11 ms·

How to think in writing

424 points by Luc 2y ago

paulpauper 2y ago
a major problem with writing or any creative endeavor is the reception is out of the creator's control. you can check all the boxes on clarity of thought and it still fails to resonate with renders for whatever reason
- glompers 2y ago
  Another major problem occurs when mixing the first intention, to communicate for a specific audience, with a second, separate risk-management intention to control that receptivity and dial it to a resonant frequency. The first intention trusts and takes a high view of their integrity and of your own. The second does the opposite.
- bawolff 2y ago
  That's a problem with all human endeavour. To paraphrase captain picard, sometimes you do everything right but still fail. The only way to never fail is to never try.
ibash 2y ago
This is great and matches something I’ve been doing for over a decade now. Writing in reflections, examining and cross examining. The only thing I would argume with is: > We just talked about it aimlessly, read randomly, and made small notes. This cost us time and caused confusion. No, this is part of the process. It’s part of noticing and a precursor to the step of examination. This is data gathering. — The other thing I’ve learned over the years is that this kind of thinking/writing scares people. I’ve made the mistake of sending an edited analysis to a cofounder. Because they didn’t have a similar practice they couldn’t perceive it as an examination of our startup’s situation, and instead received it as anxiety and uncertainty. It’s unsettling to question assumptions.
justincormack 2y ago
Proofs and Refutations is a great book.
nxicvyvy 2y ago
The PG quote is a hot take. Yes, writing can be a productive focusing mechanism, it can also provide you with good reflections. But so can meditation, so can a good walk. It's a tool, not a requirement. It also has it's own downsides in that it forces you to think a certain constrained way, and while that is also one of its strength, it does limit your ability to think creatively. Similar to how using ChatGPt to draft writing or code, there is a strong biasing effect pushing you towards something non novel.
- troupe 2y ago
  Can you give any examples of someone whose idea formation was not improved went they undertook the task of writing their thoughts down?
  - jstanley 2y ago
    No, because we don't have access to the ideas of those who don't write them down.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    I have had ideas that come to me, during walks, and other certain moments, briefly and they keep developing over time. It has happened that after I actually write them down, my mind stops caring about them and they stop happening. Alternatively I have had ideas in mind that get stronger and stronger and at some point I just have to work them and so I work on them without writing them down and I actually bring them to fruition while writing down might have oddly killed that motivation or obsession. It is mainly various side projects. The act of writing somehow diminishes that motivation or reward feeling as opposed to immediately starting to build the side project.
  - nxicvyvy 2y ago
    I've had many ideas that have been watered down by the editing process that by the time I'm done have lost the impact or connection to the original idea. Maybe I lack the vocabulary? Writing skills? Maybe I'm self censoring? Maybe it's my perfectionism optimising the local maxima? I don't know but I do know writing has ruined some, not all, of my ideas. This also wasn't my main issue above. I was more concerned that the idea you can't have good ideas without writing them down was deeply flawed and a bit gatekeepery.
codelord 2y ago
"If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it." Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with this flawed deduction.
- throwaway55533 2y ago
  How is it flawed logcally? Seems perfectly correct to me. Although I'd agree it's a bit over-literal. As if the emotional workings of the human mind can be precisely reasoned about (i.e. precisely enough to say "always"). Regardless, I've experienced this effect a lot when writing design docs. Iteration and objective criticism on a tangible thing (a doc) is an extremely effective way to see the problem from all sides.
  - cryptoz 2y ago
    Disclaimer: I'm not OP and I haven't read the full post yet. But the quote above says "If..." and then makes a statement that isn't true and then having a conclusion based on that false premise. I can tell you it isn't true because I can recall countless times in the last few months alone where writing down my ideas has resulted in a muddier thought; lost ideas while writing them down; confusing me and missing some parts; it does not "always make them more precise and more complete". So the rest of the statement is just silly. Sure, sometimes writing down ideas helps clear things up. Most times even. But always?! Definitely not.
  - wyum 2y ago
    The deduction is flawed because the success of one method (thinking with writing) does not necessarily disprove the success of other methods (such as thinking without writing).
    - FreakLegion 2y ago
      You're objecting to the premise, not the conclusion*. The deduction is valid for the premise (the part in the 'if'). Well, assuming you accept that an idea that can be "more complete" isn't "fully formed", but I'd say that's definitional. * Although it's not really right to use this kind of language here (premise, conclusion, deduction). It's a casual statement, so I suppose people can somewhat reasonably argue about it, but the assertion is tautological ('if something is incomplete, it isn't fully formed').
JadeNB 2y ago
> But then I read Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations. It is not, at first glance, a book about writing. It is a book of mathematical philosophy. By a Hungarian Stalinist, no less. I don't see what "Hungarian" has to do with it, and, though I do see what "Stalinist" might have to do with it, it probably shouldn't. (Someone's politics don't have to be good for them to make a valuable contribution to knowledge.) But, according to Wikipedia, this isn't true literally as written, unless one takes the view "once a Stalinist, always a Stalinist:" > After his release, Lakatos returned to academic life .... Still nominally a communist, his political views had shifted markedly, and he was involved with at least one dissident student group in the lead-up to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. > ... He received a PhD in philosophy in 1961 from the University of Cambridge; his doctoral thesis was entitled Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery, and his doctoral advisor was R. B. Braithwaite. The book Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, published after his death, is based on this work.
- wanderingstan 2y ago
