5 ms·

When historian Charles Weiner looked over a pile of Richard Feynman’s notebooks, he called them a wonderful ‘record of his day-to-day work’. “No, no!”, Feynman

When historian Charles Weiner looked over a pile of Richard Feynman’s notebooks, he called them a wonderful ‘record of his day-to-day work’. “No, no!”, Feynman objected strongly. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.” “Well,” Weiner said, “The work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?”, Feynman explained. From Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson

herbertl 4y ago
Thanks so much for sharing this, I really appreciate it! If/when I write a follow up to this piece, I'll need to include this story and read Thompson's book. That fragment you shared reminds me of what consultant/author/teacher Roger Martin wrote at Medium: > The most important advice I ever received on writing was from a fellow named Bernie Avishai, a great writer/editor and friend, to whom I was complaining about how much editing my writing took. He observed that the reason that I was complaining about editing was that I probably believed that I thought in order to write. My response was “Duh, of course, I think in order to write.” Bernie explained that instead, one writes to think. The human mind can only think so much without seeing a written manifestation of its thinking. You need to write down your thinking, however primitive, in order to be able to look at it and say: “That is not quite right.” Then you will be able to figure out how to make it better. And then by looking at the resulting improvement, you will be capable of saying: “That is still not quite right.” And so on, until it is a much more sophisticated view of your thinking. The lesson for me is that editing is a feature of the writing process, not a bug. Now, I don’t begrudge editing. I realize that it is just part of the process of helping me think. I love the process of editing! Nothing that anyone sees from me on Medium has been edited less than a dozen times. Each time, it is a slightly better expression of what is in my head. Via: https://medium.com/creators-hub/the-management-strategist-who-wrote-for-a-year-straight-d34be01c6dac https://medium.com/creators-hub/the-management-strategist-wh...
- TaXaZ 4y ago
  wholeheartedly agree, just it's not "getting better at representing what I thought". Instead, it's a tool of thought process, which is dynamic. These to interwoven in a dynamic relation and it's hard to separate them.
- itsmemattchung 4y ago
  As Neil Strauss puts it, "the true art of writing is in the revising." First draft you start with a clay (the first draft) and in the second pass, you revise, sculpting the clay, attempting to edit through an ideal reader's eyes.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    Also the best way to write good software. First wrote bad code that works, then fix what's wrong with it.
    - hvs 4y ago
      I agree. Especially when you don't really know how something is going to work. So many times when I'm working on a hard problem, coding out half a solution makes the rest of it naturally fall out (or show that I was completely wrong) without having to consciously think about it.
    - dspillett 4y ago
      1. Make it work. 2. Make it work *right*. 3. Make it work fast. (4. Make it work right again…)
      - BurningFrog 4y ago
        I put a "make it readable" step in there somewhere, but basically that's the cycle.
    - hbrn 4y ago
      Unfortunately a lot of folks I met fall into this trap: I'm a senior engineer with XX years of experience, I cannot write bad code. Still haven't found a good way to convince them.
im3w1l 4y ago
Basically chinese room.
beefield 4y ago
Vast majority of the gray goo in our heads is dumb as f*ck and can't hold a coherent thought more complicated than "I am hungry" together other than by accident. That's why writing is a superpower for thinking. It freezes concepts down and you are able to return and rethink them from more than one angle. Of course, mathematics is a thinking superpower on another level, and programming yet another level of superpowers of thinking. Which is why it would be important to teach basics of programming to everyone. Not so that all become software developers, but to tech them to think. Like writing and math is not teached because all should become authors or mathematicians.
mbar84 4y ago
I think Feynman would have loved excalidraw. I find it very difficult to sort my thinking in a text editor, even though I find the mechanical process of writing is much better there. I'd say there's still quite some room left here for authoring tools, but excalidraw + vim is the best I have atm.
- sleightofmind 4y ago
  Thank you for mentioning excalidraw. That's pretty tempting at $6/mo if paid yearly -- yeah, I know I can use it for free. To be able to produce a quick sketch on any computer, anywhere, and quickly share it is pretty nifty. I'm kind of astounded by what people do in browsers nowadays. Even more surprised that those things are so often no longer clunky in the slightest. And vim? Yeah. Wouldn't want to live without it, though I'm not going to argue it's better than any other capable editor. It's okay to like something just because, right?
beltsazar 4y ago
It's similar to what I've read from "The Information" by James Gleick. (It's a very intriguing book, esp. for people with CS background.) > The written word—the persistent word—was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it. It was the trigger for a wholesale, irreversible change in the human psyche—psyche being the word favored by Socrates/Plato as they struggled to understand. > [...] > Spoken words also transport information, but not with the self-consciousness that writing brings. Literate people take for granted their own awareness of words, along with the array of word-related machinery: classification, reference, definition. Before literacy, there is nothing obvious about such techniques. "Try to explain to me what a tree is," Luria says, and a peasant replies, "Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is, they don't need me telling them."

