The Need to Read
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing.
If you want to be a thinker, you have to write.
It really forces you to address your ideas more formulaically and concretizes your theses.
Start a blog! If you're reading this chances are you know how to buy a domain and spin up a blog in less than 30 minutes. Try Wordpress, or hugo with templates if you want more control. And if you don't know what to write about, this link was recently shared on HN, I thought it was pretty useful: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/
And yes, it's important to publish it. It makes your thoughts real. And ideas were meant to be shared.
Another excellent option for making getting going with blogging simple is Docusaurus - makes it very easy to get up and running!
I migrated my own blog to Docusaurus from Blogger about a year and a half ago. I became very enamoured (and still am) with the idea of writing blog posts as markdown, storing them as code and publishing them as a website.
I was delighted at how much Docusaurus aligned with that. So much so that I wrote a guide to help others migrate:
https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/definitive-guide-to-migrating-...
> Start a blog!
Posting to HN counts as writing, too.
most of the interactions you get are people trying to prove you wrong
this is great when it's with evidence, but half the time instead they accuse you of lying, argue from their own authority, or insult you
the options for including equations, data tables, and diagrams are very limited, and these are important when what you're thinking about is objectively falsifiable propositions
the options for structuring your writing into sections with titles with a table of contents, so readers can navigate an argument that takes more than two minutes to read, are similarly weak
nobody reads what you write after a week, and it's hard for you to even find it yourself
worst of all, if you discover that you were wrong two weeks or more after your initial comment, there's no way to append a correction
posting here makes my life worse
Once I started doing this I found HN comments would grow off HN. Now there are a few subjects where I can just point people at a link the next time a subject comes up. And the link has often grown out of repeated iterations of debate on HN and elsewhere.
It doesn't bother me that people forget HN comments. I don't forget them, and that seems the important thing.
You _are_ right that one needs to keep HN at arms length. Over the years I try not to engage in repeated back and forth. I'm not writing primarily for whoever I'm arguing with. I'm writing for the silent readers.
i did edit some hn comments into dercuano, derctuo, and dernocua
which comments of mine here do you think would be worth saving
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33641298#33644090
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679360#33684545
But I think there are others. Your view of your own darlings will be different from others. It might be worth downloading the archive in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389843, just because it's recent and so going to be up to date.
Thinking is like drawing a bridge on paper. Writing is to actual construct the bridge and test it.
What looks like the strongest bridge (built of paper) is not always the strongest one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtMx7FZUC6A
It's what was done at school, since primary...
But it was "at school", because the learner is to be guided with critical thinking and ability of assessment, over his own or anybody else's production.
Inspired by a thread on HN ~2 years ago, I’ve now written 1,075 interconnected notes, and no longer feel that I forget 80% of any non-fiction book I read.
Linking is key; it allows you to connect any new insight to your existing externalized knowledge base, resulting in deeper understanding and retention.
It also creates the space to connect thoughts across disparate domains, which spawns novel ideas at an even greater rate. For example, I might link an idea about neuroscience to my chess writings that links to a note about workout methods which links to a piano technique note. Now I suddenly see a new connection about applying a piano practice technique to leveling up my chess score.
It has changed the way I read, or consume information generally.
A great book that got me started is Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes
I used to set goals like x books per year, but now I realize it’s a vanity metric and instead read for insights.
I use Obsidian for note taking, which supports images too.
Did you use any particular book or blog post when mapping the method to the app? I've found one book, but not sure if good https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Obsidian-ebook/d...
Anybody tried that?
AFAIK, this is how many data(base)-systems do to make writing more efficient: Write down into a write-cache of some sort, and then do batch-wise indexing as a separate process.
Thoughts?
but do not expect someone to read it! because with GTP-3 automated content creation I'm increasingly less interested in everything which will be or is already heavily affected by it i.e. News articles, blogs and new books...
I got some excellent feedback from my manager’s manager early in my career and it was, paraphrasing, “keep reading, but write more about what you read.”
