10 ms·

Putting Ideas into Words

209 points by prtkgpt 5y ago

goldfeld 5y ago
It seems like a quantum effect of our consciousness, 'putting the ideas into words changed them'. It's a perpetual chase after wording, and when you reach the post, it's already far-off again. This thought sheds some insight not only only on semiology and systems of symbols in human language, but into what I've been learning writing poems, and why it's so much fun to do it, I think, because the goal of the expression is changed, or heightened, by the act of reaching or moving to it. So it's sometimes, or very often for certain comparisons, more involved than programming, in terms of working memory. On the topic of essay writing, the book Writing Under Pressure: The Quick Writing Process is a 60's university professor gem and fully informed me as to how I approach writing (and reading) nonfiction, anything which has an argument, a thesis, points to make. It turns the random churn of paragraphs into a pragmatic scientific method.
gashmol 5y ago
If you substitute writing with developing software (or prototyping) and ideas with requirements then you get great advice for making something users want. It even suggest the practice of checking requirements to be precise and complete. Intersting.
smlckz 5y ago
What else can be done about it instead of building things, writing down or talking?
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Destruction, listening, viewing, understanding, teaching etc.
akprasad 5y ago
As someone who writes, I can relate to a lot of this, but there are aspects that aren't true to my experience. > If you make an effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger Somewhat. Through effort I can take on a more objective perspective, but there is no platonic stranger I could pick out. Everyone has his own context and his own needs. What I try to do instead is visualize people I know who are not close friends. I think "What would X think if she were reading this?" > If he's not satisfied because you failed to mention x or didn't qualify some sentence sufficiently, then you mention x or add more qualifications I think this game is endless. There will always be a nitpicker (Hello!). I try to say enough to show that I know what I'm talking about, but beyond that I find that it chokes the broader point that I want to make. ~ For me, the real value is that writing makes language almost physical. What would normally vanish in a moment in speech becomes something you can touch, sculpt, and rearrange. And in doing so you're forced to contend with the form of it and really think through every word, and every train of thought ("Is this really what I want to say? Is this really how I should say it?"). I think this can be done in speech as well if you're in a true debate with someone who cares about language, but it's much harder. And depending on your temperament, there's a "those who can't do teach" problem where writing about something makes you feel like an expert on it. As always, the important thing is to act.
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  > Somewhat. Through effort I can take on a more objective perspective, but there is no platonic stranger I could pick out. Everyone has his own context and his own needs. What I try to do instead is visualize people I know who are not close friends. I think "What would X think if she were reading this?" Writing something down and then ignoring it for a few days is another way to get a fresh view of your writing and see the problems. Not an original idea: one of my profs in grad school suggested it. Best writing advice I've ever received. (Like every acolyte in history I of course ignored it at the time.)
  - inerte 5y ago
    Taika Waititi has an extreme (imho) version of that https://www.tiktok.com/@outstandingscreenplays/video/7057217253212720389?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&q=TAIKA%20WAITITI&t=1644725076796 https://www.tiktok.com/@outstandingscreenplays/video/7057217... . He will write something and put it aside for several years than re-read and re-write.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
Firefox tells me: "Web sites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for paulgraham.com. The certificate is only valid for the following names: .store.yahoo.com, .csell.store.yahoo.net, .store.yahoo.net, .us-dc1-edit.store.yahoo.net, .us-dc1.csell.store.yahoo.net, .us-dc2-edit.store.yahoo.net, .us-dc2.csell.store.yahoo.net, store.yahoo.com, store.yahoo.net, .stores.yahoo.net, stores.yahoo.net Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN" Does anyone else see this?
- aliceryhl 5y ago
  You probably have a plugin that translates http links into https.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    I do.
- samwillis 5y ago
  A little trivia for those that don’t know, PGs site is hosted on Yahoo Store as that is what Viaweb (his first startup) became when it was acquired by Yahoo in the mid 90s.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  The certificate is untrusted for the domain, but Firefox should let you click through the warning screen and view the page. Or you can adjust the URL to use http:
TameAntelope 5y ago
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.
- tpoacher 5y ago
  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.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    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.
mikewarot 5y ago
>In precisely defined domains it's possible to form complete ideas in your head. People can play chess in their heads, for example. And mathematicians can do some amount of math in their heads, though they don't seem to feel sure of a proof over a certain length till they write it down. But this only seems possible with ideas you can express in a formal language. For me, at least, programming falls into this category of writing. The difference, however, is that when you're programming, you have three audiences to satisfy. They are, the compiler (or interpreter), the problem to solve, and other programmers. Over time, the writing becomes part of a conversation, as I'll explain below. The compiler, the first audience, is the one that beginning programs bang their heads against the most. It can have any number of arcane and complex rules and interactions to learn about, and practice, before you can reliably get the compiler to accept your work as valid. The problem is the audience we're paid to satisfy. It requires that you end up with a workable answer given workable inputs. Satisfying it requires getting to know it a bit, then reaching back into your toolkit of