How to Think in Writing

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.

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.

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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.

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 .

“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.

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.

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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)

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.

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

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.

> 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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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?)

> 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.

Proofs and Refutations is a great book.

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.

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

> And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

That "nontrivial" qualification makes this an unfalsifiable bunkum.

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?

> 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.

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

"Writing is thinking." -- David McCullough