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Comment by cirgue | Hacker News Reader

I had always heard this used as kind of a metaphor: do whatever the hell you want to in writing, follow every thread, wander all over the place, believe your own bullshit, and just get all the ideas out of you and onto the page. When you edit, then it's time to worry about what your point actually is and how your reader will understand it. It's a little weird to me that someone would take this aphorism literally.

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Taking things too literally seems to be a plague infecting many topics lately. I've interpreted the phrase similarly, do whatever you need to, just get "it" out of your head! Perfection is the enemy of good.

Hold on. I need to start a pointless semantics debate with you by taking what you said completely literally and it won't end until we've defined all the words.

The internet in a freaking nutshell, I'm so not going to miss that part once this pile of crap tips over.

How is the internet "tipping over" going to change what's fundamentally human?

Changing the interpretation of what someone said to fit your argument can be seen on the school playground and in Plato's Gorgias. It's not going away anytime soon.

Agreeing on an interpretation is the first step to conceiving an argument. Wrestling through this is a big part of having a discussion, and someone can always try to unfairly assume the interpretation that suits them, often the least charitable one.

I would be very, very careful about assuming that any observed behaviors are fundamentally human. Leave people alone to do their thing and you would get an entirely different set of behaviors. There's no question that the internet amplifies our worst tendencies, with a little help from the psychopaths on top of the big tech pyramid. It will tip over, because it's not viable in the long term.

So basically you're saying you hate charities.

Soon: "Taking Things Literally Considered Harmful"

I enjoy this comment.

This is a case where most people are going to naturally take it literally. Most people don't hear someone espouse "write drunk, edit sober" and think "oh i bet that's a metaphor, they hear a justification to drink more. This is actually the first time I've heard someone claim that quip isn't literal, ever. That's because its not formed as metaphorical advice, its formed as a very specific instruction. There's nothing there to indicate that it should be mulled over and tweaked apart for deeper information.

This reminds me of the recent poster PETA put out. It asks people to say "feed 2 birds with one scone" instead of the familiar version. haha

I would have thought PETA would be all in favour of efficiently putting down animals. >.>

Former copy editor here, would not recommend this approach for writing anything non-artistic. Imagine a coder or engineer following this recommendation: no plan, no structure, just throwing ideas willy-nilly. Eventually, you then have to sift through all the ideas, find what's good and what gels, and then re-write to make it coherent, narrative, and logical. You'll probably incur a lot of technical debt and overhead with this approach.

However, if you go into the initial phase with a goal/structure in mind, you're going to be much closer to the final product after your first effort. Many, many writers use outlines/plans. Something that happens a lot in research is that articles are formulaic, they generally have the same sorts of content, so writing them actually becomes easier once familiarity with the structure is obtained.

I would say your approach could be useful for either an artistic format OR for someone who is severely writers' blocked. If you truly have no idea what to write, something is better than nothing. But generally speaking, having a plan/outline is very useful.

"Imagine a coder or engineer following this recommendation: no plan, no structure, just throwing ideas willy-nilly."

The only thing writers have in common is that they each have their own way of working.

Some plot meticulously, others don't plot at all. Some want to know where they're going, others prefer discovery and surprise.

Stephen King does not plot because he finds it boring. He does not want to know what's going to happen.

Here's Flannery O'Connor:

"When I started writing that story, I didn't know there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn't know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized it was inevitable."

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/21/s...

I mostly agree with your points. But coding or programming is as much artistic as it is engineering. It isn't an accident that the historical center of tech is also the center of the drug. Not just performative drugs but also hallucinogenic.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/09/hacking-the-brain-sil...

>> It isn't an accident that the historical center of tech is also the center of the drug

This assertion is ridiculous; it could most certainly be a coincidence. I'd suggest the numerous locations around the world known for a period of drug experimentation that are not technology hot beds suggests it is.

