Writing as a form of thinking
lopespm.com
lopespm.com
I read a comment on here recently that included an excerpt from a letter Kurt Vonnegut wrote before his death to some students encouraging them to write a poem, never show it to anyone, tear it up into a million tiny pieces and scatter it into disparate trashcans. He called this an act of “becoming”, and I think he had a point. Perhaps we need to start telling students this less obliquely, but I wouldn’t be surprised if (or at least I believe there’s hope that) many educators are already ahead of me here.
I honestly think that typing on computing devices and writing on paper are conceptually two separate ideas. And should have a finely measured difference in name.
Programming is often called 'writing a program' and it probably is very similar. There is something about typing on a computer that encourages me to forget what I typed in. Typing on a kb and monitor is like writing in symbolic language to me, even if the words I'm typing are in natural language.
Writing on paper permenantly marks the paper and that makes a massive difference to my mind. It's stored, referrable and my body can also physically destroy it. The muscle linkages to make the shape of a glyph or character with my pen on paper is concrete.
When I write, it's usually to help my brain think: what I write remains a bit longer in my brain (say minutes instead of seconds). Moreover, using pen and paper is so much more "free form" than typing, and instinctive too. If I have to make drawing, a pen and a few seconds are what I need; with a computer I have to figure out what tools to use (program, icons for line drawing, choosing a color). It's so much more productive.
When I type, it's more like instructing the computer what to do.
However, when I write documentation or an email it's more like formalizing a thought that was first thought about in other ways.
This is mostly true when I'm doing hard thinking tasks such as algorithms, maths, arguments, etc.
I wonder if all of this depends on the tasks or my way of working or if this is more universal... Interestingly, there are a lot of maths tutorials on the web where people use notepads or even paper instead of computers when explaining. The opposite is 3Blue1Brown which presents "finished" product, result of typing.
Ultimately you have to keep less in your head if you put it first in black and white
I also liked the concept pg introduced in his putting ideas into words [1]
About some ideas only being possible to have once you start writing them out, it's hard to keep it all in your head unless you're a savant or somt
Keeping a personal diary has proven to be an awesome entertainment. I tend to forget many things over time. Particularly during challenging or memorable experiences, I often forget how I felt and what thoughts occupied my mind. Taking the time to relax and read about interesting weeks from the previous year feels like immersing myself in a novel written by a complete stranger.
If you have an inclination towards writing, I encourage you to give it a try. Personally, I used to dislike writing, but once I started, my perspective changed. If you don't get yourself to like it, then do something else. Some people think the best while walking, others need to talk to a themselves or friend.
I must mention that writing and reading in my native language have significantly improved my speech. I used to struggle with finding the right words during casual conversations and often ended up rambling. Now, uncommon words come to me effortlessly, and now I usually assist others in finding the right words when they're stuck.
I think LLM are great for getting feedback, specially in other languages. You can ask the bot to rewrite one difficult paragraph and study the differences, or check if a native would use the same words you wrote. It's great for learning and experimenting.
I’d say you’re mostly right. I’ve used org mode a lot in the past. Now I use One Note, which I’m sure would draw a lot of complaints from this group, but it works for me. I think use whatever works best for you, try different things and stick with what you end up liking.
Org mode is crazy powerful but has a steep learning curve, and coupled with being new to emacs it can be quite daunting. While I personally use doom emacs as my daily editor I found org mode didn't suit my way of working.
I recently re-discovered Obsidian and I've been enjoying it a lot. It's very flexible, works in a way that I find intuitive to my brain and it's allowed me to keep a (almost) daily journal, as well as turned into a repository for notes I make about work projects and everything else. I'd recommend checking it out alongside org-mode.
Logseq is a “second brain” but its primary format is a daily journal. This threw me off at first because I like to file knowledge into different topics. But turns out you can just throw random thoughts at it daily in bullet points, hashtag main points, and later see all hashtags in a single view. This encourages you to keep writing on different topics without organizing them first, and still be able to have a coherent view a certain topic later (just click on the hashtag). You can even build queries for bullet points in your bullet points.
Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify uses Logseq. Logseq is essentially like a huge Lisp engine but with a modern Markdown interface.
You can add things like tables, but they are limited like a Word Processor and less like Excel.