Publishing doesn’t have to be public either. At a large organization internal communications are plenty sufficient.
Reasons: 1) Indecision - Wordpress has dependency issues that need to be kept up with, as I understand, and there's so many scripts targeting vulnerable packages...so it made sense to use a tech stack like Hugo, except...
2) Tech fatigue - I'm not a programmer, so I've ended up, more than five times, starting test sites with Gatsby or Hugo and gotten frustrated due to my limited JS knowledge, not having a mentor or being in a class (maybe I should revisit the programming class idea). I've been stuck in "dependency hell" and countless "PATH://" problems that resulted in me sudo'ing random commands from StackOverflow posts in the hope to brute force my way out of such problems, not fully cognizant of the risks associated with those issues. And then thinking back, "damn that Hugo site was quite nice, I'd like to revisit it", and when I do, feel completely lost and have to start from scratch again. The result is spending hours a day trying to get some minute design/CSS feature to work with constant tinkering, and that could have been actual writing time! Maybe ADHD is to blame...
3) Fear (of success) - I'm afraid that if I really dig deep into something I'm passionate about that is also controversial, and end up lucky enough to get some attention, that there will be people who will want to target me (i.e. writing letters to my company about how I'm a dangerous conspiracy theorist, etc.) Is this a legitimate fear or just paranoia?
4) Abuse - I'm concerned that if I spill out my soul, my hard work will be ingested by AI-driven tools such as GPT-3 - that the work will somehow lose value if it's published. But by not publishing, there's no exposure to these ideas, and it's basically pointless to not publish, because then no one can read your work and send you email about it.
Honestly, PG's site is design perfection in my view. Are those endnotes he uses doable in the Wordpress environment? Upon writing this, I realize it might be best to bite the bullet and go for a Wordpress.com type of site, seated on a custom domain. I don't know how to make it air-tight from a security perspective though, but maybe that's not as important as I'm thinking it is.
EDIT: more about that on my blog if you care -> http://antirez.com/news/136
The similarities are pretty strong. In both cases, you need to express yourself so that the receiving party may understand you.
That said, human readers are a lot more welcoming and friendly consumers of your written work than computers. Positive feedback from computers is basically nonexistent.
[0]:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSen0gefOrPWi6ZtEQ25... [1]:https://ljs.io/book.html
I started a crowdfunding project for the first book too, so that the printing and typesetting costs get covered. They were covered fully, so I knew that I won't dip into red numbers as a consequence. (This was a major worry of mine.)
I was still pretty nervous about acceptance, but it turned out OK. Whew.
412 tests passed, 0 warnings, 0 errors.
That said, receiving an e-mail like "I spent a week reading all your books, PLEASE WRITE SOME MORE" is much more satisfying.
Human feedback on the code, design, usability, appearance, documentation, etc. is all very different from passing tests.
Right now I am sitting in a train to southern Moravia, a long-time reader has invited me to a pork feast. That is not what computers do.
When I thought about the similarities I came up with:
- both are about communicating your ideas clearly. For that you need good structure, and having a logical order.
- editing and revising is key. Also, compare with refactoring in coding.
- style - there are lots of ways you can have a unique style, even in programming.
More here: https://henrikwarne.com/2019/03/30/programming-math-or-writi...
I mean, I do personally find that writing is a powerful tool for thinking. Maybe that means that Paul Graham and I are normal, and Socrates and Muhammad were atypical. But maybe it says more about humans-in-our-society than it does about the essential human condition. If humans learned "by tape" (as per the SF books from the Silver Age, referenced in TFA's opening para), maybe idea-production would work along different lines.
I admit, I tend to agree with him about the usefulness of writing. But I think it's just an irrational intuition, not the clear argument he implies.
He used to take retreats in the caves near Mecca to meditate and reflect. It was during one of these sessions that he later claimed that he was overwhelmed with the inescapable presence of archangel Gabriel who commanded him to "Read!". This directive of Gabriel to Mohammad is held to be the first verse of the divine revelation in Islam.