  I suspect you’re taking that excerpt too literally. By my reading, the author is expressing their surprise to learn something to improve their writing from an unexpected source (a book about mathematics), and is even more surprised at this source being written by someone very different from the author culturally (Hungarian) and philosophically/politicaly (Stalinist).
- dunefox 2y ago
  > I don't see what "Hungarian" has to do with it It's just additional information...
andrei-akopian 2y ago
Though it can be blamed on myself, I didn't understand what you were saying. Your vocab and sentence structure is awesome, but your thoughts just aren't comming across.
- bawolff 2y ago
  Indeed i kind of felt similar. I'm just not sure what the thesis of this piece is supposed to be. Is it that to write deeply you should question your assumptions and follow your argument to their logical conclusions? Is there something more that i missed? Surely that goes without saying?
  - treetalker 2y ago
    Here’s my (sometimes heavy-handed) restatement. The thesis is marked by asterisks. The author’s expression tends toward the literary and thus reduces clarity by requiring more work from the reader — a point which I find ironic in light of the message conveyed. - - - > When I sit down to write … [m]y thoughts are flighty and shapeless … . But when I type, it is as if I pin my thoughts to the table. I can examine them. > But it is hard to do it right. Not all writing helps me think. Most kinds of writing are rather weak, or even counterproductive, in this regard. You have to approach it in the right way. > Until last fall, I had not seen anyone properly articulate the mental moves that make writing a powerful tool for thought. … > But then I read Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations. … [I]t is, if you read it sideways, a profound exploration of the act of writing. … Because [mathematics is a special type of writing that tends toward great] precision, reading Lakatos gave me a clearer and more precise understanding of [how I use writing to] wrestle with my thoughts. > **What follows is a series of meditations about thinking through writing provoked by, but not faithful to, Lakatos’s book. … [It] covers the basic mental models that are useful to most people [to use writing to clarify their simple thinking] … .** [A forthcoming essay will explore] more complex patterns of thinking which [may be] useful [in] research or … deep creative work. > [First mental model: make fluid thinking rigid. That is, give yourself something to work with.] > [Second mental model: make conjectures.] > [Third mental model: unfold the conjectures. That is,] “interrogat[e] the conclusion to [hypothesize] why it could be true.” What premises and reasoning chains [could] lead[] to this conclusion? [This opens the conjectures up to greater criticism, which in turn helps to approach the truth, even if the explanation is wrong.] > … > [To make and unfold conjectures, I have learned to write a list of] bullet points [that attempt to explain] the intuition[s] behind [my conjectures as] a series of premises [that seem to fit together logically]. [Then I ask follow-up questions and try to find counter-examples.] [Through this process, I more readily find flaws in my thinking and discard or adjust my ideas on the fly.] > [D]eeper patterns take a longer time to emerge … because they are further from … established thoughts and [therefore] harder to articulate. > … > [Writing is like generating] texts filled with hidden doors … . [We shortchange ourselves if we do not take the time and make the effort to open those doors and explore what lies behind them by asking critical questions about what we have written and by searching for general and special counter-examples.]
pxoe 2y ago
writing can be so pervasive, even compulsive, especially nowadays and in digital spaces, that it might be due for a counter: how to just think. how to think freely. think unburdened by having to put thoughts into a form, written or spoken, out loud or internal, or even verbalized in any way at all, without being slowed down by any of those things
- andsoitis 2y ago
  symbols are intermediaries. disintermediate!
- layer8 2y ago
  At least no one notices when you only think in lowercase.
- space_oddity 2y ago
  I try to dedicate time each day to sit in silence and let my thoughts unfold naturally
BeetleB 2y ago
I'm torn about this article. On the one hand, he's right: Writing helps refine your thoughts. On the other hand, if your goal is to probe the validity of your thoughts, this is painfully inefficient. You'll get much further if you do one or two simple passes on your writing, and then pass what you've written around and ask for feedback. I think I learned this in one of Haidt's books, and it has jived with my experience: If your brain has a bias or a blind spot, it's fairly unlikely you'll uncover it by pure thought alone. Perhaps if you put in as much effort as this author has, you'll uncover 20-50% more than the average person, which still leaves you with a lot of gaping holes. But outside feedback will uncover them very quickly! I had a friend who thought like this person, and it was rarely hard to find flaws in his thoughts that he had not considered. He's as smart as I am, so it wasn't an intelligence flaw.
- Daub 2y ago
  > Writing helps refine your thoughts. Very true. Indeed I would go further and say that unless you are capable of expressing your thoughts as words, then those thoughts will have no more substance than steam. I thought I was a clear thinker until I entered academia. The many reports, instructional materials and academic papers soon enough showed me how wrong I was. Edit: the illustration to this article is one of the most appropriate I have seen.
- random3 2y ago
  Unless you have few, very simple thoughts, feedback is not really effective, nor scalable, compared to self validation for which writing is required.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    I would urge you to seek feedback from a more diverse crowd then. The article talks about counterexamples. It's hubris to think you will find most of the relevant counterexamples on your own. It's also hubris to think you'll do it quicker than others. As for scalability, I'm confused. If you have a crowd of followers, for example, you'll reach lots of people quickly, whereas by writing for yourself you'll never get feedback from more than one person. It's the perfect example of something that doesn't scale. Heck even writing a comment on HN often leads to more efficient feedback. Sure, I probably could have thought of everything other commenters point out to me, but it would take much more time and effort, and the effort does not lead to a vastly better understanding. At best only marginally better. Past a point you're in the zone of diminishing returns. You can spend two hours and get a 5% better understanding or you can talk to someone and in ten minutes get a 20% better understanding.
rednafi 2y ago
I liked the thesis of the piece but not the delivery. Personally, I prefer a Hemingway-esque style in my writing, so it was a chore to penetrate through the layers of metaphors in this text.