You can include blocks of functioning source code like a Jupyter notebook.
You can export all of it to formatted HTML or PDF or whatever you like.
You can write Lisp programs to interact with the structure and collection of your documents. This lets you build entire applications and workflows. One such application will traverse all of your documents, construct a prioritized agenda and schedule any TODO items that it finds.
Vanilla (unmodified) Emacs has an ugly org-mode that looks less inviting and less powerful than Notepad. Do not be fooled by this. A few add-on packages turn it into something powerful and beautiful.
Actually, tables in org mode have function capability like Excel too. Obviously not the full, extensive capabilities of Excel, but they are far more than simply text formatted as a table.
You can think of org-mode as interactive markup language. It has a lot of features for managing TODOs but what I like the most I hiding or displaying sections, exporting directly to latex or html using custom classes with a simple keybinding and so one.
It takes time to get familiar with Emacs. I started on October and was spending one hour a day during two weeks to get familiar with it. You have to take it very slow because there are a lot of keybidings, concepts and functions. It is like learning to play piano. But once you get it it's awesome and it is lots of fun.
This May I started getting serious with elisp, the Emacs scripting language (also Emacs own language, C and elisp), and it's amazing. You can automate everything you want really easily. I wrote some elisp functions that made my life so much useful. I used to have tons of bash shells open over the place. Now I have some key bindings that automate the usual tasks. Some written in bash but others written in elisp or a mix so I have a nice UI and can have easy selection or can add parameters and interact with my documents.
If you have time, are curious and like to hack I totally recommend giving it a try. Also the community is amazing. Getting into Emacs made me discover other funny things like mailing lists, Usenet and even philosophers!
I am not an expert and I will never be but for me it is a lot of fun. Also the community is awesome.
Sometimes I try very hard to describe my problem to ChatGPT. Then... I don't even press send, since in the process of describing my problem I've garnered enough "thought points" to solve the problem myself.
In the writing of the question I realise I know parts of the answer and can actually ask a more specific question covering the gaps of the answers I worked out.
I journal every day since 2013. I originally used the desktop wiki software written in Python called WikidPad. Nowadays I just use either GitHubs README.md and edit using the web interface or markdown editor Typora on Windows.
Writing is a satisfying way of capturing or clarifying thoughts or thinking itself.
I journal software ideas everyday on my journals (see my profile)
Please blog and share your thoughts, it is inspirational to me
And, of course, the notation can be shared. People who read are constantly recompiling the great works.
https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
mpweiher: "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious."
Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month
If I understand the problem your code solves, then I can probably understand the words you use to describe the solution to that problem and therefore understand the steps your code takes to implement that solution.
Documentation is underrated.
A well documented codebase is one that doesn't tell you what the code does (the code tells you what the code does in minute detail) but tells you the problem and the solution the code is solving. Please tell me what the code does from a problem solving perspective.
If I can't understand your code, then your code is legacy to me unfortunately. Tell me the problem and mental model the code is implementing and I can rewrite it or avoid rewriting it because I have your implementation, I understand it and I don't need to rewrite it.
> "Write as a form a wasting time"
> "Writing as a form of deluding oneself in being productive"
Hmm.
> writing is overrated
Take this kindly - you're doing it wrong. Which is fine; not everyone is a wordy thinker. That doesn't mean it's overrated.
I recently learned writing is two things, what you know and how to market yourself. While I'd say a good amount is more of the former, HN highlights some of the absolute best pieces of the prior.
People should write. And those that touch a nerve probably did it well enough do receive critical feedback.
There are very few people who regularly write as an exercise in thinking, though. But there are very few who would not benefit from it.
At the risk of being rude, what you're saying from some perspectives may read like "exercise this...", "exercise that..." and how no one dares to speak out against physical exercise. Well... that may be because it's mostly universally good for people (with definite exceptions). Writing is like exercise for the mind. Are there other ways to achieve most things than exercising your body or your mind? Yeah, I would say so - there are many paths to success, knowledge, wisdom, balance, expertise, wealth, and so on. But is exercise of the mind bad or detrimental? Generally, no. And that's why few people speak out against it.
The entirety of my experience with writing things down is that it is only ever helpful and useful in the understanding of a problem or the exploration of an idea.
