12 ms·

The Need to Read

480 points by ignoramous 4y ago

sixstringtheory 4y ago
I find the quality of my thinking is much higher when writing by hand, but it’s so slow I feel like I get down a particular path and forget so many of the other things I was considering in parallel. I can type much faster than I can write but it feels like a messier thought process. It feels more like jamming a gearbox, while writing by hand feels like a smooth shifting bicycle, with the wind in my hair. Should I try dictation and then writing it down later? Or typing up my handwritten notes after writing them? Any other ideas?
- zktrust 4y ago
  you must be much older than me. i never had a chance to handwrite my notes or thoughts. all goes to straigh to typing. I fear though my generation and future generations are missing out substantially.
  - itisit 4y ago
    > i never had a chance to handwrite my notes or thoughts. Really? Yet to come across a pen and paper in your however many years of life? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are those things so exceedingly anachronistic to you that you'd be at a loss? I'm sorry, but I feel you're being disingenuous.
  - thenerdhead 4y ago
    I rediscovered this at 27. Used to do everything with a keyboard or recorder. It’s very powerful although I do my handwriting on an iPad with a pencil.
zktrust 4y ago
have you seen nassim taleb's recent comments about this guy? Taleb while harsh, always is truthful to the truth. I'm too young to know the story behind Hacker News and ycombinator, but reading some of the recent stuff makes me question prevailing sentiments about PG.
- TekMol 4y ago
  How about an excercise in writing? Instead of referring to "comments" by someone else, tell us your own thoughts. What is the prevailing sentiment you see? And how do you question it?
- vortegne 4y ago
  I think they're both egomaniacs who treat their own word as gospel. PG is just less brash about it, so comes off as more "reasonable" to many. I think they're both just prime examples of survivorship bias and I try to avoid any of their opinions at all times. Of course, sometimes curiosity takes over, but I never leave feeling good after reading anything they have to say.
- bustedblade 4y ago
  read all of PG's stuff.. promise you will think otherwise. Taleb's books is hilarious and insightful but PG's essays convey those same truths and many more in a much more succinct format.
- throwboi123 4y ago
  Link?
  - zktrust 4y ago
    u mean for the tweet? google please. there are many.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
wskish 4y ago
Here is the output of GPT reading and summarizing this (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363). Model seems to be hallucinating the author. Any thoughts on how to improve it? "The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of a science fiction book in which reading has been replaced by a more efficient method of knowledge transfer. He argues that even if such a method existed, it would be insufficient because it would not allow for the kind of discovery that writing does. He concludes that people who want to have ideas can't afford not to read."
- TekMol 4y ago
  Does GPT-3 offer summaries out of the box? Or do you do it by a prompt like "The summary of the text above is:"?
  - wskish 4y ago
    we are strategically prompting it as such: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750013 open to all ideas here
    - TekMol 4y ago
      Is a "prompt prefix" a thing in GPT-3 or do you mean you combine that prefix with the text of the page into a prompt?
      - wskish 4y ago
        We prepend the prompt prefix to the page text to create the actual model prompt. GPT doesn't have any such abstraction.
        TekMol 4y ago
        And GPT-3 remembers the prefix at the end of a long story and writes a summary? That sounds very surprising to me. I would have strongly expected it continues the story.
jholman 4y ago
I think there is clear historical evidence that this thesis is, at a minimum, greatly exaggerated. Socrates never wrote, and I think he had more good ideas than Paul Graham ever will. Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful. I mean, I do personally find that writing is a powerful tool for thinking. Maybe that means that Paul Graham and I are normal, and Socrates and Muhammad were atypical. But maybe it says more about humans-in-our-society than it does about the essential human condition. If humans learned "by tape" (as per the SF books from the Silver Age, referenced in TFA's opening para), maybe idea-production would work along different lines. I admit, I tend to agree with him about the usefulness of writing. But I think it's just an irrational intuition, not the clear argument he implies.
- Arisaka1 4y ago
  Socrates had the ancient agora, which was (oversimplifying) a group of experts gathering in the same place bouncing off ideas from each other verbally. It's time to stop discounting the role of one's environment in personal growth.
- eternalban 4y ago
  > Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful. He used to take retreats in the caves near Mecca to meditate and reflect. It was during one of these sessions that he later claimed that he was overwhelmed with the inescapable presence of archangel Gabriel who commanded him to "Read!". This directive of Gabriel to Mohammad is held to be the first verse of the divine revelation in Islam. Read! In the Name of your Lord Who created Created Man(kind) from a clot of blood Read! And your Lord is Ar-Rahman Who Taught by the 'Pen' Taugh Man(kind) that which he knew not. [Q.96 'Al-Alaq'] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_first_revelation#The_first_revelation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_first_revelation#... As mentioned in a comment to a dup post, Paul is neglecting the reflect phase. For some this occurs prior to writing. Others, take time when writing to pause and reflect. p.s. > Muhammad was not even literate We do know that he dictated and others wrote messages [correspondences] that were sent. So no records of him writing, but this was not an uneducated man. He was a merchant, traveled, and conversed with other men at markets, oasis rest stops along the trade route. (And he was not a frivolous man.) The reason Muhammad is said to have been "illiterate" is because Qur'an refers to him (yes, it is the most meta book I've ever read) as "the un-lettered Prophet". "Ummi". Personally, I think this is a misreading, since these are technical terms (like 'Pen' in above cited verses), and 'letter' refers to the 'mystic letters* given to Moses'. i.e. Mohammad the Gentile Prophet. The prophet for the un-Lettered, the Gentile. *consult your local Rabbi :) https://aish.com/the-mystical-power-of-hebrew-letters/ https://aish.com/the-mystical-power-of-hebrew-letters/
sagz 4y ago
His first reference around audiobooks it's particularly resonating, in so far as to express, record and iterate ideas with mind maps! Mind maps, sketches, doodles, mocks, are ineffably (pun intended) great at having good ideas.
ChaitanyaSai 4y ago
“Quantum entanglement” / “quantitative easing” Can we think of a substitute to writing that will allow us to coin these phrases (which in turn sit on a stack of coined sequences of syllables) and make them stick? Speech can communicate writing in its entirety. But in committing to paper, we take these fleeting streams (sequences) of thoughts and sounds, let them live outside our limited working memories, and allow for new meanings and ideas to emerge and breathe and survive. With far greater likelihood and frequency than speech alone. Fascinating to think about what invention might make writing obsolete. Will have to be something that allows for effortless creation and storage of new sequences of old ideas…
- marcusverus 4y ago
  IMO, the need to express new ideas by combining or redefining old words is a bug in natural language, rather than a feature. It makes communication less precise and that imprecision is prone to gamesmanship. An example is the attempt by some, in the US, to redefine the meaning of “equality” in the context of our political system, from the traditional “equality under the law” to “equality of outcome”. This sort of persuasion by redefinition, in which you take a word attached to a popular idea and hijack/redirect it to your pet idea, is a Jedi-mind-trick which is enabled by the ambiguity of natural language. A more rational system of communication, in which distinct ideas were represented by distinct, immutable symbols, rather than combinations/reuses of old symbols, would make for vastly superior communication—-if we could wrap our brains around such a thing!
npunt 4y ago
There’s much more to the story than writing is a way of thinking, and reading is a big input into writing. Specifically, how each interplay with ideas, as most of us after all are in the business of creating things. And here, the most important bit is not reading, its curiosity. Curiosity about others’ ideas drives reading, curiosity about one’s own ideas drives writing. The time we spend chasing each type of curiosity is important. If we want to create, reading must have it’s limits, and sometimes pretty harsh limits, else we’ll be infected with others ideas about everything. Some choice quotes on this: "When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process..." "This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid." - Arthur Schopenhauer "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking" - Albert Einstein "If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts." - Dick Hamming EDIT: On the other hand, if you first principles all your thinking and just write write write, you may spend hours on something that could be understood and moved on from in seconds. This meme explains the reading/writing spectrum quite well: https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/vwq8yh/this_true/ https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/vwq8yh/this_true/
- dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
  Excuse me if this is rude but there is an irony to using others' words to argue one should think for themselves more.
  - woolion 4y ago
    It's a variant on the 'doubt paradox' (somebody telling you "you should not believe everything people tell you") itself a variant of the Epimenides paradox (simply known as the liar paradox): a bunch of people who have read more than you tell you to be careful about not reading too much.
unixhero 4y ago
Does HackerNews count as reading?
- ignoramous 4y ago
  The front page posts? May be. The comments section? Not really.
  - INeedMoreRam 4y ago
    Some comments are better written than posts so to disqualify them as not reading is disingenuous.
personjerry 4y ago
It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing. And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to write. It really forces you to address your ideas more formulaically and concretizes your theses. Start a blog! If you're reading this chances are you know how to buy a domain and spin up a blog in less than 30 minutes. Try Wordpress, or hugo with templates if you want more control. And if you don't know what to write about, this link was recently shared on HN, I thought it was pretty useful: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ And yes, it's important to publish it. It makes your thoughts real. And ideas were meant to be shared.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sasha_fishter 4y ago