Read!
In the Name of your Lord Who created
Created Man(kind) from a clot of blood
Read!
And your Lord is Ar-Rahman
Who Taught by the 'Pen'
Taugh Man(kind) that which he knew not.
[Q.96 'Al-Alaq']
As mentioned in a comment to a dup post, Paul is neglecting the reflect phase. For some this occurs prior to writing. Others, take time when writing to pause and reflect.
p.s.
> Muhammad was not even literate
We do know that he dictated and others wrote messages [correspondences] that were sent. So no records of him writing, but this was not an uneducated man. He was a merchant, traveled, and conversed with other men at markets, oasis rest stops along the trade route. (And he was not a frivolous man.)
The reason Muhammad is said to have been "illiterate" is because Qur'an refers to him (yes, it is the most meta book I've ever read) as "the un-lettered Prophet". "Ummi".
Personally, I think this is a misreading, since these are technical terms (like 'Pen' in above cited verses), and 'letter' refers to the 'mystic letters* given to Moses'.
i.e. Mohammad the Gentile Prophet. The prophet for the un-Lettered, the Gentile.
*consult your local Rabbi :)
First you load the dataset then you train the model.
For the messenger recipient of this message, recite is more sensible, since the knowledge that he lacks is imparted directly by an angel, so he doesn't need to lex and parse, and can just relay and recite. Possibly, though this is certainly not the case with him, the messenger doesn't even need to get semantic with a message - just go and deliver it. Like IP. (Though ours likely has various ears doing deep readings..;)
For us, we have to lex and parse (read & eval), and then we can recite (print). Just like a REPL.
So what's interesting here with these opening verses of the Sura Clot of Blood is that in my 'reading' of this book it is an invitation and instruction on how to read this book.
We are urged to read/recite ['the Book'], in/with the name of our Lord. We have a 'Lord', named 'Ar-Rahman, the Infinitely Good, sometimes rendered Most Gracious*. IT's accomplishments we are told include Creating and Teaching. Creating human. How? From a clot of blood. Then teaches it. How? With a Pen.
And after this, this creature called Man has new knowledge, new information, that it didn't have before (or possibly could never hope to independently obtain).
So, continuing my 'reading', I decided to treat this book as a Hypertext. Without nasty markup, however. So the avenue left is that semantics are links, stuff like that. So here, a reasonable place to start doing full text search to look for clusters with 'Ar-Rahman' and 'Teaching'. Because remember, we're supposed to read in/with our Lord's name.
Sure enough, there is a whole Sura called 'Ar-Rahman'. And right off the bat, looks like we took the correct semantic link:
In the name of Allah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim
ar-Rahman
Taught/teaches the Qur'an
Created Man
Taught him eloquence/expression [for reciting]
The movement of the Sun & the Moon
is *Computed*. [new information - it's a simulation]
And the Stars and the Trees [cosmic & life form scale]
prostrate themselves [no freewill for them/deterministic]
And the Heaven IT raised [spatial or mind/conscious expansion]
and *imposed* 'the Balance' [? tbd]
That you not transgress [it regulates]
within the Balance [it's all around us..]
-- how to eval --
And establish weight in justice [evaluate (REPL) with careful weighting (decision trees)]
and do not make deficient/discount
the Balance. [which is the TAO]
-- continue REPL to load full 'read-with' library --
The rest of the Sura is oddly Buddhist in flavor. A list of reminders of various favors of God, punctuated by a repeated chorus pointedly asking, almost in an accusative 'i-told-you-so' voice 'Which of the favors of your lord, you twain deny?' Now keep in mind some of these favors are in Paradise (good stuff) and the others are in Hell (very nasty stuff). But apparently, they are all 'favors'! And a 'twain' is involved. That would be the sentient 'mind' that needs 'duals' to 'read' reality. +/-. top/down. left/right. good/bad. etc.
So. We are in a simulation. It is governed by TAO. Not everything enjoys choice. We do. Duality makes us see a unity as good and bad, while in actuality it is all good. Optimistic readings, only please. Happy readings.
