[HN Gopher] The Need to Read
___________________________________________________________________
The Need to Read
Author : ignoramous
Score : 378 points
Date : 2022-11-26 08:02 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| [deleted]
| 2devnull wrote:
| PowerPoint is better. Removes a lot of bike shedding over "turn
| of phrase" and sounding smart, writing good, etc.
|
| Also, more multimedia, better aligned with current communications
| tech, and designed specifically with the intention of presenting
| thoughts, persuasion, non-fiction. Books are great, but not
| optimized for today's world.
| layer8 wrote:
| > _A good writer doesn 't just think, and then write down what he
| thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost
| always discover new things in the process of writing. And there
| is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery.
| Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to
| develop them. But even after doing this, you'll find you still
| discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind
| of thinking that can only be done by writing._
|
| Exactly the same is true for coding.
| byteflip wrote:
| I've always been quite mediocre at reading and writing. This has
| been confirmed by my grades over the years.
|
| Just this week, I've been writing a script for a YouTube video
| and it is difficult for me. Organizing my thoughts and making it
| "seamless" is a lot of work. In my software job I usually default
| to bullet points for technical writing -- which I feel is a cop
| out. I had decided before reading this article that I want to
| invest some time in these neglected skills.
|
| Does anyone have any recommendations for improving these skills?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Let go of the fear. Everyone has tens of thousands of bad words
| in them that need to be written down before the good words
| start coming out.
|
| Practice wise, write about the same thing several times. Write.
| Then reflect for a week or a month. Then write again. Then do
| it 3 months later. You will see a clear improvement.
|
| And of course, teachers are invaluable. See if you can take an
| evening class somewhere, or if you have money hire a tutor -
| you can pay a grad student at your local university.
| ant6n wrote:
| Practice? Using bullet points as a first step to make a draft
| of the overall structure seems like it could be helpful.
| clolege wrote:
| I've also been trying to improve my writing recently. What's
| helped me was to read through a couple of resources on how to
| write better [0,1,2], and then:
|
| 1. Apply the better writing advice to my everyday _speech_
|
| 2. Focus on writing down exactly what I wanted to say, and how
| I would have said it
|
| School taught me to be super wordy and focus overly on the
| editing stage. Nowadays, I read everything I write out loud and
| if it sounds awkward (or not like me) then I just delete it and
| write it again from scratch. Oftentimes it helps to just close
| my eyes, say what I want to out loud, then write down what I
| just said.
|
| It can turn out to be a little bit wordier, but it almost
| always ends up being easier to read :)
|
| [0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
| foundation/orwel... [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31060362 [2]
| https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction...
| byteflip wrote:
| Nice tips and resources thanks!
| duckmysick wrote:
| > Nowadays, I read everything I write out loud and if it
| sounds awkward (or not like me) then I just delete it and
| write it again from scratch. Oftentimes it helps to just
| close my eyes, say what I want to out loud, then write down
| what I just said.
|
| This does sound like editing to me (in a good way). Unless
| you meant something else when you wrote that school taught
| you to focus overtly on the editing stage.
| clolege wrote:
| Now that you mention it, my old style of editing might have
| been something that I learned, rather than was explicitly
| taught.
|
| I used to frame writing as a painful activity, so once I
| had a "workable" rough draft, I would break out a scalpel
| and try to make it readable with _word surgery_. I would
| spend hours staring at the same few paragraphs, and it was
| horrible.
|
| Now I just delete it. It feels like a clean slate, but the
| slate in my brain has made opinions about what's important
| to say and how to say it better.
|
| The two approaches exercise completely different muscles,
| and what I like about the "rewrite" approach is that it
| exercises some of the same muscles that will help me
| communicate myself properly on the first try.
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| "Quantum entanglement" / "quantitative easing" Can we think of a
| substitute to writing that will allow us to coin these phrases
| (which in turn sit on a stack of coined sequences of syllables)
| and make them stick? Speech can communicate writing in its
| entirety. But in committing to paper, we take these fleeting
| streams (sequences) of thoughts and sounds, let them live outside
| our limited working memories, and allow for new meanings and
| ideas to emerge and breathe and survive. With far greater
| likelihood and frequency than speech alone. Fascinating to think
| about what invention might make writing obsolete. Will have to be
| something that allows for effortless creation and storage of new
| sequences of old ideas...
| marcusverus wrote:
| IMO, the need to express new ideas by combining or redefining
| old words is a bug in natural language, rather than a feature.
| It makes communication less precise and that imprecision is
| prone to gamesmanship.
|
| An example is the attempt by some, in the US, to redefine the
| meaning of "equality" in the context of our political system,
| from the traditional "equality under the law" to "equality of
| outcome". This sort of persuasion by redefinition, in which you
| take a word attached to a popular idea and hijack/redirect it
| to your pet idea, is a Jedi-mind-trick which is enabled by the
| ambiguity of natural language.
|
| A more rational system of communication, in which distinct
| ideas were represented by distinct, immutable symbols, rather
| than combinations/reuses of old symbols, would make for vastly
| superior communication---if we could wrap our brains around
| such a thing!
| barnacled wrote:
| This really chimes with me, I'm writing a book about the Linux
| memory management subsystem [0] and my primary motivation is to
| learn the subject more deeply and what Paul says here really
| aligns with my experience.
|
| The effort to explain its machinery demands that I look very
| deeply - trying to answer questions like 'how does a page of
| memory get reclaimed?', or 'how does a userspace allocation
| propagate through the kernel?' - and following the white rabbit
| all the way down the burrow, forces a far deeper level of
| understanding than simply figuring something out for a patch.
|
| (Obligatory plug!) For anybody who's interested in the topic, I
| plan to launch the book in a year or so, to be notified when it's
| released, sign up at
| https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSen0gefOrPWi6ZtEQ25...
|
| [0]:https://ljs.io/book.html
| paulpauper wrote:
| _That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just
| because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but
| because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading
| about x doesn 't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how
| to write. [1]_
|
| I rea a lot as a kid, and still do, but suck at writing. I think
| it's at best a tangentially related skillset. Writing is not just
| about conveying information but doing so in a way that people are
| enticed to want to read, which is way harder than just the first.
| raywu wrote:
| Write simple sentences. Don't use adverbs. That's what my high
| school teacher told me. I still find it true.
| npunt wrote:
| There's much more to the story than writing is a way of thinking,
| and reading is a big input into writing. Specifically, how each
| interplay with ideas, as most of us after all are in the business
| of creating things. And here, the most important bit is not
| reading, its curiosity. Curiosity about others' ideas drives
| reading, curiosity about one's own ideas drives writing.