tricks to get just the right set of algorithm and code. It's more of a conversation, that settles down into an agreed upon text. As time goes on, the details become nuanced, and the corner cases handled. The third audience is the humans who read the program, and those in the future (including yourself!) who might want to join the conversation. All of these people need to be able to read, and adjust, the agreed upon text, or copy it to use for some other problem. As you go, the more you keep this third audience in mind, the easier it is for them to join or even rejoin the conversation. Reviewing, there are aspects of these audiences to note: The compiler is fairly easy to satisfy, you can bang away at possibilities and tweak the code until it agrees that your words are valid. Then you can keep tweaking until you make it happy. Note however, that the compiler can be capricious, it can radically change it's opinion of your work over time. Many a story as been written here about the shock of finding that certain words or phrases are newly irritating to the compiler, or just plain unacceptable. Python is said to have gone through this phase between v2 and v3. The problem can change as well. New requirements of a wide variety can result in the need to revise the agreed upon text. The third audience can vary widely. It can be just yourself for a very short time in response to a homework or programming contest problem. It can be your coworkers, past present and future. It can be the world, if the work is open source and widely useful. It can be the users of a library, who will focus narrowly on the interface you provide, while only some dare to peek at the implementation. I find that the more I keep all three audience in mind, the better the outcome. Thank you Paul for the writing prompt. 8)
jasode 5y ago
>You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing of what's in your head, only what you wrote. [...] If you make an effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger, and when you do the news is usually bad. Disagree on that because of The Curse of Knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge The various attempts at explaining "monads", "web3", "Kubernetes", etc will still leave many smart readers exclaiming "I still don't get it." PG's own essays (e.g. wealth inequality) have been misinterpreted in HN threads.
- chunkyks 5y ago
  Every time I see some glorious "this explains git in a single image", it's usually an interesting image for someone who already understands git, yet is entirely, 100%, opaque to someone who doesn't yet know git. [This comment brought to you by a thread [1] from earlier today] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311713
  - catillac 5y ago
    I saw this earlier, and while I’ve been using git for many years, I think this graphic made me understand git less. Maybe because most of my usage is committing and resetting things and not doing the more wacky git commands?
  - asiachick 5y ago
    For me this is every youtube math video ... including 3 blue 1 brown. They only really work if you already understand
  - hinkley 5y ago
    I'm glad that DevEx is finally a 'coined term' because I've been shouting into the maelstrom for most of my career. It is so common for someone to try to gently tell someone that their system (or at least the description) is a steaming pile of self-indulgent garbage by saying something like, "I don't think that's a good idea," or "This seems pretty complicated," only for the originator to take this as an invitation to continue evangelizing (aka talking about how brilliant they are). In the age of everyone working remotely using screen sharing software, there is no excuse for not spending time watching someone try to use the tools or apis that you've ~foisted off~ given them. I wish it were just ignorance but too often it feels willful. Nothing will deflate your ego like trying in earnest to teach someone to do what you do. Or fluff it up, depending on how you choose to process that information. To repurpose an old aphorism: if you meet an idiot in the morning, you met an idiot. If you meet idiots all day, you're the idiot.
persona 5y ago
> Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience, writing is the stricter test. As pg brings it up, writing is one of the many ways to shape ideas and even change them. But I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s the stricter test. Each way of expressing and sharing ideas will test it in different ways. Writing may look for conciseness, flow and completeness while talking about it can validate ideas for collaborative building. Going a step forward, I’d suggest that putting Ideas into Action IS the stricter test.
hamiltonians 5y ago
what if you are capable of conveying your ideas in words but no one likes your content
- cosheaf 5y ago
  Do you have an example?
robrenaud 5y ago
> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. This is harsh. As someone who struggled with writing text a lot, I seriously considered dropping out of state U and going to Devry for an IT degree freshman year to avoid mandatory writing classes. I still graduated with a 3.9 as I was able to focus on CS/math and get passed the writing pre-reqs. I thoroughly enjoyed the more advanced math and theoretical CS classes, where I was spending good chunks of the weekend writing proofs. I can imagine that one gets a similar kind of understanding and joy from writing a good textual argument as writing a good proof.
default-kramer 5y ago
I agree with a lot of it, except for this: "And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial." I guess it depends your definitions of "nontrivial" and "fully formed idea". But consider all the experienced auto mechanics in the world. Few of them have written anything about it, but I'm sure I would judge most of them to have fully-formed ideas about a nontrivial topic. To generalize, I'm claiming that experience can give you fully-formed ideas whether you write or not (although writing will probably help).
- wahnfrieden 5y ago
  The author is simply projecting their own interest in their writing
  - cosheaf 5y ago
    As an author should.
- quesera 5y ago
  > I agree with a lot of it, except for this: "And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial." This is just a rephrasing of the old adage that ~"to truly understand something, you must be able to teach it to others".
- blcArmadillo 5y ago
  He touches on that in the paragraph > I'm not saying that writing is the best way to explore all ideas. If you have ideas about architecture, presumably the best way to explore them is to build actual buildings. What I'm saying is that however much you learn from exploring ideas in other ways, you'll still learn new things from writing about them.