* God (in general in quite a few religions) has nice names and scary names, corresponding to Grace and Majesty. This is a very nice name. Good and Generous, unlike any.
https://retrospectjournal.com/2016/10/10/from-oral-to-writte...
The time we spend chasing each type of curiosity is important. If we want to create, reading must have it’s limits, and sometimes pretty harsh limits, else we’ll be infected with others ideas about everything. Some choice quotes on this:
"When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process..." "This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking" - Albert Einstein
"If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts." - Dick Hamming
EDIT: On the other hand, if you first principles all your thinking and just write write write, you may spend hours on something that could be understood and moved on from in seconds. This meme explains the reading/writing spectrum quite well: https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/vwq8yh/this_true/
“Ultimately no one can hear in things―books included―more than he already knows.”
Reading can help you formalize, or put established concepts upon what you have already understood, even if only unconsciously.
I remember the gist of a quote about the need to read as much as possible in a young age to inform a Weltanschauung (world view) from which in adulthood you're supposed to build on, but can't remember any source.
The point perhaps is what PG is saying "A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing."
Writing is creating and the process of creation is about discovery. When one is sculpting a clay, one is discovering materials and its properties, one is discovering ones emotions, and infact one could be discovering or understanding oneself (this ignoring the pre creation phase where one is discovering and studying art movements, various sculptors, their ideas and techniques...).
Any creation process roughly follows same patterns unless you are a facsimile creator.
Reading others' ideas, especially polished ones with a lot of authority behind them, can act as a filter on one's own (delicate, barely formed) ideas. Ideas already have a difficult path into reality, and others' biases and filters are one major contributor.
I regularly choose not to read on a given subject if I have an idea I want to explore or to clarify my own thinking, and only afterwards do I consult what others have said. Usually I wind up in the same place (or a crude version of that) but sometimes I find a new insight and those are worth it!
“I’m one of the few people you’ll meet who’s written more books than they’ve read.” —Garth Merenghi
The world we live in is becoming more complex. I think it’s because our communication pipelines now have unlimited IO - there’s too much to consume, too much to process, too many thoughts we feel the need to express in response to all these inputs. All of this at the unforgivably quick eventual constituency cross-region replication guarantees afforded to us by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and many others.
I write more these days.
I don’t share most of what I write.
I write for myself, because I think that writing my thoughts helps to refine these thoughts, retain them for future me, and, on occasion, share them with another person, thru conversion, or by just copy pasting something I wrote.
You don’t need a blog to start writing. Just start writing. VS Code. Notepad. Emacs. A piece of paper. It doesn’t matter. As long as you can do it when you feel like it. Write.
As others here mentioned, it’s kind of like programming.
We used it to live in “hello world”.
Now we all got thrown into this crazy distributed microservice world. The language of this new world is still the same. It’s (mostly) English. Except it’s more complex now and you have to be faster and better at writing. So write.
So here's a random idea based on that: Can we incentivize more people to report on a topic/event today? Just write, do not have to publish.
^ If more people just write commentary/summary like this for whatever they consume, it might double as a decent diversion from just consuming content online. And maybe.. maybe it will make us mindful about what we consume online :D
We don’t really have that anymore though right?
The current internet is economy strongly incentivizes people to write things in favor of engagement.
Sometimes this aligns with ground truth (e.g. Gergely Orosz, who has documented Musk’s Twitter takeover via daily updates). Many times it does not.
Who is supposed to be the historical record keeper, at this time, when trust in record keepers is at an all time low?
I find myself uncomfortable asking such controversial questions, but I do feel like they should be asked
All of us.
I don't think we need to get hung up on 'who', not really. I mean with regard to historical sources, how we do know that these were always 'true' reporting and not (deliberately or otherwise) untrustworthy, at best misunderstood, by whoever wrote them because they may have not had all the informarion or reporting second/third hand or an agenda.
Sometimes it isn't necessarily what is written as much as it is who wrote it and when and under what circumstances.