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toxik 2y ago
Writing fleshes out thought because writing is like talking to yourself with automatic history recording. I suggest trying to skip the middle step (writing) and just talk to yourself via voice recording or something else. It works and it takes a lot less formatting effort. Similarly, conversation works beautifully too.
- unshavedyak 2y ago
  I do this a lot, but I lose my place and cut myself off so frequently that it’s easy to get lost. I can see the value of going more slowly, documenting the process and completing sentences. Perhaps a LLM could wrap it all up for me lol.
- DenisM 2y ago
  Where would you store the voice memos? I’m concerned that unfiltered stream of thought would be perceived not well if it surfaces. This needs strong privacy and at the same time convenient UX.
supersrdjan 2y ago
The introduction to the article denies its main point: > If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. It’s a logical error. It’s like saying: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look foolish, therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks foolish. Clearly there are other ways to look foolish. So even if writing always clarified thought, it’s wrong to infer it’s impossible to have clear thoughts without writing. But since the writer here committed this mistake, he demonstrated that writing does not always result in clear thought. Incidentally, I wrote this comment to clarify my thoughts .
- card_zero 2y ago
  No, it's like: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look more foolish - always, no matter what else they did - therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks perfectly foolish. Or, say, people who have caught a Snorlax have more Pokemon, therefore no one who hasn't caught a Snorlax has all the Pokemon. This assumes that there's such a thing as a "fully formed idea" (which means an exception to "always" - you can't clarify your thoughts more and more by writing about them forever). If there isn't, it's still true, but it's not saying a whole lot.
  - afc 2y ago
    I think you're right. But I still think the quote from Graham is terrible writing: confusing, brittle, convoluted, almost as if it was designed to hide something from readers and manipulate them into a different understanding than what it actually claims. The quote is, as you explain, technically correct due to its use of "always". Take this word away and the sentence is correct English, but the meaning now is incorrect (and would match the interpretation of the comment you replied to). Making the correctness hinge so directly in the subtlety of the presence of the quantifier makes the sentence brittle and convoluted. It feels almost manipulative, as if the writer hopes the reader won't inspect the sentence so closely (and thus will miss this subtlety) and will understand something slightly different ("if you don't write, it's impossible to have clear thoughts"), so that the conclusion sounds much stronger. And readers do get the incorrect interpretation, as evidenced by the comment you replied to, which attacks the misunderstanding of that sentence. So while I fully agree with you, I still think the sentence quoted is an example of terribly unhelpful and confusing writing. Especially because the full premise "writing down your ideas _always_ makes them more precise and complete" is debatable (you just need to find one counterexample). (Incidentally, my recollection of Graham's writing is that this type of misleading sentences (that are technically correct but appear to say something else, something that isn't), as if they were deliberately cultivated.) A much better sentence would be something like: * "Writing down your ideas is great to make them more precise and more complete. It's hard to have fully formed ideas about a topic without writing about it." This matches the understanding of a quick glance of the sentence. * "Writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and complete." Closer to the actual meaning, but doesn't do a slight of hand to hide the main point.
tuxone 2y ago
If it’s all about thinking then being restricted by the vocabulary of your language[s] might be a limitation. As a bilingual, a common question from friends in primary school was what language I was thinking in. My answer was I don’t think words, I think images. I later read Edward de Bono Lateral Thinking. I might be out of context here but I thought someone might be interested in the book.
apienx 2y ago
"Writing is thinking." -- David McCullough
chrisjj 2y ago
> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. So ... music is trivial? Dance is trivial? Sculpture is trivial? I have to say I think P Graham needs to get out more.
- pauln99 2y ago
  I think he also said somewhere that people mainly disagree with distorted versions of your ideas...
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    Feel free to identify any distortion here.
- cplat 2y ago
  As someone who has done a lot of those things (beyond programming), I can assuredly say that "writing about something" is neither a proof of understanding nor a proficiency in a subject. (Case in point, our educational system)
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    Quite so. If indeed all the author's ideas are incomplete until written, his mistake is ascribing this to the power of his writing rather than the limits of his ideation.
- sifar 2y ago
  To interpret it more charitably, perhaps each of these things is it's own language and the activities therein akin to writing.
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jilles 2y ago
“Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know—and what we don’t know—about whatever we’re trying to learn.” ― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn One of the books that got me into writing for myself.
- space_oddity 2y ago
  Do you have any specific writing habits or techniques that you developed as a result of reading this book?
  - jilles 2y ago
    Yes! I write more. Instead of writing about things I know well, I write about things I want to know better. It reveals gaps in my knowledge I was not aware of. For example, I can start write "We are using X instead of Y because..." and realize I do not truly know the reason. Which leads me to investigate and then finish the sentence.
- benhoyt 2y ago
  I just finished "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. Here's a little blurb I just wrote about it: What a great book! Zinsser uses such crisp, engaging prose. He covers how to write, why to write, and what to write. He uses lots of examples from his own writing and from others -- good and bad. Stories abound. This is not a boring grammar book. Here's a taste -- he starts the chapter called "The Lead and the Ending" with these stark statements: "The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead." Punchy and self-referential. There's a decent amount about good technique, but it's more about style and voice. The second half of the book covers topics like "Writing in Your Job" (without sounding passive or using buzzwords) and "Writing Family History and Memoir" (that's actually why my brother lent me the book). And it finishes with an inspiring chapter on the craft of writing called "Write as Well as You Can". If you want to learn to write better, read this book. If you don't, definitely read it.