|
| The time we spend chasing each type of curiosity is important. If
| we want to create, reading must have it's limits, and sometimes
| pretty harsh limits, else we'll be infected with others ideas
| about everything. Some choice quotes on this:
|
| "When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his
| mental process..." "This is the case with many learned persons:
| they have read themselves stupid." - Arthur Schopenhauer
|
| "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its
| creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own
| brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking" - Albert
| Einstein
|
| "If you read all the time what other people have done you will
| think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts
| that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do -
| get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any
| answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how
| you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be
| the correct one. You need to keep up more to find out what the
| problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is
| necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But
| reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do
| great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is
| not the amount, it is the way you read that counts." - Dick
| Hamming
|
| EDIT: On the other hand, if you first principles all your
| thinking and just write write write, you may spend hours on
| something that could be understood and moved on from in seconds.
| This meme explains the reading/writing spectrum quite well:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/vwq8yh/this_true/
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| Wild guess... Schopenhauer, Einstein, et al, were referring to
| their peers and associates, many sigmas out on the curve. I'm
| imagining a sensor of the larger sample reaching the "reading
| limit"; it would make a neutrino detector look like fireworks
| at a disco.
| npunt wrote:
| The quotes are for the most part about ideas and creativity
| being stifled by reading, and this can happen to anyone -
| it's related to the curse of knowledge and the preservation
| of the beginner's mind.
|
| Reading others' ideas, especially polished ones with a lot of
| authority behind them, can act as a filter on one's own
| (delicate, barely formed) ideas. Ideas already have a
| difficult path into reality, and others' biases and filters
| are one major contributor.
|
| I regularly choose not to read on a given subject if I have
| an idea I want to explore or to clarify my own thinking, and
| only afterwards do I consult what others have said. Usually I
| wind up in the same place (or a crude version of that) but
| sometimes I find a new insight and those are worth it!
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| And when Schopenhauer wrote this, it was much harder to find
| stuff to read, so his advice is all the more important today.
| woolion wrote:
| Good list of quotes! I would add one by Nietzsche:
|
| "Ultimately no one can hear in things--books included--more
| than he already knows."
|
| Reading can help you formalize, or put established concepts
| upon what you have already understood, even if only
| unconsciously.
|
| I remember the gist of a quote about the need to read as much
| as possible in a young age to inform a Weltanschauung (world
| view) from which in adulthood you're supposed to build on, but
| can't remember any source.
| achow wrote:
| > _..most of us after all are in the business of creating
| things.. If we want to create, reading must have it's limits,
| and sometimes pretty harsh limits, lest we be infected with
| others ideas about everything._
|
| The point perhaps is what PG is saying "A good writer will
| almost always discover new things in the process of writing."
|
| Writing is creating and the process of creation is about
| discovery. When one is sculpting a clay, one is discovering
| materials and its properties, one is discovering ones emotions,
| and infact one could be discovering or understanding oneself
| (this ignoring the pre creation phase where one is discovering
| and studying art movements, various sculptors, their ideas and
| techniques...).
|
| Any creation process roughly follows same patterns unless you
| are a facsimile creator.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Excuse me if this is rude but there is an irony to using
| others' words to argue one should think for themselves more.
| npunt wrote:
| Hah on the surface I suppose. But I'm not arguing _whether_
| people should think for themselves, I'm arguing that it
| matters _when_ people should think for themselves. If you're
| more curious about others ideas on a given topic than your
| own ideas, then you should absolutely read!
| unsafecast wrote:
| I think this is more about credibility - GP made a pretty
| good argument without the quotes. But the fact that Albert
| Einstein supposedly agrees puts a lot more weight onto it.
| woolion wrote:
| It's a variant on the 'doubt paradox' (somebody telling you
| "you should not believe everything people tell you") itself a
| variant of the Epimenides paradox (simply known as the liar
| paradox): a bunch of people who have read more than you tell
| you to be careful about not reading too much.
| cbeach wrote:
| Can one think without language? It's a question my headmaster
| once posed in a general studies class.
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| Something I didn't see mentioned enough in the discussion --
| Reading is also a fantastic antidote to mindless phone scrolling
| or web surfing.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| Since getting Covid, it's been harder to put down the phone and
| pick up a book :( Sort of the opposite of that thing about
| toxoplasmosis creating alpha wolves.
| Deutscher wrote:
| This is OT and has probably been covered elsewhere, but why does
| PG not use https on his site? Also, why does it not trigger
| showing the 'Toggle Reader View (F9)' button in the Firefox
| addressbar, if anyone knows?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You can connect via https, but your browser will ask you to
| trust a Yahoo Store certificate since it has no clue how Yahoo
| Store might relate to paulgraham.com
| samsquire wrote:
| I would prefer to read other people's explanations of what the
| problems their code solves rather than the code to implement it.
|
| Wikipedia is almost enough to implement a few algorithms that
| I've implemented from written descriptions (btrees, tries and
| multiversion concurrency control). But for other algorithms I
| just use the pseudocode such as for A*.
|
| I would prefer that the English explanation was good enough to
| implement the code.
|
| I journalled computer, software, parallelism, multithreading and
| futuristic software and architecture ideas out in the open since
| 2013. I am up to 700 entries. Writing is manifested thinking.
| Writing is very good for you. Links are in my profile.
| synctext wrote:
| "Writing is Thinking" - my master thesis
| professor.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Interesting, but nostalgic.
|
| Magical brain upload technology would likely require AI, and
| would almost certainly include assistive cognition - the use of
| technology to automate and speed up learning and original
| thought.
|
| We're edging towards a revolution that will be more of a
| disruption than the invention of print. Instead of thoughts that
| are "manually" generated and externalised as static symbols -
| albeit electronically distributed - thinking and learning will be
| automated and integrated.
|
| You can use Wikipedia to access a lot of human knowledge. But
| imagine a meta-Wikipedia that would integrate and summarise an
| entire domain, combined with assistive cognition that made it
| possible to hold that summary in your head as a single perceptual
| entity.
|
| You wouldn't just have the skills offered by domain competence,
| but you would also be able to look for trends and patterns,
| compare the domain with others, expand the "shape" with new
| features in creative but congruent ways, and so on.
| jamager wrote:
| A visitor came to Richard Feynman's office. When he saw Fenyman's
| notebooks, he was excited to see records of Feynman's thinking.
| Feynman replied: They aren't a record of my thinking process.
| They are my thinking process.
| kang wrote:
| If one learns to write by reading, one would learn to 'upload' by
| 'downloading'. The method of knowing is not dependent on the
| medium. I can present the steps in knowing to demonstrate it, but
| I have already made my point.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah it seems weird to assume that it wouldn't be possible to
| 'write' that way. In fact it could possibly be far more
| powerful since you wouldn't be limited by words and language,
| but could write just about anything the human brain can
| experience. It's not like those download packages make
| themselves.
|
| It's almost an 'old writer yells at cloud' type post.
| javajosh wrote:
| How would you respond to Socrates' objections to writing [0]?
| Especially:
|
| "You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with
| painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are
| alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most
| solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You'd think
| they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you
| question anything that has been said because you want to learn
| more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.
| When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about
| everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no
| less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn't know
| to whom it should speak and to whom it should not."