  Simon Willson explanation is actually really good. Thank you for sharing this!
- syliconadder 4y ago
  I think this level of kindness makes it easy for people to feel okay expressing themselves. Thank you for this beautiful message.
- johnny_reilly 4y ago
  What Simon said! I've found that blogging hugely helps me clarify my own thinking on a topic, and flush out areas of ignorance. Another excellent option for making getting going with blogging simple is Docusaurus - makes it very easy to get up and running! https://docusaurus.io https://docusaurus.io
  - slorber 4y ago
    Yes, great choice :)
copperx 4y ago
Citations are needed for such bold claims if PG wants to be persuasive.
- shmageggy 4y ago
  I've noticed SV rich guys never use citations (Sam Altman is another that comes to mind), probably because of the uncritical fawning they receive regardless. Why bother backing up what you say with evidence when the audience doesn't demand it.
knome 4y ago
Asimov had a nice short story about taped knowledge, "Profession". It's a really good read.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Interesting, but nostalgic. Magical brain upload technology would likely require AI, and would almost certainly include assistive cognition - the use of technology to automate and speed up learning and original thought. We're edging towards a revolution that will be more of a disruption than the invention of print. Instead of thoughts that are "manually" generated and externalised as static symbols - albeit electronically distributed - thinking and learning will be automated and integrated. You can use Wikipedia to access a lot of human knowledge. But imagine a meta-Wikipedia that would integrate and summarise an entire domain, combined with assistive cognition that made it possible to hold that summary in your head as a single perceptual entity. You wouldn't just have the skills offered by domain competence, but you would also be able to look for trends and patterns, compare the domain with others, expand the "shape" with new features in creative but congruent ways, and so on.
sn41 4y ago
Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. - Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" [1] [1] http://www.literaturepage.com/read/francis-bacon-essays-102.html http://www.literaturepage.com/read/francis-bacon-essays-102....
euroderf 4y ago
Related: a GTTW Loop (gripe-think-try-write loop). When I'm stuck on a technical problem, I start writing a grumpy email to the support-PoC. I anticipate their questions and find the answers and add them into the email. This is repeated as necessary. It's not unusual then that at some point the answer magically drops into my lap and the grumpy email is tossed into the gripe-recycler.
jawadch93 4y ago
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Joeyjoejoe24 4y ago
"You can't think well without writing well" What about socrates, epictete etc ? Who rejected the very idea of writing in favor of oral teaching. They seemed to be pretty good at thinking. Beware the writing excess Paul
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  These tidbits always have to be taken in the context they've been said in. Paul Graham is a venture capitalist in a hyper-connected society, where pretty much everyone can read and write. When these ancient philosophers preferred oral exchanges over text based communication you've to realize that text wasn't quiet as easily produced and consumed in their society and what they were likely going for was a fluid exchange of ideas, which was pretty hard to do with written words in that age.
quickthrower2 4y ago
To start writing your ideas: do it. No one else needs to read them. It can be on your local hard drive. It is valuable to do. Reading doesn’t have to be back to back books or papers. Blogs, tutorials, comments also count!
rcarr 4y ago
"I feel the need, the need to read." - Maverick, Top Gun
Deutscher 4y ago
This is OT and has probably been covered elsewhere, but why does PG not use https on his site? Also, why does it not trigger showing the 'Toggle Reader View (F9)' button in the Firefox addressbar, if anyone knows?
- zozbot234 4y ago
  You can connect via https, but your browser will ask you to trust a Yahoo Store certificate since it has no clue how Yahoo Store might relate to paulgraham.com
kang 4y ago
If one learns to write by reading, one would learn to 'upload' by 'downloading'. The method of knowing is not dependent on the medium. I can present the steps in knowing to demonstrate it, but I have already made my point.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Yeah it seems weird to assume that it wouldn't be possible to 'write' that way. In fact it could possibly be far more powerful since you wouldn't be limited by words and language, but could write just about anything the human brain can experience. It's not like those download packages make themselves. It's almost an 'old writer yells at cloud' type post.
gtsnexp 4y ago
I might be wrong but, from his most recent posts, I get the feeling that PG is growing increasingly laconic. Makes sense?
kaushalvivek 4y ago
I wonder if the core idea here is limited to reading books, or if it extends seamlessly to articles, blogs and other quality content.
antirez 4y ago
Many of us are programmers. Some of us are also trying to be writers. Trust me: writing is like programming. Reading code is very useful to become a better programmer, but you learn programming mostly by writing code. Similarly you mostly learn how to write prose by writing prose, tons of it. Reading is especially useful if you identify certain books that are very high in style (for me one of such books was "Vite di uomini non illustri" by Giuseppe Pontiggia), for your taste at least, for what you beleive the best writing is. You read these books many times, to understand what's going on, what are the patterns, how to do the same magic. As a casual reader you can read 200 books every year and yet remain a terrible writer. EDIT: more about that on my blog if you care -> http://antirez.com/news/136 http://antirez.com/news/136
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  I wrote eight books, sold about 35 000 copies (fairly huge number for Czechia with its not-quite-11 million people), and I am also a programmer. The similarities are pretty strong. In both cases, you need to express yourself so that the receiving party may understand you. That said, human readers are a lot more welcoming and friendly consumers of your written work than computers. Positive feedback from computers is basically nonexistent.
  - Hendrikto 4y ago
    > Positive feedback from computers is basically nonexistent. 412 tests passed, 0 warnings, 0 errors.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      I know, I know. That said, receiving an e-mail like "I spent a week reading all your books, PLEASE WRITE SOME MORE" is much more satisfying.
    - bstpierre 4y ago
      I suspect this is tongue in cheek, but passing tests aren’t really the computer’s feedback. They’re feedback from Past You, who wrote the tests. The computer is just performing the tests. The tests might be incomplete or even wrong. The code might be horrendous. The computer doesn’t care. Human feedback on the code, design, usability, appearance, documentation, etc. is all very different from passing tests.
avindroth 4y ago
To facilitate writing, 'pages' have to be ubiquitous. There is always something to write about, and ubiquity of pages facilitates the ink on paper, the pixels on screen. Writing is a medium, and an excellent one at that. I'd agree that writing is a unique medium in generating a special kind of thoughts that are deeply introspective and concept-revealing. But I find that you can view writing not as one medium, but as a host of various submedia. Typing on a keyboard is very different from writing on a whiteboard. The kinds of thoughts you can host to different 'pages' vary. Even electronic writing can vary depending on the psychological and technological context. Writing on Twitter on mobile varies from writing encrypted notes on your personal machine. Is one thing better than the other? I don't think we can easily claim such. Use whiteboards when whiteboards are good, use paper when paper is good, use iPads when iPads are good. But access to various hosts for just the right occasion surely nurtures ideas faster in the right medium of growth.
jamager 4y ago
A visitor came to Richard Feynman's office. When he saw Fenyman's notebooks, he was excited to see records of Feynman's thinking. Feynman replied: They aren't a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process.
raghavtoshniwal 4y ago
> Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer. > That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon Probably just my lived experience, but watching youtube at faster playback speed feels like downloading information. Increasing speeds at parts which I can easily grok and decreasing it when it takes time to understand the content.
barnacled 4y ago
This really chimes with me, I'm writing a book about the Linux memory management subsystem [0] and my primary motivation is to learn the subject more deeply and what Paul says here really aligns with my experience. The effort to explain its machinery demands that I look very deeply - trying to answer questions like 'how does a page of memory get reclaimed?', or 'how does a userspace allocation propagate through the kernel?' - and following the white rabbit all the way down the burrow, forces a far deeper level of understanding than simply figuring something out for a patch. (Obligatory plug!) For anybody who's interested in the topic, I plan to launch the book in a year or so, to be notified when it's released, sign up at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSen0gefOrPWi6ZtEQ25YEKAN2TTeVq1vom6IrIUq4Va67_l2w/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSen0gefOrPWi6ZtEQ25... [0]:https://ljs.io/book.html https://ljs.io/book.html
samsquire 4y ago
I would prefer to read other people's explanations of what the problems their code solves rather than the code to implement it. Wikipedia is almost enough to implement a few algorithms that I've implemented from written descriptions (btrees, tries and multiversion concurrency control). But for other algorithms I just use the pseudocode such as for A*. I would prefer that the English explanation was good enough to implement the code. I journalled computer, software, parallelism, multithreading and futuristic software and architecture ideas out in the open since 2013. I am up to 700 entries. Writing is manifested thinking. Writing is very good for you. Links are in my profile.
- synctext 4y ago
  "Writing is Thinking" - my master thesis professor.
myle 4y ago
Video content is replacing writing/reading for the masses.
- backpropaganda 4y ago
  Good video content is created by first writing the script.
yourgranny 4y ago
Since this is a Paul Graham post, I'm gonna ask because it is the elephant in the room. Why has Hacker News been so quiet about Twitter? I think I know but I want my suspicions confirmed. I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely but the stories that don't appear seemingly lean in a single direction and it is turning me away now.