"The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of a science fiction book in which reading has been replaced by a more efficient method of knowledge transfer. He argues that even if such a method existed, it would be insufficient because it would not allow for the kind of discovery that writing does. He concludes that people who want to have ideas can't afford not to read."
open to all ideas here
That sounds very surprising to me. I would have strongly expected it continues the story.
> So you are under the belief that the written output of one man born in 1564 was of greater quantity than all “good” writing prior to his time? Are you sure you thought this through?
This is not the point i was trying to make.
I haven't downvoted you, but if I did, it would be for the tone of your comments alone. I don't care about PG one way or another, but I am sick of the total level of glibness on the Internet, and while I gave up on mainstream social media, I would prefer HN to stay a little bit friendlier and less toxic than Twitter or Reddit.
Good writer, good idea makers exist without the need to have been good at reading.
But enough to fill a single person's lifetime regardless? So whether you take Shakespeare or Murakami, their individual perspectives are not that different since either of them could have filled their lifetimes with reading.
> The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now
The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much. This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.
> your messiah PG
This is low-level, disrespectful, intellectually dishonest and a phallacy. GP said nothing about Graham and you are pulling this out of nowhere.
> The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much. This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.
I think it's fair to say that we don't actually know much about Plato. All stories being told about plato are in third person narrative. I think you are contradicting yourself, Socrates and other ancients were a big proponent of discarding writing in place of dialogue. I think this should suffice as point.
"This is an essay written by Paul Graham in November of 2022. In it, he talks about how reading is necessary not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning to write well. He argues that there is no substitute for reading, and that people who want to have ideas need to be good at reading."
Journaling is by far the most effective technique I’ve come across in my life so far. It gets the rumination out. Helps you brainstorm. Gets you reflecting on unresolved things in your life. I wish I started sooner.
3 pages is not a good control. How big are the pages? How small is your handwriting? I read the Artist’s Way and nowhere did she specify how large the paper should be.
In my experience the deeper insights came on the second page about 30 minutes in, after depleting my brain of its ruminations and searching for more thoughts to fill up the page.
She also mentions that this happens 1 1/2 pages in on average which I would agree with. I write using Notability on an iPad and my handwriting is fairly small.
I just looked through a few. I write about 8 words per row and there's 36 rows. Around 300 words on each page, so ~900 words for morning writing.
I do feel you on the burning out part. I almost always get at least 2 pages in a day. Sometimes more than 3, but I timebox it and move on without feeling bad if I don't always get 3.
Exactly the same is true for coding.
Here’s the real shit, scariest thing I’ve ever read:
The Erosion of Deep Literacy, Adam Garfinkle, National Affairs, 2020
>This article makes far reaching societal claims with essentially no evidence.
and
>I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far from adequately supported
Well, but if we could produce a tape that taught x, presumably we could also produce a tape that taught writing.
And yeah, probably a tape that structured your brain in some way that had the knowledge may include the prerequisites necessary for it to work (better language/reasoning and writing).
But even if it didn’t, Asimov’s story agrees with him - it was insufficient. It’s why they made some people avoid the tapes.
I'm inclined to believe it's not, because we're actually pretty bad at rote memorization. We usually need to understand the memory—how it can be used, or why it's important. Professionals construct "mental palaces", effectively building artificial meaning.
Just this week, I’ve been writing a script for a YouTube video and it is difficult for me. Organizing my thoughts and making it “seamless” is a lot of work. In my software job I usually default to bullet points for technical writing — which I feel is a cop out. I had decided before reading this article that I want to invest some time in these neglected skills.
Does anyone have any recommendations for improving these skills?
1. Apply the better writing advice to my everyday speech
2. Focus on writing down exactly what I wanted to say, and how I would have said it
School taught me to be super wordy and focus overly on the editing stage. Nowadays, I read everything I write out loud and if it sounds awkward (or not like me) then I just delete it and write it again from scratch. Oftentimes it helps to just close my eyes, say what I want to out loud, then write down what I just said.
