[HN Gopher] How to think in writing
___________________________________________________________________
How to think in writing
Author : Luc
Score : 347 points
Date : 2024-07-06 18:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.henrikkarlsson.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.henrikkarlsson.xyz)
| paulpauper wrote:
| a major problem with writing or any creative endeavor is the
| reception is out of the creator's control. you can check all the
| boxes on clarity of thought and it still fails to resonate with
| renders for whatever reason
| glompers wrote:
| Another major problem occurs when mixing the first intention,
| to communicate for a specific audience, with a second, separate
| risk-management intention to control that receptivity and dial
| it to a resonant frequency. The first intention trusts and
| takes a high view of their integrity and of your own. The
| second does the opposite.
| bawolff wrote:
| That's a problem with all human endeavour. To paraphrase
| captain picard, sometimes you do everything right but still
| fail.
|
| The only way to never fail is to never try.
| ibash wrote:
| This is great and matches something I've been doing for over a
| decade now. Writing in reflections, examining and cross
| examining.
|
| The only thing I would argume with is:
|
| > We just talked about it aimlessly, read randomly, and made
| small notes. This cost us time and caused confusion.
|
| No, this is part of the process. It's part of noticing and a
| precursor to the step of examination. This is data gathering.
|
| --
|
| The other thing I've learned over the years is that this kind of
| thinking/writing scares people.
|
| I've made the mistake of sending an edited analysis to a
| cofounder. Because they didn't have a similar practice they
| couldn't perceive it as an examination of our startup's
| situation, and instead received it as anxiety and uncertainty.
|
| It's unsettling to question assumptions.
| justincormack wrote:
| Proofs and Refutations is a great book.
| nxicvyvy wrote:
| The PG quote is a hot take.
|
| Yes, writing can be a productive focusing mechanism, it can also
| provide you with good reflections. But so can meditation, so can
| a good walk. It's a tool, not a requirement. It also has it's own
| downsides in that it forces you to think a certain constrained
| way, and while that is also one of its strength, it does limit
| your ability to think creatively.
|
| Similar to how using ChatGPt to draft writing or code, there is a
| strong biasing effect pushing you towards something non novel.
| troupe wrote:
| Can you give any examples of someone whose idea formation was
| not improved went they undertook the task of writing their
| thoughts down?
| jstanley wrote:
| No, because we don't have access to the ideas of those who
| don't write them down.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I have had ideas that come to me, during walks, and other
| certain moments, briefly and they keep developing over time.
| It has happened that after I actually write them down, my
| mind stops caring about them and they stop happening.
|
| Alternatively I have had ideas in mind that get stronger and
| stronger and at some point I just have to work them and so I
| work on them without writing them down and I actually bring
| them to fruition while writing down might have oddly killed
| that motivation or obsession.
|
| It is mainly various side projects. The act of writing
| somehow diminishes that motivation or reward feeling as
| opposed to immediately starting to build the side project.
| andrei-akopian wrote:
| Things you write down stick better (according to school
| teachers) and if you write digitally you can look stuff up as
| you write.
|
| There are similar quotes about meditation and walking so they
| are all part of the same toolkit (and it is great if you can
| use any part of it).
| willsmith72 wrote:
| > if you write digitally you can look stuff up as you write
|
| is that supposed to be a good thing? if the goal is
| developing ideas, i would wager that it's not.
| andrei-akopian wrote:
| If looking up helps you catch a misconception or
| missunderstanding about the real world, it's great.
|
| I find it very hard for external sources to support my
| thinking (if they do I don't read them but save for later
| comparison). If anything they prove me wrong when I am on
| the wrong path.
| jstanley wrote:
| Not _every part_ of your ideas need to be novel and
| unadulterated by the rest of human progress. If your ideas
| need to fit in to some wider context (e.g. you need to
| produce working code) then it is very helpful to be able to
| look up important facts about that wider context rather
| than guessing.
| codelord wrote:
| "If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and
| more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has
| fully formed ideas about it."
|
| Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with this
| flawed deduction.
| throwaway55533 wrote:
| How is it flawed logcally? Seems perfectly correct to me.
| Although I'd agree it's a bit over-literal. As if the emotional
| workings of the human mind can be precisely reasoned about
| (i.e. precisely enough to say "always").
|
| Regardless, I've experienced this effect a lot when writing
| design docs. Iteration and objective criticism on a tangible
| thing (a doc) is an extremely effective way to see the problem
| from all sides.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm not OP and I haven't read the full post yet.