- camillomiller 4y ago
  I have noticed the same, and I would have the same question. I don't wanna think that it's because it's mostly a community of (male) Musk-Jack-SamAltman simps and wannabes that are just a good startup idea away from being billionaire themselves. A good, well elaborated answer, might help me to steer away from this conclusion.
- ramblerman 4y ago
  > I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely your post achieves the exact opposite. -- Either way it's pretty bad etiquette to hijack a thread for some completely different purpose. Don't let the inevitability of your your post getting flagged further your conspiracy narrative.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- imgabe 4y ago
  You’re free to submit stories and say whatever you want. It should be pretty clear why nobody is talking about Twitter on a completely unrelated thread.
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  I was a bit surprised myself, but after thinking about it - the discussions under the Twitter stories that I’ve seen on the front page have mostly rapidly deteriorated to the point of being pretty unedifying for everyone. That’s not surprising, since it’s a story that meets at the intersection of tech, business, politics, and controversial public figures. There are quite a lot of strong views on it, and in my experience this community doesn’t tend to deal in a particularly adult way with events like that. That kind of discussion usually sinks pretty quickly - I assume mostly because of the algorithm down-ranking overheated discussions. Then you have the general leaning of HN towards a bit of a libertarian, counter-mainstream narrative - it’s not hard to see that the pattern you describe being a natural outcome of all that, no shadowy motives required. It kinda sucks to be honest, because from many different perspectives it’s absolutely gigantic news with lots of really interesting stuff to think and talk about.
Kaibeezy 4y ago
I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far from adequately supported. Merely an assertion of opinion, not a even really a fleshed-out essay. Here’s the real shit, scariest thing I’ve ever read: The Erosion of Deep Literacy, Adam Garfinkle, National Affairs, 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311662
- iillexial 4y ago
  The first comment in your link says basically the same what you have said: >This article makes far reaching societal claims with essentially no evidence. and >I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far from adequately supported
  - Kaibeezy 4y ago
    So read the article. It’s way better supported than this one. I’ll be interested in your reactions and happy to engage in a conversation. See you later?
    - iillexial 4y ago
      Sorry, I didn't mean to claim that article that you sent makes false claims. It was just fun seeing a comment that claims about not well supported article, following the link, and seeing the same comment. Nothing more.
eatonphil 4y ago
Every time I write something I intend to be permanent I reread what I've written multiple times out loud. I find complicated sentences, or related phrases that are unnecessarily far apart, or words that I'd never use in speech. Then I make modifications to minimize these. So even aside from reading what others write, I think you can only write well yourself if you assiduously read what you write.
- borroka 4y ago
  Editing a few days after writing does wonders to improve the quality of the writing, especially allowing you to find those parts, expressions, words that you do not hear as your own voice. Reading and rereading immediately after writing is certainly helpful, but it presents a "fluency" problem. That is, due to the fatigue of rereading what is still fresh in our minds and in our hands and the increasing familiarity with the text, we bypass some parts of the text while reading. It's kind of like having a weird uncle in the family: after we see this guy running around the living room naked for some years, we think it's ordinary, fine, ok: "oh, it's just Uncle Bob", we tell ourselves. Then we go to college, come home for vacation after meeting new people, lost the "familiarity" of family life, and when we finally see Uncle Bob running around the living room naked, our reaction is not one of jovial acceptance like before, but one of horror.
d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
Something I didn’t see mentioned enough in the discussion — Reading is also a fantastic antidote to mindless phone scrolling or web surfing.
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
  Since getting Covid, it’s been harder to put down the phone and pick up a book :( Sort of the opposite of that thing about toxoplasmosis creating alpha wolves.
thenerdhead 4y ago
If you haven’t yet, try doing 3 handwritten morning pages each day. This technique is pretty well known in helping with unblocking creativity by the author Julia Cameron in “The Artist’s Way”. Journaling is by far the most effective technique I’ve come across in my life so far. It gets the rumination out. Helps you brainstorm. Gets you reflecting on unresolved things in your life. I wish I started sooner.
- wyre 4y ago
  I got so burnt out from doing morning pages I haven’t been able to journal significantly in months. I agree it is incredibly effective, but it took me at least an hour to fill up my three A5 pages, it became hard to make the time in the mornings. Ideally, it wouldn’t take this long. Cameron’s suggestion is when there is a pause in the writing to start writing a mantra, over and over, until more words come, but that’s easier said than done in my experience. 3 pages is not a good control. How big are the pages? How small is your handwriting? I read the Artist’s Way and nowhere did she specify how large the paper should be. In my experience the deeper insights came on the second page about 30 minutes in, after depleting my brain of its ruminations and searching for more thoughts to fill up the page.
  - thenerdhead 4y ago
    > In my experience the deeper insights came on the second page about 30 minutes in, after depleting my brain of its ruminations and searching for more thoughts to fill up the page. She also mentions that this happens 1 1/2 pages in on average which I would agree with. I write using Notability on an iPad and my handwriting is fairly small. I just looked through a few. I write about 8 words per row and there's 36 rows. Around 300 words on each page, so ~900 words for morning writing. I do feel you on the burning out part. I almost always get at least 2 pages in a day. Sometimes more than 3, but I timebox it and move on without feeling bad if I don't always get 3.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Two things come to mind: - When you have to explain something to someone else - and you wish to do it well - you're forced to rethink, reprocess, etc. The exercise deepens your own understanding. - Our senses (and associated neural support) are weighted to the visual. Reading plays to that strength.
kingkongjaffa 4y ago
I’m thinking about this more and more in the context of being a developer and product manager. I’m a knowledge worker, my unit of work is often writing, either for a computer to read or people to read. Getting better at writing, and simply writing more is a core goal and something I struggle with. I’m looking at different systems like evergreen notes, zettlekasten etc. and trying to incorporate those in my own note taking. https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes
breck 4y ago
I highly recommend the book "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler. I've been rereading it every few years since it changed my life in high school (turned me into a lifelong autodidact).
- sasha_fishter 4y ago
  I've seen this popping up every now and then. I just put it on my wishlist for next order...
cbeach 4y ago
Can one think without language? It’s a question my headmaster once posed in a general studies class.
magicloop 4y ago
I see reading as a knowledge compression function. So it is efficient to read something that the writer otherwise spent a long time assembling. But reading is just a route to quality thinking. Another route is via technical debate. You verbally describe a problem and solution and then your peers drill into that and offer counterpoints. This is in my experience as beneficial as reading due its interactive aspect - which reading does not offer.
exhaze 4y ago
Folks here mentioned that the core point is not about the need to the importance of reading, but the importance of writing. No, it’s really about becoming better at deep, structured thinking. I think that’s quite a good thing to focus on. The world we live in is becoming more complex. I think it’s because our communication pipelines now have unlimited IO - there’s too much to consume, too much to process, too many thoughts we feel the need to express in response to all these inputs. All of this at the unforgivably quick eventual constituency cross-region replication guarantees afforded to us by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and many others. I write more these days. I don’t share most of what I write. I write for myself, because I think that writing my thoughts helps to refine these thoughts, retain them for future me, and, on occasion, share them with another person, thru conversion, or by just copy pasting something I wrote. You don’t need a blog to start writing. Just start writing. VS Code. Notepad. Emacs. A piece of paper. It doesn’t matter. As long as you can do it when you feel like it. Write.
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  Recently I’ve heard it put in the context of how we can use rituals to build up our personal power (in the energy / ability to get things done sense, not the psychotic sense). This prompted me to make a list of things that can be ritualized for this purpose and writing is a big one.
  - exhaze 4y ago
    I kind of stumbled upon writing by accident. To me it’s not about ability to get things done (thought it helps). It’s about feeling some semblance of control and structure, something I think so many struggle with in the past few years (Trump, COVID, Ukraine/Russia, recent tech layoffs, etc etc). As others here mentioned, it’s kind of like programming. We used it to live in “hello world”. Now we all got thrown into this crazy distributed microservice world. The language of this new world is still the same. It’s (mostly) English. Except it’s more complex now and you have to be faster and better at writing. So write.
    - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer. That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon [...] because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write. Well, but if we could produce a tape that taught x, presumably we could also produce a tape that taught writing.
- gonehome 4y ago