|
| I often wonder if our ancestors, who were a great deal more
| private about things like techniques and guild knowledge, not to
| mention esoteric religious teachings, didn't have the right idea.
| Perhaps even the penchant for writing scientific articles in
| Latin and Greek was an explicitly chosen shibboleth to avoid the
| kinds of informational chaos we see coming to a head in the
| internet age of 2022.
|
| 0 -
| https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I am very much in agreement with PG's thesis in this essay, but
| I am a little surprised that he didn't at least address
| Socrates' famous critique of writing (and not just by pointing
| out that the only reason we know about it is that somebody else
| wrote it down).
| gtsnexp wrote:
| I might be wrong but, from his most recent posts, I get the
| feeling that PG is growing increasingly laconic. Makes sense?
| kaushalvivek wrote:
| I wonder if the core idea here is limited to reading books, or if
| it extends seamlessly to articles, blogs and other quality
| content.
| myle wrote:
| Video content is replacing writing/reading for the masses.
| backpropaganda wrote:
| Good video content is created by first writing the script.
| antirez wrote:
| Many of us are programmers. Some of us are also trying to be
| writers. Trust me: writing is like programming. Reading code is
| very useful to become a better programmer, but you learn
| programming mostly by _writing_ code. Similarly you mostly learn
| how to write prose by writing prose, tons of it. Reading is
| especially useful if you identify certain books that are very
| high in style (for me one of such books was "Vite di uomini non
| illustri" by Giuseppe Pontiggia), for your taste at least, for
| what you beleive the best writing is. You read these books many
| times, to understand what's going on, what are the patterns, how
| to do the same magic. As a casual reader you can read 200 books
| every year and yet remain a terrible writer.
|
| EDIT: more about that on my blog if you care ->
| http://antirez.com/news/136
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I wrote eight books, sold about 35 000 copies (fairly huge
| number for Czechia with its not-quite-11 million people), and I
| am also a programmer.
|
| The similarities are pretty strong. In both cases, you need to
| express yourself so that the receiving party may understand
| you.
|
| That said, human readers are a lot more welcoming and friendly
| consumers of your written work than computers. Positive
| feedback from computers is basically nonexistent.
| barnacled wrote:
| Incredible work! I'm writing my own book (obligatory mailing
| list link [0] and description [1]) and I wondered how you
| tackled the mental side? It is a bit of a rollercoaster I am
| finding. That constant fear gnawing in the back of your head
| 'is this really any good at all?' :) I suppose it is the
| price of caring.
|
| [0]:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSen0gefOrPWi6ZtE
| Q25... [1]:https://ljs.io/book.html
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Prior to writing my first book, I already published quite a
| lot of articles, so I knew that there was some non-empty
| audience set out there :)
|
| I started a crowdfunding project for the first book too, so
| that the printing and typesetting costs get covered. They
| were covered fully, so I knew that I won't dip into red
| numbers as a consequence. (This was a major worry of mine.)
|
| I was still pretty nervous about acceptance, but it turned
| out OK. Whew.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > Positive feedback from computers is basically nonexistent.
|
| 412 tests passed, 0 warnings, 0 errors.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I know, I know.
|
| That said, receiving an e-mail like "I spent a week reading
| all your books, PLEASE WRITE SOME MORE" is much more
| satisfying.
| bstpierre wrote:
| I suspect this is tongue in cheek, but passing tests aren't
| really the computer's feedback. They're feedback from Past
| You, who wrote the tests. The computer is just performing
| the tests. The tests might be incomplete or even wrong. The
| code might be horrendous. The computer doesn't care.
|
| Human feedback on the code, design, usability, appearance,
| documentation, etc. is all very different from passing
| tests.
| antirez wrote:
| Don't you want to hug your monitor when it compiles? :D
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I do, the trouble is, the monitor doesn't hug me back :D
|
| Right now I am sitting in a train to southern Moravia, a
| long-time reader has invited me to a pork feast. That is
| not what computers do.
| antirez wrote:
| Enjoy!
| amelius wrote:
| Personally waiting for the day when you can layout your
| thoughts in a bulletpoint list, and GPT-3/4/5 turns it into a
| coherent and pleasant to read whole.
| duckmysick wrote:
| If you don't want to wait, you can get someone on fiverr to
| do it for you.
| henrik_w wrote:
| Absolutely agree that programming and writing have lots in
| common. I usually don't write anything longer than a blog post,
| but even a short blog post takes a lot of time for me.
| Expressing your thoughts in words is hard! Likewise for
| programming :-)
|
| When I thought about the similarities I came up with:
|
| - both are about communicating your ideas clearly. For that you
| need good structure, and having a logical order.
|
| - editing and revising is key. Also, compare with refactoring
| in coding.
|
| - style - there are lots of ways you can have a unique style,
| even in programming.
|
| More here: https://henrikwarne.com/2019/03/30/programming-math-
| or-writi...
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| I write probably 30-100 emails a day, I struggle with writing
| longer form things.
| sn41 wrote:
| Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an
| exact man. - Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" [1]
|
| [1] http://www.literaturepage.com/read/francis-bacon-
| essays-102....
| euroderf wrote:
| Related: a GTTW Loop (gripe-think-try-write loop).
|
| When I'm stuck on a technical problem, I start writing a grumpy
| email to the support-PoC. I anticipate their questions and find
| the answers and add them into the email. This is repeated as
| necessary. It's not unusual then that at some point the answer
| magically drops into my lap and the grumpy email is tossed into
| the gripe-recycler.
| avindroth wrote:
| To facilitate writing, 'pages' have to be ubiquitous. There is
| always something to write about, and ubiquity of pages
| facilitates the ink on paper, the pixels on screen.
|
| Writing is a medium, and an excellent one at that. I'd agree that
| writing is a unique medium in generating a special kind of
| thoughts that are deeply introspective and concept-revealing. But
| I find that you can view writing not as one medium, but as a host
| of various submedia.
|
| Typing on a keyboard is very different from writing on a
| whiteboard. The kinds of thoughts you can host to different
| 'pages' vary. Even electronic writing can vary depending on the
| psychological and technological context. Writing on Twitter on
| mobile varies from writing encrypted notes on your personal
| machine.
|
| Is one thing better than the other? I don't think we can easily
| claim such. Use whiteboards when whiteboards are good, use paper
| when paper is good, use iPads when iPads are good. But access to
| various hosts for just the right occasion surely nurtures ideas
| faster in the right medium of growth.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Also with advancements in converting natural language to
| programming, most programming and automation will be done by
| simply concise writing. Writing well will become more important
| in STEM than it already is.
| yourgranny wrote:
| Since this is a Paul Graham post, I'm gonna ask because it is the
| elephant in the room. Why has Hacker News been so quiet about
| Twitter? I think I know but I want my suspicions confirmed. I
| would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely but
| the stories that don't appear seemingly lean in a single
| direction and it is turning me away now.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| I was a bit surprised myself, but after thinking about it - the
| discussions under the Twitter stories that I've seen on the
| front page have mostly rapidly deteriorated to the point of
| being pretty unedifying for everyone.
