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.
> 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.
I think people are overthinking starting. Just write down first two words and then next couple. Don’t even make it a sentence just bag of words on paper then make sentence out of that.
It doesn’t have to be perfect from the first paragraph. You will share fixed up version later.
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.
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 =)...
The book gives you permission to lean into your scanner personality type. It explains that exploring our ideas is often enough and you can do so in a notebook. Interestingly, I eventually complete many of the projects I write about in my Scanners Daybook. It could be that writing them down somehow solidifies the idea and focuses your mind. Still, writing it down is enough in many cases too and I’m perfectly happy to move on, having explored the idea as deeply as I wanted right now.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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've found that the more time you spend "intellectualizing" your own thoughts, it'll become harder to back down, because you get so invested in your ideas.
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.
> 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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Yes! I write more. Instead of writing about things I know well, I write about things I want to know better. It reveals gaps in my knowledge I was not aware of.
For example, I can start write "We are using X instead of Y because..." and realize I do not truly know the reason. Which leads me to investigate and then finish the sentence.
I don't mind this person relating their experiences, and encouraging others to do similar. But as someone who is (and strives to be!) non-verbal in a lot of my thought, keep in mind that there are other brain types out there (:
This article is sprinkled with "people this" and "people that" terminology, which is mirrored in our broader culture. But I say it is actually "some people this" and "some people that." Don't be a word-chauvinist.
To be fair, I do appreciate that a lot of the author's sentences started with "When I ..." and similar. Makes it more palatable to me.
----
This idea I just wrote down was fully-formed in my mind, and I could have just moved on with my life. I chose to put it into words (and pick those words, and re-edit them, spending my short time on this planet to do so) in order to communicate it to you, dear reader. Not to help me think (:
(though I do sometimes use words to help me think, too. Let's not get too black-and-white about it)
(sorry for the wall of text; I guess you asked for it :)
Mostly, I feel it slows me down. I'd rather continue on to the next thought than translate the current one into words in my head. It's a semi-conscious decision. I can almost feel the word-making machinery gearing up, but if I race ahead it doesn't have time to grab on.
Also, it can be a bit overly-constraining. Sometimes constraints are good, like the article mentions — they force you to make decisions and face issues. But sometimes I feel like ideas are better served left in an "un-collapsed" state, at least for a time. I feel like much of my most valuable thinking happens in that state. And sometimes manifesting the thought is better accomplished through artwork, or physical activity, or something else that's not writing.
So I guess there's a "to manifest or not manifest the thought" decision, and after that, there's a "to manifest in writing/words vs. another medium" decision.
I remember as a teenager talking to some friends about thinking, and the idea of thinking without words was surprising to them — for them, thinking was words. And I gather this is true for many people. But I also gather it's not true for many people, myself included (: Apparently, there are some people who have word-thoughts appear as text floating in their mind, which is wild to me — lots of weird mental variety out there[1].
Over the years, I've come to see my thoughts as more "tactile" than anything else. Lots of physical textures and movements involved. Just earlier, I was wrestling with an issue that has been on my mind, and it was like trying to solve one of those "separate the ring from the rope" puzzles — lots of turning, twisting, pushing, pulling. I've been struggling with this task, and writing about too, but I feel like I made more progress with that recent mental wrangling than I had with pen and paper. Though I can't quite (yet) put into words the progress I've made!
Anyway, when people write about "how to think" topics, I sometimes feel left out because there's often an implicit assumption/bias towards wordiness, and the primacy of words in thinking. Unsurprisingly, these writings are written by writers who love words, so there's a bit of a self-selection bias going on. Words sometimes get ascribed near-mystical powers ("In the beginning was the Word...", magic incantations, runes, etc), and they are kind of magical. But I also know from my own inner world that there's a nameless, wordless magic, too. But writers don't write about that as much ("write what you know"), so you don't hear about it, and it doesn't hold as much cultural sway.
So, I try to speak up for the alternatives, encourage people to keep a broader perspective.
Thank you. This is very different from my own experience and I find it fascinating.