  I think he’s referencing Asimov’s profession novella there, though the main point of that story was that the protagonist couldn’t get the tapes because of the capability for original thought (some people had to make the tapes). And yeah, probably a tape that structured your brain in some way that had the knowledge may include the prerequisites necessary for it to work (better language/reasoning and writing). But even if it didn’t, Asimov’s story agrees with him - it was insufficient. It’s why they made some people avoid the tapes.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    I haven't read that Asimov story. However, I suppose the core question is this: from a neurological perspective, is learning factual information different from learning a skill? I'm inclined to believe it's not, because we're actually pretty bad at rote memorization. We usually need to understand the memory—how it can be used, or why it's important. Professionals construct "mental palaces", effectively building artificial meaning.
enan 4y ago
The essay makes this central claim but then spends most of the time talking about writing leading to better thinking (which I think is well proven). Does anyone know of research that backs up the main thesis? "Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write."
theuseus 4y ago
> Writes a post abour reading. > Talks exclusively about writing. GG
photochemsyn 4y ago
If we were back in pre-writing days, when people memorized long sagas word for word, then anyone contemplating the creation of a new saga would similarly be told of 'the need to listen'.
javajosh 4y ago
How would you respond to Socrates' objections to writing [0]? Especially: "You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not." I often wonder if our ancestors, who were a great deal more private about things like techniques and guild knowledge, not to mention esoteric religious teachings, didn't have the right idea. Perhaps even the penchant for writing scientific articles in Latin and Greek was an explicitly chosen shibboleth to avoid the kinds of informational chaos we see coming to a head in the internet age of 2022. 0 - https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  I am very much in agreement with PG's thesis in this essay, but I am a little surprised that he didn't at least address Socrates' famous critique of writing (and not just by pointing out that the only reason we know about it is that somebody else wrote it down).
byteflip 4y ago
I’ve always been quite mediocre at reading and writing. This has been confirmed by my grades over the years. Just this week, I’ve been writing a script for a YouTube video and it is difficult for me. Organizing my thoughts and making it “seamless” is a lot of work. In my software job I usually default to bullet points for technical writing — which I feel is a cop out. I had decided before reading this article that I want to invest some time in these neglected skills. Does anyone have any recommendations for improving these skills?
- ant6n 4y ago
  Practice? Using bullet points as a first step to make a draft of the overall structure seems like it could be helpful.
- clolege 4y ago
  I've also been trying to improve my writing recently. What's helped me was to read through a couple of resources on how to write better [0,1,2], and then: 1. Apply the better writing advice to my everyday speech 2. Focus on writing down exactly what I wanted to say, and how I would have said it School taught me to be super wordy and focus overly on the editing stage. Nowadays, I read everything I write out loud and if it sounds awkward (or not like me) then I just delete it and write it again from scratch. Oftentimes it helps to just close my eyes, say what I want to out loud, then write down what I just said. It can turn out to be a little bit wordier, but it almost always ends up being easier to read :) [0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31060362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31060362 [2] https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction/dp/0060891548 https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction...
  - byteflip 4y ago
    Nice tips and resources thanks!
  - duckmysick 4y ago
paulpauper 4y ago
That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write. [1] I rea a lot as a kid, and still do, but suck at writing. I think it's at best a tangentially related skillset. Writing is not just about conveying information but doing so in a way that people are enticed to want to read, which is way harder than just the first.
- raywu 4y ago
  Write simple sentences. Don’t use adverbs. That’s what my high school teacher told me. I still find it true.
kenjackson 4y ago
Also with advancements in converting natural language to programming, most programming and automation will be done by simply concise writing. Writing well will become more important in STEM than it already is.
layer8 4y ago
> A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you'll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. Exactly the same is true for coding.
clolege 4y ago
> You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. I find it hilarious that pg chose to use two double negatives to get across this point. Double negatives sound profound, but they use more contextual overhead to convey less information than their positive counterparts. pg is a much better writer than me, but I think it would be more accurate (and stick better) if it instead was just: Your reading limits your writing, and your writing limits your thinking.
thoughtpeddler 4y ago
For two decades I've been a heavy "event-driven journaler" (i.e. I journal when events occur in my life that I need to think through by writing, vs. journaling as a routine daily practice). This has been an immensely helpful way to structure my thinking, in the way PG writes about. It also develops a record of thoughts that I refer back to and reflect on. It's driven my personal growth, and helped me uncover personal blindspots. In more recent times, life is busier, and journaling the way I used to is harder to make time for. (Either that, or the Day One app just isn't doing it for me anymore, I'm not sure.) Instead, I've started to use the voice memos app to voice dictate my thoughts, as if I'm being interviewed on a podcast. My tone is that of an interviewee, providing their answer, sharing their reasoning on a topic, debating the pros and cons, and arriving at a conclusion. I use this format for both personal matters or thoughts related to professional endeavors. It's really working for me. It's a higher velocity way to get my thoughts out, yet still keep them structured. Thanks to increased playback speeds, I can go through my past thoughts more easily too. I highly recommend more people try this, especially if writing/typing it out seems like a chore.
2devnull 4y ago
PowerPoint is better. Removes a lot of bike shedding over “turn of phrase” and sounding smart, writing good, etc. Also, more multimedia, better aligned with current communications tech, and designed specifically with the intention of presenting thoughts, persuasion, non-fiction. Books are great, but not optimized for today’s world.
IntFee588 4y ago
I think it's a tradeoff. As a comparison, I like learning about coding and software architecture through videos and other online resources. The field is so vast that looking at other peoples' code is the easiest way to absorb the broadest amount of material. However, eventually, actually sitting down and writing original software is key to achieving true expertise. I suspect reading & writing follows a similar pattern.
eligro91 4y ago
A suggestion for those who do not have time to write: record yourself. use the time when you commute, when driving, when walking the dogs, cleaning, or anything ritual you're doing on daily basis. just tap the recorder in your phone and start talking about topics that bothers your mind during the day. I'm maintaining a recording diary, and I'm talking about everything. It's helping me to be more confident on some ideas I want to share with others, to be more prepared to arguments with my wife, and to understand better myself - what I'm thinking about situations, why I'm doing things that I don't like and what I can do about that. You can as well use it as retrospective analysis. we won't remember 99.9% of the things we did in our life. those recordings can help you in few years, you can extract the data from them and have a easy way to listen / read things you've said 1-2 years ago on some topics and see how you've evolved since then.
rookie_knight 4y ago
Is this in response to Vitalik's tweet or is the tweet in response to this?
robg 4y ago
Reading is input, writing is output. The transformation between the two is where humanity grows.
kalimanzaro 4y ago
Is PG implying that SBF is bad at writing, and by extension, thinking? If he is, then I surmise that certain forms of thinking may not be helped by writing long essays, for example, thinking about how to manage public opinion or emotions. For those, writing short messages might be enough.
dredmorbius 4y ago
There's a gem in the notes at the end of this essay which resonates strongly with me: By "good at reading" I don't mean good at the mechanics of reading. You don't have to be good at extracting words from the page so much as extracting meaning from the words. The first lesson is that reading is not simply parsing glyhphs and assembling words. It's contextualising that information, assimilating it, analysing and synthesizing it. Strong shades of Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. It also brings to mind a recent Ezra Klein podcast episode with Maryanne Wolf, on the neurophysiology of reading: If you think about language, that is a natural process. There’s a genetic program in which it unfolds. There’s nothing like that for reading. We were never meant to read. But what is amazing is that the brain does have this almost semi-miraculous capacity to make new circuits within itself using the processes that are genetically there but in new ways. So what the brain has is the capacity to make novel circuits. And the invention, the human invention of reading, required a new circuit. So the brain very gradually learned how to connect parts that were there for other reasons and made a new circuit that became the first underlying network for reading very simple symbols 6,000 years ago. <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-maryanne-wolf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...> Transcript: <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-maryanne-wolf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/transcript-ezra-k...> TL;DR: we've only been reading for 6,000 years, far too short for dedicated neurological hardware to evolve --- our brains are doing this in software as a learned behaviour. Language: you're born with the innate capacity to do this, with dedicated neurological regions, speech hardware (the larynx, tongue, and other physiology), and possibly some hearing adaptations. Reading? You've got to teach children how to do that, starting with alphabets, phonetics, meaning, and all the stuff we layer over atomic symbols: simile and metaphor, idioms, cultural touchstones, and all that jazz. And we do really well at that, at least at basic levels. Though if you look more deeply into actual skills, it turns out that literacy levels vary tremendously across the population, in ways which are not nearly as evident in, say, spoken language. See: "Adult Literacy in the United States" <https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146>)
Ontol 4y ago
russian translation https://vc.ru/flood/551857-pol-grem-chitat-pisat-dumat https://vc.ru/flood/551857-pol-grem-chitat-pisat-dumat