|
| But the quote above says "If..." and then makes a statement
| that isn't true and then having a conclusion based on that
| false premise. I can tell you it isn't true because I can
| recall countless times in the last few months alone where
| writing down my ideas has resulted in a muddier thought; lost
| ideas while writing them down; confusing me and missing some
| parts; it does _not_ "always make them more precise and more
| complete". So the rest of the statement is just silly.
|
| Sure, sometimes writing down ideas helps clear things up.
| Most times even. But always?! _Definitely not_.
| wyum wrote:
| The deduction is flawed because the success of one method
| (thinking with writing) does not necessarily disprove the
| success of other methods (such as thinking without writing).
| FreakLegion wrote:
| You're objecting to the premise, not the conclusion*. The
| deduction is valid for the premise (the part in the 'if').
| Well, assuming you accept that an idea that can be "more
| complete" isn't "fully formed", but I'd say that's
| definitional.
|
| * Although it's not really right to use this kind of
| language here (premise, conclusion, deduction). It's a
| casual statement, so I suppose people can somewhat
| reasonably argue about it, but the assertion is
| tautological ('if something is incomplete, it isn't fully
| formed').
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The keyword is "always". IF writing about something
| _always_ improves it, that implies it cannot ever reach
| full potential without writing about it.
| card_zero wrote:
| Or _with_ writing about it. But there 's an implicit "if
| you haven't already written about it". We might wonder
| what other implicit preconditions there are.
|
| Similarly, if walking North always brings you closer to
| the North Pole, then you can never reach the North Pole
| without walking North, or at all. But look out for
| oceans.
| guyomes wrote:
| Taking the statement completely out of context, it states :
| if A implies B, then not A implies not B. This is a logical
| flaw.
|
| The correct statement from a logical point of view is: if A
| implies B, then not B implies not A.
|
| In this case, even if writing down your ideas makes them more
| precise, there might be other methods that make your ideas
| more precise. Again this is just the logical point of view,
| out of context.
| nequo wrote:
| > Taking the statement completely out of context, it states
| : if A implies B, then not A implies not B. This is a
| logical flaw.
|
| The statement in TFA is not that though. Instead, it is "if
| A implies B, then not A implies not C." A:
| writing about thoughts B: thoughts become more
| complete C: thoughts are most complete
|
| If "A implies B" is true, then it also doesn't matter if
| other methods also make your ideas more complete, because
| "A implies B" means that writing would make them even more
| complete, therefore "not C."
| guyomes wrote:
| You're perfectly right. It is indeed perfectly logical
| then. It could be reformulated like this: if f(A) > f(not
| A) then f(not A) is not maximal.
|
| f: a function indicating how complete the thoughts are.
|
| A: writing about thoughts.
| __0x01 wrote:
| What books can I read to reason like this?
|
| EDIT: shortened sentence
| JadeNB wrote:
| > "If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise
| and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic
| has fully formed ideas about it."
|
| > Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with
| this flawed deduction.
|
| I think that it can be rescued, at some expense of awkwardness,
| by grouping not as one would expect ("(fully formed) ideas"),
| but in a slightly non-standard way:
|
| > "If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise
| and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic
| has fully (formed ideas about it)."
|
| That is, if you haven't written about the topic, then you
| haven't understood it as precisely and completely as you could.
| While this is obviously exaggeration, I think that it's (1)
| logically consistent, (2) possibly what pg meant, and (3) a
| useful slogan, even if intentionally over-stated.
| furyofantares wrote:
| The deduction is logically sound; it's of the form "if <false
| statement> then <other false statement that would follow if the
| first was true>".
|
| This is, of course, even worse than a logical error.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| There's no logical flaw here. An idea can't be _fully_ formed,
| if it could be more precise and more complete.
| bgoated01 wrote:
| Sure, and even ideas that have been written about can be more
| precise and complete, perhaps by writing more about them, for
| example, so no one has fully formed ideas by this logic.
| Sharlin wrote:
| And that's probably true. I doubt anyone has ever expressed
| an idea that couldn't be amended, clarified, or expanded
| upon in some way.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Depends on the idea. To me the whole article was too
| generic or handwavy without giving specific examples of
| what kind of ideas are actually fully formed and which
| are not.
|
| What is a definition of an idea that is fully formed and
| that is sufficiently complex enough?