|
| That's not surprising, since it's a story that meets at the
| intersection of tech, business, politics, and controversial
| public figures. There are quite a lot of strong views on it,
| and in my experience this community doesn't tend to deal in a
| particularly adult way with events like that.
|
| That kind of discussion usually sinks pretty quickly - I assume
| mostly because of the algorithm down-ranking overheated
| discussions. Then you have the general leaning of HN towards a
| bit of a libertarian, counter-mainstream narrative - it's not
| hard to see that the pattern you describe being a natural
| outcome of all that, no shadowy motives required.
|
| It kinda sucks to be honest, because from many different
| perspectives it's absolutely gigantic news with lots of really
| interesting stuff to think and talk about.
| camillomiller wrote:
| I have noticed the same, and I would have the same question.
|
| I don't wanna think that it's because it's mostly a community
| of (male) Musk-Jack-SamAltman simps and wannabes that are just
| a good startup idea away from being billionaire themselves. A
| good, well elaborated answer, might help me to steer away from
| this conclusion.
| ramblerman wrote:
| > I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely
|
| your post achieves the exact opposite.
|
| --
|
| Either way it's pretty bad etiquette to hijack a thread for
| some completely different purpose. Don't let the inevitability
| of your your post getting flagged further your conspiracy
| narrative.
| matwood wrote:
| There was a lot of Twitter news early on, but Musk continuing
| to act like a child is old news we don't need to see here again
| and again. I would prefer to see another Twitter story when
| there is actually a story and not simply 'someone was
| fired/hired/let on/kicked off'.
| [deleted]
| imgabe wrote:
| You're free to submit stories and say whatever you want. It
| should be pretty clear why nobody is talking about Twitter on a
| completely unrelated thread.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| If you haven't yet, try doing 3 handwritten morning pages each
| day. This technique is pretty well known in helping with
| unblocking creativity by the author Julia Cameron in "The
| Artist's Way".
|
| Journaling is by far the most effective technique I've come
| across in my life so far. It gets the rumination out. Helps you
| brainstorm. Gets you reflecting on unresolved things in your
| life. I wish I started sooner.
| wyre wrote:
| I got so burnt out from doing morning pages I haven't been able
| to journal significantly in months. I agree it is incredibly
| effective, but it took me at least an hour to fill up my three
| A5 pages, it became hard to make the time in the mornings.
| Ideally, it wouldn't take this long. Cameron's suggestion is
| when there is a pause in the writing to start writing a mantra,
| over and over, until more words come, but that's easier said
| than done in my experience.
|
| 3 pages is not a good control. How big are the pages? How small
| is your handwriting? I read the Artist's Way and nowhere did
| she specify how large the paper should be.
|
| In my experience the deeper insights came on the second page
| about 30 minutes in, after depleting my brain of its
| ruminations and searching for more thoughts to fill up the
| page.
| IntFee588 wrote:
| I think it's a tradeoff. As a comparison, I like learning about
| coding and software architecture through videos and other online
| resources. The field is so vast that looking at other peoples'
| code is the easiest way to absorb the broadest amount of
| material. However, eventually, actually sitting down and writing
| original software is key to achieving true expertise. I suspect
| reading & writing follows a similar pattern.
| jawadch93 wrote:
| unixhero wrote:
| Does HackerNews count as reading?
| ignoramous wrote:
| The front page posts? May be. The comments section? Not really.
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| Some comments are better written than posts so to disqualify
| them as not reading is disingenuous.
| eligro91 wrote:
| A suggestion for those who do not have time to write: record
| yourself.
|
| use the time when you commute, when driving, when walking the
| dogs, cleaning, or anything ritual you're doing on daily basis.
| just tap the recorder in your phone and start talking about
| topics that bothers your mind during the day.
|
| I'm maintaining a recording diary, and I'm talking about
| everything. It's helping me to be more confident on some ideas I
| want to share with others, to be more prepared to arguments with
| my wife, and to understand better myself - what I'm thinking
| about situations, why I'm doing things that I don't like and what
| I can do about that.
|
| You can as well use it as retrospective analysis. we won't
| remember 99.9% of the things we did in our life. those recordings
| can help you in few years, you can extract the data from them and
| have a easy way to listen / read things you've said 1-2 years ago
| on some topics and see how you've evolved since then.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Two things come to mind:
|
| - When you have to explain something to someone else - and you
| wish to do it well - you're forced to rethink, reprocess, etc.
| The exercise deepens your own understanding.
|
| - Our senses (and associated neural support) are weighted to the
| visual. Reading plays to that strength.
| theuseus wrote:
| > Writes a post abour reading. > Talks exclusively about writing.
|
| GG
| Joeyjoejoe24 wrote:
| "You can't think well without writing well"
|
| What about socrates, epictete etc ? Who rejected the very idea of
| writing in favor of oral teaching. They seemed to be pretty good
| at thinking.
|
| Beware the writing excess Paul
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| These tidbits always have to be taken in the context they've
| been said in.
|
| Paul Graham is a venture capitalist in a hyper-connected
| society, where pretty much everyone can read and write.
|
| When these ancient philosophers preferred oral exchanges over
| text based communication you've to realize that text wasn't
| quiet as easily produced and consumed in their society and what
| they were likely going for was a fluid exchange of ideas, which
| was pretty hard to do with written words in that age.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| To start writing your ideas: do it. No one else needs to read
| them. It can be on your local hard drive. It is valuable to do.
|
| Reading doesn't have to be back to back books or papers. Blogs,
| tutorials, comments also count!
| rcarr wrote:
| "I feel the need, the need to read." - Maverick, Top Gun
| exhaze wrote:
| Folks here mentioned that the core point is not about the need to
| the importance of reading, but the importance of writing. No,
| it's really about becoming better at deep, structured thinking. I
| think that's quite a good thing to focus on.
|
| The world we live in is becoming more complex. I think it's
| because our communication pipelines now have unlimited IO -
| there's too much to consume, too much to process, too many
| thoughts we feel the need to express in response to all these
| inputs. All of this at the unforgivably quick eventual
| constituency cross-region replication guarantees afforded to us
| by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and many others.
|
| I write more these days.
|
| I don't share most of what I write.
|
| I write for myself, because I think that writing my thoughts
| helps to refine these thoughts, retain them for future me, and,
| on occasion, share them with another person, thru conversion, or
| by just copy pasting something I wrote.
|
| You don't need a blog to start writing. Just start writing. VS
| Code. Notepad. Emacs. A piece of paper. It doesn't matter. As
| long as you can do it when you feel like it. Write.
| balaji1 wrote:
| Weatherford, in his Genghis Khan book, says there isn't much
| surviving text about that period and region. But whar sources
| he uses in that book are all by "chroniclers" of that era - my
| understanding is that the chroniclers are average reporters of
| that period, with a decent patronage; just documenting things
| on paper as they hear/research/study it; without the intention
| of publishing for widespread readership.