480 points by ignoramous 4y ago

I find the quality of my thinking is much higher when writing by hand, but it’s so slow I feel like I get down a particular path and forget so many of the other things I was considering in parallel. I can type much faster than I can write but it feels like a messier thought process. It feels more like jamming a gearbox, while writing by hand feels like a smooth shifting bicycle, with the wind in my hair. Should I try dictation and then writing it down later? Or typing up my handwritten notes after writing them? Any other ideas?

zktrust 4y ago
you must be much older than me. i never had a chance to handwrite my notes or thoughts. all goes to straigh to typing. I fear though my generation and future generations are missing out substantially.
- itisit 4y ago
  > i never had a chance to handwrite my notes or thoughts. Really? Yet to come across a pen and paper in your however many years of life? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are those things so exceedingly anachronistic to you that you'd be at a loss? I'm sorry, but I feel you're being disingenuous.
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  I rediscovered this at 27. Used to do everything with a keyboard or recorder. It’s very powerful although I do my handwriting on an iPad with a pencil.

zktrust 4y ago

have you seen nassim taleb's recent comments about this guy? Taleb while harsh, always is truthful to the truth. I'm too young to know the story behind Hacker News and ycombinator, but reading some of the recent stuff makes me question prevailing sentiments about PG.

TekMol 4y ago
How about an excercise in writing? Instead of referring to "comments" by someone else, tell us your own thoughts. What is the prevailing sentiment you see? And how do you question it?
vortegne 4y ago
I think they're both egomaniacs who treat their own word as gospel. PG is just less brash about it, so comes off as more "reasonable" to many. I think they're both just prime examples of survivorship bias and I try to avoid any of their opinions at all times. Of course, sometimes curiosity takes over, but I never leave feeling good after reading anything they have to say.
bustedblade 4y ago
read all of PG's stuff.. promise you will think otherwise. Taleb's books is hilarious and insightful but PG's essays convey those same truths and many more in a much more succinct format.
throwboi123 4y ago
Link?
- zktrust 4y ago
  u mean for the tweet? google please. there are many.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

wskish 4y ago

Here is the output of GPT reading and summarizing this (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363). Model seems to be hallucinating the author. Any thoughts on how to improve it? "The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of a science fiction book in which reading has been replaced by a more efficient method of knowledge transfer. He argues that even if such a method existed, it would be insufficient because it would not allow for the kind of discovery that writing does. He concludes that people who want to have ideas can't afford not to read."

TekMol 4y ago
Does GPT-3 offer summaries out of the box? Or do you do it by a prompt like "The summary of the text above is:"?
- wskish 4y ago
  we are strategically prompting it as such: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750013 open to all ideas here
  - TekMol 4y ago
    Is a "prompt prefix" a thing in GPT-3 or do you mean you combine that prefix with the text of the page into a prompt?
    - wskish 4y ago
      We prepend the prompt prefix to the page text to create the actual model prompt. GPT doesn't have any such abstraction.
      - TekMol 4y ago
        And GPT-3 remembers the prefix at the end of a long story and writes a summary? That sounds very surprising to me. I would have strongly expected it continues the story.

jholman 4y ago

I think there is clear historical evidence that this thesis is, at a minimum, greatly exaggerated. Socrates never wrote, and I think he had more good ideas than Paul Graham ever will. Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful. I mean, I do personally find that writing is a powerful tool for thinking. Maybe that means that Paul Graham and I are normal, and Socrates and Muhammad were atypical. But maybe it says more about humans-in-our-society than it does about the essential human condition. If humans learned "by tape" (as per the SF books from the Silver Age, referenced in TFA's opening para), maybe idea-production would work along different lines. I admit, I tend to agree with him about the usefulness of writing. But I think it's just an irrational intuition, not the clear argument he implies.

Arisaka1 4y ago
Socrates had the ancient agora, which was (oversimplifying) a group of experts gathering in the same place bouncing off ideas from each other verbally. It's time to stop discounting the role of one's environment in personal growth.
eternalban 4y ago
> Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful. He used to take retreats in the caves near Mecca to meditate and reflect. It was during one of these sessions that he later claimed that he was overwhelmed with the inescapable presence of archangel Gabriel who commanded him to "Read!". This directive of Gabriel to Mohammad is held to be the first verse of the divine revelation in Islam. Read! In the Name of your Lord Who created Created Man(kind) from a clot of blood Read! And your Lord is Ar-Rahman Who Taught by the 'Pen' Taugh Man(kind) that which he knew not. [Q.96 'Al-Alaq'] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_first_revelation#The_first_revelation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_first_revelation#... As mentioned in a comment to a dup post, Paul is neglecting the reflect phase. For some this occurs prior to writing. Others, take time when writing to pause and reflect. p.s. > Muhammad was not even literate We do know that he dictated and others wrote messages [correspondences] that were sent. So no records of him writing, but this was not an uneducated man. He was a merchant, traveled, and conversed with other men at markets, oasis rest stops along the trade route. (And he was not a frivolous man.) The reason Muhammad is said to have been "illiterate" is because Qur'an refers to him (yes, it is the most meta book I've ever read) as "the un-lettered Prophet". "Ummi". Personally, I think this is a misreading, since these are technical terms (like 'Pen' in above cited verses), and 'letter' refers to the 'mystic letters* given to Moses'. i.e. Mohammad the Gentile Prophet. The prophet for the un-Lettered, the Gentile. *consult your local Rabbi :) https://aish.com/the-mystical-power-of-hebrew-letters/ https://aish.com/the-mystical-power-of-hebrew-letters/

sagz 4y ago

His first reference around audiobooks it's particularly resonating, in so far as to express, record and iterate ideas with mind maps! Mind maps, sketches, doodles, mocks, are ineffably (pun intended) great at having good ideas.

ChaitanyaSai 4y ago

“Quantum entanglement” / “quantitative easing” Can we think of a substitute to writing that will allow us to coin these phrases (which in turn sit on a stack of coined sequences of syllables) and make them stick? Speech can communicate writing in its entirety. But in committing to paper, we take these fleeting streams (sequences) of thoughts and sounds, let them live outside our limited working memories, and allow for new meanings and ideas to emerge and breathe and survive. With far greater likelihood and frequency than speech alone. Fascinating to think about what invention might make writing obsolete. Will have to be something that allows for effortless creation and storage of new sequences of old ideas…

marcusverus 4y ago
IMO, the need to express new ideas by combining or redefining old words is a bug in natural language, rather than a feature. It makes communication less precise and that imprecision is prone to gamesmanship. An example is the attempt by some, in the US, to redefine the meaning of “equality” in the context of our political system, from the traditional “equality under the law” to “equality of outcome”. This sort of persuasion by redefinition, in which you take a word attached to a popular idea and hijack/redirect it to your pet idea, is a Jedi-mind-trick which is enabled by the ambiguity of natural language. A more rational system of communication, in which distinct ideas were represented by distinct, immutable symbols, rather than combinations/reuses of old symbols, would make for vastly superior communication—-if we could wrap our brains around such a thing!

npunt 4y ago

There’s much more to the story than writing is a way of thinking, and reading is a big input into writing. Specifically, how each interplay with ideas, as most of us after all are in the business of creating things. And here, the most important bit is not reading, its curiosity. Curiosity about others’ ideas drives reading, curiosity about one’s own ideas drives writing. The time we spend chasing each type of curiosity is important. If we want to create, reading must have it’s limits, and sometimes pretty harsh limits, else we’ll be infected with others ideas about everything. Some choice quotes on this: "When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process..." "This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid." - Arthur Schopenhauer "Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking" - Albert Einstein "If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts." - Dick Hamming EDIT: On the other hand, if you first principles all your thinking and just write write write, you may spend hours on something that could be understood and moved on from in seconds. This meme explains the reading/writing spectrum quite well: https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/vwq8yh/this_true/ https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/vwq8yh/this_true/

dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
Excuse me if this is rude but there is an irony to using others' words to argue one should think for themselves more.
- woolion 4y ago
  It's a variant on the 'doubt paradox' (somebody telling you "you should not believe everything people tell you") itself a variant of the Epimenides paradox (simply known as the liar paradox): a bunch of people who have read more than you tell you to be careful about not reading too much.

unixhero 4y ago

Does HackerNews count as reading?

ignoramous 4y ago
The front page posts? May be. The comments section? Not really.
- INeedMoreRam 4y ago
  Some comments are better written than posts so to disqualify them as not reading is disingenuous.