| tshaddox wrote:
| But also, if more writing can always make the idea "more
| complete," then no one at all (even the people who write) has
| any "completely complete" ideas.
| andrei-akopian wrote:
| <div class="commtext c00">Yes this is some terrible logic, but
| the idea is true.
|
| Writing about something fixes (most) wrong thoughts, and since
| you are wrong in 99% of cases you can safely say that you are
| wrong unless you have written about it.</div>
| treetalker wrote:
| To be sure, the quoted text in the parent comment is itself the
| linked essay's quotation of Paul Graham.
|
| Whether logically rigorous or not, that excerpt seems to be the
| essay's author's way of rhetorically opening his reflections on
| the idea that writing verbally crystallizes thought.
|
| As a reader, I do not believe that the author is making a claim
| that the quoted Paul Graham statement, reduced to symbolic
| logic, is in all respects valid or sound.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| "If allspice makes food taste better, than no one who doesn't
| use allspice can cook well."
| mizzao wrote:
| The analogy is probably something more like:
|
| Salt is necessary to bring out the flavor in pretty much all
| food. So no one who doesn't use salt has made a good meal.
|
| Because salt is much more irreplaceable than allspice in
| cooking, just like writing is difficult to replace in honing
| ideas.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with
| this flawed deduction.
|
| ... or this writing improved an even more flawed original.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Or it gave author unwarranted confidence in a flawed argument
| on the basis of a flawed assumption.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > But then I read Imre Lakatos's _Proofs and Refutations_. It is
| not, at first glance, a book about writing. It is a book of
| mathematical philosophy. By a Hungarian Stalinist, no less.
|
| I don't see what "Hungarian" has to do with it, and, though I do
| see what "Stalinist" might have to do with it, it probably
| shouldn't. (Someone's politics don't have to be good for them to
| make a valuable contribution to knowledge.) But, according to
| Wikipedia, this isn't true literally as written, unless one takes
| the view "once a Stalinist, always a Stalinist:"
|
| > After his release, Lakatos returned to academic life .... Still
| nominally a communist, his political views had shifted markedly,
| and he was involved with at least one dissident student group in
| the lead-up to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
|
| > ... He received a PhD in philosophy in 1961 from the University
| of Cambridge; his doctoral thesis was entitled _Essays in the
| Logic of Mathematical Discovery_ , and his doctoral advisor was
| R. B. Braithwaite. The book _Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of
| Mathematical Discovery_ , published after his death, is based on
| this work.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| I suspect you're taking that excerpt too literally. By my
| reading, the author is expressing their surprise to learn
| something to improve their writing from an unexpected source (a
| book about mathematics), and is even more surprised at this
| source being written by someone very different from the author
| culturally (Hungarian) and philosophically/politicaly
| (Stalinist).
| dunefox wrote:
| > I don't see what "Hungarian" has to do with it
|
| It's just additional information...
| andrei-akopian wrote:
| Though it can be blamed on myself, I didn't understand what you
| were saying. Your vocab and sentence structure is awesome, but
| your thoughts just aren't comming across.
| bawolff wrote:
| Indeed i kind of felt similar. I'm just not sure what the
| thesis of this piece is supposed to be. Is it that to write
| deeply you should question your assumptions and follow your
| argument to their logical conclusions? Is there something more
| that i missed? Surely that goes without saying?
| treetalker wrote:
| Here's my (sometimes heavy-handed) restatement. The thesis is
| marked by asterisks.
|
| The author's expression tends toward the literary and thus
| reduces clarity by requiring more work from the reader -- a
| point which I find ironic in light of the message conveyed.
|
| - - -
|
| > When I sit down to write ... [m]y thoughts are flighty and
| shapeless ... . But when I type, it is as if I pin my
| thoughts to the table. I can examine them.
|
| > But it is hard to do it right. Not all writing helps me
| think. Most kinds of writing are rather weak, or even
| counterproductive, in this regard. You have to approach it in
| the right way.
|
| > Until last fall, I had not seen anyone properly articulate
| the mental moves that make writing a powerful tool for
| thought. ...
|
| > But then I read Imre Lakatos's Proofs and Refutations. ...
| [I]t is, if you read it sideways, a profound exploration of
| the act of writing. ... Because [mathematics is a special
| type of writing that tends toward great] precision, reading
| Lakatos gave me a clearer and more precise understanding of
| [how I use writing to] wrestle with my thoughts.