diego 5y ago
> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. This would imply that Socrates only had trivial ideas. Socrates would disagree with this statement, and so would a large number of people. This belief seems like a cognitive bias to me. If you prefer written ideas, unwritten ideas may seem trivial to you.
- gumby 5y ago
  Well, Socrates (to the extent he actually existed) did form well reasoned arguments, but I’m sure that was truly laborious. The generalization of pg’s argument is the classic “EDGE” method (“Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, and Evaluate”). You don’t understand something until you can “fully” explain it to others. And note that our understanding of Socrates is a product of Plato. Thoughts that might have been half-baked in Socrates’ telling could be thought through and expanded by Plato through the process described in this essay. Or have been formulated de novo by Plato and then ascribed to Socrates.
- hirundo 5y ago
  I think people who can compose complete well ordered arguments in their head are like those who can play chess well while blindfolded. It's an extraordinary talent.
  - diego 5y ago
    Agree with that. However, in 2022 writing is not the only way to order your thoughts outside your head. I for example have put together Youtube videos without writing anything down. The process is like this: - Think of a point I'd want to make, perhaps in 20-60 seconds. - Do a few video takes until I believe it's good enough. Sometimes the first take works. - Keep doing it until I have enough material, then edit the video. As someone who is in his 50s though, I can understand the point of view of someone who grew up in an age in which writing was the obvious way. Paul might think differently if he tried to start a Youtube channel, but it doesn't seem to be interesting to him.
    - network2592 5y ago
dybber 5y ago
No HTTPS?
- jwogrady 5y ago
  It's a yahoo cert. The padlock says "certificate is not valid" while the cert details says "This certificate is valid". I guess that means... "Technically it's good cert, but the Google Chrome dev team doesn't like Yahoo."* *not that I disagree..... but who is making these judgement calls?
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    It'a a valid certificate for a bunch of Yahoo domains, but its use on paulgraham.com is not trusted. It should throw up a warning screen and let you click through to the site, either temporarily or permanently on a TOFU basis.
VoodooJuJu 5y ago
>And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial The unintelligible is not necessarily unintelligent -Nietzsche And in this particular piece, Mr. Graham's hyper-intelligibility seems to manifest as pseudo-intelligence.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't call names or cross into personal attack (regardless of who the person is). It's against the site guidelines, and you can make your substantive points without it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 5y ago
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xorencrypted 5y ago
The juxtaposition of a comment next to code best illustrates the real advantage natural language has. It's pretty good at moving the mind of the reader into the state intended. To convey information concisely. but isn't always right
simplegeek 5y ago
> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. Harsh. Socrates didn't write his ideas, a counter example that immediately popped up in my head.
- jyriand 5y ago
  Plato did. Just wondering, maybe the things we read about Socrates are not actually his ideas, but Plato's?
- kashyapc 5y ago
  (Reusing my comment[1] from a different thread the other day.) Many people think Socrates is "against writing" by all means. In the dialogue Phaedrus, he—well, Socrates as portrayed by Plato—does sort of say that writing is okay, as long as you're doing it in the right spirit (seeking truth) and are not deceiving your audience. What Socrates rails against is the "speechmakers" who don't truly know what they're talking about, but instead write based on "what is likely" to persuade the audience. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603526
  - slowmovintarget 5y ago
    Plato, in writing words into Socrate's mouth, was cautioning against the atrophy of the skill of memorization of oratory, which was how histories had been passed up to that time. Whether this was Plato's idea, or Socrates', the idea wasn't wrong. It was, however, irrelevant. It is acceptable for that skill to atrophy if we replace it with something far more durable. The irony of putting that in writing would not have been lost on Plato.
ar_imani 5y ago
In my experience, writing down doesn't help me develop new idea, but exploring new ways to support it or explain process as straightforward as it should be, which I can not do in my head or real-time conversation. As the author says, it takes lots of time and effort to put yourself in a stranger's mind.
deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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kashyapc 5y ago
I find this much better than PG's previous essay, "write simply"[1], even if I don't agree with all of it (e.g. see jasode's comment[2]). Meanwhile, at work I've been trying to encourage the habit of writing a 2-4 page "memo" when conveying critical decisions. It's proving difficult to root out the impulsive habit of "let's put together a shoddy slide deck with broken thoughts, and hurry through it on a call". When we're all remote, whether you like it or not, people will judge you by your words. And when you're not writing code, most of what you do is writing: design documents, proposals for budget, Git commit messages, feature requests, usage guides, investigative reports, synthesizing complex discussion threads into useful summaries, technical presentations, email, and synchronous chat. Not least of all, robust writing skills allow you to "defend" your arguments with nuance and concede with grace. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26427773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26427773 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30314144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30314144
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
'Writing is nature's way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.' - Leslie Lamport I am finding more and more intelligent people have been able to coalesce my thinking into smaller and smaller parts. I am beginning to accept meritocracy is brutal.