personjerry 4y ago

It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing. And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to write. It really forces you to address your ideas more formulaically and concretizes your theses. Start a blog! If you're reading this chances are you know how to buy a domain and spin up a blog in less than 30 minutes. Try Wordpress, or hugo with templates if you want more control. And if you don't know what to write about, this link was recently shared on HN, I thought it was pretty useful: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ And yes, it's important to publish it. It makes your thoughts real. And ideas were meant to be shared.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sasha_fishter 4y ago
Simon Willson explanation is actually really good. Thank you for sharing this!
syliconadder 4y ago
I think this level of kindness makes it easy for people to feel okay expressing themselves. Thank you for this beautiful message.
johnny_reilly 4y ago
What Simon said! I've found that blogging hugely helps me clarify my own thinking on a topic, and flush out areas of ignorance. Another excellent option for making getting going with blogging simple is Docusaurus - makes it very easy to get up and running! https://docusaurus.io https://docusaurus.io
- slorber 4y ago
  Yes, great choice :)

copperx 4y ago

Citations are needed for such bold claims if PG wants to be persuasive.

shmageggy 4y ago
I've noticed SV rich guys never use citations (Sam Altman is another that comes to mind), probably because of the uncritical fawning they receive regardless. Why bother backing up what you say with evidence when the audience doesn't demand it.

knome 4y ago

Asimov had a nice short story about taped knowledge, "Profession". It's a really good read.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

Interesting, but nostalgic. Magical brain upload technology would likely require AI, and would almost certainly include assistive cognition - the use of technology to automate and speed up learning and original thought. We're edging towards a revolution that will be more of a disruption than the invention of print. Instead of thoughts that are "manually" generated and externalised as static symbols - albeit electronically distributed - thinking and learning will be automated and integrated. You can use Wikipedia to access a lot of human knowledge. But imagine a meta-Wikipedia that would integrate and summarise an entire domain, combined with assistive cognition that made it possible to hold that summary in your head as a single perceptual entity. You wouldn't just have the skills offered by domain competence, but you would also be able to look for trends and patterns, compare the domain with others, expand the "shape" with new features in creative but congruent ways, and so on.

sn41 4y ago

Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. - Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" [1] [1] http://www.literaturepage.com/read/francis-bacon-essays-102.html http://www.literaturepage.com/read/francis-bacon-essays-102....

euroderf 4y ago

Related: a GTTW Loop (gripe-think-try-write loop). When I'm stuck on a technical problem, I start writing a grumpy email to the support-PoC. I anticipate their questions and find the answers and add them into the email. This is repeated as necessary. It's not unusual then that at some point the answer magically drops into my lap and the grumpy email is tossed into the gripe-recycler.

jawadch93 4y ago

[dead]

Joeyjoejoe24 4y ago

"You can't think well without writing well" What about socrates, epictete etc ? Who rejected the very idea of writing in favor of oral teaching. They seemed to be pretty good at thinking. Beware the writing excess Paul

411111111111111 4y ago
These tidbits always have to be taken in the context they've been said in. Paul Graham is a venture capitalist in a hyper-connected society, where pretty much everyone can read and write. When these ancient philosophers preferred oral exchanges over text based communication you've to realize that text wasn't quiet as easily produced and consumed in their society and what they were likely going for was a fluid exchange of ideas, which was pretty hard to do with written words in that age.

quickthrower2 4y ago

To start writing your ideas: do it. No one else needs to read them. It can be on your local hard drive. It is valuable to do. Reading doesn’t have to be back to back books or papers. Blogs, tutorials, comments also count!

rcarr 4y ago

"I feel the need, the need to read." - Maverick, Top Gun

Deutscher 4y ago

This is OT and has probably been covered elsewhere, but why does PG not use https on his site? Also, why does it not trigger showing the 'Toggle Reader View (F9)' button in the Firefox addressbar, if anyone knows?

zozbot234 4y ago
You can connect via https, but your browser will ask you to trust a Yahoo Store certificate since it has no clue how Yahoo Store might relate to paulgraham.com

kang 4y ago

If one learns to write by reading, one would learn to 'upload' by 'downloading'. The method of knowing is not dependent on the medium. I can present the steps in knowing to demonstrate it, but I have already made my point.

moffkalast 4y ago
Yeah it seems weird to assume that it wouldn't be possible to 'write' that way. In fact it could possibly be far more powerful since you wouldn't be limited by words and language, but could write just about anything the human brain can experience. It's not like those download packages make themselves. It's almost an 'old writer yells at cloud' type post.

gtsnexp 4y ago

I might be wrong but, from his most recent posts, I get the feeling that PG is growing increasingly laconic. Makes sense?

kaushalvivek 4y ago

I wonder if the core idea here is limited to reading books, or if it extends seamlessly to articles, blogs and other quality content.

antirez 4y ago

Many of us are programmers. Some of us are also trying to be writers. Trust me: writing is like programming. Reading code is very useful to become a better programmer, but you learn programming mostly by writing code. Similarly you mostly learn how to write prose by writing prose, tons of it. Reading is especially useful if you identify certain books that are very high in style (for me one of such books was "Vite di uomini non illustri" by Giuseppe Pontiggia), for your taste at least, for what you beleive the best writing is. You read these books many times, to understand what's going on, what are the patterns, how to do the same magic. As a casual reader you can read 200 books every year and yet remain a terrible writer. EDIT: more about that on my blog if you care -> http://antirez.com/news/136 http://antirez.com/news/136

inglor_cz 4y ago
I wrote eight books, sold about 35 000 copies (fairly huge number for Czechia with its not-quite-11 million people), and I am also a programmer. The similarities are pretty strong. In both cases, you need to express yourself so that the receiving party may understand you. That said, human readers are a lot more welcoming and friendly consumers of your written work than computers. Positive feedback from computers is basically nonexistent.
- Hendrikto 4y ago
  > Positive feedback from computers is basically nonexistent. 412 tests passed, 0 warnings, 0 errors.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    I know, I know. That said, receiving an e-mail like "I spent a week reading all your books, PLEASE WRITE SOME MORE" is much more satisfying.
  - bstpierre 4y ago
    I suspect this is tongue in cheek, but passing tests aren’t really the computer’s feedback. They’re feedback from Past You, who wrote the tests. The computer is just performing the tests. The tests might be incomplete or even wrong. The code might be horrendous. The computer doesn’t care. Human feedback on the code, design, usability, appearance, documentation, etc. is all very different from passing tests.

avindroth 4y ago

To facilitate writing, 'pages' have to be ubiquitous. There is always something to write about, and ubiquity of pages facilitates the ink on paper, the pixels on screen. Writing is a medium, and an excellent one at that. I'd agree that writing is a unique medium in generating a special kind of thoughts that are deeply introspective and concept-revealing. But I find that you can view writing not as one medium, but as a host of various submedia. Typing on a keyboard is very different from writing on a whiteboard. The kinds of thoughts you can host to different 'pages' vary. Even electronic writing can vary depending on the psychological and technological context. Writing on Twitter on mobile varies from writing encrypted notes on your personal machine. Is one thing better than the other? I don't think we can easily claim such. Use whiteboards when whiteboards are good, use paper when paper is good, use iPads when iPads are good. But access to various hosts for just the right occasion surely nurtures ideas faster in the right medium of growth.

jamager 4y ago

A visitor came to Richard Feynman's office. When he saw Fenyman's notebooks, he was excited to see records of Feynman's thinking. Feynman replied: They aren't a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process.

raghavtoshniwal 4y ago

> Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer. > That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon Probably just my lived experience, but watching youtube at faster playback speed feels like downloading information. Increasing speeds at parts which I can easily grok and decreasing it when it takes time to understand the content.

barnacled 4y ago

This really chimes with me, I'm writing a book about the Linux memory management subsystem [0] and my primary motivation is to learn the subject more deeply and what Paul says here really aligns with my experience. The effort to explain its machinery demands that I look very deeply - trying to answer questions like 'how does a page of memory get reclaimed?', or 'how does a userspace allocation propagate through the kernel?' - and following the white rabbit all the way down the burrow, forces a far deeper level of understanding than simply figuring something out for a patch. (Obligatory plug!) For anybody who's interested in the topic, I plan to launch the book in a year or so, to be notified when it's released, sign up at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSen0gefOrPWi6ZtEQ25YEKAN2TTeVq1vom6IrIUq4Va67_l2w/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSen0gefOrPWi6ZtEQ25... [0]:https://ljs.io/book.html https://ljs.io/book.html

samsquire 4y ago

I would prefer to read other people's explanations of what the problems their code solves rather than the code to implement it. Wikipedia is almost enough to implement a few algorithms that I've implemented from written descriptions (btrees, tries and multiversion concurrency control). But for other algorithms I just use the pseudocode such as for A*. I would prefer that the English explanation was good enough to implement the code. I journalled computer, software, parallelism, multithreading and futuristic software and architecture ideas out in the open since 2013. I am up to 700 entries. Writing is manifested thinking. Writing is very good for you. Links are in my profile.

synctext 4y ago
"Writing is Thinking" - my master thesis professor.