|
| > **What follows is a series of meditations about thinking
| through writing provoked by, but not faithful to, Lakatos's
| book. ... [It] covers the basic mental models that are useful
| to most people [to use writing to clarify their simple
| thinking] ... .** [A forthcoming essay will explore] more
| complex patterns of thinking which [may be] useful [in]
| research or ... deep creative work.
|
| > [First mental model: make fluid thinking rigid. That is,
| give yourself something to work with.]
|
| > [Second mental model: make conjectures.]
|
| > [Third mental model: unfold the conjectures. That is,]
| "interrogat[e] the conclusion to [hypothesize] why it could
| be true." What premises and reasoning chains [could] lead[]
| to this conclusion? [This opens the conjectures up to greater
| criticism, which in turn helps to approach the truth, even if
| the explanation is wrong.]
|
| > ...
|
| > [To make and unfold conjectures, I have learned to write a
| list of] bullet points [that attempt to explain] the
| intuition[s] behind [my conjectures as] a series of premises
| [that seem to fit together logically]. [Then I ask follow-up
| questions and try to find counter-examples.] [Through this
| process, I more readily find flaws in my thinking and discard
| or adjust my ideas on the fly.]
|
| > [D]eeper patterns take a longer time to emerge ... because
| they are further from ... established thoughts and
| [therefore] harder to articulate.
|
| > ...
|
| > [Writing is like generating] texts filled with hidden doors
| ... . [We shortchange ourselves if we do not take the time
| and make the effort to open those doors and explore what lies
| behind them by asking critical questions about what we have
| written and by searching for general and special counter-
| examples.]
| bawolff wrote:
| Perhaps i just have the wrong mental model on how people
| think, but this sounds like just a description of all human
| thought processes, whether writing deep thoughts or
| deciding what to eat for dinner. I honestly am not sure
| what the alternative would be.
| treetalker wrote:
| I tend to agree. The author appears to have discovered
| that he can better examine and criticize his own thoughts
| by making his thinking verbally explicit and then putting
| in effort to actually perform that examination (both
| mentally and through further writing).
|
| I suppose there are other ways to work with the mind's
| symbols, such as visual art, music, etc. But the author
| seems confined to language and language-based logic.
| calf wrote:
| I think the author is simultaneously reinventing the wheel
| and overthinking the writing process. Their essay overloads
| all the work of deep thinking onto the task of writing,
| which indeed scientists say writing a piece of text is one
| of the hardest cognitive tasks.
|
| The top-down elaboration of bullet points is what middle-
| school students should've been taught, outlining.
|
| The conjecturing and counterexamples are reasoning
| critically about your own ideas.
|
| All of this is easy said but it's all well known and high
| school education should've taught the basics of this, the
| rest is just lots of practice.
| benreesman wrote:
| In fairness to the OP, I'd fucking hate to be trying to get my
| ideas out on the internet when it had to get past like 4
| different LLMs to ever see the light of day.
|
| One of the many chilling effects of modern AI is that there's
| now a CAPTCHA for writing anything that people read unless
| you're really famous or something.
| pxoe wrote:
| writing can be so pervasive, even compulsive, especially nowadays
| and in digital spaces, that it might be due for a counter: how to
| just think. how to think freely. think unburdened by having to
| put thoughts into a form, written or spoken, out loud or
| internal, or even verbalized in any way at all, without being
| slowed down by any of those things
| andsoitis wrote:
| symbols are intermediaries. disintermediate!
| layer8 wrote:
| At least no one notices when you only think in lowercase.
| space_oddity wrote:
| I try to dedicate time each day to sit in silence and let my
| thoughts unfold naturally
| BeetleB wrote:
| I'm torn about this article.
|
| On the one hand, he's right: Writing helps refine your thoughts.
|
| On the other hand, if your goal is to probe the validity of your
| thoughts, this is painfully inefficient. You'll get much further
| if you do one or two simple passes on your writing, and then pass
| what you've written around and ask for feedback.
|
| I think I learned this in one of Haidt's books, and it has jived
| with my experience: If your brain has a bias or a blind spot,
| it's fairly unlikely you'll uncover it by pure thought alone.
| _Perhaps_ if you put in as much effort as this author has, you
| 'll uncover 20-50% more than the average person, which still
| leaves you with a lot of gaping holes. But outside feedback will
| uncover them _very quickly!_
|
| I had a friend who thought like this person, and it was rarely
| hard to find flaws in his thoughts that he had not considered.