It can turn out to be a little bit wordier, but it almost always ends up being easier to read :)
[0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31060362 [2] https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction...
This does sound like editing to me (in a good way). Unless you meant something else when you wrote that school taught you to focus overtly on the editing stage.
I used to frame writing as a painful activity, so once I had a "workable" rough draft, I would break out a scalpel and try to make it readable with word surgery. I would spend hours staring at the same few paragraphs, and it was horrible.
Now I just delete it. It feels like a clean slate, but the slate in my brain has made opinions about what's important to say and how to say it better.
The two approaches exercise completely different muscles, and what I like about the "rewrite" approach is that it exercises some of the same muscles that will help me communicate myself properly on the first try.
Practice wise, write about the same thing several times. Write. Then reflect for a week or a month. Then write again. Then do it 3 months later. You will see a clear improvement.
And of course, teachers are invaluable. See if you can take an evening class somewhere, or if you have money hire a tutor - you can pay a grad student at your local university.
I can type much faster than I can write but it feels like a messier thought process. It feels more like jamming a gearbox, while writing by hand feels like a smooth shifting bicycle, with the wind in my hair.
Should I try dictation and then writing it down later? Or typing up my handwritten notes after writing them? Any other ideas?
Really? Yet to come across a pen and paper in your however many years of life? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are those things so exceedingly anachronistic to you that you'd be at a loss? I'm sorry, but I feel you're being disingenuous.
This has been an immensely helpful way to structure my thinking, in the way PG writes about. It also develops a record of thoughts that I refer back to and reflect on. It's driven my personal growth, and helped me uncover personal blindspots.
In more recent times, life is busier, and journaling the way I used to is harder to make time for. (Either that, or the Day One app just isn't doing it for me anymore, I'm not sure.)
Instead, I've started to use the voice memos app to voice dictate my thoughts, as if I'm being interviewed on a podcast. My tone is that of an interviewee, providing their answer, sharing their reasoning on a topic, debating the pros and cons, and arriving at a conclusion.
I use this format for both personal matters or thoughts related to professional endeavors. It's really working for me. It's a higher velocity way to get my thoughts out, yet still keep them structured. Thanks to increased playback speeds, I can go through my past thoughts more easily too. I highly recommend more people try this, especially if writing/typing it out seems like a chore.
The effort to explain its machinery demands that I look very deeply - trying to answer questions like 'how does a page of memory get reclaimed?', or 'how does a userspace allocation propagate through the kernel?' - and following the white rabbit all the way down the burrow, forces a far deeper level of understanding than simply figuring something out for a patch.
(Obligatory plug!) For anybody who's interested in the topic, I plan to launch the book in a year or so, to be notified when it's released, sign up at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSen0gefOrPWi6ZtEQ25...
Writing is a medium, and an excellent one at that. I'd agree that writing is a unique medium in generating a special kind of thoughts that are deeply introspective and concept-revealing. But I find that you can view writing not as one medium, but as a host of various submedia.
Typing on a keyboard is very different from writing on a whiteboard. The kinds of thoughts you can host to different 'pages' vary. Even electronic writing can vary depending on the psychological and technological context. Writing on Twitter on mobile varies from writing encrypted notes on your personal machine.
Is one thing better than the other? I don't think we can easily claim such. Use whiteboards when whiteboards are good, use paper when paper is good, use iPads when iPads are good. But access to various hosts for just the right occasion surely nurtures ideas faster in the right medium of growth.
Reading doesn’t have to be back to back books or papers. Blogs, tutorials, comments also count!
An example is the attempt by some, in the US, to redefine the meaning of “equality” in the context of our political system, from the traditional “equality under the law” to “equality of outcome”. This sort of persuasion by redefinition, in which you take a word attached to a popular idea and hijack/redirect it to your pet idea, is a Jedi-mind-trick which is enabled by the ambiguity of natural language.