My thoughts are mostly verbal. I do hear an inner voice all the time. I cannot easily catch the moment before words start to form. This excessive wordiness often leads me to a negative experience, it’s relatively easy to fall down on a spiral, worrying to much, going over and over about all the things that can go wrong. I just wish I had the ability to stop. I’m looking into meditation because of this.
One bit of research that stuck with me is the "split brain" experiments in the 1960s [1][2]. There do seem to be multiple different "personalities" at work, fairly independent of each other, with different strengths and weaknesses. The idea of a non-speaking but more spatial/visual consciousness in the right half of the brain resonates with me. The verbal side does seem to be reluctant to give up control, sometimes[3].
For me, on some low level, I've always wanted to be comfortable in my own skin, so I feel like my various parts can ultimately agree on that goal, and it helps avoid conflict. There is some level of self-trust that's required for wordy-me to give up some control to the bigger, quieter, less predictable me(s).
I definitely feel like I understand what you mean about the spiral of worrying and I too associate that with the wordy/controlling part of myself, somewhat. I wish you luck on trusting yourself(s) and releasing that grip a bit, from time to time.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
+1, pg is using a pretty typical argument you see in analysis/topology.
If you want to get to real analysis/topology the typical sequence is
1. Logic and Set theory (recommendation: How to Prove It, Velleman)
2. Linear Algebra (don't have a good recommendation)
3a. Real analysis (recommendation: PMA, Rudin)
3b. Topology (recommendation: Topology, Munkres)
I'm not sure I'd recommend learning math. It's an extremely expensive skill -- though pretty valuable in the software industry. People who go learn math are generally just drawn to it; you can't stop them even if you wanted to.
But be aware, (1) you'll have no one to talk about math with. And (2) you'll be joining a club of all the outcasts in society, including the Unabomber.
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.
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).
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').
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.
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.
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?
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.
> "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.
<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>
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.
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.
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?
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've had many ideas that have been watered down by the editing process that by the time I'm done have lost the impact or connection to the original idea.
Maybe I lack the vocabulary? Writing skills? Maybe I'm self censoring? Maybe it's my perfectionism optimising the local maxima?
I don't know but I do know writing has ruined some, not all, of my ideas.
This also wasn't my main issue above. I was more concerned that the idea you can't have good ideas without writing them down was deeply flawed and a bit gatekeepery.
> 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.
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).
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
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.
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.
> 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.
I think people are overthinking starting. Just write down first two words and then next couple. Don’t even make it a sentence just bag of words on paper then make sentence out of that.
It doesn’t have to be perfect from the first paragraph. You will share fixed up version later.
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
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 =)...
The book gives you permission to lean into your scanner personality type. It explains that exploring our ideas is often enough and you can do so in a notebook. Interestingly, I eventually complete many of the projects I write about in my Scanners Daybook. It could be that writing them down somehow solidifies the idea and focuses your mind. Still, writing it down is enough in many cases too and I’m perfectly happy to move on, having explored the idea as deeply as I wanted right now.
> 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.
Unless you have few, very simple thoughts, feedback is not really effective, nor scalable, compared to self validation for which writing is required.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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. :)
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.
Reminds me of this blog post: https://camhashemi.com/posts/organic-proposals/
> 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've found that the more time you spend "intellectualizing" your own thoughts, it'll become harder to back down, because you get so invested in your ideas.
Obtaining external feedback can significantly enhance the process of validating and challenging those thoughts.
People are remarkably resistance to feedback.
Socrates is kicking from his grave.
If your brain has a blind spot, stop writing English and write code, with test cases that hit all corner cases.
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.
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.
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).
> 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
> 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.
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 :-)
In some sense, isn't making flawed arguments an intelligence flaw by definition?
Not necessarily.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Logical_truth&d...
https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/
For example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster
That depends on the flaw and whether you'd consider lacking omniscience to be a sign of low intelligence.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Do you have any specific writing habits or techniques that you developed as a result of reading this book?