| He's as smart as I am, so it wasn't an intelligence flaw.
| Daub wrote:
| > Writing helps refine your thoughts.
|
| Very true. Indeed I would go further and say that unless you
| are capable of expressing your thoughts as words, then those
| thoughts will have no more substance than steam.
|
| I thought I was a clear thinker until I entered academia. The
| many reports, instructional materials and academic papers soon
| enough showed me how wrong I was.
|
| Edit: the illustration to this article is one of the most
| appropriate I have seen.
| random3 wrote:
| Unless you have few, very simple thoughts, feedback is not
| really effective, nor scalable, compared to self validation for
| which writing is required.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I would urge you to seek feedback from a more diverse crowd
| then.
|
| The article talks about counterexamples. It's hubris to think
| you will find most of the relevant counterexamples on your
| own. It's also hubris to think you'll do it quicker than
| others.
|
| As for scalability, I'm confused. If you have a crowd of
| followers, for example, you'll reach lots of people quickly,
| whereas by writing for yourself you'll never get feedback
| from more than one person. It's the perfect example of
| something that _doesn 't_ scale.
|
| Heck even writing a comment on HN often leads to more
| efficient feedback. Sure, I probably could have thought of
| everything other commenters point out to me, but it would
| take much more time and effort, and the effort does not lead
| to a vastly better understanding. At best only marginally
| better.
|
| Past a point you're in the zone of diminishing returns. You
| can spend two hours and get a 5% better understanding or you
| can talk to someone and in ten minutes get a 20% better
| understanding.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| > If you have a crowd of followers
|
| That's a big _if_ , and that's the problem with relying on
| feedback. The more specific the topic, the less people
| you'll find that can give relevant feedback. Even within a
| team (less people but more specialized in your problem
| domain), it can be difficult to get relevant feedback.
|
| It still works because it is a form of "rubber-ducking".
| But the less involved in your topic the "crowd" is, the
| less efficient it is.
|
| Moreover feedback has the same problem as tests (and code
| reviews): it can show the existence of an inconsistency or
| a blind spot, but positive feedback doesn't prove that you
| are entirely correct.
| setopt wrote:
| > positive feedback doesn't prove that you are entirely
| correct
|
| You often don't need to be 100% sure that everything is
| correct before you move from "writing notes" to "doing
| something". At that point, I find that note-taking
| becomes counter-productive because of the time it
| requires.
|
| I say this as an avid note taker myself: I've often
| caught myself procrastinating by polishing my notes 100%,
| instead of moving on and getting things done.
| mistermann wrote:
| > It still works because it is a form of "rubber-
| ducking". But the less involved in your topic the "crowd"
| is, the less efficient it is.
|
| Might this be based on some unsound assumptions?
|
| We might have accidentally stumbled into a real-world
| test of the proposition here. :)
| random3 wrote:
| Keep in mind that the topic is thinking in writing (vs
| "volatile" thinking).I average 25-30 notes per day. Even if
| I'd ignore it's relatively specialized math and CS, it
| would take a rather large crowd to review and a lot of
| context. Meanwhile, like with coding, writing and re-
| reading notes forces your mind to lay out things with more
| structure, often uncovering loose ends.
|
| I agree that public forum like HN/Reddit is a good,
| scalable way to review (some) ideas, but it works for a
| fraction.
| 2143 wrote:
| > He's as smart as I am, so it wasn't an intelligence flaw.
|
| I literally wow-ed out loud.
|
| I've always felt everybody around me is much smarter than me.
| Now I have found the opposite personality -- somebody who is
| fully confident about themselves.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I get that the comment came across as arrogant. However you
| misunderstood the point. It's not that I'm very smart, but
| that a superior intelligence was _not_ the factor in me
| finding glasses in his reasoning. It can 't be, because as I
| pointed out, my intelligence is _not_ superior to his.
|
| Of course I do get your point that I should consider whether
| both he and I are simply not that intelligent and that's the
| reason I find flaws in his arguments. It's logically sound,
| but I'll cling to my doubts regarding it's accuracy :-)
| jstanley wrote:
| In some sense, isn't making flawed arguments an
| intelligence flaw by definition?
| thfuran wrote:
| That depends on the flaw and whether you'd consider
| lacking omniscience to be a sign of low intelligence.
