8 ms·

Writing is thinking

330 points by __rito__ 1y ago

msarrel 1y ago
Thinking and writing are closely linked. Thinking and using ChatGPT are not. Overview ‹ Your Brain on ChatGPT — MIT Media Lab https://share.google/RYjkIU1y4zdsAUDZt https://share.google/RYjkIU1y4zdsAUDZt
- thekoma 1y ago
  https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/overview/ https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ove...
zug_zug 1y ago
I see a lot of people say "writing is so important," and I think what they mean is "I feel really smart/good when I write." And I think what they are experiencing is that they've been assembling ideas in their heads for weeks, and only when it's all come together are they ready synthesize that information at a higher level, and they mistake this synthesis for the writing itself (rather than the writing being a symptom OF the synthesis -- if they had tried to write a week prior they would have found it unproductive).
- jryb 1y ago
  Just one personal anecdote: I definitely find contradictions or gaps in my thinking/knowledge when I write. Finding and resolving those deficiencies is what I point to when I say "writing is thinking".
- __rito__ 1y ago
  This is not true for at least me. Let's say, I am making something concrete by putting ideas, thoughts, knowledge into paper. While doing it, I am finding gaps and mistakes and finding opportunities to correct them. But it is not limited to 'correction', it also opens newer dimensions and perspectives- ones that previously didn't exist in my conscious mind. I consider writing as a tool of thinking. Another tool is brainstorming with a group, or any group discussion in general. These amend to your thoughts, make the existing ones more solid, and opens new direction, and unravels connections previously not accessible. Read this essay by Paul Graham: Putting Ideas into Words [0]. And also refer to his other essays on writing. There is also a great book by Paul Zissner: Writing to Learn. I suggest this book to people. Writing, when done while learning works akin to teaching- one of the most crucial steps in so-called Feynman Technique of learning. [0]: https://paulgraham.com/words.html https://paulgraham.com/words.html
  - zug_zug 1y ago
    Yeah I think I've read multiple PG essays on the importance of writing, but they always struck me as no different than Katy Perry telling you to sing, or some Grandmaster saying "go play chess." That is -- a personal anecdote that doesn't necessarily generalize. I'm not saying that writing can't be a useful tool to organize ideas, definitely it can. But I think I've found two things: - Now the best way to "iterate" my thoughts is to rubberduck with ChatGPT; it's really amazing how much faster I can learn when I admit how little I know, even on something like global warming or an advanced math topic. - By and large, "organizing my thoughts" isn't really a high-return activity in my life. Having an intelligently written blog that I've put hundreds of hours into has never done anything for my career or led to any personal connections, and honestly who's to say my time wouldn't have been better-spent just coming with some jokes to network better rather than having some cohesive theory of everything that nobody asked for?
  - FrankenDino 1y ago
    Anything by William Zinsser is worth reading. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7881675.William_Zinsser https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7881675.William_Zinsse...
  - __rito__ 1y ago
    I just noticed that I wrote William Zissner's name wrong. Please read 'Paul Zissner' as William Zissner.
- aquariusDue 1y ago
  Sometimes I like to test whether I can actually construct or assemble a finished something in my mind from an inkling of a thought. For example a few days ago I realized that I found it hard to reverse a word in my mind, even a simple one. Try for yourself, think of a word and then reverse it in your head with your eyes closed. Some people might struggle with the above, some may find it doable in their heads, but most can agree that it's absurdly easy if you can externalize it to paper or a text editor at least.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  I disagree. Not sure how common this workflow is, but I write by putting all the different unsynthesized ideas down and rearrange them as the latent structure "reveals itself." At the end you have something synthesized. Sure some type latent structure was there all along (thus why I put them down), but it wasn't necessarily visible to me, nor optimal, nor did it include/exclude all the right points. The need for iteration itself proves that the act of writing is actually doing the synthesis.
- wrp 1y ago
  You need to add into consideration that laying things out in visual display provides cognitive support, reducing the effort to reason about more things. So writing out ideas really does allow you to reach a greater scope of synthesis.
- chambers 1y ago
  I think you're right. I'll add on: there's a lot of thinking that does not need writing, and there's a lot of writing that needs no thinking. Deng Xiaoping and other greats wrote pretty minimally for their own thinking, if at all. Whereas many of us not-so-greats seem to knee-jerk comment without a single thought. It makes sense for our age. Amid a thousand distractions, typing on the keyboard gives the illusion of getting a grip. Note-taking on my computer gives the illusion of a second brain. Ululating on the internet gives the illusion of sharing thoughts. Instead of "writing is thinking", I prefer "thought precedes speech" https://inframethodology.cbs.dk/?p=1127 https://inframethodology.cbs.dk/?p=1127; it fits the small human mind better though I've yet to learn it properly.
- lukebechtel 1y ago
  it depends how you write. often when I write an idea down, my "inner critic" process gets more activated upon seeing the textual representation. thus I find gaps and flaws more easily. not true for all domains, but many.
- starluz 1y ago
  [dead]
- jimbokun 1y ago
  If they tried writing a week prior that would have realized sooner the gaps in the ideas they were assembling, leading to them closing those gaps faster.
- bGl2YW5j 1y ago
  This is a really cynical take. People work differently and get value from different things. It’s probably safe to assume most aren’t virtue signalling about writing.
- denkmoon 1y ago
  Getting stuff written down makes me realise the weak points and the errors in my thinking which I know from experience I don't find if I don't write it down.
sram1337 1y ago
relevant PG essay https://paulgraham.com/writes.html https://paulgraham.com/writes.html
carlesfe 1y ago
