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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

A pg essay is a work of modern art these days; I think he distills so much that it ends up taking a real effort to reconstruct meaning out of what’s left.

Let’s see if I got the message:

* writing is difficult.

* writing about a topic forces you to test your knowledge of that topic.

* you often learn about the topic, and that often changes how you view that topic.

* the reader should write more with the explicit purpose of learning about a topic.

And the killer point:

* if you haven’t written about a topic, you can’t know it well.

I wonder if writing comments on websites counts.

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While your points are absolutely true as well, this is not what I got from the essay.

What I got from it, which is subtly different from what you say, but resonates with my experience a lot more, is that the brain has a habit of assuring itself it has the whole picture about a topic, almost to the point of delusion; it's kind of how the brain works; it generalises things into abstract patterns, and fills in the gaps for you. It's not until you're forced to externalise the information, and explicitly face the knowledge gaps you didn't even realise your brain had filled-in for you, that you realise how many of them there were in the first place.

Writing is a great way of a) spotting, b) attempting to fill / reflect on the gaps, c) realising you never had the full information in the first place, d) consciously deciding to fill in these gaps properly.

So yes, the process also helps you learn as a side-effect, but the point is not learning per-se; after all there are other ways to learn 'properly', where writing things down isn't strictly necessary. For me the main point of the article is the shock of how much implicit knowledge turns out to simply not be there when you try to prod it explicitly, and why writing things down is therefore such a good exercise/habit to cultivate in the first place, since trying to verbalise things explicitly on paper is an effective technique that forces you to 'prod' areas you didn't know needed prodding.

Is there a requirement for this effect to work that you publish your writing, exposing it to external scrutiny?

Neither you nor pg explicitly say this, but it feels important.

When exposing makes you consider the audience thoughtfully, yes, it's a whole other game then. It's so common for me that I think some part or a piece of writing is fine. But when I consider posting it, or submitting to a literary contest, suddenly I see that piece, naked, before the panelists, and it's a poor show. Not until I make that decision does my brain stop furninishing mental decorators to dress up the rags which I'd been subconsciously overlooking, or was simply worried about other more pressing issues elsewhere.

> Is there a requirement for this effect to work that you publish your writing, exposing it to external scrutiny?

It isn't the publication that confers this particular benefit, if that's what you are asking, but the threat of publication.

But the threat needs to be credible to confer the benefit. Whether the threat can remain credible if the work is never published probably differs from person to person.

What you wrote is my takeaway from the article as well. There's an expression "if you can't do, teach!" which can be interpreted in different ways, but I would say it means you get much better at something when you are forced to write, re-read/interpret and explain it.

> if you haven’t written about a topic, you can’t know it well.

Well, writing is encoding of ideas into a semi-precise format of written language. The intention is to communicate as precisely as you can to other humans. When you have ideas brewing in the amygdala + prefrontal cortex, they're hazy. Writing them down requires vetting of imprecise aspects of your hazy ideas.

Writing can be replaced by any other encoding format (talking to a friend, giving a lecture, etc), but that's still, for me, in the English language. May be just thinking more precisely about it? We still often 'think' in our home language even if no communication is involved, some interaction with the auditory region of the brain. The human brain is complex. Some people also find vizualization of ideas very powerful, probably involves activation of some regions of the occipital lobes.

Writing just forces you to be precise, it is not required to know something well. That seems like a bold, unsubstantiated claim. Very, ahem...modern artsy.

You got this right. I also think of PG very highly for his ability to communicate with words. His video interviews might not be this deep & thoughtful but he definitely mastered the art of writing.

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