| mistermann wrote:
| Not necessarily.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Logical_trut
| h&d...
|
| https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/
|
| For example:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster
| samatman wrote:
| Argument is an art of rhetoric, not logic. Many very
| smart people make flawed arguments, sometimes
| instinctively, sometimes deliberately.
|
| I'm not saying they should. In fact, I'll now say: they
| shouldn't. But whatever defect this habit is evidence of,
| it isn't necessarily a defect of their intelligence.
| Sometimes, but not always, or even usually.
| kazinator wrote:
| If your brain has a blind spot, stop writing English and write
| code, with test cases that hit all corner cases.
| BeetleB wrote:
| By the very definition, if your brain has a blind spot it'll
| not think of all the corner cases to test. That's why we do
| code reviews.
| kazinator wrote:
| The code will reveal the corner cases to you; you will
| think of things you didn't think of before writing the
| code.
|
| Before you write the code, your ideas may be so poor that
| they don't even hit the happy cases when you try to code
| them. You go "Oh, what was I thinking; it's obvious now
| that it could never work that way ..."
|
| Of course, it's coding we are talking about; there will be
| bugs. Fewer than in some wishful prose, though.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Ah, I see your point now.
|
| Sure, writing code will help you understand the problem
| better, and may let you see _more_ corner cases. But not
| all (which was my point).
| mistermann wrote:
| > The code will reveal the corner cases to you; you will
| think of things you didn't think of before writing the
| code.
|
| The step of putting propositions into a proper form such
| that tests can be written against them is arguably half
| the benefit.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-formed_formula
| sph wrote:
| > On the other hand, if your goal is to probe the validity of
| your thoughts, this is painfully inefficient. You'll get much
| further if you do one or two simple passes on your writing, and
| then pass what you've written around and ask for feedback.
|
| And how do you avoid having to start with a blank page. I have
| been reading "How to take smart notes", which delves into
| Zettelkasten, and the point of _writing_ and linking notes is,
| indeed to refine your thoughts, and to be able to collect them
| into a larger essay /article/what have you.
|
| As a self-taught person with an incredible idea-making brain
| and terrible note-taking skills, it's taken me almost 4 decades
| to learn that writing is a crucial component of understanding
| complex systems, and it doesn't start by the essay, which, as
| you say, only needs one or two simple passes. The essay is the
| tip of the iceberg, the important stuff is all the research and
| writing that leads to a topic or theory.
| codazoda wrote:
| Consider the book Refuse to Choose by the late Barbara Sher.
| This book helped me fill notebooks where before I would start
| a notebook and throw it aside after a handful of pages.
|
| https://amzn.to/3RSCGov
| Folcon wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, having looked at the blurb, I'm left
| wondering, what do you fill notebooks with?
|
| Planning projects and what you want to do?
|
| From the description, I'd personally think I could be
| labelled a scanner, but I'm trying to work out if this is a
| read now or read later book/
|
| At present I'm interested in unpacking more of what's going
| on in my head and putting it down on paper, and I'm curious
| to know what reading the book gave you and if it will be
| useful in pulling out interesting stuff from my thoughts
| =)...
| whatever1 wrote:
| Socrates is kicking from his grave.
| space_oddity wrote:
| Obtaining external feedback can significantly enhance the
| process of validating and challenging those thoughts.
| aklemm wrote:
| People are remarkably resistance to feedback.
| rednafi wrote:
| I liked the thesis of the piece but not the delivery. Personally,
| I prefer a Hemingway-esque style in my writing, so it was a chore
| to penetrate through the layers of metaphors in this text.
| toxik wrote:
| Writing fleshes out thought because writing is like talking to
| yourself with automatic history recording. I suggest trying to
| skip the middle step (writing) and just talk to yourself via
| voice recording or something else. It works and it takes a lot
| less formatting effort. Similarly, conversation works beautifully
| too.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I do this a lot, but I lose my place and cut myself off so
| frequently that it's easy to get lost. I can see the value of
| going more slowly, documenting the process and completing
| sentences.
|
| Perhaps a LLM could wrap it all up for me lol.
| DenisM wrote:
| Where would you store the voice memos? I'm concerned that
| unfiltered stream of thought would be perceived not well if it
| surfaces. This needs strong privacy and at the same time
| convenient UX.
| supersrdjan wrote:
| The introduction to the article denies its main point:
|
| > If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and
| more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has
| fully formed ideas about it.
