In Praise of Writing (2021) | Hacker News Reader

In Praise of Writing (2021)

advait.live

36 pointscrcastle14 comments

I think everybody needs to practice Precis Writing by hand. In particular; students should be trained in this art. This will do more for knowledge retention and assimilation than any fancy technology (and i say this as a "techie").

All the greats wrote prodigiously. Its importance only sunk in for me when i read the Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. Text, Symbols, Diagrams etc. are all brought together to express Thoughts and Ideas all of which can be revised and extended as needed. It is in the Refining/Clarifying/Modifying/Compressing process where "real learning" happens. You just need Pen/Pencil/Paper and a quiet place.

If Leonardo were alive today would he write his notebook by hand? Or would he adopt a modern a technology that would let him put down his thoughts and diagrams more expressively and precisely, that would allow better revision and better retrieval at a later date? I suspect he would choose the latter.

I see no magic in putting pen to paper. Something like a python / jupyter notebook containing words and figures (and perhaps code) that could be indexed automatically and later searched naturally and intuitively seems far more powerful, reusable and extensible than paper.

Or maybe the note taking process could start with writing on paper, then digitize them into digital form. That way you could determine whether pen and ink were essential to the process or not.

> If Leonardo were alive today would he write his notebook by hand? Or would he adopt a modern a technology that would let him put down his thoughts and diagrams more expressively and precisely, that would allow better revision and better retrieval at a later date? I suspect he would choose the latter.

I suspect he would choose the former. He could have dictated his thoughts to an assistant. He could have made his sketches more 'expressively' in oil on canvas. But he didn't. He chose to be alone with a notebook and get his thoughts out.

Or perhaps today's Leonardos lost themselves in computer mess and can't think as straight and simply, unassisted, as that renaissance rockstar.

Perhaps we'd have more profound genius if fountain pens, letters and hardcover tomes were more popular in young circles than Medium.

He would have wasted his life posting food pics on Instagram.

There actually is magic to pen and paper. There’s a wealth of research showing the benefits of employing the motor skills of handwriting compared to typing, such as better memory and lower cognitive load.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C34&q=han...

His drawing abilities were awesome, he probably would stick to paper, assisted by modern inventions like ballpens and mechanical pencils. People like to shun paper, but I think that happens because most of us have awful drawing skills, so it is used as a medium for verbal thinking, but not for "crankshaft-thinking", as Feynman called it.

Do you write a précis for every thing that you want to retain? And do you have a filing system for them?

I keep everything simple (my dictum is; "Choice is the enemy of Action"). Just ordinary Notebooks numbered as needed; one for "Musings" (notes/sayings to myself), another for Science/Technology/etc. and a multi-pen. That's it. My writings are all Precis in the sense that i use my own words to succinctly write down thoughts/passages with references to Books/etc. as needed. I only do this for subjects/topics which i judge to be worth understanding well; for others i just read and try to memorize the highlights/passages and Book names for later retrieval. Cross-linking is done using simple page/alphabet numbering.

PS: A simple system like the "Cornell Notetaking Method" maybe helpful in adding a little more structure to the above.

Some lovely thoughts in this article.

- Feedback mechanism: We construct our most deeply held beliefs by testing them against our peers. Writing is a great way to do that.

- Keeping state: We aren't computer memory banks. Writing is a technology that extends our minds in space-time. Many books/blogs are written as a way to keep notes-to-self for later.

- organising thoughts: For me Org-mode is a key tool in my life. Code and writing overlap significantly. I lean heavily on plain text, simple markup, outlining and annotating reproducible code and docs using Babel so I can literally "highlight and compile" my "writing" into other forms.

One maybe missing in this article, writing as a portable pedagogical tool, I wrote about it here:

  https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/joy-text-world-tech-zealotry
  
  (sometimes this link works and sometimes throws up a paywall and I
  don't know why, it may be a JS thing)

Hey, thanks for the praise! Also, it was nice reading about your perspectives too.

I use Sublime Text for notes, but Org looks like it may be even better. Thanks!

Which Babel tool are you referring to?

org-babel: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/

It lets you write (and run, but not every language) code in org files and tangle the output into more conventional source files.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com