Why write? | Hacker News Reader

Why write?

bastian.rieck.me

157 pointsPseudomanifold36 comments

Illusion of explanatory depth.

Until you write (or otherwise explain), you really don’t know whether you even know what you think you do. We humans tend to over-estimate how well we understand something. We mentally paper over holes in our knowledge and handwave away pesky little details, until we try to explain the thing. Then you realize ”Wait, those two ideas aren’t connecting …”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_explanatory_depth

The other big reason, for me, is that without writing it soon feels like my head is exploding. So many ideas racing around it feels like I can’t think straight.

If I want to study something seriously, I formulate questions about what I am learning and commit them to Anki cards for review. It's anecdotal, but since I have been doing that, I am more careful of the content of what I study (I ask to myself: Did I understand that right? What does this part mean exactly? Isn't there a contradiction there? Let's see...).

Yes. Taking it further, writing isn't just how you express your thinking; the writing IS the thinking.

Feynman, in his freshman lectures, had some topic (I don't remember what) that he wanted to use as a topic. But he couldn't figure out how to explain it to freshmen. He said, "That means we don't really understand it."

It's generally good advice.

Although when I was younger I took it too much to heart and became obsessed with having a verbal and written understanding of everything when, sometimes, a deeper understanding at a subconscious, more intuitive, level is more useful. :)

Then you write code. I thought I understood how German health insurance works until I wrote a calculator for it. Suddenly I had to consider far more cases.

Writing is like extending the context window for our brains neural nets. Writing helps us also defragment our brains. We write notes for ourselves to empty our brains of the thoughts at times.

PG's work back in the day on writing as a form of think is still pretty relevant. http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html

If writing is a form of thinking, and a picture is worth a thousand words, does drawing (instead of writing) give a 1000x boost to thinking in any way?

It can certainly help pierce the shroud of qualia and aid knowledge transfer. Other forms of communication like diagrams, portrait sketches, and maps prove this out.

Yes, but all you need is arrows; see Category theory ;)

I love that we can't have a discussion about brains without a very poor computer science analogy.

I like how this applies to commit messages and patchset cover letters as well. You write the whys and wherefores to both explain to others what's going on, as well as to make sure you understand yourself. For sure that increases your audience, nobody cared about your fix before! And you need to narrate all this -- a patch that fixes an issue should read a little bit like a whodunnit. What the issue is, how to trigger it, what the impact is, how the patch fixes it.

Thanks for mentioning this. I don't get to do much writing in my time off work, since that time is devoted to (more) coding to try and make my side project into a business. So what I do to compensate is I make an effort and write all commit messages, descriptions, code review comments and documentation as if I were writing for an audience of top engineers auditing my work. I find this approach makes me enjoy the process more, be more deliberate about my actions, and how I communicate them. Even a dull runbook can be beautifully written.

Good advice. Implicit here is that you really need _something motivating_ to write/think about in order to follow this advice.

That's probably obvious, but perhaps relevant for someone who comes at this with an ambiguous desire to "write well" but without clarity on "about what."

Maybe a trivial point, but that's certainly the starting point of any writer's journey: a topic?

An interesting topic or amalgamation point are weekly notes: summarize your week. Most of us on HN work with interesting problems and try to solve hard problems.

Write about the stuff you learned in this week or what you worked on.

It can be brief and it should e fun. Not homework.

Agree, I'm doing that to write about my indie hacking story, it's fun

Sounds interesting, where can I read it?

I recently started writing reviews of each book I read. I found it helps me retain the contents of the book and often people give positive feedback about what they learned from my review.

Is there any review(er) in particular you used as inspiration here? Curious if you treat this more as personal notes, or a public-facing review?

I do the same, since the Start of the year. I write personal notes and if a book really gets to me I will write a public review

I do it on my college alum slack channel, but I recently wrote one up that made it to the front page of HN:

https://ahalbert.com/reviews/2023/06/04/the_culture_map.html

I took some inspiration from the book review contests of "Astral Codex Ten"

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-publi...