|
| So here's a random idea based on that: Can we incentivize more
| people to report on a topic/event today? Just write, do not
| have to publish.
|
| ^ If more people just write commentary/summary like this for
| whatever they consume, it might double as a decent diversion
| from just consuming content online. And maybe.. maybe it will
| make us mindful about what we consume online :D
| exhaze wrote:
| > average reporters of that period, with a decent patronage;
| just documenting things on paper as they hear/research/study
| it; without the intention of publishing for widespread
| readership.
|
| We don't really have that anymore though right?
|
| The current internet is economy strongly incentivizes people
| to write things in favor of engagement.
|
| Sometimes this aligns with ground truth (e.g. Gergely Orosz,
| who has documented Musk's Twitter takeover via daily
| updates). Many times it does not.
|
| Who is supposed to be the historical record keeper, at this
| time, when trust in record keepers is at an all time low?
|
| I find myself uncomfortable asking such controversial
| questions, but I do feel like they should be asked
| abledantheman wrote:
| > Who is supposed to be the historical record keeper, at
| this time, when trust in record keepers is at an all time
| low?
|
| All of us.
|
| I don't think we need to get hung up on 'who', not really.
| I mean with regard to historical sources, how we do know
| that these were always 'true' reporting and not
| (deliberately or otherwise) untrustworthy, at best
| misunderstood, by whoever wrote them because they may have
| not had all the informarion or reporting second/third hand
| or an agenda.
|
| Sometimes it isn't necessarily what is written as much as
| it is who wrote it and when and under what circumstances.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Recently I've heard it put in the context of how we can use
| rituals to build up our personal power (in the energy / ability
| to get things done sense, not the psychotic sense). This
| prompted me to make a list of things that can be ritualized for
| this purpose and writing is a big one.
| exhaze wrote:
| I kind of stumbled upon writing by accident. To me it's not
| about ability to get things done (thought it helps). It's
| about feeling some semblance of control and structure,
| something I think so many struggle with in the past few years
| (Trump, COVID, Ukraine/Russia, recent tech layoffs, etc etc).
|
| As others here mentioned, it's kind of like programming.
|
| We used it to live in "hello world".
|
| Now we all got thrown into this crazy distributed
| microservice world. The language of this new world is still
| the same. It's (mostly) English. Except it's more complex now
| and you have to be faster and better at writing. So write.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Distributed microservice world is a great way of putting it
| as formerly monolithic systems dissemble into factions.
| exhaze wrote:
| By the way, here's a thought that worries me - where does
| "let's all become good deep structural thinkers by
| writing a lot" break down? How will we know it happened?
| What do we do then?
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Revert to stone tablets?
| clolege wrote:
| > You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write
| well without reading well.
|
| I find it hilarious that pg chose to use two double negatives to
| get across _this_ point.
|
| Double negatives sound profound, but they use more contextual
| overhead to convey less information than their positive
| counterparts. pg is a much better writer than me, but I think it
| would be more accurate (and stick better) if it instead was just:
|
| _Your reading limits your writing, and your writing limits your
| thinking._
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far from
| adequately supported. Merely an assertion of opinion, not a even
| really a fleshed-out essay.
|
| Here's the real shit, scariest thing I've ever read:
|
| _The Erosion of Deep Literacy_ , Adam Garfinkle, National
| Affairs, 2020
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311662
| iillexial wrote:
| The first comment in your link says basically the same what you
| have said:
|
| >This article makes far reaching societal claims with
| essentially no evidence.
|
| and
|
| >I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far
| from adequately supported
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| So read the article. It's way better supported than this one.
| I'll be interested in your reactions and happy to engage in a
| conversation. See you later?
| iillexial wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't mean to claim that article that you sent
| makes false claims. It was just fun seeing a comment that
| claims about not well supported article, following the
| link, and seeing the same comment. Nothing more.
| personjerry wrote:
| It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but
| most of the article is actually about _writing_. And I think that
| 's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about
| "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year.
|
| I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various
| forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more
| writing.
|
| If you want to be a thinker, you have to write.
|
| It really forces you to address your ideas more formulaically and
| concretizes your theses.
|
| Start a blog! If you're reading this chances are you know how to
| buy a domain and spin up a blog in less than 30 minutes. Try
| Wordpress, or hugo with templates if you want more control. And
| if you don't know what to write about, this link was recently
| shared on HN, I thought it was pretty useful:
| https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/
|
| And yes, it's important to publish it. It makes your thoughts
| real. And ideas were meant to be shared.
| sasha_fishter wrote:
| Simon Willson explanation is actually really good. Thank you
| for sharing this!
| dirtyid wrote:
| Yes, for me reading can be replaced and optimized by listening
| text to speech at speeds at faster than my typical reading.
| Writing still essentialto retain and formalize ideas. Listening
| doesn't fully replace reading, still need to go back to text to
| revist ideas when writing, but listening, at least for me,
| incentivizes approaching new content in first place.
| silvestrov wrote:
| When writing you have to actual flesh out the details and
| figure out what to include and what to omit. It is so easy to
| skip that in day dreaming.
|
| Thinking is like drawing a bridge on paper. Writing is to
| actual construct the bridge and test it.
|
| What looks like the strongest bridge (built of paper) is not
| always the strongest one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtMx7FZUC6A
| dEnigma wrote:
| "It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written
| down." -- Philip Glass
| [deleted]
| mck- wrote:
| If blogging is like a webpage, then a Zettelkasten is like a
| Wikipedia for your brains.
|
| Inspired by a thread on HN ~2 years ago, I've now written 1,075
| interconnected notes, and no longer feel that I forget 80% of
| any non-fiction book I read.
|
| Linking is key; it allows you to connect any new insight to
| your existing externalized knowledge base, resulting in deeper
| understanding and retention.
|
| It also creates the space to connect thoughts across disparate
| domains, which spawns novel ideas at an even greater rate. For
| example, I might link an idea about neuroscience to my chess
| writings that links to a note about workout methods which links
| to a piano technique note. Now I suddenly see a new connection
| about applying a piano practice technique to leveling up my
| chess score.
|
| It has changed the way I read, or consume information
| generally.
|
| A great book that got me started is Ahrens, S. (2017). How to
| Take Smart Notes
| [deleted]
| DenisM wrote:
| So do you take notes as you read? How do you handle charts?
| mck- wrote:
| Yes indeed, anytime anything is worth remembering (or
| connecting with other notes) I write it down. It interrupts
| reading, so I don't churn through as many books.
|
| I used to set goals like x books per year, but now I
| realize it's a vanity metric and instead read for insights.
|
| I use Obsidian for note taking, which supports images too.
| User23 wrote:
| > It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading,
| but most of the article is actually about writing. And I think
| that's an understated point.
|
| I got some excellent feedback from my manager's manager early
| in my career and it was, paraphrasing, "keep reading, but write
| more about what you read."
|
| Publishing doesn't have to be public either. At a large
| organization internal communications are plenty sufficient.
| syliconadder wrote:
| I think this level of kindness makes it easy for people to feel
| okay expressing themselves. Thank you for this beautiful
| message.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _If you want to be a thinker, you have to write_
|
| It's what was done at school, since primary...
|
| But it was "at school", because the learner is to be guided
| with critical thinking and ability of assessment, over his own
| or anybody else's production.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| >Start a blog!
|
| but do not expect someone to read it! because with GTP-3
| automated content creation I'm increasingly less interested in
| everything which will be or is already heavily affected by it
| i.e. News articles, blogs and new books...