I don't often look back at what I wrote. Partly that's because the process of writing helps me to remember something, and also the writing is the journey required to tech the destination, and once at the destination, the journey is no longer needed.
And yes, if there is an "other side" of the writing argument, I'm not in it, so I appreciate these posts, and generally nod in agreement. I also appreciate them as a reminder to both write more and more often.
I don't disagree with your ideas that it can be counter-productive. However, I'm not convinced that would be the majority perspective. I think the reason why it's not spoken about much is because there's no enforcing others to become writers. It's an individual choice and usually only affects yourself.
I'm not sure what real good a downvote can serve. I will make an appeal to your understanding of human history.
Writing is a representation of language, and as such is the greatest, clearest manifestation of generalised human intellectual capacity. Writing as a technical achievement is the foundation of human civilisation.
> moreover in HN. The people around me, mostly don't care about writing other than code.
The best coders are coding for others to understand. In the great tradition of human writing, coding is communication.
I would love to find a replacement to natural language writing for organizing and developing thoughts, one that was more structured and could be manipulated systematically. A programming language for thinking I guess.
I think your central issue isn’t with writing in of itself, as the surplus of extraneous pointless vacuous writing that is out these days. Social media posts, tweets, content farming blogs, fake-FAQs, carousel listicles, comments comments comments- are surrounded by so much bad, pre-AI analog AI generated writing or quick takes written without deep thought. That’s what you probably have issues with, not with writing itself.
I write down something and mentally my kind can almost not worry about focusing too much on that particular part and continue to work through the problem.
I actually feel proper frustration now if I don't have one available, but on the writing itself for writings sake, I've never been interested or even felt the urge to write thoughts. The idea of people owning journals always was fascinating to me.
After reading the comments though I might give it a real effort to try and see.
I'm almost sure I've seen small little trackpad like devices that work with the stylus.
Found one anyway : https://www.amazon.it/XP-PEN-Tavoletta-Grafica-Ultrasottile-...
This struck a chord. I've extensive notebooks going back years which I've never really re-read because I remember most of them. But if I didn't write it down, I can't remember the meeting/lecture/thought.
The brain is a strange device.
Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”
Much like writing, teaching and explaining concepts to others also forces us to think through more. I wonder if research around transformation of concepts from our brain into any medium (writing, visual or data) forces more thinking around the concept.
Even as I write this, I draft it, redraft it, eliminate and add to explain the idea. There is also a form of emergence in the concept as I put the thoughts to words.
I know I read that on HN.
I think it was a Graham essay.
But maybe not.
Anyway, it changed things for me.
It allowed me to embrace the part of my crazy for typing into boxes.
To let writing be its own reward (though I can't deny I like internet points, too).
I stopped trying to win arguments.
And started learning to step away from my outrages.
Because I wrote because of the chaos in me, not chaos in the world.
Ah, I feel better now.
Not sure if I will leave this up.
That's how it was with me when I wrote this.
YMMV.
I like a lot of your points, but for me personally, replace "writing" with "drawing" and it's a lot more relevant.
I expect for others it could be "playing an instrument" or "dancing". The point is to express yourself in a way that works for you.
Writing gets an over-large share of influence in our society, IMO. There is something special about writing and language, in how specific it they be, but there are also things special about those other forms of expression I mentioned, unique to them.
I guess I'm just saying that the important thing is "find a way to express yourself." Writing is just one piece of that puzzle.
I draw and play music too. Sure, in an architecture office, a drawing would be a conventional answer. So would three chords in a rehearsal space.
But in normal circumstances, like these, writing is how we express thoughts. You didn’t respond with a link to SoundCloud or a hosted jpeg.
I get what you are saying. And I am not arguing that writing is the best way of thinking or the only way.
Sorry for not being clear. I was only talking about my thoughts. Not yours.
I realize you were quoting another source, I just get slightly annoyed by the phrase "writing is thinking" and its various other permutations that come up.
For me, that is very much not the case.
I agree that writing/speech is the normal way to answer a (written/spoken) question. It's how I would clumsily describe my thoughts to someone in that circumstance. But it is not how I would form those thoughts.