A more rational system of communication, in which distinct ideas were represented by distinct, immutable symbols, rather than combinations/reuses of old symbols, would make for vastly superior communication—-if we could wrap our brains around such a thing!
Wikipedia is almost enough to implement a few algorithms that I've implemented from written descriptions (btrees, tries and multiversion concurrency control). But for other algorithms I just use the pseudocode such as for A*.
I would prefer that the English explanation was good enough to implement the code.
I journalled computer, software, parallelism, multithreading and futuristic software and architecture ideas out in the open since 2013. I am up to 700 entries. Writing is manifested thinking. Writing is very good for you. Links are in my profile.
- my master thesis professor."You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not."
I often wonder if our ancestors, who were a great deal more private about things like techniques and guild knowledge, not to mention esoteric religious teachings, didn't have the right idea. Perhaps even the penchant for writing scientific articles in Latin and Greek was an explicitly chosen shibboleth to avoid the kinds of informational chaos we see coming to a head in the internet age of 2022.
0 - https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
When I'm stuck on a technical problem, I start writing a grumpy email to the support-PoC. I anticipate their questions and find the answers and add them into the email. This is repeated as necessary. It's not unusual then that at some point the answer magically drops into my lap and the grumpy email is tossed into the gripe-recycler.
use the time when you commute, when driving, when walking the dogs, cleaning, or anything ritual you're doing on daily basis. just tap the recorder in your phone and start talking about topics that bothers your mind during the day.
I'm maintaining a recording diary, and I'm talking about everything. It's helping me to be more confident on some ideas I want to share with others, to be more prepared to arguments with my wife, and to understand better myself - what I'm thinking about situations, why I'm doing things that I don't like and what I can do about that.
You can as well use it as retrospective analysis. we won't remember 99.9% of the things we did in our life. those recordings can help you in few years, you can extract the data from them and have a easy way to listen / read things you've said 1-2 years ago on some topics and see how you've evolved since then.
Magical brain upload technology would likely require AI, and would almost certainly include assistive cognition - the use of technology to automate and speed up learning and original thought.
We're edging towards a revolution that will be more of a disruption than the invention of print. Instead of thoughts that are "manually" generated and externalised as static symbols - albeit electronically distributed - thinking and learning will be automated and integrated.
You can use Wikipedia to access a lot of human knowledge. But imagine a meta-Wikipedia that would integrate and summarise an entire domain, combined with assistive cognition that made it possible to hold that summary in your head as a single perceptual entity.
You wouldn't just have the skills offered by domain competence, but you would also be able to look for trends and patterns, compare the domain with others, expand the "shape" with new features in creative but congruent ways, and so on.
[1] http://www.literaturepage.com/read/francis-bacon-essays-102....
"Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write."
It's almost an 'old writer yells at cloud' type post.
I rea a lot as a kid, and still do, but suck at writing. I think it's at best a tangentially related skillset. Writing is not just about conveying information but doing so in a way that people are enticed to want to read, which is way harder than just the first.
Getting better at writing, and simply writing more is a core goal and something I struggle with.
I’m looking at different systems like evergreen notes, zettlekasten etc. and trying to incorporate those in my own note taking.
I find it hilarious that pg chose to use two double negatives to get across this point.
Double negatives sound profound, but they use more contextual overhead to convey less information than their positive counterparts. pg is a much better writer than me, but I think it would be more accurate (and stick better) if it instead was just:
Your reading limits your writing, and your writing limits your thinking.
But reading is just a route to quality thinking. Another route is via technical debate. You verbally describe a problem and solution and then your peers drill into that and offer counterpoints. This is in my experience as beneficial as reading due its interactive aspect - which reading does not offer.
So even aside from reading what others write, I think you can only write well yourself if you assiduously read what you write.
It's kind of like having a weird uncle in the family: after we see this guy running around the living room naked for some years, we think it's ordinary, fine, ok: "oh, it's just Uncle Bob", we tell ourselves.
Then we go to college, come home for vacation after meeting new people, lost the "familiarity" of family life, and when we finally see Uncle Bob running around the living room naked, our reaction is not one of jovial acceptance like before, but one of horror.