richrichie 2y ago
> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. That "nontrivial" qualification makes this an unfalsifiable bunkum.
paultopia 2y ago
This is a fantastic essay. As a professor, I routinely work with students on research and writing projects where they're suffering under the common misimpression that they need to know everything they intend to say before writing a single word down; I may start sending this to them to help clear the brain worm out.
- space_oddity 2y ago
  Common misconception that you need to have everything perfectly figured out before start writing.
space_oddity 2y ago
Writing is a tool for learning and self-discovery for me
gsuuon 2y ago
Sometimes complex topics are really like rubric's cubes - some changes here break things over there and then you need to make a bunch of turns to fix things elsewhere. Thinking through writing is necessary for these, because they look much simpler until they aren't and all the gory details start tripping over each other. The unfortunate part is that it feels very difficult to 're-enter' the topic as if reading for the first time, so the writing can easily become difficult to understand for a fresh-reader since it was edited by someone who's read it dozens of times in various incarnations and orders. 1) that sounds like a Montessori school? 2) I feel like Walter White is one of the more memorable character names (w/ the alliteration, no?)
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naikrovek 2y ago
> If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. This is very flawed logic. This assumes that only writing can result in fully formed ideas, and that is simply a false assumption. I can't believe that it was even typed out as-is, it's so wrong. It's wrong on its face. It's wrong if you think about it for 1/10th of a second. It's wrong if you think about it for a minute. It's wrong if you think about it for an hour. It's even wrong if you write it out.
hsavit1 2y ago
I love how Paul Ghram is quoted and not an actual writer. Why would I take writing advice from him and not from, say, James Joyce?
- sandspar 2y ago
  There are different kinds of writing. They have unique requirements. James Joyce was a novelist. The article is about writing essays. Paul Graham is one of our leading essayists. Measured by impact on "builders" he's probably the foremost essayist. If you want to learn how to make documentaries, would you rather learn from the best documentarian or from Spielberg?
- realprimoh 2y ago
  How is Paul Graham not an actual writer? He has written some extremely influential essays that have reached outside of just Silicon Valley.
interroboink 2y ago
I don't mind this person relating their experiences, and encouraging others to do similar. But as someone who is (and strives to be!) non-verbal in a lot of my thought, keep in mind that there are other brain types out there (: This article is sprinkled with "people this" and "people that" terminology, which is mirrored in our broader culture. But I say it is actually "some people this" and "some people that." Don't be a word-chauvinist. To be fair, I do appreciate that a lot of the author's sentences started with "When I ..." and similar. Makes it more palatable to me. ---- This idea I just wrote down was fully-formed in my mind, and I could have just moved on with my life. I chose to put it into words (and pick those words, and re-edit them, spending my short time on this planet to do so) in order to communicate it to you, dear reader. Not to help me think (: (though I do sometimes use words to help me think, too. Let's not get too black-and-white about it)
- dfreire 2y ago
  What a great comment. Can you expand on why do you strive to be non-verbal?
  - interroboink 2y ago
    (sorry for the wall of text; I guess you asked for it :) Mostly, I feel it slows me down. I'd rather continue on to the next thought than translate the current one into words in my head. It's a semi-conscious decision. I can almost feel the word-making machinery gearing up, but if I race ahead it doesn't have time to grab on. Also, it can be a bit overly-constraining. Sometimes constraints are good, like the article mentions — they force you to make decisions and face issues. But sometimes I feel like ideas are better served left in an "un-collapsed" state, at least for a time. I feel like much of my most valuable thinking happens in that state. And sometimes manifesting the thought is better accomplished through artwork, or physical activity, or something else that's not writing. So I guess there's a "to manifest or not manifest the thought" decision, and after that, there's a "to manifest in writing/words vs. another medium" decision. I remember as a teenager talking to some friends about thinking, and the idea of thinking without words was surprising to them — for them, thinking was words. And I gather this is true for many people. But I also gather it's not true for many people, myself included (: Apparently, there are some people who have word-thoughts appear as text floating in their mind, which is wild to me — lots of weird mental variety out there[1]. Over the years, I've come to see my thoughts as more "tactile" than anything else. Lots of physical textures and movements involved. Just earlier, I was wrestling with an issue that has been on my mind, and it was like trying to solve one of those "separate the ring from the rope" puzzles — lots of turning, twisting, pushing, pulling. I've been struggling with this task, and writing about too, but I feel like I made more progress with that recent mental wrangling than I had with pen and paper. Though I can't quite (yet) put into words the progress I've made! Anyway, when people write about "how to think" topics, I sometimes feel left out because there's often an implicit assumption/bias towards wordiness, and the primacy of words in thinking. Unsurprisingly, these writings are written by writers who love words, so there's a bit of a self-selection bias going on. Words sometimes get ascribed near-mystical powers ("In the beginning was the Word...", magic incantations, runes, etc), and they are kind of magical. But I also know from my own inner world that there's a nameless, wordless magic, too. But writers don't write about that as much ("write what you know"), so you don't hear about it, and it doesn't hold as much cultural sway. So, I try to speak up for the alternatives, encourage people to keep a broader perspective. [1] In case you're interested in such things, some interesting research: https://news.wisc.edu/that-little-voice-in-your-head-if-you-have-it-may-be-aligning-your-thoughts/ https://news.wisc.edu/that-little-voice-in-your-head-if-you-...