myle 4y ago

Video content is replacing writing/reading for the masses.

backpropaganda 4y ago
Good video content is created by first writing the script.

yourgranny 4y ago

Since this is a Paul Graham post, I'm gonna ask because it is the elephant in the room. Why has Hacker News been so quiet about Twitter? I think I know but I want my suspicions confirmed. I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely but the stories that don't appear seemingly lean in a single direction and it is turning me away now.

camillomiller 4y ago
I have noticed the same, and I would have the same question. I don't wanna think that it's because it's mostly a community of (male) Musk-Jack-SamAltman simps and wannabes that are just a good startup idea away from being billionaire themselves. A good, well elaborated answer, might help me to steer away from this conclusion.
ramblerman 4y ago
> I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely your post achieves the exact opposite. -- Either way it's pretty bad etiquette to hijack a thread for some completely different purpose. Don't let the inevitability of your your post getting flagged further your conspiracy narrative.
deleted 4y ago
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imgabe 4y ago
You’re free to submit stories and say whatever you want. It should be pretty clear why nobody is talking about Twitter on a completely unrelated thread.
matthewmacleod 4y ago
I was a bit surprised myself, but after thinking about it - the discussions under the Twitter stories that I’ve seen on the front page have mostly rapidly deteriorated to the point of being pretty unedifying for everyone. That’s not surprising, since it’s a story that meets at the intersection of tech, business, politics, and controversial public figures. There are quite a lot of strong views on it, and in my experience this community doesn’t tend to deal in a particularly adult way with events like that. That kind of discussion usually sinks pretty quickly - I assume mostly because of the algorithm down-ranking overheated discussions. Then you have the general leaning of HN towards a bit of a libertarian, counter-mainstream narrative - it’s not hard to see that the pattern you describe being a natural outcome of all that, no shadowy motives required. It kinda sucks to be honest, because from many different perspectives it’s absolutely gigantic news with lots of really interesting stuff to think and talk about.

Kaibeezy 4y ago

I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far from adequately supported. Merely an assertion of opinion, not a even really a fleshed-out essay. Here’s the real shit, scariest thing I’ve ever read: The Erosion of Deep Literacy, Adam Garfinkle, National Affairs, 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311662

iillexial 4y ago
The first comment in your link says basically the same what you have said: >This article makes far reaching societal claims with essentially no evidence. and >I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far from adequately supported
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
  So read the article. It’s way better supported than this one. I’ll be interested in your reactions and happy to engage in a conversation. See you later?
  - iillexial 4y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean to claim that article that you sent makes false claims. It was just fun seeing a comment that claims about not well supported article, following the link, and seeing the same comment. Nothing more.

eatonphil 4y ago

Every time I write something I intend to be permanent I reread what I've written multiple times out loud. I find complicated sentences, or related phrases that are unnecessarily far apart, or words that I'd never use in speech. Then I make modifications to minimize these. So even aside from reading what others write, I think you can only write well yourself if you assiduously read what you write.

borroka 4y ago
Editing a few days after writing does wonders to improve the quality of the writing, especially allowing you to find those parts, expressions, words that you do not hear as your own voice. Reading and rereading immediately after writing is certainly helpful, but it presents a "fluency" problem. That is, due to the fatigue of rereading what is still fresh in our minds and in our hands and the increasing familiarity with the text, we bypass some parts of the text while reading. It's kind of like having a weird uncle in the family: after we see this guy running around the living room naked for some years, we think it's ordinary, fine, ok: "oh, it's just Uncle Bob", we tell ourselves. Then we go to college, come home for vacation after meeting new people, lost the "familiarity" of family life, and when we finally see Uncle Bob running around the living room naked, our reaction is not one of jovial acceptance like before, but one of horror.

d4rkp4ttern 4y ago

Something I didn’t see mentioned enough in the discussion — Reading is also a fantastic antidote to mindless phone scrolling or web surfing.

Kaibeezy 4y ago
Since getting Covid, it’s been harder to put down the phone and pick up a book :( Sort of the opposite of that thing about toxoplasmosis creating alpha wolves.

thenerdhead 4y ago

If you haven’t yet, try doing 3 handwritten morning pages each day. This technique is pretty well known in helping with unblocking creativity by the author Julia Cameron in “The Artist’s Way”. Journaling is by far the most effective technique I’ve come across in my life so far. It gets the rumination out. Helps you brainstorm. Gets you reflecting on unresolved things in your life. I wish I started sooner.

wyre 4y ago
I got so burnt out from doing morning pages I haven’t been able to journal significantly in months. I agree it is incredibly effective, but it took me at least an hour to fill up my three A5 pages, it became hard to make the time in the mornings. Ideally, it wouldn’t take this long. Cameron’s suggestion is when there is a pause in the writing to start writing a mantra, over and over, until more words come, but that’s easier said than done in my experience. 3 pages is not a good control. How big are the pages? How small is your handwriting? I read the Artist’s Way and nowhere did she specify how large the paper should be. In my experience the deeper insights came on the second page about 30 minutes in, after depleting my brain of its ruminations and searching for more thoughts to fill up the page.
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  > In my experience the deeper insights came on the second page about 30 minutes in, after depleting my brain of its ruminations and searching for more thoughts to fill up the page. She also mentions that this happens 1 1/2 pages in on average which I would agree with. I write using Notability on an iPad and my handwriting is fairly small. I just looked through a few. I write about 8 words per row and there's 36 rows. Around 300 words on each page, so ~900 words for morning writing. I do feel you on the burning out part. I almost always get at least 2 pages in a day. Sometimes more than 3, but I timebox it and move on without feeling bad if I don't always get 3.

deleted 4y ago

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chiefalchemist 4y ago

Two things come to mind: - When you have to explain something to someone else - and you wish to do it well - you're forced to rethink, reprocess, etc. The exercise deepens your own understanding. - Our senses (and associated neural support) are weighted to the visual. Reading plays to that strength.

kingkongjaffa 4y ago

I’m thinking about this more and more in the context of being a developer and product manager. I’m a knowledge worker, my unit of work is often writing, either for a computer to read or people to read. Getting better at writing, and simply writing more is a core goal and something I struggle with. I’m looking at different systems like evergreen notes, zettlekasten etc. and trying to incorporate those in my own note taking. https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes

breck 4y ago

I highly recommend the book "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler. I've been rereading it every few years since it changed my life in high school (turned me into a lifelong autodidact).

sasha_fishter 4y ago
I've seen this popping up every now and then. I just put it on my wishlist for next order...

cbeach 4y ago

Can one think without language? It’s a question my headmaster once posed in a general studies class.

magicloop 4y ago

I see reading as a knowledge compression function. So it is efficient to read something that the writer otherwise spent a long time assembling. But reading is just a route to quality thinking. Another route is via technical debate. You verbally describe a problem and solution and then your peers drill into that and offer counterpoints. This is in my experience as beneficial as reading due its interactive aspect - which reading does not offer.

exhaze 4y ago

Folks here mentioned that the core point is not about the need to the importance of reading, but the importance of writing. No, it’s really about becoming better at deep, structured thinking. I think that’s quite a good thing to focus on. The world we live in is becoming more complex. I think it’s because our communication pipelines now have unlimited IO - there’s too much to consume, too much to process, too many thoughts we feel the need to express in response to all these inputs. All of this at the unforgivably quick eventual constituency cross-region replication guarantees afforded to us by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and many others. I write more these days. I don’t share most of what I write. I write for myself, because I think that writing my thoughts helps to refine these thoughts, retain them for future me, and, on occasion, share them with another person, thru conversion, or by just copy pasting something I wrote. You don’t need a blog to start writing. Just start writing. VS Code. Notepad. Emacs. A piece of paper. It doesn’t matter. As long as you can do it when you feel like it. Write.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
Recently I’ve heard it put in the context of how we can use rituals to build up our personal power (in the energy / ability to get things done sense, not the psychotic sense). This prompted me to make a list of things that can be ritualized for this purpose and writing is a big one.
- exhaze 4y ago
  I kind of stumbled upon writing by accident. To me it’s not about ability to get things done (thought it helps). It’s about feeling some semblance of control and structure, something I think so many struggle with in the past few years (Trump, COVID, Ukraine/Russia, recent tech layoffs, etc etc). As others here mentioned, it’s kind of like programming. We used it to live in “hello world”. Now we all got thrown into this crazy distributed microservice world. The language of this new world is still the same. It’s (mostly) English. Except it’s more complex now and you have to be faster and better at writing. So write.
  - rgrieselhuber 4y ago

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

> In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer. That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon [...] because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write. Well, but if we could produce a tape that taught x, presumably we could also produce a tape that taught writing.