- contingencies 5y ago
  There's a whole section of quotes on writing with applicability to programming in https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup Personally I think Lamport's statements on the subject are hard to disagree with.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
I often bang on about Software as a form of literacy. And I have noticed recently that it is actually harder for me at work to express my thoughts in English than just to damn well write some code. I cannot work out if this is my English is declining or my coding is improving.
rschneid 5y ago
>And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. I think this argument misses a potentially deeper point about the true magical power of reading... I did resonate with the majority of the piece, however.
- lukifer 5y ago
  The risk with relying on reading alone is dogma: quoting someone else's words as being unassailable truth. I love a good quote, or aphorism, or copy-pasta'd thought technology as much as anyone. But there's profound power in understanding ideas well enough to re-formulate them in your own words, maybe even without referencing their origins. Best way to do that is practice, practice, practice.
- contingencies 5y ago
  Writing in a single language in long-form is not the only way to articulate complex ideas. While text offers great features, large blocks of it are a mode of communication that is falling out of popular use with good reason as today's world is hyper-connected and people access media more purposefully. They often come to media seeking clarity around a particular concept. In short, they usually seek objective reference information (even if it's for some highly specific issue), rather than opine. Long-form, OTOH, provides background reasoning and opine. It may be well structured and correct, but it's not the target semantic category for most itches that need to be scratched. This situation is compounded by globalization. Particularly in English, the general level of literacy is falling. Larger vocabularies and complex grammatical structures are no longer comprehensible to the majority of English readers, who are non-native. While one could challenge PG to rewrite his essays as i18n infographics, perversely this would make autonomous translation more difficult due to rasterization of text. Quip: Perhaps HTML+CSS+SVG for less-text diagramming is the upcoming communicative norm? Abstract concepts rendered as IKEA-instructions through PC genericized cuddle-bugs. It's a thing on twitter, I know. As programmers, at least when working on complex systems, we actually break large ideas in to smaller ones and use the least powerful language to tackle each of them. There is something to be said for carrying this philosophy to all communications.
dbrueck 5y ago
On a small scale, this is exactly why when I'm stuck on a development problem (an elusive bug or trying to hammer out a good design), a thorough email about it to a colleague often provides the breakthrough. Because you're taking up a co-worker's time & energy, it motivates you to lay out the problem with the right amount of context, walk through some of the tradeoffs or things you've considered, etc. And it's not unusual at all for the email to never get sent - among my closest co-workers we'll often tell each other something like, "I couldn't figure out how to fix XYZ so I wrote you a long email about it, fixed the problem, and deleted the email". (the downside is that once you've experienced this a few times, crummy problem reports from others kind of drive you crazy)
- prtkgpt 5y ago
  That’s exactly what he’s saying. The ability to put your ideas in words. Think of it as a YC application secret:)
- jasfi 5y ago
  An alternative that I have tried in the past, when stuck with a development issue, is to write an analysis of the problem. This then leads to insights, which typically reveals the way forward.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > a thorough email about it to a colleague often provides the breakthrough. This is known as "Rubber Duck Debugging": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
slowmovintarget 5y ago
"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard." ~David McCullough
- hinkley 5y ago
  I feel like this is close but no cigar. Writing well involves thinking clearly about other people. Whether I write notes to myself that are later useful is one thing. Whether anyone else knows wtf I'm talking about is a whole other kettle of fish.
  - slowmovintarget 5y ago
    In other words, you don't bother writing well when you write quick notes for yourself. So... cigar?
    - hinkley 5y ago
      Most people think they're writing for other people when they're just talking to themselves, from lack of practice, lack of concern, or a mixture of both.
arepublicadoceu 5y ago
Kinda off-topic: Can someone more knowledgeable than me on the inner workings of the web explain why Paul Graham website is one of the few(only?) website that I go where absolutely NO reader mode works? I've tried firefox, chrome, edge. I have no idea how web dev works but it seems to me that his web page looks like it was made in the late 90s or early 00s and it's almost all buttons and text. Why, oh why it's the only website that I go that defies my reader mode? Sincerely, Someone who can only read more than one paragraph of text on reader mode.
- zffr 5y ago
  Works for me on iOS safari
d--b 5y ago
Paul Graham seems like a good guy, but sometimes he drops far-reaching low-quality statements like: > And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. That’s a ridiculously strong opinion. I don’t know what the purpose of it is. Shaming people who don’t write much? Making himself feel good because he does write? Paul: if you’re reading this, will you please tone the conclusions a bit down ? It’ll make you a better writer.
- geitir 5y ago
  On the subject of writing I think your website has a double negative: "so your data never doesn't get sent to the internet."
  - d--b 5y ago
    Nice one thanks
marmot777 5y ago
When I’ve writing about something, I do find that my comprehension levels up. Part of it is writing forces a systematic treatment of a topic, revealing knowledge gaps, or even that I’m flat out wrong about something. That burst of intense focus on something does seem to stimulate the ability to make connections you hadn’t made before. I suspect part of this is because your unconscious mind is being flooded and gets to work making connections even when you’re taking a break.