> That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon
Probably just my lived experience, but watching youtube at faster playback speed feels like downloading information. Increasing speeds at parts which I can easily grok and decreasing it when it takes time to understand the content.
- When you have to explain something to someone else - and you wish to do it well - you're forced to rethink, reprocess, etc. The exercise deepens your own understanding.
- Our senses (and associated neural support) are weighted to the visual. Reading plays to that strength.
Mind maps, sketches, doodles, mocks, are ineffably (pun intended) great at having good ideas.
What about socrates, epictete etc ? Who rejected the very idea of writing in favor of oral teaching. They seemed to be pretty good at thinking.
Beware the writing excess Paul
Paul Graham is a venture capitalist in a hyper-connected society, where pretty much everyone can read and write.
When these ancient philosophers preferred oral exchanges over text based communication you've to realize that text wasn't quiet as easily produced and consumed in their society and what they were likely going for was a fluid exchange of ideas, which was pretty hard to do with written words in that age.
Also, more multimedia, better aligned with current communications tech, and designed specifically with the intention of presenting thoughts, persuasion, non-fiction. Books are great, but not optimized for today’s world.
It's a really good read.
By "good at reading" I don't mean good at the mechanics of reading. You don't have to be good at extracting words from the page so much as extracting meaning from the words.
The first lesson is that reading is not simply parsing glyhphs and assembling words. It's contextualising that information, assimilating it, analysing and synthesizing it. Strong shades of Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book.
It also brings to mind a recent Ezra Klein podcast episode with Maryanne Wolf, on the neurophysiology of reading:
If you think about language, that is a natural process. There’s a genetic program in which it unfolds. There’s nothing like that for reading. We were never meant to read. But what is amazing is that the brain does have this almost semi-miraculous capacity to make new circuits within itself using the processes that are genetically there but in new ways. So what the brain has is the capacity to make novel circuits. And the invention, the human invention of reading, required a new circuit. So the brain very gradually learned how to connect parts that were there for other reasons and made a new circuit that became the first underlying network for reading very simple symbols 6,000 years ago.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...>
Transcript: <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/transcript-ezra-k...>
TL;DR: we've only been reading for 6,000 years, far too short for dedicated neurological hardware to evolve --- our brains are doing this in software as a learned behaviour.
Language: you're born with the innate capacity to do this, with dedicated neurological regions, speech hardware (the larynx, tongue, and other physiology), and possibly some hearing adaptations.
Reading? You've got to teach children how to do that, starting with alphabets, phonetics, meaning, and all the stuff we layer over atomic symbols: simile and metaphor, idioms, cultural touchstones, and all that jazz. And we do really well at that, at least at basic levels. Though if you look more deeply into actual skills, it turns out that literacy levels vary tremendously across the population, in ways which are not nearly as evident in, say, spoken language. See: "Adult Literacy in the United States" <https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146>)
GG
I don't wanna think that it's because it's mostly a community of (male) Musk-Jack-SamAltman simps and wannabes that are just a good startup idea away from being billionaire themselves. A good, well elaborated answer, might help me to steer away from this conclusion.
your post achieves the exact opposite.
--
Either way it's pretty bad etiquette to hijack a thread for some completely different purpose. Don't let the inevitability of your your post getting flagged further your conspiracy narrative.
That’s not surprising, since it’s a story that meets at the intersection of tech, business, politics, and controversial public figures. There are quite a lot of strong views on it, and in my experience this community doesn’t tend to deal in a particularly adult way with events like that.
That kind of discussion usually sinks pretty quickly - I assume mostly because of the algorithm down-ranking overheated discussions. Then you have the general leaning of HN towards a bit of a libertarian, counter-mainstream narrative - it’s not hard to see that the pattern you describe being a natural outcome of all that, no shadowy motives required.
It kinda sucks to be honest, because from many different perspectives it’s absolutely gigantic news with lots of really interesting stuff to think and talk about.