424 points by Luc 2y ago

a major problem with writing or any creative endeavor is the reception is out of the creator's control. you can check all the boxes on clarity of thought and it still fails to resonate with renders for whatever reason

glompers 2y ago
Another major problem occurs when mixing the first intention, to communicate for a specific audience, with a second, separate risk-management intention to control that receptivity and dial it to a resonant frequency. The first intention trusts and takes a high view of their integrity and of your own. The second does the opposite.
bawolff 2y ago
That's a problem with all human endeavour. To paraphrase captain picard, sometimes you do everything right but still fail. The only way to never fail is to never try.

ibash 2y ago

This is great and matches something I’ve been doing for over a decade now. Writing in reflections, examining and cross examining. The only thing I would argume with is: > We just talked about it aimlessly, read randomly, and made small notes. This cost us time and caused confusion. No, this is part of the process. It’s part of noticing and a precursor to the step of examination. This is data gathering. — The other thing I’ve learned over the years is that this kind of thinking/writing scares people. I’ve made the mistake of sending an edited analysis to a cofounder. Because they didn’t have a similar practice they couldn’t perceive it as an examination of our startup’s situation, and instead received it as anxiety and uncertainty. It’s unsettling to question assumptions.

justincormack 2y ago

Proofs and Refutations is a great book.

nxicvyvy 2y ago

The PG quote is a hot take. Yes, writing can be a productive focusing mechanism, it can also provide you with good reflections. But so can meditation, so can a good walk. It's a tool, not a requirement. It also has it's own downsides in that it forces you to think a certain constrained way, and while that is also one of its strength, it does limit your ability to think creatively. Similar to how using ChatGPt to draft writing or code, there is a strong biasing effect pushing you towards something non novel.

troupe 2y ago
Can you give any examples of someone whose idea formation was not improved went they undertook the task of writing their thoughts down?
- jstanley 2y ago
  No, because we don't have access to the ideas of those who don't write them down.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  I have had ideas that come to me, during walks, and other certain moments, briefly and they keep developing over time. It has happened that after I actually write them down, my mind stops caring about them and they stop happening. Alternatively I have had ideas in mind that get stronger and stronger and at some point I just have to work them and so I work on them without writing them down and I actually bring them to fruition while writing down might have oddly killed that motivation or obsession. It is mainly various side projects. The act of writing somehow diminishes that motivation or reward feeling as opposed to immediately starting to build the side project.
- nxicvyvy 2y ago
  I've had many ideas that have been watered down by the editing process that by the time I'm done have lost the impact or connection to the original idea. Maybe I lack the vocabulary? Writing skills? Maybe I'm self censoring? Maybe it's my perfectionism optimising the local maxima? I don't know but I do know writing has ruined some, not all, of my ideas. This also wasn't my main issue above. I was more concerned that the idea you can't have good ideas without writing them down was deeply flawed and a bit gatekeepery.

codelord 2y ago

"If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it." Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with this flawed deduction.

throwaway55533 2y ago
How is it flawed logcally? Seems perfectly correct to me. Although I'd agree it's a bit over-literal. As if the emotional workings of the human mind can be precisely reasoned about (i.e. precisely enough to say "always"). Regardless, I've experienced this effect a lot when writing design docs. Iteration and objective criticism on a tangible thing (a doc) is an extremely effective way to see the problem from all sides.
- cryptoz 2y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm not OP and I haven't read the full post yet. But the quote above says "If..." and then makes a statement that isn't true and then having a conclusion based on that false premise. I can tell you it isn't true because I can recall countless times in the last few months alone where writing down my ideas has resulted in a muddier thought; lost ideas while writing them down; confusing me and missing some parts; it does not "always make them more precise and more complete". So the rest of the statement is just silly. Sure, sometimes writing down ideas helps clear things up. Most times even. But always?! Definitely not.
- wyum 2y ago
  The deduction is flawed because the success of one method (thinking with writing) does not necessarily disprove the success of other methods (such as thinking without writing).
  - FreakLegion 2y ago
    You're objecting to the premise, not the conclusion*. The deduction is valid for the premise (the part in the 'if'). Well, assuming you accept that an idea that can be "more complete" isn't "fully formed", but I'd say that's definitional. * Although it's not really right to use this kind of language here (premise, conclusion, deduction). It's a casual statement, so I suppose people can somewhat reasonably argue about it, but the assertion is tautological ('if something is incomplete, it isn't fully formed').

JadeNB 2y ago

> But then I read Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations. It is not, at first glance, a book about writing. It is a book of mathematical philosophy. By a Hungarian Stalinist, no less. I don't see what "Hungarian" has to do with it, and, though I do see what "Stalinist" might have to do with it, it probably shouldn't. (Someone's politics don't have to be good for them to make a valuable contribution to knowledge.) But, according to Wikipedia, this isn't true literally as written, unless one takes the view "once a Stalinist, always a Stalinist:" > After his release, Lakatos returned to academic life .... Still nominally a communist, his political views had shifted markedly, and he was involved with at least one dissident student group in the lead-up to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. > ... He received a PhD in philosophy in 1961 from the University of Cambridge; his doctoral thesis was entitled Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery, and his doctoral advisor was R. B. Braithwaite. The book Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, published after his death, is based on this work.