209 points by prtkgpt 5y ago

It seems like a quantum effect of our consciousness, 'putting the ideas into words changed them'. It's a perpetual chase after wording, and when you reach the post, it's already far-off again. This thought sheds some insight not only only on semiology and systems of symbols in human language, but into what I've been learning writing poems, and why it's so much fun to do it, I think, because the goal of the expression is changed, or heightened, by the act of reaching or moving to it. So it's sometimes, or very often for certain comparisons, more involved than programming, in terms of working memory. On the topic of essay writing, the book Writing Under Pressure: The Quick Writing Process is a 60's university professor gem and fully informed me as to how I approach writing (and reading) nonfiction, anything which has an argument, a thesis, points to make. It turns the random churn of paragraphs into a pragmatic scientific method.

gashmol 5y ago

If you substitute writing with developing software (or prototyping) and ideas with requirements then you get great advice for making something users want. It even suggest the practice of checking requirements to be precise and complete. Intersting.

smlckz 5y ago

What else can be done about it instead of building things, writing down or talking?

jacquesm 5y ago
Destruction, listening, viewing, understanding, teaching etc.

akprasad 5y ago

As someone who writes, I can relate to a lot of this, but there are aspects that aren't true to my experience. > If you make an effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger Somewhat. Through effort I can take on a more objective perspective, but there is no platonic stranger I could pick out. Everyone has his own context and his own needs. What I try to do instead is visualize people I know who are not close friends. I think "What would X think if she were reading this?" > If he's not satisfied because you failed to mention x or didn't qualify some sentence sufficiently, then you mention x or add more qualifications I think this game is endless. There will always be a nitpicker (Hello!). I try to say enough to show that I know what I'm talking about, but beyond that I find that it chokes the broader point that I want to make. ~ For me, the real value is that writing makes language almost physical. What would normally vanish in a moment in speech becomes something you can touch, sculpt, and rearrange. And in doing so you're forced to contend with the form of it and really think through every word, and every train of thought ("Is this really what I want to say? Is this really how I should say it?"). I think this can be done in speech as well if you're in a true debate with someone who cares about language, but it's much harder. And depending on your temperament, there's a "those who can't do teach" problem where writing about something makes you feel like an expert on it. As always, the important thing is to act.

hodgesrm 5y ago
> Somewhat. Through effort I can take on a more objective perspective, but there is no platonic stranger I could pick out. Everyone has his own context and his own needs. What I try to do instead is visualize people I know who are not close friends. I think "What would X think if she were reading this?" Writing something down and then ignoring it for a few days is another way to get a fresh view of your writing and see the problems. Not an original idea: one of my profs in grad school suggested it. Best writing advice I've ever received. (Like every acolyte in history I of course ignored it at the time.)
- inerte 5y ago
  Taika Waititi has an extreme (imho) version of that https://www.tiktok.com/@outstandingscreenplays/video/7057217253212720389?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&q=TAIKA%20WAITITI&t=1644725076796 https://www.tiktok.com/@outstandingscreenplays/video/7057217... . He will write something and put it aside for several years than re-read and re-write.

kwhitefoot 5y ago

Firefox tells me: "Web sites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for paulgraham.com. The certificate is only valid for the following names: .store.yahoo.com, .csell.store.yahoo.net, .store.yahoo.net, .us-dc1-edit.store.yahoo.net, .us-dc1.csell.store.yahoo.net, .us-dc2-edit.store.yahoo.net, .us-dc2.csell.store.yahoo.net, store.yahoo.com, store.yahoo.net, .stores.yahoo.net, stores.yahoo.net Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN" Does anyone else see this?

aliceryhl 5y ago
You probably have a plugin that translates http links into https.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  I do.
samwillis 5y ago
A little trivia for those that don’t know, PGs site is hosted on Yahoo Store as that is what Viaweb (his first startup) became when it was acquired by Yahoo in the mid 90s.
zozbot234 5y ago
The certificate is untrusted for the domain, but Firefox should let you click through the warning screen and view the page. Or you can adjust the URL to use http:

TameAntelope 5y ago

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.

tpoacher 5y ago
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.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  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.