|
| It's a logical error. It's like saying: people who point out
| logical errors in internet comments look foolish, therefore no
| one who hasn't done that looks foolish. Clearly there are other
| ways to look foolish.
|
| So even if writing always clarified thought, it's wrong to infer
| it's impossible to have clear thoughts without writing.
|
| But since the writer here committed this mistake, he demonstrated
| that writing does not always result in clear thought.
|
| Incidentally, I wrote this comment to clarify my thoughts .
| card_zero wrote:
| No, it's like: people who point out logical errors in internet
| comments look _more_ foolish - _always,_ no matter what else
| they did - therefore no one who hasn't done that looks
| _perfectly_ foolish.
|
| Or, say, people who have caught a Snorlax have more Pokemon,
| therefore no one who hasn't caught a Snorlax has all the
| Pokemon.
|
| This assumes that there's such a thing as a "fully formed idea"
| (which means an exception to "always" - you can't clarify your
| thoughts more and more by writing about them forever). If there
| isn't, it's still true, but it's not saying a whole lot.
| afc wrote:
| I think you're right. But I still think the quote from Graham
| is terrible writing: confusing, brittle, convoluted, almost
| as if it was designed to hide something from readers and
| manipulate them into a different understanding than what it
| actually claims.
|
| The quote is, as you explain, technically correct due to its
| use of "always". Take this word away and the sentence is
| correct English, but the meaning now is incorrect (and would
| match the interpretation of the comment you replied to).
| Making the correctness hinge so directly in the subtlety of
| the presence of the quantifier makes the sentence brittle and
| convoluted.
|
| It feels almost manipulative, as if the writer hopes the
| reader won't inspect the sentence so closely (and thus will
| miss this subtlety) and will understand something slightly
| different ("if you don't write, it's impossible to have clear
| thoughts"), so that the conclusion sounds much stronger. And
| readers do get the incorrect interpretation, as evidenced by
| the comment you replied to, which attacks the
| misunderstanding of that sentence.
|
| So while I fully agree with you, I still think the sentence
| quoted is an example of terribly unhelpful and confusing
| writing. Especially because the full premise "writing down
| your ideas _always_ makes them more precise and complete" is
| debatable (you just need to find one counterexample).
|
| (Incidentally, my recollection of Graham's writing is that
| this type of misleading sentences (that are technically
| correct but appear to say something else, something that
| isn't), as if they were deliberately cultivated.)
|
| A much better sentence would be something like:
|
| * "Writing down your ideas is great to make them more precise
| and more complete. It's hard to have fully formed ideas about
| a topic without writing about it." This matches the
| understanding of a quick glance of the sentence.
|
| * "Writing down your ideas _always_ makes them more precise
| and complete. " Closer to the actual meaning, but doesn't do
| a slight of hand to hide the main point.
| mistermann wrote:
| > So while I fully agree with you, I still think the
| sentence quoted is an example of terribly unhelpful and
| confusing writing.
|
| Would you have us believe that there is zero utility in
| this conversation (which was catalyzed by the flawed
| writing)?
|
| Possibly relevant, and don't miss the "see also" section:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality
|
| Also note that this topic is different than this one (they
| often appear to be the same, _because of causality_ ):
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_(physics)
| gregates wrote:
| Stressing the "always" makes the argument valid only because
| it's a wordier version of "ideas can always be made more
| precise and complete, therefore no idea is perfectly precise
| and complete," which has nothing to do with writing. If we
| try to salvage the argument by making the assumption that the
| author obviously meant some ideas are perfect, but only
| written ideas, this becomes "unwrittendown ideas can always
| be made more precise and complete, therefore no unwrittendown
| idea is perfect". Which is vacuously valid in that the
| antecedent and consequent are identical.
|
| The argument is either merely asserting the conclusion or
| invalid. I guess it's a matter of judgment which one is the
| charitable interpretation of the author's meaning.
|
| Perhaps the most charitable interpretation is that the quoted
| bit isn't intended as an argument at all, just a restatement
| to cast an already-established conclusion in a different
| light. It's presented as a "shocking" additional implication,
| but perhaps it's the shock that's supposed to be novel, not
| the implication.
| kzrdude wrote:
| That introduction is a quote with attribution Paul Graham, so
| the author of the blog did not write that and did not strictly
| commit that mistake.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Perhaps it is because of the impossibility of coming to full
| clarity? It is the process of the truth developing that is more
| important than any absolute truth, which, it is always clear,
| turns out to be just a stage of development.