gonehome 4y ago
I think he’s referencing Asimov’s profession novella there, though the main point of that story was that the protagonist couldn’t get the tapes because of the capability for original thought (some people had to make the tapes). And yeah, probably a tape that structured your brain in some way that had the knowledge may include the prerequisites necessary for it to work (better language/reasoning and writing). But even if it didn’t, Asimov’s story agrees with him - it was insufficient. It’s why they made some people avoid the tapes.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I haven't read that Asimov story. However, I suppose the core question is this: from a neurological perspective, is learning factual information different from learning a skill? I'm inclined to believe it's not, because we're actually pretty bad at rote memorization. We usually need to understand the memory—how it can be used, or why it's important. Professionals construct "mental palaces", effectively building artificial meaning.

enan 4y ago

The essay makes this central claim but then spends most of the time talking about writing leading to better thinking (which I think is well proven). Does anyone know of research that backs up the main thesis? "Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write."

theuseus 4y ago

> Writes a post abour reading. > Talks exclusively about writing. GG

photochemsyn 4y ago

If we were back in pre-writing days, when people memorized long sagas word for word, then anyone contemplating the creation of a new saga would similarly be told of 'the need to listen'.

javajosh 4y ago

How would you respond to Socrates' objections to writing [0]? Especially: "You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not." I often wonder if our ancestors, who were a great deal more private about things like techniques and guild knowledge, not to mention esoteric religious teachings, didn't have the right idea. Perhaps even the penchant for writing scientific articles in Latin and Greek was an explicitly chosen shibboleth to avoid the kinds of informational chaos we see coming to a head in the internet age of 2022. 0 - https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...

rossdavidh 4y ago
I am very much in agreement with PG's thesis in this essay, but I am a little surprised that he didn't at least address Socrates' famous critique of writing (and not just by pointing out that the only reason we know about it is that somebody else wrote it down).

byteflip 4y ago

I’ve always been quite mediocre at reading and writing. This has been confirmed by my grades over the years. Just this week, I’ve been writing a script for a YouTube video and it is difficult for me. Organizing my thoughts and making it “seamless” is a lot of work. In my software job I usually default to bullet points for technical writing — which I feel is a cop out. I had decided before reading this article that I want to invest some time in these neglected skills. Does anyone have any recommendations for improving these skills?

ant6n 4y ago
Practice? Using bullet points as a first step to make a draft of the overall structure seems like it could be helpful.
clolege 4y ago
I've also been trying to improve my writing recently. What's helped me was to read through a couple of resources on how to write better [0,1,2], and then: 1. Apply the better writing advice to my everyday speech 2. Focus on writing down exactly what I wanted to say, and how I would have said it School taught me to be super wordy and focus overly on the editing stage. Nowadays, I read everything I write out loud and if it sounds awkward (or not like me) then I just delete it and write it again from scratch. Oftentimes it helps to just close my eyes, say what I want to out loud, then write down what I just said. It can turn out to be a little bit wordier, but it almost always ends up being easier to read :) [0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31060362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31060362 [2] https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction/dp/0060891548 https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction...
- byteflip 4y ago
  Nice tips and resources thanks!
- duckmysick 4y ago

paulpauper 4y ago

That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write. [1] I rea a lot as a kid, and still do, but suck at writing. I think it's at best a tangentially related skillset. Writing is not just about conveying information but doing so in a way that people are enticed to want to read, which is way harder than just the first.

raywu 4y ago
Write simple sentences. Don’t use adverbs. That’s what my high school teacher told me. I still find it true.

kenjackson 4y ago

Also with advancements in converting natural language to programming, most programming and automation will be done by simply concise writing. Writing well will become more important in STEM than it already is.

layer8 4y ago

> A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you'll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. Exactly the same is true for coding.

clolege 4y ago

> You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. I find it hilarious that pg chose to use two double negatives to get across this point. Double negatives sound profound, but they use more contextual overhead to convey less information than their positive counterparts. pg is a much better writer than me, but I think it would be more accurate (and stick better) if it instead was just: Your reading limits your writing, and your writing limits your thinking.

thoughtpeddler 4y ago

For two decades I've been a heavy "event-driven journaler" (i.e. I journal when events occur in my life that I need to think through by writing, vs. journaling as a routine daily practice). This has been an immensely helpful way to structure my thinking, in the way PG writes about. It also develops a record of thoughts that I refer back to and reflect on. It's driven my personal growth, and helped me uncover personal blindspots. In more recent times, life is busier, and journaling the way I used to is harder to make time for. (Either that, or the Day One app just isn't doing it for me anymore, I'm not sure.) Instead, I've started to use the voice memos app to voice dictate my thoughts, as if I'm being interviewed on a podcast. My tone is that of an interviewee, providing their answer, sharing their reasoning on a topic, debating the pros and cons, and arriving at a conclusion. I use this format for both personal matters or thoughts related to professional endeavors. It's really working for me. It's a higher velocity way to get my thoughts out, yet still keep them structured. Thanks to increased playback speeds, I can go through my past thoughts more easily too. I highly recommend more people try this, especially if writing/typing it out seems like a chore.

2devnull 4y ago

PowerPoint is better. Removes a lot of bike shedding over “turn of phrase” and sounding smart, writing good, etc. Also, more multimedia, better aligned with current communications tech, and designed specifically with the intention of presenting thoughts, persuasion, non-fiction. Books are great, but not optimized for today’s world.

IntFee588 4y ago

I think it's a tradeoff. As a comparison, I like learning about coding and software architecture through videos and other online resources. The field is so vast that looking at other peoples' code is the easiest way to absorb the broadest amount of material. However, eventually, actually sitting down and writing original software is key to achieving true expertise. I suspect reading & writing follows a similar pattern.

eligro91 4y ago

A suggestion for those who do not have time to write: record yourself. use the time when you commute, when driving, when walking the dogs, cleaning, or anything ritual you're doing on daily basis. just tap the recorder in your phone and start talking about topics that bothers your mind during the day. I'm maintaining a recording diary, and I'm talking about everything. It's helping me to be more confident on some ideas I want to share with others, to be more prepared to arguments with my wife, and to understand better myself - what I'm thinking about situations, why I'm doing things that I don't like and what I can do about that. You can as well use it as retrospective analysis. we won't remember 99.9% of the things we did in our life. those recordings can help you in few years, you can extract the data from them and have a easy way to listen / read things you've said 1-2 years ago on some topics and see how you've evolved since then.

rookie_knight 4y ago

Is this in response to Vitalik's tweet or is the tweet in response to this?

robg 4y ago

Reading is input, writing is output. The transformation between the two is where humanity grows.

kalimanzaro 4y ago

Is PG implying that SBF is bad at writing, and by extension, thinking? If he is, then I surmise that certain forms of thinking may not be helped by writing long essays, for example, thinking about how to manage public opinion or emotions. For those, writing short messages might be enough.

dredmorbius 4y ago

There's a gem in the notes at the end of this essay which resonates strongly with me: By "good at reading" I don't mean good at the mechanics of reading. You don't have to be good at extracting words from the page so much as extracting meaning from the words. The first lesson is that reading is not simply parsing glyhphs and assembling words. It's contextualising that information, assimilating it, analysing and synthesizing it. Strong shades of Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. It also brings to mind a recent Ezra Klein podcast episode with Maryanne Wolf, on the neurophysiology of reading: If you think about language, that is a natural process. There’s a genetic program in which it unfolds. There’s nothing like that for reading. We were never meant to read. But what is amazing is that the brain does have this almost semi-miraculous capacity to make new circuits within itself using the processes that are genetically there but in new ways. So what the brain has is the capacity to make novel circuits. And the invention, the human invention of reading, required a new circuit. So the brain very gradually learned how to connect parts that were there for other reasons and made a new circuit that became the first underlying network for reading very simple symbols 6,000 years ago. <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-maryanne-wolf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...> Transcript: <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-maryanne-wolf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/transcript-ezra-k...> TL;DR: we've only been reading for 6,000 years, far too short for dedicated neurological hardware to evolve --- our brains are doing this in software as a learned behaviour. Language: you're born with the innate capacity to do this, with dedicated neurological regions, speech hardware (the larynx, tongue, and other physiology), and possibly some hearing adaptations. Reading? You've got to teach children how to do that, starting with alphabets, phonetics, meaning, and all the stuff we layer over atomic symbols: simile and metaphor, idioms, cultural touchstones, and all that jazz. And we do really well at that, at least at basic levels. Though if you look more deeply into actual skills, it turns out that literacy levels vary tremendously across the population, in ways which are not nearly as evident in, say, spoken language. See: "Adult Literacy in the United States" <https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146>)

Ontol 4y ago

russian translation https://vc.ru/flood/551857-pol-grem-chitat-pisat-dumat https://vc.ru/flood/551857-pol-grem-chitat-pisat-dumat