wanderingstan 2y ago
I suspect you’re taking that excerpt too literally. By my reading, the author is expressing their surprise to learn something to improve their writing from an unexpected source (a book about mathematics), and is even more surprised at this source being written by someone very different from the author culturally (Hungarian) and philosophically/politicaly (Stalinist).
dunefox 2y ago
> I don't see what "Hungarian" has to do with it It's just additional information...

andrei-akopian 2y ago

Though it can be blamed on myself, I didn't understand what you were saying. Your vocab and sentence structure is awesome, but your thoughts just aren't comming across.

bawolff 2y ago
Indeed i kind of felt similar. I'm just not sure what the thesis of this piece is supposed to be. Is it that to write deeply you should question your assumptions and follow your argument to their logical conclusions? Is there something more that i missed? Surely that goes without saying?
- treetalker 2y ago
  Here’s my (sometimes heavy-handed) restatement. The thesis is marked by asterisks. The author’s expression tends toward the literary and thus reduces clarity by requiring more work from the reader — a point which I find ironic in light of the message conveyed. - - - > When I sit down to write … [m]y thoughts are flighty and shapeless … . But when I type, it is as if I pin my thoughts to the table. I can examine them. > But it is hard to do it right. Not all writing helps me think. Most kinds of writing are rather weak, or even counterproductive, in this regard. You have to approach it in the right way. > Until last fall, I had not seen anyone properly articulate the mental moves that make writing a powerful tool for thought. … > But then I read Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations. … [I]t is, if you read it sideways, a profound exploration of the act of writing. … Because [mathematics is a special type of writing that tends toward great] precision, reading Lakatos gave me a clearer and more precise understanding of [how I use writing to] wrestle with my thoughts. > **What follows is a series of meditations about thinking through writing provoked by, but not faithful to, Lakatos’s book. … [It] covers the basic mental models that are useful to most people [to use writing to clarify their simple thinking] … .** [A forthcoming essay will explore] more complex patterns of thinking which [may be] useful [in] research or … deep creative work. > [First mental model: make fluid thinking rigid. That is, give yourself something to work with.] > [Second mental model: make conjectures.] > [Third mental model: unfold the conjectures. That is,] “interrogat[e] the conclusion to [hypothesize] why it could be true.” What premises and reasoning chains [could] lead[] to this conclusion? [This opens the conjectures up to greater criticism, which in turn helps to approach the truth, even if the explanation is wrong.] > … > [To make and unfold conjectures, I have learned to write a list of] bullet points [that attempt to explain] the intuition[s] behind [my conjectures as] a series of premises [that seem to fit together logically]. [Then I ask follow-up questions and try to find counter-examples.] [Through this process, I more readily find flaws in my thinking and discard or adjust my ideas on the fly.] > [D]eeper patterns take a longer time to emerge … because they are further from … established thoughts and [therefore] harder to articulate. > … > [Writing is like generating] texts filled with hidden doors … . [We shortchange ourselves if we do not take the time and make the effort to open those doors and explore what lies behind them by asking critical questions about what we have written and by searching for general and special counter-examples.]

pxoe 2y ago

writing can be so pervasive, even compulsive, especially nowadays and in digital spaces, that it might be due for a counter: how to just think. how to think freely. think unburdened by having to put thoughts into a form, written or spoken, out loud or internal, or even verbalized in any way at all, without being slowed down by any of those things

andsoitis 2y ago
symbols are intermediaries. disintermediate!
layer8 2y ago
At least no one notices when you only think in lowercase.
space_oddity 2y ago
I try to dedicate time each day to sit in silence and let my thoughts unfold naturally

BeetleB 2y ago

I'm torn about this article. On the one hand, he's right: Writing helps refine your thoughts. On the other hand, if your goal is to probe the validity of your thoughts, this is painfully inefficient. You'll get much further if you do one or two simple passes on your writing, and then pass what you've written around and ask for feedback. I think I learned this in one of Haidt's books, and it has jived with my experience: If your brain has a bias or a blind spot, it's fairly unlikely you'll uncover it by pure thought alone. Perhaps if you put in as much effort as this author has, you'll uncover 20-50% more than the average person, which still leaves you with a lot of gaping holes. But outside feedback will uncover them very quickly! I had a friend who thought like this person, and it was rarely hard to find flaws in his thoughts that he had not considered. He's as smart as I am, so it wasn't an intelligence flaw.

Daub 2y ago
> Writing helps refine your thoughts. Very true. Indeed I would go further and say that unless you are capable of expressing your thoughts as words, then those thoughts will have no more substance than steam. I thought I was a clear thinker until I entered academia. The many reports, instructional materials and academic papers soon enough showed me how wrong I was. Edit: the illustration to this article is one of the most appropriate I have seen.
random3 2y ago
Unless you have few, very simple thoughts, feedback is not really effective, nor scalable, compared to self validation for which writing is required.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  I would urge you to seek feedback from a more diverse crowd then. The article talks about counterexamples. It's hubris to think you will find most of the relevant counterexamples on your own. It's also hubris to think you'll do it quicker than others. As for scalability, I'm confused. If you have a crowd of followers, for example, you'll reach lots of people quickly, whereas by writing for yourself you'll never get feedback from more than one person. It's the perfect example of something that doesn't scale. Heck even writing a comment on HN often leads to more efficient feedback. Sure, I probably could have thought of everything other commenters point out to me, but it would take much more time and effort, and the effort does not lead to a vastly better understanding. At best only marginally better. Past a point you're in the zone of diminishing returns. You can spend two hours and get a 5% better understanding or you can talk to someone and in ten minutes get a 20% better understanding.

rednafi 2y ago

I liked the thesis of the piece but not the delivery. Personally, I prefer a Hemingway-esque style in my writing, so it was a chore to penetrate through the layers of metaphors in this text.