| tuxone wrote:
| If it's all about thinking then being restricted by the
| vocabulary of your language[s] might be a limitation. As a
| bilingual, a common question from friends in primary school was
| what language I was thinking in. My answer was I don't think
| words, I think images. I later read Edward de Bono Lateral
| Thinking. I might be out of context here but I thought someone
| might be interested in the book.
| apienx wrote:
| "Writing is thinking." -- David McCullough
| chrisjj wrote:
| > And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about
| anything nontrivial.
|
| So ... music is trivial?
|
| Dance is trivial?
|
| Sculpture is trivial?
|
| I have to say I think P Graham needs to get out more.
| pauln99 wrote:
| I think he also said somewhere that people mainly disagree with
| distorted versions of your ideas...
| chrisjj wrote:
| Feel free to identify any distortion here.
| cplat wrote:
| As someone who has done a lot of those things (beyond
| programming), I can assuredly say that "writing about
| something" is neither a proof of understanding nor a
| proficiency in a subject. (Case in point, our educational
| system)
| chrisjj wrote:
| Quite so.
|
| If indeed all the author's ideas are incomplete until
| written, his mistake is ascribing this to the power of his
| writing rather than the limits of his ideation.
| sifar wrote:
| To interpret it more charitably, perhaps each of these things
| is it's own language and the activities therein akin to
| writing.
| jilles wrote:
| "Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we
| think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables
| us to find out what we know--and what we don't know--about
| whatever we're trying to learn."
|
| -- William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn
|
| One of the books that got me into writing for myself.
| space_oddity wrote:
| Do you have any specific writing habits or techniques that you
| developed as a result of reading this book?
| benhoyt wrote:
| I just finished "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. Here's a
| little blurb I just wrote about it:
|
| What a great book! Zinsser uses such crisp, engaging prose. He
| covers how to write, why to write, and what to write. He uses
| lots of examples from his own writing and from others -- good
| and bad. Stories abound. This is not a boring grammar book.
|
| Here's a taste -- he starts the chapter called "The Lead and
| the Ending" with these stark statements: "The most important
| sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce
| the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is
| dead." Punchy and self-referential.
|
| There's a decent amount about good technique, but it's more
| about style and voice. The second half of the book covers
| topics like "Writing in Your Job" (without sounding passive or
| using buzzwords) and "Writing Family History and Memoir"
| (that's actually why my brother lent me the book). And it
| finishes with an inspiring chapter on the craft of writing
| called "Write as Well as You Can".
|
| If you want to learn to write better, read this book. If you
| don't, definitely read it.
| richrichie wrote:
| > And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about
| anything nontrivial.
|
| That "nontrivial" qualification makes this an unfalsifiable
| bunkum.
| paultopia wrote:
| This is a fantastic essay. As a professor, I routinely work with
| students on research and writing projects where they're suffering
| under the common misimpression that they need to know everything
| they intend to say before writing a single word down; I may start
| sending this to them to help clear the brain worm out.
| space_oddity wrote:
| Common misconception that you need to have everything perfectly
| figured out before start writing.
| space_oddity wrote:
| Writing is a tool for learning and self-discovery for me
| gsuuon wrote:
| Sometimes complex topics are really like rubric's cubes - some
| changes here break things over there and then you need to make a
| bunch of turns to fix things elsewhere. Thinking through writing
| is necessary for these, because they look much simpler until they
| aren't and all the gory details start tripping over each other.
| The unfortunate part is that it feels very difficult to 're-
| enter' the topic as if reading for the first time, so the writing
| can easily become difficult to understand for a fresh-reader
| since it was edited by someone who's read it dozens of times in
| various incarnations and orders.
|
| 1) that sounds like a Montessori school? 2) I feel like Walter
| White is one of the more memorable character names (w/ the
| alliteration, no?)
| naikrovek wrote:
| > If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and
| more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has
| fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no
| fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
|
| This is very flawed logic. This assumes that _only writing_ can
| result in fully formed ideas, and that is simply a false
| assumption. I can 't believe that it was even typed out as-is,
| it's so wrong. It's wrong on its face. It's wrong if you think
| about it for 1/10th of a second. It's wrong if you think about it
| for a minute. It's wrong if you think about it for an hour. It's
| even wrong if you write it out.
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