mikewarot 5y ago

>In precisely defined domains it's possible to form complete ideas in your head. People can play chess in their heads, for example. And mathematicians can do some amount of math in their heads, though they don't seem to feel sure of a proof over a certain length till they write it down. But this only seems possible with ideas you can express in a formal language. For me, at least, programming falls into this category of writing. The difference, however, is that when you're programming, you have three audiences to satisfy. They are, the compiler (or interpreter), the problem to solve, and other programmers. Over time, the writing becomes part of a conversation, as I'll explain below. The compiler, the first audience, is the one that beginning programs bang their heads against the most. It can have any number of arcane and complex rules and interactions to learn about, and practice, before you can reliably get the compiler to accept your work as valid. The problem is the audience we're paid to satisfy. It requires that you end up with a workable answer given workable inputs. Satisfying it requires getting to know it a bit, then reaching back into your toolkit of tricks to get just the right set of algorithm and code. It's more of a conversation, that settles down into an agreed upon text. As time goes on, the details become nuanced, and the corner cases handled. The third audience is the humans who read the program, and those in the future (including yourself!) who might want to join the conversation. All of these people need to be able to read, and adjust, the agreed upon text, or copy it to use for some other problem. As you go, the more you keep this third audience in mind, the easier it is for them to join or even rejoin the conversation. Reviewing, there are aspects of these audiences to note: The compiler is fairly easy to satisfy, you can bang away at possibilities and tweak the code until it agrees that your words are valid. Then you can keep tweaking until you make it happy. Note however, that the compiler can be capricious, it can radically change it's opinion of your work over time. Many a story as been written here about the shock of finding that certain words or phrases are newly irritating to the compiler, or just plain unacceptable. Python is said to have gone through this phase between v2 and v3. The problem can change as well. New requirements of a wide variety can result in the need to revise the agreed upon text. The third audience can vary widely. It can be just yourself for a very short time in response to a homework or programming contest problem. It can be your coworkers, past present and future. It can be the world, if the work is open source and widely useful. It can be the users of a library, who will focus narrowly on the interface you provide, while only some dare to peek at the implementation. I find that the more I keep all three audience in mind, the better the outcome. Thank you Paul for the writing prompt. 8)

jasode 5y ago

>You have to pretend to be a neutral reader who knows nothing of what's in your head, only what you wrote. [...] If you make an effort, you can read your writing as if you were a complete stranger, and when you do the news is usually bad. Disagree on that because of The Curse of Knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge The various attempts at explaining "monads", "web3", "Kubernetes", etc will still leave many smart readers exclaiming "I still don't get it." PG's own essays (e.g. wealth inequality) have been misinterpreted in HN threads.

chunkyks 5y ago
Every time I see some glorious "this explains git in a single image", it's usually an interesting image for someone who already understands git, yet is entirely, 100%, opaque to someone who doesn't yet know git. [This comment brought to you by a thread [1] from earlier today] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311713
- catillac 5y ago
  I saw this earlier, and while I’ve been using git for many years, I think this graphic made me understand git less. Maybe because most of my usage is committing and resetting things and not doing the more wacky git commands?
- asiachick 5y ago
  For me this is every youtube math video ... including 3 blue 1 brown. They only really work if you already understand
- hinkley 5y ago
  I'm glad that DevEx is finally a 'coined term' because I've been shouting into the maelstrom for most of my career. It is so common for someone to try to gently tell someone that their system (or at least the description) is a steaming pile of self-indulgent garbage by saying something like, "I don't think that's a good idea," or "This seems pretty complicated," only for the originator to take this as an invitation to continue evangelizing (aka talking about how brilliant they are). In the age of everyone working remotely using screen sharing software, there is no excuse for not spending time watching someone try to use the tools or apis that you've ~foisted off~ given them. I wish it were just ignorance but too often it feels willful. Nothing will deflate your ego like trying in earnest to teach someone to do what you do. Or fluff it up, depending on how you choose to process that information. To repurpose an old aphorism: if you meet an idiot in the morning, you met an idiot. If you meet idiots all day, you're the idiot.

persona 5y ago

> Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience, writing is the stricter test. As pg brings it up, writing is one of the many ways to shape ideas and even change them. But I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s the stricter test. Each way of expressing and sharing ideas will test it in different ways. Writing may look for conciseness, flow and completeness while talking about it can validate ideas for collaborative building. Going a step forward, I’d suggest that putting Ideas into Action IS the stricter test.

hamiltonians 5y ago

what if you are capable of conveying your ideas in words but no one likes your content

cosheaf 5y ago
Do you have an example?

robrenaud 5y ago

> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. This is harsh. As someone who struggled with writing text a lot, I seriously considered dropping out of state U and going to Devry for an IT degree freshman year to avoid mandatory writing classes. I still graduated with a 3.9 as I was able to focus on CS/math and get passed the writing pre-reqs. I thoroughly enjoyed the more advanced math and theoretical CS classes, where I was spending good chunks of the weekend writing proofs. I can imagine that one gets a similar kind of understanding and joy from writing a good textual argument as writing a good proof.

default-kramer 5y ago

I agree with a lot of it, except for this: "And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial." I guess it depends your definitions of "nontrivial" and "fully formed idea". But consider all the experienced auto mechanics in the world. Few of them have written anything about it, but I'm sure I would judge most of them to have fully-formed ideas about a nontrivial topic. To generalize, I'm claiming that experience can give you fully-formed ideas whether you write or not (although writing will probably help).

wahnfrieden 5y ago
The author is simply projecting their own interest in their writing
- cosheaf 5y ago
  As an author should.
quesera 5y ago
> I agree with a lot of it, except for this: "And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial." This is just a rephrasing of the old adage that ~"to truly understand something, you must be able to teach it to others".
blcArmadillo 5y ago
He touches on that in the paragraph > I'm not saying that writing is the best way to explore all ideas. If you have ideas about architecture, presumably the best way to explore them is to build actual buildings. What I'm saying is that however much you learn from exploring ideas in other ways, you'll still learn new things from writing about them.