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toxik 2y ago

Writing fleshes out thought because writing is like talking to yourself with automatic history recording. I suggest trying to skip the middle step (writing) and just talk to yourself via voice recording or something else. It works and it takes a lot less formatting effort. Similarly, conversation works beautifully too.

unshavedyak 2y ago
I do this a lot, but I lose my place and cut myself off so frequently that it’s easy to get lost. I can see the value of going more slowly, documenting the process and completing sentences. Perhaps a LLM could wrap it all up for me lol.
DenisM 2y ago
Where would you store the voice memos? I’m concerned that unfiltered stream of thought would be perceived not well if it surfaces. This needs strong privacy and at the same time convenient UX.

supersrdjan 2y ago

The introduction to the article denies its main point: > If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. It’s a logical error. It’s like saying: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look foolish, therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks foolish. Clearly there are other ways to look foolish. So even if writing always clarified thought, it’s wrong to infer it’s impossible to have clear thoughts without writing. But since the writer here committed this mistake, he demonstrated that writing does not always result in clear thought. Incidentally, I wrote this comment to clarify my thoughts .

card_zero 2y ago
No, it's like: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look more foolish - always, no matter what else they did - therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks perfectly foolish. Or, say, people who have caught a Snorlax have more Pokemon, therefore no one who hasn't caught a Snorlax has all the Pokemon. This assumes that there's such a thing as a "fully formed idea" (which means an exception to "always" - you can't clarify your thoughts more and more by writing about them forever). If there isn't, it's still true, but it's not saying a whole lot.
- afc 2y ago
  I think you're right. But I still think the quote from Graham is terrible writing: confusing, brittle, convoluted, almost as if it was designed to hide something from readers and manipulate them into a different understanding than what it actually claims. The quote is, as you explain, technically correct due to its use of "always". Take this word away and the sentence is correct English, but the meaning now is incorrect (and would match the interpretation of the comment you replied to). Making the correctness hinge so directly in the subtlety of the presence of the quantifier makes the sentence brittle and convoluted. It feels almost manipulative, as if the writer hopes the reader won't inspect the sentence so closely (and thus will miss this subtlety) and will understand something slightly different ("if you don't write, it's impossible to have clear thoughts"), so that the conclusion sounds much stronger. And readers do get the incorrect interpretation, as evidenced by the comment you replied to, which attacks the misunderstanding of that sentence. So while I fully agree with you, I still think the sentence quoted is an example of terribly unhelpful and confusing writing. Especially because the full premise "writing down your ideas _always_ makes them more precise and complete" is debatable (you just need to find one counterexample). (Incidentally, my recollection of Graham's writing is that this type of misleading sentences (that are technically correct but appear to say something else, something that isn't), as if they were deliberately cultivated.) A much better sentence would be something like: * "Writing down your ideas is great to make them more precise and more complete. It's hard to have fully formed ideas about a topic without writing about it." This matches the understanding of a quick glance of the sentence. * "Writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and complete." Closer to the actual meaning, but doesn't do a slight of hand to hide the main point.

tuxone 2y ago

If it’s all about thinking then being restricted by the vocabulary of your language[s] might be a limitation. As a bilingual, a common question from friends in primary school was what language I was thinking in. My answer was I don’t think words, I think images. I later read Edward de Bono Lateral Thinking. I might be out of context here but I thought someone might be interested in the book.

apienx 2y ago

"Writing is thinking." -- David McCullough

chrisjj 2y ago

> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. So ... music is trivial? Dance is trivial? Sculpture is trivial? I have to say I think P Graham needs to get out more.

pauln99 2y ago
I think he also said somewhere that people mainly disagree with distorted versions of your ideas...
- chrisjj 2y ago
  Feel free to identify any distortion here.
cplat 2y ago
As someone who has done a lot of those things (beyond programming), I can assuredly say that "writing about something" is neither a proof of understanding nor a proficiency in a subject. (Case in point, our educational system)
- chrisjj 2y ago
  Quite so. If indeed all the author's ideas are incomplete until written, his mistake is ascribing this to the power of his writing rather than the limits of his ideation.
sifar 2y ago
To interpret it more charitably, perhaps each of these things is it's own language and the activities therein akin to writing.

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jilles 2y ago

“Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know—and what we don’t know—about whatever we’re trying to learn.” ― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn One of the books that got me into writing for myself.

space_oddity 2y ago
Do you have any specific writing habits or techniques that you developed as a result of reading this book?
- jilles 2y ago
  Yes! I write more. Instead of writing about things I know well, I write about things I want to know better. It reveals gaps in my knowledge I was not aware of. For example, I can start write "We are using X instead of Y because..." and realize I do not truly know the reason. Which leads me to investigate and then finish the sentence.
benhoyt 2y ago
I just finished "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. Here's a little blurb I just wrote about it: What a great book! Zinsser uses such crisp, engaging prose. He covers how to write, why to write, and what to write. He uses lots of examples from his own writing and from others -- good and bad. Stories abound. This is not a boring grammar book. Here's a taste -- he starts the chapter called "The Lead and the Ending" with these stark statements: "The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead." Punchy and self-referential. There's a decent amount about good technique, but it's more about style and voice. The second half of the book covers topics like "Writing in Your Job" (without sounding passive or using buzzwords) and "Writing Family History and Memoir" (that's actually why my brother lent me the book). And it finishes with an inspiring chapter on the craft of writing called "Write as Well as You Can". If you want to learn to write better, read this book. If you don't, definitely read it.