While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this. We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods. I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days. Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write. Socrates argued that writing would destroy people's memory. He wasn't 100% wrong, yet here we are. The criticism towards the use of LLMs is so deliciously ironic. The analogy with writing... writes itself. Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently.
- Isamu 1y ago
  You seem to be responding to the reverse, “thinking is writing”, which I agree is not true, you can think without writing. They are making the point that writing is more than dumping a completed thought. The act of doing that helps you to critique your dumped thoughts, to have more thoughts about your thoughts, to simplify them or expand them. It’s easier to go meta once you dump your state.
  - carlesfe 1y ago
    I think you are right and I understood it the other way around Kind of ironic, though - I wrote, but my thinking process wasn't so great :) Thanks for the correction!
- wrp 1y ago
  > writers...developed full books in their mind first When reading long, closely reasoned passages of medieval philosophy, I've wondered about their development process, when there was no such thing as scratch paper. > Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently. People are just glibly saying this sort of thing, but what specifically is coming? I'm now wrestling with the problem of dealing with university students who don't hesitate to lean on LLMs. I'm trying to not be dismissive, but it feels like they are just thinking less, not differently.
infogulch 1y ago
Even speaking is thinking. This is why free speech is the very First Amendment. Whoever denies your right to speak freely is controlling your thinking. Writing is thinking with a superpower. It's like using the "Pensive" from Harry Potter, depicted in the scene where Harry and Dumbledore pull memory whisps out of their temple to rewatch in a mirror pool. Writing enables you to apply your attention to an idea at multiple levels of analysis with significantly less effort than doing the same while also preserving the idea in your head manually.
- Tsarp 1y ago
  https://voicebraindump.com https://voicebraindump.com
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
  > Even speaking is thinking. This is why free speech is the very First Amendment. Whoever denies your right to speak freely is controlling your thinking. There's an excellent podcast (Radiolab, possibly) about how this conception of what the first amendment means is rather recent (1910s-1920s) and that the ideas of what "free speech" meant before that are really radically different.
jll29 1y ago
To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally). And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc. Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first one ought to learn how to calculate mentally and using pen and paper. If for no other reason, to check whether we made a typo when entering our calculation, e.g. when the result is off by 100 because we did not press the decimal point firmly enough. I am very concerned that young people delegate to LLMs before reaching that stage.
- ysofunny 1y ago
  it's like those kids will live in the future, where there's advanced AI I think we should trust children enought that they'll also figure out a crazy changing technological world. on the other hand, internet millenial ideals are fast dying. the digital dream of cultural and mediatic abundance is turning into a nightmare of redundant content as information wars saturate the figurative airwaves
  - IggleSniggle 1y ago
    Of course I trust my kids to make the most of the environment they are given, and given that their environment will differ from the one I am adapted for, they will likely surpass me in being well adapted to the environment of the future; it's still my responsibility to prepare them as best as I can for it. You might put a baby in a pool so it can learn to swim, but you make sure their environment is such that drowning is an impossibility. A child destined to be an Olympian swimmer still requires guidance, even if their natural ability and inclinations outpace both their peers and their elders.
    - jimkleiber 1y ago
      Yeah, I think there are environmental things for which our culture cannot prepare us, yet I also think many of our inherited behaviors and beliefs will help us because the environment may not change that much.
pfoof 1y ago
I would also compare reading to being reprogrammed like EEPROM. Although the process is slower, the changes feel more permanent when learning: you need to create connections yourself from examples compared to someone demonstrating it on the video.
pryelluw 1y ago
Writing what someone else wrote is thinking what someone else thought. My favorite learning technique is reading, listening or viewing something and then typing it into libreoffice. Specially useful when it is something that is transcribed. Works really well for code, too. Give it a try!
markhahn 1y ago
We think by association. We can sometimes tighten up the process when there's a formal logical framework that applies, but it's not as natural or automatic. What writing changes is that in words, you have to make it explicit how one thing leads to another. Partly, that's just due to the imposition of sentence structure. Ironically, this is precisely the crazy thing about Trumpspeech: it's just associations - vibe-chaining if you will.
fehu22 1y ago
writing is logical original
empath75 1y ago
It is interesting to hold in one's head the following two beliefs: Writing requires thought. LLMs do not think.
- zahlman 1y ago
  "Writing is thinking" does not entail "writing requires thought". Which has a lot to do with how people intuit when text is LLM-generated.
Ezhik 1y ago
With the latest technology we can fix that. Page full, head empty.
cubefox 1y ago
This is an important point: > For example, LLMs can aid in improving readability and grammar, which might be particularly useful to those for which English is not their first language. I don't know whether this has been empirically confirmed, but I have the strong belief that a manuscript with poor grammar, by a non-native English speaker, has a much higher probability of being rejected than the same manuscript but copyedited by something like Grammerly or a SOTA LLM. Ideally writing style should matter much less than the quality of the research, but reviewers are not just influenced by objective criteria but, unconsciously, also by vibes, which includes things like writing style and even formatting.
- zahlman 1y ago
  Meanwhile, more and more posts on discussion forums etc. is clearly "copyedited" by these tools and the result is quite grating for the regulars.
  - cubefox 1y ago
    Probably less grating though than broken English. (Copyediting is also different from pure LLM replies which don't involve editing anything.)
    - precompute 1y ago