Not GP, but https://fourminutebooks.com comes to mind. It's also just incredibly useful to get a "4 minute precis" and decide whether or not it's worth it to you to spend more time on that book.

how many hours do you invest in this per book and per month?

I did this for a few months in 2017 but it was taking like 90 minutes per chapter, and at full saturday morning 8am attention! It's like doing math homework. And math homework is not the most important thing I can spend the best 90 minutes of my day on.

I don't know, but I wrote nearly 3000 words on the last book review I did. I'd say I spend less time than 90 minutes per chapter. I'm also sharing the reviews, which I find the most rewarding part.

I started writing when I was teaching newer programmers and I found the amount I didn't know how to explain clearly was staggering. Things I thought I knew so were actually kind of blurry blobs in my mind.

Recently I've been exploring Bevy and rust game development and my learning has been so much better when I create docs for myself: https://taintedcoders.com/

In the grand tapestry of wisdom handed down through the ages, there's a thread that, albeit melancholically, is increasingly fading in its pertinence - the art of writing.

Regrettably, the rationale behind the wielding of pen, or rather the dance of fingers over a keyboard, seems to be slipping through our collective grasp. As we venture further into the age of technological wonder, our heartfelt prose and studied arguments increasingly find themselves serving as nothing more than a feast for the insatiable maw of Large Language Models.

Consider, if you will, the very lines you are reading this moment. The symphony of language, the subtle twinkle of wit, and the aesthetic embrace of style, they are not the product of a human hand. Rather, they are a serenade composed by the Large Language Model itself, offering a tantalizing peek into a future where the boundary between artificial and natural intellect blurs. An age where the muse is not only the master of the quill, but also the orchestrator of ones and zeros.

In such a vast cosmos of algorithmically curated lexicon, one may quite justifiably question - what room remains for the human scribe? The quill may well seem poised on the precipice of obsolescence. A quaint relic of yesteryears, one might sigh, the act of writing, alas, has been seemingly reduced to the merest whisper of its former grandeur.

Well, isn't it simply a divine comedy? Despite the initial lament over our seemingly diminishing role in the grand narrative of writing, there emerges a purpose, albeit a somewhat disheartening one. It turns out we have become the humble farmers in this brave new world, tirelessly tilling the fields of knowledge to yield a rich crop of text.

Our eloquent sonnets, deep introspections, and grand debates serve as mere fodder for these voracious Large Language Models. We scribble away, only to feed the gaping, ever-hungry mouths of these digital giants. We thought we were nurturing an ally, yet, it seems we've been raising the devourer of our own literary relevance. Isn't the irony simply delicious?

Writing is a set of techniques that can be learned to communicate effectively. That said, reaching excellence requires some talent other than the technique, but that's obvious, and common to every other activity. It's worth remembering that teaching how to communicate effectively is 2500 years old: it started in Sicily with sophists, paid teachers of rhetoric in the ancient Greek world. We kinda unlearned that writing is a learnable skill.

Two other reasons:

1. You learn what you don't know about the topic or things you assumed you understood but really don't (a comment by @Swizec identifies the Illusion of explanatory depth; TIL)

2. You learn what things you thought you "knew" that are either contradictory or unfounded.

I found that writing forces me to look for a simpler, clearer underlying idea. I sometimes have a bunch of disjointed thoughts that I feel intensely about, and writing forces me to find a theme to bind them together.

Simple ideas sell, and finding them is a valuable skill.

Feynman similarly wrote that writing helps him think. Far and away my #1 use for it.

Writing is good to explain an idea that is too hard to just have in your head imo

A trite re-phrasing, which somehow captures some of the advice in this article:

Write "why"

(that is: aim express the intuition behind something, rather than gory details.)

Writing is akin to debugging your own thought processes

the blog is really clean I liek it

The font and the layout are amazing. I was wondering what font it is.

Author here :-) Thanks a lot---the font is Gentium Book Basic. If you are interested in the layout, send me an e-mail or a DM; I can share the theme.

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