Though I have also had conversations with people basically saying they can't imagine thinking without words — the two are one and the same, to them.
Lots of weird brains out there; I enjoy it.
I guess Bill Gates doesn't have to worry about resale value.
I believe that people relt on writing as a crutch if they do it too often.
Thinking clearly should be a great mental exercise that people don't reap the benefits of since it is easier to write. Easier because slower.
Sharp wits require to train speed. Like mental calculus.
Using language models makes me faster at what I do and frequently it seems like what I'm doing with them is increasing the quality of my output. Blog posts that I would antagonize about publishing are cleaned up and made ready for submission in a matter of an hour or so. Before, it took me several days to get happy with the results and even then I would continue to refine it after publishing.
Language models don't come up with the ideas for me, however. All the things I use that it produces was heavily prompted and discussed with myself. At all times I'm driving the conversation and what is being communicated. It's how the information is communicated that is being augmented now. Clarifying my fragmented thoughts on paper becomes far easier to transform into something another can consume easily.
As a related example, over the past 10 years or so, I've been obsessed with thinking about consciousness (or thinking about thinking). After talking to many about this, and reading as much as I can about it that has been written, I've come to the conclusion that many of us think differently. Coming up with a plausible argument that explains this thought in a clearer manner would be one example of how I use language models.
After a long interaction with ChatGPT4 on this subject, which included Buddhist thought, Aphantasia, Bicameral Mind (itself controversial) and more, I issued the following request: "Summarize the argument people think differently with a comparison to Aphants not being able to use mental or auditory information recall." Here's the answer it gave:
> The comparison implies that just as individuals with aphantasia lack visual mental imagery, others may have variations in their cognitive processes that affect their ability to use or manipulate mental or auditory information. These differences in information processing can result in diverse thinking styles, problem-solving approaches, and ways of perceiving and understanding the world.
If we think about the lack of something as an edge case of what is known, then maybe we can "outline" the idea using the "edges" of the concept...
If you have Aphantasia writing is very much a way of thinking about thinking about things. Like CSSer, it gives me a way to do critical thinking about a subject, without relying on visual or audio information recall. Language models enhance my natural ability to "only think" by allowing me to write and read more about a subject that interests me. Using critical thinking, I try to understand and verify all the text I'm reading makes sense, which include what I've written as well as what the model has generated. It's only a "stochastic parrot" if you fail to think critically about the output before sharing it with others, would be one way to put it.
In Bhikkhu Bodhi's functional model of the mind [1], the six sense bases are building blocks for a unified consciousness. They are often referred to as the "Six Sense Spheres" or "Six Sense Doors." These six sense bases are: Eye, Ear, Nose, Tongue, Body and Mind. Body does things like feel heat, or hunger. Mind is the mental sense base, which encompasses the cognitive and perceptive functions of the mind, enables the perception of mental objects, thoughts, emotions, and ideas. The computed language model furthers this:
> In some individuals, the mind has the capacity to produce internal imagery or auditory experiences. This ability allows them to generate mental representations or simulations of visual or auditory stimuli without the presence of external sensory input. These internal experiences can vary in vividness, clarity, and detail from person to person.
> Internal imagery refers to the mental generation of visual images within the mind's eye. Individuals with this ability can conjure up mental pictures, scenes, or objects, similar to "seeing" something in their mind without the actual physical stimuli being present.
> Similarly, internal audio refers to the experience of hearing sounds, voices, or music within the mind. People who possess this ability can mentally replay or recall auditory stimuli, creating an internal auditory experience that resembles hearing without external sound sources.
I am a person with a condition labeled "Aphantasia". For me, writing is a means of thinking and that thinking is now being augmented by language models. If I choose to approach the process with a critical view of the content, then it is most certainly not a waste of my time. How others interact and think with it is going to vary widely however, so any statement I make about how language models affect others will be irrational and wrong, in many cases.
And if what I said doesn't make sense to you, maybe this will:
> Ultimately, the availability of language models serves as a reminder that every individual possesses a unique view of the world, and their thoughts and expressions may resonate differently with others. Embracing this diversity of perspectives and engaging in respectful and open dialogue can lead to a richer understanding and appreciation of the multifaceted nature of human cognition and communication.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/this-figure-shows-the-ba...