      Broken English still has its charm and brings the structure of the writer's native language to the fore, which makes it relatively easier to parse and glean intentions from than polished LLM-speak.
      - cubefox 1y ago
        That might be true, but I think it's false. Or more precisely, I think manuscripts with broken English have statistically a higher probability of being rejected than ones that are copyedited with AI.
motohagiography 1y ago
the act of writing takes raw experience, puts it in front of the eyes, and then filters it back through your critical faculties so you can refine and reason about it. the iteration makes it higher quality thought. making writing valuable is another skill (see this evergreen lecture from the university of chicago leadership lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFwVf5a3pZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFwVf5a3pZM) however when I encounter people with low written or verbal acuity, they have to survive somehow, so it's wise to observe what tools of cunning they tend to reach for.
poindontcare 1y ago
They are delusional if they think that the only use of LLM for scientific research is to correct grammar.
bwfan123 1y ago
We may enter a vicious loop where writing is increasingly generated by LLMs. Then, LLMs have to train on their own output leading to model collapse. Hence, the models depend on human writing.
- abound 1y ago
  This intuitively makes sense (like deep-frying a JPEG), but it doesn't seem to happen in practice, as modern models are frequently trained on text both output from other models, and curated from other models. Realistically, going forward model training will just need to incorporate a step to remove data below some quality threshold, LLM-generated or otherwise.
zahlman 1y ago
Related (from a few days ago)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641669
azangru 1y ago
> Current LLMs might also be wrong Current humans might as well :-)
alliancedamages 1y ago
While the article’s point seems intuitively true, it cites only two papers related to the benefits of handwriting. But it’s argument is stronger than that. Is there peer-reviewed evidence to support the stronger claim of the benefits of typewriting?
iambateman 1y ago
Using an LLM is also thinking, when used as such. This morning I asked ChatGPT a question about how Quickbooks handles charts of accounts compared to NetSuite. It answered my question better than anything else would have. Also, I'm currently using Claude Code to fix some bugs -- it's handling the heavy lifting while I think about what needs to happen. I'm in favor of human writing as an underrated tool of culture-making...but the scope of what counts as "thinking" is expanding.
nicholast 1y ago
The best way to learn a subject is to teach it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
pcrh 1y ago
I am quite puzzled how an LLM could even start "write" a scientific paper. Say you start with a set of findings, for example, western blots, data from a transgenic mouse engineered for the relevant gene, and some single cell sequencing data. Your manuscript describes the identification of a novel protein, editing the gene in a mouse and showing what pathways are affected in the mouse. What material would you give the LLM? How would the LLM "know" which of these novel findings were in any way meaningful? As far as I'm aware, it is unlikely that the LLM would be able to do anything other that paraphrase what you instruct it to write. It would be a return to the days before word processing became common, and researchers would either dictate their manuscripts to a typist, or hand the typist a stack of hand-written paper. The actually hard part of writing scientific papers is not putting the words "down on paper" so to speak, but deciding what to say.
- dist-epoch 1y ago
  > How would the LLM "know" which of these novel findings were in any way meaningful Given that they are trained on all of arXiv, ..., it's much more likely they are aware of all public relevant papers than your average researcher.
  - pcrh 1y ago
    A researcher on any particular topic is not supposed to be an "average" researcher, but already deeply familiar with their subject.
- dboreham 1y ago
  The LLM can make a plan or outline first, which is also writing.
  - pcrh 1y ago
    Any researcher already has this in their head long before any writing takes place.
    - polairscience 1y ago
kelseyfrog 1y ago
Writing needs a conceptual split analogous to the split between math and calculating. Just as a calculating can be implemented on a computer which has low cognitive abilities but high algorithmic and procedural abilities, we need to extract out the word-smithing capabilities from writing separate from the thinking portion. Our lack of distinction in terms reflects a muddled conceptual framework. LLMs are excellent wordsmiths completely divorced from the concept of thinking. They break the correlative assumption - that excellent writing is corresponds with excellent thinking. Until now, we've been able to discern poor idea because they have a certain aesthetic, think conspiracy rants in docx saying something about a theory of everything based on vibrations. But that no longer holds. We have decent enough word-smithing coupled with a deficit of thinking. Unfortunately this breaks our heuristics with consequences ranging from polluting our online commons to folks end up believing nonsense like ChatGPT named itself Nova and they are a torchbearer for spiritual gobbledygook. My point is that we're in the process of untangling these two and as a result, we're likely to see confusion and maybe even persistent misunderstanding until this distinction becomes a more common part of how we talk about and evaluate written work. They're living in an AGI-world and we're just..not.
zkmon 1y ago
Whenever I need to do some hard thinking and things are not clear, I fire up my sublime text and write down the context in the simplest terms and short lines (only few words per line). While doing this, I will be absolutely rude to myself asking extremely basic and direct questions to bring out the real context, real goals and real path. It's like answering an under-world boss. No bullshit, no pretense, no regard to any norms, no impressing someone. Then the whole thing falls into a meaningful structure. I leave it when it produces some immediate action items.
omot 1y ago
I wonder how much of this applies to coding. Is coding thinking?
- danieljacksonno 1y ago
  It seems obvious to me. Just like drawing and sketching helps thinking about design, coding helps thinking about programming. It's one of the reasons for the "one to throw away"-idea of writing shitty code first just to get it to work, and then remake it after you have thought through the problem by coding it.
MinimalAction 1y ago