Yes! I write more. Instead of writing about things I know well, I write about things I want to know better. It reveals gaps in my knowledge I was not aware of.
For example, I can start write "We are using X instead of Y because..." and realize I do not truly know the reason. Which leads me to investigate and then finish the sentence.
I don't mind this person relating their experiences, and encouraging others to do similar. But as someone who is (and strives to be!) non-verbal in a lot of my thought, keep in mind that there are other brain types out there (:
This article is sprinkled with "people this" and "people that" terminology, which is mirrored in our broader culture. But I say it is actually "some people this" and "some people that." Don't be a word-chauvinist.
To be fair, I do appreciate that a lot of the author's sentences started with "When I ..." and similar. Makes it more palatable to me.
----
This idea I just wrote down was fully-formed in my mind, and I could have just moved on with my life. I chose to put it into words (and pick those words, and re-edit them, spending my short time on this planet to do so) in order to communicate it to you, dear reader. Not to help me think (:
(though I do sometimes use words to help me think, too. Let's not get too black-and-white about it)
What a great comment.
Can you expand on why do you strive to be non-verbal?
(sorry for the wall of text; I guess you asked for it :)
Mostly, I feel it slows me down. I'd rather continue on to the next thought than translate the current one into words in my head. It's a semi-conscious decision. I can almost feel the word-making machinery gearing up, but if I race ahead it doesn't have time to grab on.
Also, it can be a bit overly-constraining. Sometimes constraints are good, like the article mentions — they force you to make decisions and face issues. But sometimes I feel like ideas are better served left in an "un-collapsed" state, at least for a time. I feel like much of my most valuable thinking happens in that state. And sometimes manifesting the thought is better accomplished through artwork, or physical activity, or something else that's not writing.
So I guess there's a "to manifest or not manifest the thought" decision, and after that, there's a "to manifest in writing/words vs. another medium" decision.
I remember as a teenager talking to some friends about thinking, and the idea of thinking without words was surprising to them — for them, thinking was words. And I gather this is true for many people. But I also gather it's not true for many people, myself included (: Apparently, there are some people who have word-thoughts appear as text floating in their mind, which is wild to me — lots of weird mental variety out there[1].
Over the years, I've come to see my thoughts as more "tactile" than anything else. Lots of physical textures and movements involved. Just earlier, I was wrestling with an issue that has been on my mind, and it was like trying to solve one of those "separate the ring from the rope" puzzles — lots of turning, twisting, pushing, pulling. I've been struggling with this task, and writing about too, but I feel like I made more progress with that recent mental wrangling than I had with pen and paper. Though I can't quite (yet) put into words the progress I've made!
Anyway, when people write about "how to think" topics, I sometimes feel left out because there's often an implicit assumption/bias towards wordiness, and the primacy of words in thinking. Unsurprisingly, these writings are written by writers who love words, so there's a bit of a self-selection bias going on. Words sometimes get ascribed near-mystical powers ("In the beginning was the Word...", magic incantations, runes, etc), and they are kind of magical. But I also know from my own inner world that there's a nameless, wordless magic, too. But writers don't write about that as much ("write what you know"), so you don't hear about it, and it doesn't hold as much cultural sway.
So, I try to speak up for the alternatives, encourage people to keep a broader perspective.
[1] In case you're interested in such things, some interesting research: https://news.wisc.edu/that-little-voice-in-your-head-if-you-...
Thank you. This is very different from my own experience and I find it fascinating.
My thoughts are mostly verbal. I do hear an inner voice all the time. I cannot easily catch the moment before words start to form. This excessive wordiness often leads me to a negative experience, it’s relatively easy to fall down on a spiral, worrying to much, going over and over about all the things that can go wrong. I just wish I had the ability to stop. I’m looking into meditation because of this.
I agree, it's a very interesting topic (:
One bit of research that stuck with me is the "split brain" experiments in the 1960s [1][2]. There do seem to be multiple different "personalities" at work, fairly independent of each other, with different strengths and weaknesses. The idea of a non-speaking but more spatial/visual consciousness in the right half of the brain resonates with me. The verbal side does seem to be reluctant to give up control, sometimes[3].