herbertl 4y ago

Thanks so much for sharing this, I really appreciate it! If/when I write a follow up to this piece, I'll need to include this story and read Thompson's book. That fragment you shared reminds me of what consultant/author/teacher Roger Martin wrote at Medium: > The most important advice I ever received on writing was from a fellow named Bernie Avishai, a great writer/editor and friend, to whom I was complaining about how much editing my writing took. He observed that the reason that I was complaining about editing was that I probably believed that I thought in order to write. My response was “Duh, of course, I think in order to write.” Bernie explained that instead, one writes to think. The human mind can only think so much without seeing a written manifestation of its thinking. You need to write down your thinking, however primitive, in order to be able to look at it and say: “That is not quite right.” Then you will be able to figure out how to make it better. And then by looking at the resulting improvement, you will be capable of saying: “That is still not quite right.” And so on, until it is a much more sophisticated view of your thinking. The lesson for me is that editing is a feature of the writing process, not a bug. Now, I don’t begrudge editing. I realize that it is just part of the process of helping me think. I love the process of editing! Nothing that anyone sees from me on Medium has been edited less than a dozen times. Each time, it is a slightly better expression of what is in my head. Via: https://medium.com/creators-hub/the-management-strategist-who-wrote-for-a-year-straight-d34be01c6dac https://medium.com/creators-hub/the-management-strategist-wh...

TaXaZ 4y ago
wholeheartedly agree, just it's not "getting better at representing what I thought". Instead, it's a tool of thought process, which is dynamic. These to interwoven in a dynamic relation and it's hard to separate them.
itsmemattchung 4y ago
As Neil Strauss puts it, "the true art of writing is in the revising." First draft you start with a clay (the first draft) and in the second pass, you revise, sculpting the clay, attempting to edit through an ideal reader's eyes.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Also the best way to write good software. First wrote bad code that works, then fix what's wrong with it.
  - hvs 4y ago
    I agree. Especially when you don't really know how something is going to work. So many times when I'm working on a hard problem, coding out half a solution makes the rest of it naturally fall out (or show that I was completely wrong) without having to consciously think about it.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    1. Make it work. 2. Make it work *right*. 3. Make it work fast. (4. Make it work right again…)
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      I put a "make it readable" step in there somewhere, but basically that's the cycle.
  - hbrn 4y ago
    Unfortunately a lot of folks I met fall into this trap: I'm a senior engineer with XX years of experience, I cannot write bad code. Still haven't found a good way to convince them.

im3w1l 4y ago

Basically chinese room.

beefield 4y ago

Vast majority of the gray goo in our heads is dumb as f*ck and can't hold a coherent thought more complicated than "I am hungry" together other than by accident. That's why writing is a superpower for thinking. It freezes concepts down and you are able to return and rethink them from more than one angle. Of course, mathematics is a thinking superpower on another level, and programming yet another level of superpowers of thinking. Which is why it would be important to teach basics of programming to everyone. Not so that all become software developers, but to tech them to think. Like writing and math is not teached because all should become authors or mathematicians.

mbar84 4y ago

I think Feynman would have loved excalidraw. I find it very difficult to sort my thinking in a text editor, even though I find the mechanical process of writing is much better there. I'd say there's still quite some room left here for authoring tools, but excalidraw + vim is the best I have atm.

sleightofmind 4y ago
Thank you for mentioning excalidraw. That's pretty tempting at $6/mo if paid yearly -- yeah, I know I can use it for free. To be able to produce a quick sketch on any computer, anywhere, and quickly share it is pretty nifty. I'm kind of astounded by what people do in browsers nowadays. Even more surprised that those things are so often no longer clunky in the slightest. And vim? Yeah. Wouldn't want to live without it, though I'm not going to argue it's better than any other capable editor. It's okay to like something just because, right?

beltsazar 4y ago

It's similar to what I've read from "The Information" by James Gleick. (It's a very intriguing book, esp. for people with CS background.) > The written word—the persistent word—was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it. It was the trigger for a wholesale, irreversible change in the human psyche—psyche being the word favored by Socrates/Plato as they struggled to understand. > [...] > Spoken words also transport information, but not with the self-consciousness that writing brings. Literate people take for granted their own awareness of words, along with the array of word-related machinery: classification, reference, definition. Before literacy, there is nothing obvious about such techniques. "Try to explain to me what a tree is," Luria says, and a peasant replies, "Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is, they don't need me telling them."