To quote Paul Graham: "Writing is thinking. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did: If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking. So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots." https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html
MichaelRo 1y ago
To write something you must form a "theory of the system", which is orders of magnitude more difficult than feeding on fodder. It's the difference between being fluent in a language and sort of understanding something. It's quite similar in hard sciences as it's in natural languages. For instance I don't understand Hungarian at all. Few words "igen", "jó napot kívánok" doesn't a knowledge of the language form. Then German. I had to learn it in school so I have orders of magnitude better grasp at it because I can actually say a few statements that form in my mind: "Nein, ich brauch nicht ein anderes stück Steak". Might not be 100% correct gramatically and vocabulary wise but it conveys the message and also transmits that I understand the context. And then come English which I speak since 33 years. I actually THINK in English a lot of times and there are concepts I can't easily express in my native Romanian language without resorting to a painfully long and sometimes unsuccessful software-driven (as opposed to FPGA-encoded) translation process.
h2zizzle 1y ago
My experience with writing is that it's often a matter of simply noting down what comes pouring from my subconscious, with the most taxing task being keeping ahold of some given connection, sentiment, or wording (as that subconscious seems to generate more than my working memory can keep track of). Sometimes I struggle to fit those sentiments and connections to wording that I imagine will make sense, to someone else or even to myself. I guess that would be the, "Writing is thinking," part, but it seems more like, "Effective and coscientious (self-)communication is thinking."
xiande04 1y ago
I've been saying this for years.
ghaff 1y ago
A former manager (and editor) used to say writing is discovery which is more or less the same thing. I agree.
CrackerNews 1y ago
If this were to be an analogy to AI, would inference discover information that wasn't found during training? Is this where hallucinations come from?
sroussey 1y ago
If writing is thinking, then perhaps we should think more about what language would produce the best thinking, and does it exist? How do we go about creating it? And if thinking is dependent on language, maybe we should create a new language for artificial intelligence rather than feeding it human languages.
- emmanueloga_ 1y ago
  There's been a lot of work in this area but no definitive answer, and few constructed languages speakers [1]. I imagine the wins may be marginal, similar to the wins in dvorak vs qwerty typing. -- 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Artificial_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Artifici...
ndgold 1y ago
True. Writing by hand is even better.
agcat 1y ago
I love this! Especially the part about if writing is thinking, are we not then reading the ‘thoughts’ of the LLM rather than those of the researchers behind the paper?
jz10 1y ago
We can't really talk about this topic without mentioning the book "How to Take Smart Notes" by Soenke Ahrens One key takeaway is if you want to learn/remember something better, always rewrite things in your own words as both the act of writing AND paraphrasing makes it more sticky
gwern 1y ago
New HN metric: how many comments do you have to scroll down on a LLM-edited/written submission before someone points it out? Triple bonus if the submission is about LLM writing and the need to think for yourself without a LLM, and still no one has pointed this out. Current page score: 333 points.
- opdahl 1y ago
  What makes you believe this was written by an LLM?
  - gwern 1y ago
    Because it has many of the typical 4o stylistic tics like 'it's not X, it's Y' or enumeration or the em dashes, or the twist ending. It's not 100% unedited ChatGPT and far from the most blatant instance that has caught my eye (they've started showing up in the New York Times and New Yorker as well, have you noticed that?), but certainly sounds like that was used: "Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner." "This is not merely a philosophical observation; it is backed by scientific evidence." "Importantly, if writing is thinking, are we not then reading the ‘thoughts’ of the LLM rather than those of the researchers behind the paper?" "overcoming writer’s block, provide alternative explanations for findings or identify connections between seemingly unrelated subjects." (Note that this is particularly ironic because as the op-ed notes, if they did use it, they are required by Nature to disclose this... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00191-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00191-1 But of course, how would anyone ever prove they did so? You know how difficult it is to get Nature to retract even blatant fraud.)
everdrive 1y ago
This is one of the most important reasons why it's so harmful to let an LLM write for you: what they're actually doing is thinking for you.
stillpointlab 1y ago
Many people here are taking away from this that substituting our own writing with the writing from an LLM is a danger for human development. I see things more optimistically. If good writing leads to good thinking, then anything I do to improve my ability to write well transitively helps me to think well. In that sense, I actually see a huge benefit to LLMs in improving my writing and therefore improving my thinking. Not only can I ask for detailed and powerful feedback, I can also ask for more details on background context or related topics that I wouldn't be aware of. I believe judicious use of LLMs can make us better than we could be without them.
- spot5010 1y ago
  I subscribe to this view. LLMs can be tools for thinking, not substitutes to thinking. In fact, I feel that with time, the way we think may fundamentally change, just like how reading and writing changed thinking. An LLM can be an ideal foil to test out ideas, and the process of thinking could be an iterative process with the LLM as an active participant.
Amaury-El 1y ago
Writing has always been how I organize my thoughts. A lot of ideas only become clear as I work through them on the page. AI can save time, but it also makes it easy to skip the slower, more reflective parts of thinking. For me, that’s often where the real value of writing comes from.
RS-232 1y ago
Memory is intelligence
navaed01 1y ago
Part of me can’t help but think that scientific journals as billion dollar industries need to keep the status quo of how articles are written, where they get submitted and who reviews them. Even though per review today is failing
Johnnylove 1y ago
[dead]
mintflow 1y ago
Maybe as a coder, I will someday will just calm down and write code without using any LLMs, just for train my thinking capability...