diego 5y ago

> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. This would imply that Socrates only had trivial ideas. Socrates would disagree with this statement, and so would a large number of people. This belief seems like a cognitive bias to me. If you prefer written ideas, unwritten ideas may seem trivial to you.

gumby 5y ago
Well, Socrates (to the extent he actually existed) did form well reasoned arguments, but I’m sure that was truly laborious. The generalization of pg’s argument is the classic “EDGE” method (“Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, and Evaluate”). You don’t understand something until you can “fully” explain it to others. And note that our understanding of Socrates is a product of Plato. Thoughts that might have been half-baked in Socrates’ telling could be thought through and expanded by Plato through the process described in this essay. Or have been formulated de novo by Plato and then ascribed to Socrates.
hirundo 5y ago
I think people who can compose complete well ordered arguments in their head are like those who can play chess well while blindfolded. It's an extraordinary talent.
- diego 5y ago
  Agree with that. However, in 2022 writing is not the only way to order your thoughts outside your head. I for example have put together Youtube videos without writing anything down. The process is like this: - Think of a point I'd want to make, perhaps in 20-60 seconds. - Do a few video takes until I believe it's good enough. Sometimes the first take works. - Keep doing it until I have enough material, then edit the video. As someone who is in his 50s though, I can understand the point of view of someone who grew up in an age in which writing was the obvious way. Paul might think differently if he tried to start a Youtube channel, but it doesn't seem to be interesting to him.
  - network2592 5y ago

dybber 5y ago

No HTTPS?

jwogrady 5y ago
It's a yahoo cert. The padlock says "certificate is not valid" while the cert details says "This certificate is valid". I guess that means... "Technically it's good cert, but the Google Chrome dev team doesn't like Yahoo."* *not that I disagree..... but who is making these judgement calls?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  It'a a valid certificate for a bunch of Yahoo domains, but its use on paulgraham.com is not trusted. It should throw up a warning screen and let you click through to the site, either temporarily or permanently on a TOFU basis.

VoodooJuJu 5y ago

>And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial The unintelligible is not necessarily unintelligent -Nietzsche And in this particular piece, Mr. Graham's hyper-intelligibility seems to manifest as pseudo-intelligence.

dang 5y ago
Please don't call names or cross into personal attack (regardless of who the person is). It's against the site guidelines, and you can make your substantive points without it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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xorencrypted 5y ago

The juxtaposition of a comment next to code best illustrates the real advantage natural language has. It's pretty good at moving the mind of the reader into the state intended. To convey information concisely. but isn't always right

simplegeek 5y ago

> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. Harsh. Socrates didn't write his ideas, a counter example that immediately popped up in my head.

jyriand 5y ago
Plato did. Just wondering, maybe the things we read about Socrates are not actually his ideas, but Plato's?
kashyapc 5y ago
(Reusing my comment[1] from a different thread the other day.) Many people think Socrates is "against writing" by all means. In the dialogue Phaedrus, he—well, Socrates as portrayed by Plato—does sort of say that writing is okay, as long as you're doing it in the right spirit (seeking truth) and are not deceiving your audience. What Socrates rails against is the "speechmakers" who don't truly know what they're talking about, but instead write based on "what is likely" to persuade the audience. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29603526
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  Plato, in writing words into Socrate's mouth, was cautioning against the atrophy of the skill of memorization of oratory, which was how histories had been passed up to that time. Whether this was Plato's idea, or Socrates', the idea wasn't wrong. It was, however, irrelevant. It is acceptable for that skill to atrophy if we replace it with something far more durable. The irony of putting that in writing would not have been lost on Plato.

ar_imani 5y ago

In my experience, writing down doesn't help me develop new idea, but exploring new ways to support it or explain process as straightforward as it should be, which I can not do in my head or real-time conversation. As the author says, it takes lots of time and effort to put yourself in a stranger's mind.

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kashyapc 5y ago

I find this much better than PG's previous essay, "write simply"[1], even if I don't agree with all of it (e.g. see jasode's comment[2]). Meanwhile, at work I've been trying to encourage the habit of writing a 2-4 page "memo" when conveying critical decisions. It's proving difficult to root out the impulsive habit of "let's put together a shoddy slide deck with broken thoughts, and hurry through it on a call". When we're all remote, whether you like it or not, people will judge you by your words. And when you're not writing code, most of what you do is writing: design documents, proposals for budget, Git commit messages, feature requests, usage guides, investigative reports, synthesizing complex discussion threads into useful summaries, technical presentations, email, and synchronous chat. Not least of all, robust writing skills allow you to "defend" your arguments with nuance and concede with grace. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26427773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26427773 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30314144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30314144

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

'Writing is nature's way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.' - Leslie Lamport I am finding more and more intelligent people have been able to coalesce my thinking into smaller and smaller parts. I am beginning to accept meritocracy is brutal.