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The goal isn't for someone to read it. We just covered that.
| The goal is more writing, less reading.
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| What Simon said! I've found that blogging hugely helps me
| clarify my own thinking on a topic, and flush out areas of
| ignorance.
|
| Another excellent option for making getting going with blogging
| simple is Docusaurus - makes it very easy to get up and
| running!
|
| https://docusaurus.io
| slorber wrote:
| Yes, great choice :)
| johnny_reilly wrote:
| Declare your interest Sebastien ;-)
|
| I migrated my own blog to Docusaurus from Blogger about a
| year and a half ago. I became very enamoured (and still am)
| with the idea of writing blog posts as markdown, storing
| them as code and publishing them as a website.
|
| I was delighted at how much Docusaurus aligned with that.
| So much so that I wrote a guide to help others migrate:
|
| https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/definitive-guide-to-
| migrating-...
| skydhash wrote:
| My own blog is on bearblog.dev. There's also nicheless.blog
| if you want a shorter length as a constraint - and excuse ;).
| I've tried setting a static generator and even wrote my own,
| but I spent more time fiddling with them than writing. Now I
| just write. Pretty much raw thoughts like how I would speak
| with a friend. Doing more structured writing takes all the
| joy about it for me.
| thunky wrote:
| > If you want to be a thinker, you have to write.
|
| > Start a blog!
|
| Posting to HN counts as writing, too.
| kragen wrote:
| posting to hn has its disadvantages
|
| most of the interactions you get are people trying to prove
| you wrong
|
| this is great when it's with evidence, but half the time
| instead they accuse you of lying, argue from their own
| authority, or insult you
|
| the options for including equations, data tables, and
| diagrams are very limited, and these are important when what
| you're thinking about is objectively falsifiable propositions
|
| the options for structuring your writing into sections with
| titles with a table of contents, so readers can navigate an
| argument that takes more than two minutes to read, are
| similarly weak
|
| nobody reads what you write after a week, and it's hard for
| you to even find it yourself
|
| worst of all, if you discover that you were wrong two weeks
| or more after your initial comment, there's no way to append
| a correction
| akkartik wrote:
| You are already so prolific outside HN, have you considered
| collecting your HN comments in your own space?
|
| Once I started doing this I found HN comments would grow
| off HN. Now there are a few subjects where I can just point
| people at a link the next time a subject comes up. And the
| link has often grown out of repeated iterations of debate
| on HN and elsewhere.
|
| It doesn't bother me that people forget HN comments. I
| don't forget them, and that seems the important thing.
|
| You _are_ right that one needs to keep HN at arms length.
| Over the years I try not to engage in repeated back and
| forth. I'm not writing primarily for whoever I'm arguing
| with. I'm writing for the silent readers.
| kragen wrote:
| oh thanks
|
| i did edit some hn comments into dercuano, derctuo, and
| dernocua
|
| which comments of mine here do you think would be worth
| saving
| akkartik wrote:
| After many years I recently have a way to follow people
| on HN once again (https://www.hnfollow.com). Since I
| started following you, I've favorited a couple in
| particular:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33641298#33644090
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679360#33684545
|
| But I think there are others. Your view of your own
| darlings will be different from others. It might be worth
| downloading the archive in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389843, just
| because it's recent and so going to be up to date.
| kragen wrote:
| thank you!
| rerdavies wrote:
| ... all of which seem like motivation for writing better.
| Keep on posting!
| kragen wrote:
| doubt i will
|
| posting here makes my life worse
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often
| been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge.
| Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program
| being loaded into a computer. That sort of thing is unlikely to
| happen anytime soon [...] because even if one existed, it would
| be insufficient. Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x;
| it also teaches you how to write.
|
| Well, but if we could produce a tape that taught x, presumably we
| could also produce a tape that taught writing.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think he's referencing Asimov's profession novella there,
| though the main point of that story was that the protagonist
| couldn't get the tapes because of the capability for original
| thought (some people had to make the tapes).
|
| And yeah, probably a tape that structured your brain in some
| way that had the knowledge may include the prerequisites
| necessary for it to work (better language/reasoning and
| writing).
|
| But even if it didn't, Asimov's story agrees with him - it was
| insufficient. It's why they made some people avoid the tapes.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I haven't read that Asimov story. However, I suppose the core
| question is this: from a neurological perspective, is
| learning factual information different from learning a skill?
|
| I'm inclined to believe it's not, because we're actually
| pretty bad at rote memorization. We usually need to
| _understand_ the memory--how it can be used, or why it 's
| important. Professionals construct "mental palaces",
| effectively building artificial meaning.
| magicloop wrote:
| I see reading as a knowledge compression function. So it is
| efficient to read something that the writer otherwise spent a
| long time assembling.
|
| But reading is just a route to quality thinking. Another route is
| via technical debate. You verbally describe a problem and
| solution and then your peers drill into that and offer
| counterpoints. This is in my experience as beneficial as reading
| due its interactive aspect - which reading does not offer.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Every time I write something I intend to be permanent I reread
| what I've written multiple times out loud. I find complicated
| sentences, or related phrases that are unnecessarily far apart,
| or words that I'd never use in speech. Then I make modifications
| to minimize these.
|
| So even aside from reading what others write, I think you can
| only write well yourself if you assiduously read what _you_
| write.
| borroka wrote:
| Editing a few days after writing does wonders to improve the
| quality of the writing, especially allowing you to find those
| parts, expressions, words that you do not hear as your own
| voice. Reading and rereading immediately after writing is
| certainly helpful, but it presents a "fluency" problem. That
| is, due to the fatigue of rereading what is still fresh in our
| minds and in our hands and the increasing familiarity with the
| text, we bypass some parts of the text while reading.
|
| It's kind of like having a weird uncle in the family: after we
| see this guy running around the living room naked for some
| years, we think it's ordinary, fine, ok: "oh, it's just Uncle
| Bob", we tell ourselves.
|
| Then we go to college, come home for vacation after meeting new
| people, lost the "familiarity" of family life, and when we
| finally see Uncle Bob running around the living room naked, our
| reaction is not one of jovial acceptance like before, but one
| of horror.
| copperx wrote:
| Citations are needed for such bold claims if PG wants to be
| persuasive.
| shmageggy wrote:
| I've noticed SV rich guys never use citations (Sam Altman is
| another that comes to mind), probably because of the uncritical
| fawning they receive regardless. Why bother backing up what you
| say with evidence when the audience doesn't demand it.
| breck wrote:
| I highly recommend the book "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer
| Adler. I've been rereading it every few years since it changed my
| life in high school (turned me into a lifelong autodidact).
| sasha_fishter wrote:
| I've seen this popping up every now and then. I just put it on
| my wishlist for next order...