330 points by __rito__ 1y ago

Thinking and writing are closely linked. Thinking and using ChatGPT are not. Overview ‹ Your Brain on ChatGPT — MIT Media Lab https://share.google/RYjkIU1y4zdsAUDZt https://share.google/RYjkIU1y4zdsAUDZt

thekoma 1y ago
https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/overview/ https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ove...

zug_zug 1y ago

I see a lot of people say "writing is so important," and I think what they mean is "I feel really smart/good when I write." And I think what they are experiencing is that they've been assembling ideas in their heads for weeks, and only when it's all come together are they ready synthesize that information at a higher level, and they mistake this synthesis for the writing itself (rather than the writing being a symptom OF the synthesis -- if they had tried to write a week prior they would have found it unproductive).

jryb 1y ago
Just one personal anecdote: I definitely find contradictions or gaps in my thinking/knowledge when I write. Finding and resolving those deficiencies is what I point to when I say "writing is thinking".
__rito__ 1y ago
This is not true for at least me. Let's say, I am making something concrete by putting ideas, thoughts, knowledge into paper. While doing it, I am finding gaps and mistakes and finding opportunities to correct them. But it is not limited to 'correction', it also opens newer dimensions and perspectives- ones that previously didn't exist in my conscious mind. I consider writing as a tool of thinking. Another tool is brainstorming with a group, or any group discussion in general. These amend to your thoughts, make the existing ones more solid, and opens new direction, and unravels connections previously not accessible. Read this essay by Paul Graham: Putting Ideas into Words [0]. And also refer to his other essays on writing. There is also a great book by Paul Zissner: Writing to Learn. I suggest this book to people. Writing, when done while learning works akin to teaching- one of the most crucial steps in so-called Feynman Technique of learning. [0]: https://paulgraham.com/words.html https://paulgraham.com/words.html
- zug_zug 1y ago
  Yeah I think I've read multiple PG essays on the importance of writing, but they always struck me as no different than Katy Perry telling you to sing, or some Grandmaster saying "go play chess." That is -- a personal anecdote that doesn't necessarily generalize. I'm not saying that writing can't be a useful tool to organize ideas, definitely it can. But I think I've found two things: - Now the best way to "iterate" my thoughts is to rubberduck with ChatGPT; it's really amazing how much faster I can learn when I admit how little I know, even on something like global warming or an advanced math topic. - By and large, "organizing my thoughts" isn't really a high-return activity in my life. Having an intelligently written blog that I've put hundreds of hours into has never done anything for my career or led to any personal connections, and honestly who's to say my time wouldn't have been better-spent just coming with some jokes to network better rather than having some cohesive theory of everything that nobody asked for?
- FrankenDino 1y ago
  Anything by William Zinsser is worth reading. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7881675.William_Zinsser https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7881675.William_Zinsse...
- __rito__ 1y ago
  I just noticed that I wrote William Zissner's name wrong. Please read 'Paul Zissner' as William Zissner.
aquariusDue 1y ago
Sometimes I like to test whether I can actually construct or assemble a finished something in my mind from an inkling of a thought. For example a few days ago I realized that I found it hard to reverse a word in my mind, even a simple one. Try for yourself, think of a word and then reverse it in your head with your eyes closed. Some people might struggle with the above, some may find it doable in their heads, but most can agree that it's absurdly easy if you can externalize it to paper or a text editor at least.
sorcerer-mar 1y ago
I disagree. Not sure how common this workflow is, but I write by putting all the different unsynthesized ideas down and rearrange them as the latent structure "reveals itself." At the end you have something synthesized. Sure some type latent structure was there all along (thus why I put them down), but it wasn't necessarily visible to me, nor optimal, nor did it include/exclude all the right points. The need for iteration itself proves that the act of writing is actually doing the synthesis.
wrp 1y ago
You need to add into consideration that laying things out in visual display provides cognitive support, reducing the effort to reason about more things. So writing out ideas really does allow you to reach a greater scope of synthesis.
chambers 1y ago
I think you're right. I'll add on: there's a lot of thinking that does not need writing, and there's a lot of writing that needs no thinking. Deng Xiaoping and other greats wrote pretty minimally for their own thinking, if at all. Whereas many of us not-so-greats seem to knee-jerk comment without a single thought. It makes sense for our age. Amid a thousand distractions, typing on the keyboard gives the illusion of getting a grip. Note-taking on my computer gives the illusion of a second brain. Ululating on the internet gives the illusion of sharing thoughts. Instead of "writing is thinking", I prefer "thought precedes speech" https://inframethodology.cbs.dk/?p=1127 https://inframethodology.cbs.dk/?p=1127; it fits the small human mind better though I've yet to learn it properly.
lukebechtel 1y ago
it depends how you write. often when I write an idea down, my "inner critic" process gets more activated upon seeing the textual representation. thus I find gaps and flaws more easily. not true for all domains, but many.
starluz 1y ago
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jimbokun 1y ago
If they tried writing a week prior that would have realized sooner the gaps in the ideas they were assembling, leading to them closing those gaps faster.
bGl2YW5j 1y ago
This is a really cynical take. People work differently and get value from different things. It’s probably safe to assume most aren’t virtue signalling about writing.
denkmoon 1y ago
Getting stuff written down makes me realise the weak points and the errors in my thinking which I know from experience I don't find if I don't write it down.

sram1337 1y ago

relevant PG essay https://paulgraham.com/writes.html https://paulgraham.com/writes.html

carlesfe 1y ago

While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this. We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods. I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days. Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write. Socrates argued that writing would destroy people's memory. He wasn't 100% wrong, yet here we are. The criticism towards the use of LLMs is so deliciously ironic. The analogy with writing... writes itself. Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently.