richrichie 2y ago

> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. That "nontrivial" qualification makes this an unfalsifiable bunkum.

paultopia 2y ago

This is a fantastic essay. As a professor, I routinely work with students on research and writing projects where they're suffering under the common misimpression that they need to know everything they intend to say before writing a single word down; I may start sending this to them to help clear the brain worm out.

space_oddity 2y ago
Common misconception that you need to have everything perfectly figured out before start writing.

space_oddity 2y ago

Writing is a tool for learning and self-discovery for me

gsuuon 2y ago

Sometimes complex topics are really like rubric's cubes - some changes here break things over there and then you need to make a bunch of turns to fix things elsewhere. Thinking through writing is necessary for these, because they look much simpler until they aren't and all the gory details start tripping over each other. The unfortunate part is that it feels very difficult to 're-enter' the topic as if reading for the first time, so the writing can easily become difficult to understand for a fresh-reader since it was edited by someone who's read it dozens of times in various incarnations and orders. 1) that sounds like a Montessori school? 2) I feel like Walter White is one of the more memorable character names (w/ the alliteration, no?)

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naikrovek 2y ago

> If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial. This is very flawed logic. This assumes that only writing can result in fully formed ideas, and that is simply a false assumption. I can't believe that it was even typed out as-is, it's so wrong. It's wrong on its face. It's wrong if you think about it for 1/10th of a second. It's wrong if you think about it for a minute. It's wrong if you think about it for an hour. It's even wrong if you write it out.

hsavit1 2y ago

I love how Paul Ghram is quoted and not an actual writer. Why would I take writing advice from him and not from, say, James Joyce?

sandspar 2y ago
There are different kinds of writing. They have unique requirements. James Joyce was a novelist. The article is about writing essays. Paul Graham is one of our leading essayists. Measured by impact on "builders" he's probably the foremost essayist. If you want to learn how to make documentaries, would you rather learn from the best documentarian or from Spielberg?
realprimoh 2y ago
How is Paul Graham not an actual writer? He has written some extremely influential essays that have reached outside of just Silicon Valley.

interroboink 2y ago

I don't mind this person relating their experiences, and encouraging others to do similar. But as someone who is (and strives to be!) non-verbal in a lot of my thought, keep in mind that there are other brain types out there (: This article is sprinkled with "people this" and "people that" terminology, which is mirrored in our broader culture. But I say it is actually "some people this" and "some people that." Don't be a word-chauvinist. To be fair, I do appreciate that a lot of the author's sentences started with "When I ..." and similar. Makes it more palatable to me. ---- This idea I just wrote down was fully-formed in my mind, and I could have just moved on with my life. I chose to put it into words (and pick those words, and re-edit them, spending my short time on this planet to do so) in order to communicate it to you, dear reader. Not to help me think (: (though I do sometimes use words to help me think, too. Let's not get too black-and-white about it)

dfreire 2y ago
What a great comment. Can you expand on why do you strive to be non-verbal?
- interroboink 2y ago
  (sorry for the wall of text; I guess you asked for it :) Mostly, I feel it slows me down. I'd rather continue on to the next thought than translate the current one into words in my head. It's a semi-conscious decision. I can almost feel the word-making machinery gearing up, but if I race ahead it doesn't have time to grab on. Also, it can be a bit overly-constraining. Sometimes constraints are good, like the article mentions — they force you to make decisions and face issues. But sometimes I feel like ideas are better served left in an "un-collapsed" state, at least for a time. I feel like much of my most valuable thinking happens in that state. And sometimes manifesting the thought is better accomplished through artwork, or physical activity, or something else that's not writing. So I guess there's a "to manifest or not manifest the thought" decision, and after that, there's a "to manifest in writing/words vs. another medium" decision. I remember as a teenager talking to some friends about thinking, and the idea of thinking without words was surprising to them — for them, thinking was words. And I gather this is true for many people. But I also gather it's not true for many people, myself included (: Apparently, there are some people who have word-thoughts appear as text floating in their mind, which is wild to me — lots of weird mental variety out there[1]. Over the years, I've come to see my thoughts as more "tactile" than anything else. Lots of physical textures and movements involved. Just earlier, I was wrestling with an issue that has been on my mind, and it was like trying to solve one of those "separate the ring from the rope" puzzles — lots of turning, twisting, pushing, pulling. I've been struggling with this task, and writing about too, but I feel like I made more progress with that recent mental wrangling than I had with pen and paper. Though I can't quite (yet) put into words the progress I've made! Anyway, when people write about "how to think" topics, I sometimes feel left out because there's often an implicit assumption/bias towards wordiness, and the primacy of words in thinking. Unsurprisingly, these writings are written by writers who love words, so there's a bit of a self-selection bias going on. Words sometimes get ascribed near-mystical powers ("In the beginning was the Word...", magic incantations, runes, etc), and they are kind of magical. But I also know from my own inner world that there's a nameless, wordless magic, too. But writers don't write about that as much ("write what you know"), so you don't hear about it, and it doesn't hold as much cultural sway. So, I try to speak up for the alternatives, encourage people to keep a broader perspective. [1] In case you're interested in such things, some interesting research: https://news.wisc.edu/that-little-voice-in-your-head-if-you-have-it-may-be-aligning-your-thoughts/ https://news.wisc.edu/that-little-voice-in-your-head-if-you-...