For me, on some low level, I've always wanted to be comfortable in my own skin, so I feel like my various parts can ultimately agree on that goal, and it helps avoid conflict. There is some level of self-trust that's required for wordy-me to give up some control to the bigger, quieter, less predictable me(s).
I definitely feel like I understand what you mean about the spiral of worrying and I too associate that with the wordy/controlling part of myself, somewhat. I wish you luck on trusting yourself(s) and releasing that grip a bit, from time to time.
[1] Some direct footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv4K5aStdU
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
[3] A book that theorizes about broader implications of this stuff (I haven't read it myself) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
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.
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.
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.
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
I try to dedicate time each day to sit in silence and let my thoughts unfold naturally
symbols are intermediaries. disintermediate!
At least no one notices when you only think in lowercase.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
I think he also said somewhere that people mainly disagree with distorted versions of your ideas...
Feel free to identify any distortion here.
To interpret it more charitably, perhaps each of these things is it's own language and the activities therein akin to writing.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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."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.
What books can I read to reason like this?
EDIT: shortened sentence
This might sound strange but a book on real analysis or topology that walks through proofs could be one.
+1, pg is using a pretty typical argument you see in analysis/topology.
If you want to get to real analysis/topology the typical sequence is
1. Logic and Set theory (recommendation: How to Prove It, Velleman)
2. Linear Algebra (don't have a good recommendation)
3a. Real analysis (recommendation: PMA, Rudin)
3b. Topology (recommendation: Topology, Munkres)
I'm not sure I'd recommend learning math. It's an extremely expensive skill -- though pretty valuable in the software industry. People who go learn math are generally just drawn to it; you can't stop them even if you wanted to.
But be aware, (1) you'll have no one to talk about math with. And (2) you'll be joining a club of all the outcasts in society, including the Unabomber.
[dead]
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.
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).
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').
The keyword is "always". IF writing about something always improves it, that implies it cannot ever reach full potential without writing about it.
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.
There's no logical flaw here. An idea can't be fully formed, if it could be more precise and more complete.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> "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.
<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>
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.
"If allspice makes food taste better, than no one who doesn't use allspice can cook well."
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.
> Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with this flawed deduction.
... or this writing improved an even more flawed original.
Or it gave author unwarranted confidence in a flawed argument on the basis of a flawed assumption.
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Only lately?
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.
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.
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?
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Common misconception that you need to have everything perfectly figured out before start writing.
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?)
> 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.
Proofs and Refutations is a great book.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
Can you give any examples of someone whose idea formation was not improved went they undertook the task of writing their thoughts down?
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.
I've had many ideas that have been watered down by the editing process that by the time I'm done have lost the impact or connection to the original idea.
Maybe I lack the vocabulary? Writing skills? Maybe I'm self censoring? Maybe it's my perfectionism optimising the local maxima?
I don't know but I do know writing has ruined some, not all, of my ideas.
This also wasn't my main issue above. I was more concerned that the idea you can't have good ideas without writing them down was deeply flawed and a bit gatekeepery.
No, because we don't have access to the ideas of those who don't write them down.
Writing is a tool for learning and self-discovery for me
> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
That "nontrivial" qualification makes this an unfalsifiable bunkum.
I love how Paul Ghram is quoted and not an actual writer. Why would I take writing advice from him and not from, say, James Joyce?
There are different kinds of writing. They have unique requirements.
James Joyce was a novelist. The article is about writing essays.
Paul Graham is one of our leading essayists. Measured by impact on "builders" he's probably the foremost essayist.
If you want to learn how to make documentaries, would you rather learn from the best documentarian or from Spielberg?
How is Paul Graham not an actual writer? He has written some extremely influential essays that have reached outside of just Silicon Valley.
> 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.
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).
> I don't see what "Hungarian" has to do with it
It's just additional information...
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
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.
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.
"Writing is thinking." -- David McCullough
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