Isamu 1y ago
You seem to be responding to the reverse, “thinking is writing”, which I agree is not true, you can think without writing. They are making the point that writing is more than dumping a completed thought. The act of doing that helps you to critique your dumped thoughts, to have more thoughts about your thoughts, to simplify them or expand them. It’s easier to go meta once you dump your state.
- carlesfe 1y ago
  I think you are right and I understood it the other way around Kind of ironic, though - I wrote, but my thinking process wasn't so great :) Thanks for the correction!
wrp 1y ago
> writers...developed full books in their mind first When reading long, closely reasoned passages of medieval philosophy, I've wondered about their development process, when there was no such thing as scratch paper. > Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently. People are just glibly saying this sort of thing, but what specifically is coming? I'm now wrestling with the problem of dealing with university students who don't hesitate to lean on LLMs. I'm trying to not be dismissive, but it feels like they are just thinking less, not differently.

infogulch 1y ago

Even speaking is thinking. This is why free speech is the very First Amendment. Whoever denies your right to speak freely is controlling your thinking. Writing is thinking with a superpower. It's like using the "Pensive" from Harry Potter, depicted in the scene where Harry and Dumbledore pull memory whisps out of their temple to rewatch in a mirror pool. Writing enables you to apply your attention to an idea at multiple levels of analysis with significantly less effort than doing the same while also preserving the idea in your head manually.

Tsarp 1y ago
https://voicebraindump.com https://voicebraindump.com
PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
> Even speaking is thinking. This is why free speech is the very First Amendment. Whoever denies your right to speak freely is controlling your thinking. There's an excellent podcast (Radiolab, possibly) about how this conception of what the first amendment means is rather recent (1910s-1920s) and that the ideas of what "free speech" meant before that are really radically different.

jll29 1y ago

To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally). And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc. Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first one ought to learn how to calculate mentally and using pen and paper. If for no other reason, to check whether we made a typo when entering our calculation, e.g. when the result is off by 100 because we did not press the decimal point firmly enough. I am very concerned that young people delegate to LLMs before reaching that stage.

ysofunny 1y ago
it's like those kids will live in the future, where there's advanced AI I think we should trust children enought that they'll also figure out a crazy changing technological world. on the other hand, internet millenial ideals are fast dying. the digital dream of cultural and mediatic abundance is turning into a nightmare of redundant content as information wars saturate the figurative airwaves
- IggleSniggle 1y ago
  Of course I trust my kids to make the most of the environment they are given, and given that their environment will differ from the one I am adapted for, they will likely surpass me in being well adapted to the environment of the future; it's still my responsibility to prepare them as best as I can for it. You might put a baby in a pool so it can learn to swim, but you make sure their environment is such that drowning is an impossibility. A child destined to be an Olympian swimmer still requires guidance, even if their natural ability and inclinations outpace both their peers and their elders.
  - jimkleiber 1y ago
    Yeah, I think there are environmental things for which our culture cannot prepare us, yet I also think many of our inherited behaviors and beliefs will help us because the environment may not change that much.

pfoof 1y ago

I would also compare reading to being reprogrammed like EEPROM. Although the process is slower, the changes feel more permanent when learning: you need to create connections yourself from examples compared to someone demonstrating it on the video.

pryelluw 1y ago

Writing what someone else wrote is thinking what someone else thought. My favorite learning technique is reading, listening or viewing something and then typing it into libreoffice. Specially useful when it is something that is transcribed. Works really well for code, too. Give it a try!

markhahn 1y ago

We think by association. We can sometimes tighten up the process when there's a formal logical framework that applies, but it's not as natural or automatic. What writing changes is that in words, you have to make it explicit how one thing leads to another. Partly, that's just due to the imposition of sentence structure. Ironically, this is precisely the crazy thing about Trumpspeech: it's just associations - vibe-chaining if you will.

fehu22 1y ago

writing is logical original

empath75 1y ago

It is interesting to hold in one's head the following two beliefs: Writing requires thought. LLMs do not think.

zahlman 1y ago
"Writing is thinking" does not entail "writing requires thought". Which has a lot to do with how people intuit when text is LLM-generated.

Ezhik 1y ago

With the latest technology we can fix that. Page full, head empty.

cubefox 1y ago

This is an important point: > For example, LLMs can aid in improving readability and grammar, which might be particularly useful to those for which English is not their first language. I don't know whether this has been empirically confirmed, but I have the strong belief that a manuscript with poor grammar, by a non-native English speaker, has a much higher probability of being rejected than the same manuscript but copyedited by something like Grammerly or a SOTA LLM. Ideally writing style should matter much less than the quality of the research, but reviewers are not just influenced by objective criteria but, unconsciously, also by vibes, which includes things like writing style and even formatting.