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| I'm thinking about this more and more in the context of being a
| developer and product manager. I'm a knowledge worker, my unit of
| work is often writing, either for a computer to read or people to
| read.
|
| Getting better at writing, and simply writing more is a core goal
| and something I struggle with.
|
| I'm looking at different systems like evergreen notes,
| zettlekasten etc. and trying to incorporate those in my own note
| taking.
|
| https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes
| thoughtpeddler wrote:
| For two decades I've been a heavy "event-driven journaler" (i.e.
| I journal when events occur in my life that I need to think
| through by writing, vs. journaling as a routine daily practice).
|
| This has been an immensely helpful way to structure my thinking,
| in the way PG writes about. It also develops a record of thoughts
| that I refer back to and reflect on. It's driven my personal
| growth, and helped me uncover personal blindspots.
|
| In more recent times, life is busier, and journaling the way I
| used to is harder to make time for. (Either that, or the Day One
| app just isn't doing it for me anymore, I'm not sure.)
|
| Instead, I've started to use the voice memos app to voice dictate
| my thoughts, as if I'm being interviewed on a podcast. My tone is
| that of an interviewee, providing their answer, sharing their
| reasoning on a topic, debating the pros and cons, and arriving at
| a conclusion.
|
| I use this format for both personal matters or thoughts related
| to professional endeavors. It's really working for me. It's a
| higher velocity way to get my thoughts out, yet still keep them
| structured. Thanks to increased playback speeds, I can go through
| my past thoughts more easily too. I highly recommend more people
| try this, especially if writing/typing it out seems like a chore.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| If we were back in pre-writing days, when people memorized long
| sagas word for word, then anyone contemplating the creation of a
| new saga would similarly be told of 'the need to listen'.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| I find the quality of my thinking is much higher when writing by
| hand, but it's so slow I feel like I get down a particular path
| and forget so many of the other things I was considering in
| parallel.
|
| I can type much faster than I can write but it feels like a
| messier thought process. It feels more like jamming a gearbox,
| while writing by hand feels like a smooth shifting bicycle, with
| the wind in my hair.
|
| Should I try dictation and then writing it down later? Or typing
| up my handwritten notes after writing them? Any other ideas?
| zktrust wrote:
| you must be much older than me. i never had a chance to
| handwrite my notes or thoughts. all goes to straigh to typing.
| I fear though my generation and future generations are missing
| out substantially.
| itisit wrote:
| > i never had a chance to handwrite my notes or thoughts.
|
| Really? Yet to come across a pen and paper in your however
| many years of life? I'm not sure what point you're trying to
| make. Are those things so exceedingly anachronistic to you
| that you'd be at a loss? I'm sorry, but I feel you're being
| disingenuous.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I rediscovered this at 27. Used to do everything with a
| keyboard or recorder. It's very powerful although I do my
| handwriting on an iPad with a pencil.
| zktrust wrote:
| have you seen nassim taleb's recent comments about this guy?
| Taleb while harsh, always is truthful to the truth. I'm too young
| to know the story behind Hacker News and ycombinator, but reading
| some of the recent stuff makes me question prevailing sentiments
| about PG.
| vortegne wrote:
| I think they're both egomaniacs who treat their own word as
| gospel. PG is just less brash about it, so comes off as more
| "reasonable" to many. I think they're both just prime examples
| of survivorship bias and I try to avoid any of their opinions
| at all times. Of course, sometimes curiosity takes over, but I
| never leave feeling good after reading anything they have to
| say.
| bustedblade wrote:
| read all of PG's stuff.. promise you will think otherwise.
| Taleb's books is hilarious and insightful but PG's essays
| convey those same truths and many more in a much more succinct
| format.
| [deleted]
| throwboi123 wrote:
| Link?
| zktrust wrote:
| u mean for the tweet? google please. there are many.
| TekMol wrote:
| How about an excercise in writing? Instead of referring to
| "comments" by someone else, tell us your own thoughts. What is
| the prevailing sentiment you see? And how do you question it?
| enan wrote:
| The essay makes this central claim but then spends most of the
| time talking about writing leading to better thinking (which I
| think is well proven). Does anyone know of research that backs up
| the main thesis?
|
| "Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches
| you how to write."
| raghavtoshniwal wrote:
| > Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a
| program being loaded into a computer.
|
| > That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon
|
| Probably just my lived experience, but watching youtube at faster
| playback speed feels like downloading information. Increasing
| speeds at parts which I can easily grok and decreasing it when it
| takes time to understand the content.
| wskish wrote:
| Here is the output of GPT reading and summarizing this (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363). Model seems to be
| hallucinating the author. Any thoughts on how to improve it?
|
| "The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he
| argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring
| knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of
| a science fiction book in which reading has been replaced by a
| more efficient method of knowledge transfer. He argues that even
| if such a method existed, it would be insufficient because it
| would not allow for the kind of discovery that writing does. He
| concludes that people who want to have ideas can't afford not to
| read."
| TekMol wrote:
| Does GPT-3 offer summaries out of the box? Or do you do it by a
| prompt like "The summary of the text above is:"?
| wskish wrote:
| we are strategically prompting it as such:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750013
|
| open to all ideas here
| TekMol wrote:
| Is a "prompt prefix" a thing in GPT-3 or do you mean you
| combine that prefix with the text of the page into a
| prompt?
| wskish wrote:
| We prepend the prompt prefix to the page text to create
| the actual model prompt. GPT doesn't have any such
| abstraction.
| TekMol wrote:
| And GPT-3 remembers the prefix at the end of a long story
| and writes a summary?
|
| That sounds very surprising to me. I would have strongly
| expected it continues the story.
| zktrust wrote:
| i think that's also rubbish, just like PG's written opinion
| piece. How on earth did we then get the great work by William
| Shakespeare. ShakeSPeare born a time when reading a lot wasn't
| even possible. There was little to none good content material
| out there. He was writing more than he could have possible read
| anywhere else.
| pavlov wrote:
| Shakespeare wrote about Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus,
| Richard III, Henry IV, and so on. How did he learn about
| these people if there was nothing to read?
| zktrust wrote:
| u make one hell of a point that i thought about. this is
| recursion but in different languages, which is not really
| applicable with exception of Richard and Henry. Read in
| latin, then translate it to THE ORIGINAL OTHER LANGUAGE
| ENGLISH. You are diluting my genuine point that I am
| making. The content of way back then was negligible to
| content that exists now. In all fairness, the opinion
| brought forward by your messiah PG is not really fit for
| standing judgement because of the point i brought forward.
|
| Good writer, good idea makers exist without the need to
| have been good at reading.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > The content of way back then was negligible to content
| that exists now
|
| But enough to fill a single person's lifetime regardless?
