You can literally just take a pen and paper
| avoiding a computer altogether.
|
| That being said, one point Paul makes, is that finding a
| conversation partner that is willing to patiently listen to
| you as you explain ideas may be challenging. Filming a
| video and putting it out there can make it less
| challenging. And you can get some constructive feedback
| from many individuals. Although, I am not sure to what
| extent Youtube is the right medium for this exercise.
| [deleted]
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 'Writing is nature's way of telling us how lousy our thinking
| is.'
|
| - Leslie Lamport
|
| I am finding more and more intelligent people have been able to
| coalesce my thinking into smaller and smaller parts. I am
| beginning to accept meritocracy is brutal.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| what if you are capable of conveying your ideas in words but no
| one likes your content
| cosheaf wrote:
| Do you have an example?
| xorencrypted wrote:
| The juxtaposition of a comment next to code best illustrates the
| real advantage natural language has. It's pretty good at moving
| the mind of the reader into the state intended. To convey
| information concisely. but isn't always right
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I often bang on about Software as a form of literacy. And I have
| noticed recently that it is actually harder for me at work to
| express my thoughts in English than just to damn well write some
| code.
|
| I cannot work out if this is my English is declining or my coding
| is improving.
| simplegeek wrote:
| > And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about
| anything nontrivial.
|
| Harsh. Socrates didn't write his ideas, a counter example that
| immediately popped up in my head.
| kashyapc wrote:
| (Reusing my comment[1] from a different thread the other day.)
|
| Many people think Socrates is "against writing" by all means.
| In the dialogue _Phaedrus_ , he--well, Socrates as portrayed by
| Plato--does sort of say that writing is okay, as long as you're
| doing it in the right spirit (seeking truth) and are not
| deceiving your audience.
|
| What Socrates rails against is the "speechmakers" who don't
| truly know what they're talking about, but instead write based
| on "what is likely" to persuade the audience.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603526
| jyriand wrote:
| Plato did. Just wondering, maybe the things we read about
| Socrates are not actually his ideas, but Plato's?
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(page generated 2022-02-12 23:00 UTC)