zahlman 1y ago
Meanwhile, more and more posts on discussion forums etc. is clearly "copyedited" by these tools and the result is quite grating for the regulars.
- cubefox 1y ago
  Probably less grating though than broken English. (Copyediting is also different from pure LLM replies which don't involve editing anything.)
  - precompute 1y ago
    Broken English still has its charm and brings the structure of the writer's native language to the fore, which makes it relatively easier to parse and glean intentions from than polished LLM-speak.
    - cubefox 1y ago
      That might be true, but I think it's false. Or more precisely, I think manuscripts with broken English have statistically a higher probability of being rejected than ones that are copyedited with AI.

motohagiography 1y ago

the act of writing takes raw experience, puts it in front of the eyes, and then filters it back through your critical faculties so you can refine and reason about it. the iteration makes it higher quality thought. making writing valuable is another skill (see this evergreen lecture from the university of chicago leadership lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFwVf5a3pZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFwVf5a3pZM) however when I encounter people with low written or verbal acuity, they have to survive somehow, so it's wise to observe what tools of cunning they tend to reach for.

poindontcare 1y ago

They are delusional if they think that the only use of LLM for scientific research is to correct grammar.

bwfan123 1y ago

We may enter a vicious loop where writing is increasingly generated by LLMs. Then, LLMs have to train on their own output leading to model collapse. Hence, the models depend on human writing.

abound 1y ago
This intuitively makes sense (like deep-frying a JPEG), but it doesn't seem to happen in practice, as modern models are frequently trained on text both output from other models, and curated from other models. Realistically, going forward model training will just need to incorporate a step to remove data below some quality threshold, LLM-generated or otherwise.

zahlman 1y ago

Related (from a few days ago)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641669

azangru 1y ago

> Current LLMs might also be wrong Current humans might as well :-)

alliancedamages 1y ago

While the article’s point seems intuitively true, it cites only two papers related to the benefits of handwriting. But it’s argument is stronger than that. Is there peer-reviewed evidence to support the stronger claim of the benefits of typewriting?

iambateman 1y ago

Using an LLM is also thinking, when used as such. This morning I asked ChatGPT a question about how Quickbooks handles charts of accounts compared to NetSuite. It answered my question better than anything else would have. Also, I'm currently using Claude Code to fix some bugs -- it's handling the heavy lifting while I think about what needs to happen. I'm in favor of human writing as an underrated tool of culture-making...but the scope of what counts as "thinking" is expanding.

nicholast 1y ago

The best way to learn a subject is to teach it.

deleted 1y ago

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pcrh 1y ago

I am quite puzzled how an LLM could even start "write" a scientific paper. Say you start with a set of findings, for example, western blots, data from a transgenic mouse engineered for the relevant gene, and some single cell sequencing data. Your manuscript describes the identification of a novel protein, editing the gene in a mouse and showing what pathways are affected in the mouse. What material would you give the LLM? How would the LLM "know" which of these novel findings were in any way meaningful? As far as I'm aware, it is unlikely that the LLM would be able to do anything other that paraphrase what you instruct it to write. It would be a return to the days before word processing became common, and researchers would either dictate their manuscripts to a typist, or hand the typist a stack of hand-written paper. The actually hard part of writing scientific papers is not putting the words "down on paper" so to speak, but deciding what to say.

dist-epoch 1y ago
> How would the LLM "know" which of these novel findings were in any way meaningful Given that they are trained on all of arXiv, ..., it's much more likely they are aware of all public relevant papers than your average researcher.
- pcrh 1y ago
  A researcher on any particular topic is not supposed to be an "average" researcher, but already deeply familiar with their subject.
dboreham 1y ago
The LLM can make a plan or outline first, which is also writing.
- pcrh 1y ago
  Any researcher already has this in their head long before any writing takes place.
  - polairscience 1y ago

kelseyfrog 1y ago

Writing needs a conceptual split analogous to the split between math and calculating. Just as a calculating can be implemented on a computer which has low cognitive abilities but high algorithmic and procedural abilities, we need to extract out the word-smithing capabilities from writing separate from the thinking portion. Our lack of distinction in terms reflects a muddled conceptual framework. LLMs are excellent wordsmiths completely divorced from the concept of thinking. They break the correlative assumption - that excellent writing is corresponds with excellent thinking. Until now, we've been able to discern poor idea because they have a certain aesthetic, think conspiracy rants in docx saying something about a theory of everything based on vibrations. But that no longer holds. We have decent enough word-smithing coupled with a deficit of thinking. Unfortunately this breaks our heuristics with consequences ranging from polluting our online commons to folks end up believing nonsense like ChatGPT named itself Nova and they are a torchbearer for spiritual gobbledygook. My point is that we're in the process of untangling these two and as a result, we're likely to see confusion and maybe even persistent misunderstanding until this distinction becomes a more common part of how we talk about and evaluate written work. They're living in an AGI-world and we're just..not.

zkmon 1y ago

Whenever I need to do some hard thinking and things are not clear, I fire up my sublime text and write down the context in the simplest terms and short lines (only few words per line). While doing this, I will be absolutely rude to myself asking extremely basic and direct questions to bring out the real context, real goals and real path. It's like answering an under-world boss. No bullshit, no pretense, no regard to any norms, no impressing someone. Then the whole thing falls into a meaningful structure. I leave it when it produces some immediate action items.

omot 1y ago

I wonder how much of this applies to coding. Is coding thinking?

danieljacksonno 1y ago
It seems obvious to me. Just like drawing and sketching helps thinking about design, coding helps thinking about programming. It's one of the reasons for the "one to throw away"-idea of writing shitty code first just to get it to work, and then remake it after you have thought through the problem by coding it.