contingencies 5y ago
There's a whole section of quotes on writing with applicability to programming in https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup Personally I think Lamport's statements on the subject are hard to disagree with.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

I often bang on about Software as a form of literacy. And I have noticed recently that it is actually harder for me at work to express my thoughts in English than just to damn well write some code. I cannot work out if this is my English is declining or my coding is improving.

rschneid 5y ago

>And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. I think this argument misses a potentially deeper point about the true magical power of reading... I did resonate with the majority of the piece, however.

lukifer 5y ago
The risk with relying on reading alone is dogma: quoting someone else's words as being unassailable truth. I love a good quote, or aphorism, or copy-pasta'd thought technology as much as anyone. But there's profound power in understanding ideas well enough to re-formulate them in your own words, maybe even without referencing their origins. Best way to do that is practice, practice, practice.
contingencies 5y ago
Writing in a single language in long-form is not the only way to articulate complex ideas. While text offers great features, large blocks of it are a mode of communication that is falling out of popular use with good reason as today's world is hyper-connected and people access media more purposefully. They often come to media seeking clarity around a particular concept. In short, they usually seek objective reference information (even if it's for some highly specific issue), rather than opine. Long-form, OTOH, provides background reasoning and opine. It may be well structured and correct, but it's not the target semantic category for most itches that need to be scratched. This situation is compounded by globalization. Particularly in English, the general level of literacy is falling. Larger vocabularies and complex grammatical structures are no longer comprehensible to the majority of English readers, who are non-native. While one could challenge PG to rewrite his essays as i18n infographics, perversely this would make autonomous translation more difficult due to rasterization of text. Quip: Perhaps HTML+CSS+SVG for less-text diagramming is the upcoming communicative norm? Abstract concepts rendered as IKEA-instructions through PC genericized cuddle-bugs. It's a thing on twitter, I know. As programmers, at least when working on complex systems, we actually break large ideas in to smaller ones and use the least powerful language to tackle each of them. There is something to be said for carrying this philosophy to all communications.

dbrueck 5y ago

On a small scale, this is exactly why when I'm stuck on a development problem (an elusive bug or trying to hammer out a good design), a thorough email about it to a colleague often provides the breakthrough. Because you're taking up a co-worker's time & energy, it motivates you to lay out the problem with the right amount of context, walk through some of the tradeoffs or things you've considered, etc. And it's not unusual at all for the email to never get sent - among my closest co-workers we'll often tell each other something like, "I couldn't figure out how to fix XYZ so I wrote you a long email about it, fixed the problem, and deleted the email". (the downside is that once you've experienced this a few times, crummy problem reports from others kind of drive you crazy)

prtkgpt 5y ago
That’s exactly what he’s saying. The ability to put your ideas in words. Think of it as a YC application secret:)
jasfi 5y ago
An alternative that I have tried in the past, when stuck with a development issue, is to write an analysis of the problem. This then leads to insights, which typically reveals the way forward.
webmaven 5y ago
> a thorough email about it to a colleague often provides the breakthrough. This is known as "Rubber Duck Debugging": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

slowmovintarget 5y ago

"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard." ~David McCullough

hinkley 5y ago
I feel like this is close but no cigar. Writing well involves thinking clearly about other people. Whether I write notes to myself that are later useful is one thing. Whether anyone else knows wtf I'm talking about is a whole other kettle of fish.
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  In other words, you don't bother writing well when you write quick notes for yourself. So... cigar?
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Most people think they're writing for other people when they're just talking to themselves, from lack of practice, lack of concern, or a mixture of both.

arepublicadoceu 5y ago

Kinda off-topic: Can someone more knowledgeable than me on the inner workings of the web explain why Paul Graham website is one of the few(only?) website that I go where absolutely NO reader mode works? I've tried firefox, chrome, edge. I have no idea how web dev works but it seems to me that his web page looks like it was made in the late 90s or early 00s and it's almost all buttons and text. Why, oh why it's the only website that I go that defies my reader mode? Sincerely, Someone who can only read more than one paragraph of text on reader mode.

zffr 5y ago
Works for me on iOS safari

d--b 5y ago

Paul Graham seems like a good guy, but sometimes he drops far-reaching low-quality statements like: > And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. That’s a ridiculously strong opinion. I don’t know what the purpose of it is. Shaming people who don’t write much? Making himself feel good because he does write? Paul: if you’re reading this, will you please tone the conclusions a bit down ? It’ll make you a better writer.

geitir 5y ago
On the subject of writing I think your website has a double negative: "so your data never doesn't get sent to the internet."
- d--b 5y ago
  Nice one thanks

marmot777 5y ago

When I’ve writing about something, I do find that my comprehension levels up. Part of it is writing forces a systematic treatment of a topic, revealing knowledge gaps, or even that I’m flat out wrong about something. That burst of intense focus on something does seem to stimulate the ability to make connections you hadn’t made before. I suspect part of this is because your unconscious mind is being flooded and gets to work making connections even when you’re taking a break.