I'm not sure about that. When coding, like other comments about writing, I can feel much more relaxed and ultimately more creative when I have a couple of drinks during the process. That doesn't mean that I have "no plan, no structure, just throwing ideas willy-nilly.". Maybe that's what I would do if I was falling over, black out drunk - but I don't think that's the spirit of what we're talking about here - or at least it's not the way I take it. To the contrary, my plans and structures can often come together more easily in the relaxed, somewhat inebriated state that a little alcohol provides.

For coders, it is the equivalent of MVP. The coder gather pieces of code and/or documentation to have something to show. The feedback helps to finalize narrative and make stuff coherent.

But how do you form a plan/outline? -> You do prototyping and prototyping can be done in a chaotic way. And YES, after that you have to clean up that stuff.

As a coder I do a lot of my best work with a beer or two.

There's definitely a different style of development, in my experience. After a few beers or when very sleep-deprived, I find myself avoiding "analysis paralysis" and just getting something written, even if it's not super elegant. There can definitely be a benefit to doing that, though I wouldn't recommend slamming shots at 9am before the workday starts!

There are better, less poisonous and destructive, drugs.

Is it really worth sacrificing your health for? It doesn't even taste nice once you cut through the cultural programming to pretend otherwise.

Having a beer or two is not "sacrificing your health". And if liking the taste of alcoholic drinks counts as being "programmed", then so does every other preference and desire human beings have.

But it is, alcohol is very poisonous; which is why you feel like shit and loose your memory when you overdo it, and why it's so hard to hit just the right amount of poisoning to feel funny without feeling sick.

Drinking poison that tastes like shit doesn't really happen without outside pressure. That's not true of every other preference and desire.

But keep lying to yourself, not my problem.

Having a beer or two occasionally won’t kill you. But making it a working routine, even with such a small quantity that won’t even make you drunk, will definitely have some impact in your health in the long-term.

It doesn't even taste nice

Citation needed. Maybe you just haven’t tried a good beer yet.

Oh, I've drunk more quality beer than most. Stop for six months and try again if you don't believe me, once the body has detoxed it's going to start putting up a fight. I can't even smell alcohol these days, even at the levels of normal beer; it smells like gasoline.

You might not like it, but this is what peak HN looks like

I actually like the taste of some beers.

Your point seems really tied up in your own preferences and discounts other people’s experiences.

Keep telling yourself that then, it's not really my problem.

Or try quitting for six months and see how the body reacts to alcohol when reintroduced.

Gotta hit that Ballmer Peak.

https://www.xkcd.com/323/

I second that on a POC.

It is a metaphor, and I am pretty sure that everyone reads it as such.

This post is about the author being against a thing that no one believes. It qualifies as a strawman, easily.

I always took it literally.

I can’t be the only person that did.

Judging by the comments here, you aren't the only one who took it literally.

I'd never heard the advice before, but I'm pretty sure I'd have thought they were being literal, unless they also expanded upon the statement in a way that let me know it was a metaphor, not a literal statement.

Scanning the rest of the thread, I can see examples of other folks who took it literally.

There may be multiple effects, here: one, that there will always be people who like to drink and will latch on to any idiom that gives them a social excuse to do so. My ex, whose undergraduate degree was journalism, used to say this phrase in a HHOS (ha-ha, only serious) manner. In retrospect, she just liked drinking.

Another effect that comes to mind is that there will always be some small percentage of people who – for whatever reason – do not understand metaphors or jokes or subtext.

Finally, this phrase in particular seems likely to propagate on its own without being attached to the underlying wisdom that was originally intended.

It's really about skewing your exploration/exploitation tradeoff towards exploration if you want to excel.

(Of course, now that I think of it that way, it sure sounds like survivor bias... Exploring rather than exploiting is great if your exploration finds something!)

Kurt Vonnegut framed two camps of writers: ones like you summarize above and others that precisely and painstakingly put each word to paper, exactly how they want it to look and do little or no editing. Both are legitimate and you should probably just use whatever works and forget about the "correct" way to write.

Perhaps the difference is between people (professional artists?) who need to create competent art to make a living, and people (amateur artists like myself) who see art as a way of relaxing and unwinding.

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