MinimalAction 1y ago

To quote Paul Graham: "Writing is thinking. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did: If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking. So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots." https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html

MichaelRo 1y ago

To write something you must form a "theory of the system", which is orders of magnitude more difficult than feeding on fodder. It's the difference between being fluent in a language and sort of understanding something. It's quite similar in hard sciences as it's in natural languages. For instance I don't understand Hungarian at all. Few words "igen", "jó napot kívánok" doesn't a knowledge of the language form. Then German. I had to learn it in school so I have orders of magnitude better grasp at it because I can actually say a few statements that form in my mind: "Nein, ich brauch nicht ein anderes stück Steak". Might not be 100% correct gramatically and vocabulary wise but it conveys the message and also transmits that I understand the context. And then come English which I speak since 33 years. I actually THINK in English a lot of times and there are concepts I can't easily express in my native Romanian language without resorting to a painfully long and sometimes unsuccessful software-driven (as opposed to FPGA-encoded) translation process.

h2zizzle 1y ago

My experience with writing is that it's often a matter of simply noting down what comes pouring from my subconscious, with the most taxing task being keeping ahold of some given connection, sentiment, or wording (as that subconscious seems to generate more than my working memory can keep track of). Sometimes I struggle to fit those sentiments and connections to wording that I imagine will make sense, to someone else or even to myself. I guess that would be the, "Writing is thinking," part, but it seems more like, "Effective and coscientious (self-)communication is thinking."

xiande04 1y ago

I've been saying this for years.

ghaff 1y ago

A former manager (and editor) used to say writing is discovery which is more or less the same thing. I agree.

CrackerNews 1y ago

If this were to be an analogy to AI, would inference discover information that wasn't found during training? Is this where hallucinations come from?

sroussey 1y ago

If writing is thinking, then perhaps we should think more about what language would produce the best thinking, and does it exist? How do we go about creating it? And if thinking is dependent on language, maybe we should create a new language for artificial intelligence rather than feeding it human languages.

emmanueloga_ 1y ago
There's been a lot of work in this area but no definitive answer, and few constructed languages speakers [1]. I imagine the wins may be marginal, similar to the wins in dvorak vs qwerty typing. -- 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Artificial_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Artifici...

ndgold 1y ago

True. Writing by hand is even better.

agcat 1y ago

I love this! Especially the part about if writing is thinking, are we not then reading the ‘thoughts’ of the LLM rather than those of the researchers behind the paper?

jz10 1y ago

We can't really talk about this topic without mentioning the book "How to Take Smart Notes" by Soenke Ahrens One key takeaway is if you want to learn/remember something better, always rewrite things in your own words as both the act of writing AND paraphrasing makes it more sticky

gwern 1y ago

New HN metric: how many comments do you have to scroll down on a LLM-edited/written submission before someone points it out? Triple bonus if the submission is about LLM writing and the need to think for yourself without a LLM, and still no one has pointed this out. Current page score: 333 points.

opdahl 1y ago
What makes you believe this was written by an LLM?
- gwern 1y ago
  Because it has many of the typical 4o stylistic tics like 'it's not X, it's Y' or enumeration or the em dashes, or the twist ending. It's not 100% unedited ChatGPT and far from the most blatant instance that has caught my eye (they've started showing up in the New York Times and New Yorker as well, have you noticed that?), but certainly sounds like that was used: "Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner." "This is not merely a philosophical observation; it is backed by scientific evidence." "Importantly, if writing is thinking, are we not then reading the ‘thoughts’ of the LLM rather than those of the researchers behind the paper?" "overcoming writer’s block, provide alternative explanations for findings or identify connections between seemingly unrelated subjects." (Note that this is particularly ironic because as the op-ed notes, if they did use it, they are required by Nature to disclose this... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00191-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00191-1 But of course, how would anyone ever prove they did so? You know how difficult it is to get Nature to retract even blatant fraud.)

everdrive 1y ago

This is one of the most important reasons why it's so harmful to let an LLM write for you: what they're actually doing is thinking for you.

stillpointlab 1y ago

Many people here are taking away from this that substituting our own writing with the writing from an LLM is a danger for human development. I see things more optimistically. If good writing leads to good thinking, then anything I do to improve my ability to write well transitively helps me to think well. In that sense, I actually see a huge benefit to LLMs in improving my writing and therefore improving my thinking. Not only can I ask for detailed and powerful feedback, I can also ask for more details on background context or related topics that I wouldn't be aware of. I believe judicious use of LLMs can make us better than we could be without them.

spot5010 1y ago
I subscribe to this view. LLMs can be tools for thinking, not substitutes to thinking. In fact, I feel that with time, the way we think may fundamentally change, just like how reading and writing changed thinking. An LLM can be an ideal foil to test out ideas, and the process of thinking could be an iterative process with the LLM as an active participant.

Amaury-El 1y ago

Writing has always been how I organize my thoughts. A lot of ideas only become clear as I work through them on the page. AI can save time, but it also makes it easy to skip the slower, more reflective parts of thinking. For me, that’s often where the real value of writing comes from.

RS-232 1y ago

Memory is intelligence

navaed01 1y ago

Part of me can’t help but think that scientific journals as billion dollar industries need to keep the status quo of how articles are written, where they get submitted and who reviews them. Even though per review today is failing

Johnnylove 1y ago

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mintflow 1y ago

Maybe as a coder, I will someday will just calm down and write code without using any LLMs, just for train my thinking capability...