| So whether you take Shakespeare or Murakami, their
| individual perspectives are not that different since
| either of them could have filled their lifetimes with
| reading.
|
| > The content of way back then was negligible to content
| that exists now
|
| The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us
| an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much.
| This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus
| Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.
|
| > your messiah PG
|
| This is low-level, disrespectful, intellectually
| dishonest and a phallacy. GP said nothing about Graham
| and you are pulling this out of nowhere.
| zktrust wrote:
| the last point was for a different thread but as u see
| platform has been making sure i cant respond in timely
| fashion to all threads. I sequeezed it in there.
|
| > The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us
| an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much.
| This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus
| Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.
|
| I think it's fair to say that we don't actually know much
| about Plato. All stories being told about plato are in
| third person narrative. I think you are contradicting
| yourself, Socrates and other ancients were a big
| proponent of discarding writing in place of dialogue. I
| think this should suffice as point.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Sorry for calling you dishonest; you do not seem so.
| mikebenfield wrote:
| So you are under the belief that the written output of one
| man born in 1564 was of greater quantity than all "good"
| writing prior to his time? Are you sure you thought this
| through?
| zktrust wrote:
| no i am not under the belief of anything other than
| mentioning PG in a slightly bad light will get me downvotes
| or a ban on this platform.
|
| > So you are under the belief that the written output of
| one man born in 1564 was of greater quantity than all
| "good" writing prior to his time? Are you sure you thought
| this through?
|
| This is not the point i was trying to make.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is not PG, it is your sneering and arrogant attitude
| that attracts downvotes.
|
| I haven't downvoted you, but if I did, it would be for
| the tone of your comments alone. I don't care about PG
| one way or another, but I am sick of the total level of
| glibness on the Internet, and while I gave up on
| mainstream social media, I would prefer HN to stay a
| little bit friendlier and less toxic than Twitter or
| Reddit.
| zktrust wrote:
| thank you for not downvoting me. i am less arrogant than
| you think i am a true effective altruist. hahahahaha
| inglor_cz wrote:
| You're welcome. Transmitting one's true personality
| across TCP/IP is harder than it looks.
| mikebenfield wrote:
| I am not a huge fan of PG and I seriously doubt that had
| anything to do with your downvotes.
| wskish wrote:
| I tweaked the GPT prompt to include the domain name from the
| story url as additional context. That fixes this one and a few
| other problematic ones. Here is a typical summary of this story
| now:
|
| "This is an essay written by Paul Graham in November of 2022.
| In it, he talks about how reading is necessary not just for
| acquiring knowledge, but for learning to write well. He argues
| that there is no substitute for reading, and that people who
| want to have ideas need to be good at reading."
| rookie_knight wrote:
| Is this in response to Vitalik's tweet or is the tweet in
| response to this?
| knome wrote:
| Asimov had a nice short story about taped knowledge,
| "Profession".
|
| It's a really good read.
| jholman wrote:
| I think there is clear historical evidence that this thesis is,
| at a minimum, greatly exaggerated. Socrates never wrote, and I
| think he had more good ideas than Paul Graham ever will. Muhammad
| was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity,
| his ideas were extremely powerful.
|
| I mean, I do personally find that writing is a powerful tool for
| thinking. Maybe that means that Paul Graham and I are normal, and
| Socrates and Muhammad were atypical. But maybe it says more about
| humans-in-our-society than it does about the essential human
| condition. If humans learned "by tape" (as per the SF books from
| the Silver Age, referenced in TFA's opening para), maybe idea-
| production would work along different lines.
|
| I admit, I tend to agree with him about the usefulness of
| writing. But I think it's just an irrational intuition, not the
| clear argument he implies.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| Socrates had the ancient agora, which was (oversimplifying) a
| group of experts gathering in the same place bouncing off ideas
| from each other verbally. It's time to stop discounting the
| role of one's environment in personal growth.
| eternalban wrote:
| > Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by
| divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful.
|
| He used to take retreats in the caves near Mecca to _meditate
| and reflect_. It was during one of these sessions that he later
| claimed that he was overwhelmed with the inescapable presence
| of archangel Gabriel who commanded him to _" Read!"_. This
| directive of Gabriel to Mohammad is held to be the first verse
| of the divine revelation in Islam. Read!
| In the Name of your Lord Who created Created Man(kind)
| from a clot of blood Read! And your Lord is
| Ar-Rahman Who Taught by the 'Pen' Taugh Man(kind)
| that which he knew not. [Q.96 'Al-Alaq']
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_first_revelation#...
|
| As mentioned in a comment to a dup post, Paul is neglecting the
| _reflect_ phase. For some this occurs prior to writing. Others,
| take time when writing to pause and reflect.
|
| p.s.
|
| > Muhammad was not even literate
|
| We _do_ know that he dictated and others wrote messages
| [correspondences] that were sent. So no records of him writing,
| but this was not an uneducated man. He was a merchant,
| traveled, and conversed with other men at markets, oasis rest
| stops along the trade route. (And he was not a frivolous man.)
|
| The reason Muhammad is said to have been "illiterate" is
| because Qur'an refers to him (yes, it is the most meta book
| I've ever read) as "the un-lettered Prophet". "Ummi".
|
| Personally, I think this is a misreading, since these are
| technical terms (like 'Pen' in above cited verses), and
| 'letter' refers to the 'mystic letters* given to Moses'.
|
| i.e. Mohammad the _Gentile_ Prophet. The prophet for the un-
| Lettered, _the Gentile_.
|
| *consult your local Rabbi :)
|
| https://aish.com/the-mystical-power-of-hebrew-letters/
| Razengan wrote:
| > _the reflect phase. For some this occurs prior to writing.
| Others, take time when writing to pause and reflect._
|
| First you load the dataset then you train the model.
| eternalban wrote:
| That's Zen.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| There is some debate about whether that's better translated
| as 'recite' as opposed to 'read'
| thenerdhead wrote:
| It is a good point, but with time comes change. Plato was an
| excellent scribe of Socrates and Aristotle after him. Just
| because Socrates thought it was inhuman to write things down,
| doesn't mean his successors did and we are all thankful they
| did such a diligent job in doing so. But then again the
| argument of writing things down expands the metaphysics of
| philosophy, especially Socrates perspective given it's not in
| his head.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Many people in ancient civilizations were trained in a mostly
| forgotten art, the recital of long stories, aka 'oral
| histories'. However, it's doubtful that any one person could
| retain a whole library of such oral histories, i.e. it was
| probably closer to one long text per person, given the
| limitations of human memory. Writing was essentially the
| creation of an external memory system that other people could
| refer to. For example, the first records of Icelandic sagas:
|
| https://retrospectjournal.com/2016/10/10/from-oral-to-writte...
| sagz wrote:
| His first reference around audiobooks it's particularly
| resonating, in so far as to express, record and iterate ideas
| with mind maps!
|
| Mind maps, sketches, doodles, mocks, are ineffably (pun intended)
| great at _having_ good ideas.
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