I heard once that, "Writing is thinking," which has stuck with me throughout my life.
You really haven't thought about it hard enough if you haven't tried writing it down.
I have a whole system of journals that I use to collect my thoughts across various subjects I dabble in. Algorithms: there's a journal for that. Abstract algebra? There's a journal for that. Etc.
At work? I use bullet journal... I add sections in for projects I'm working on. When I'm working on refactoring an old area of the code or investigating a hard-to-diagnose error I start writing. I ask questions, get answers, and I update my project journal. It helps me clarify the issue and I find once I can explain the system or the error clearly the answers (or how to find them) becomes obvious.
It may seem quaint, eccentric, or out-dated but it's a practical, reliable tool. Ask questions and write down the answers. Eventually a coherent narrative and a full thought will form before you.
And a corollary to this: There is probably an intellectual cost of returning to oral culture, which seems to be what's happening at the moment at a large scale [1].
It's been happening with social media already, but having non-human entities take over "written thought" for many is probably going to have pretty significant consequences. I'm finding a lot of utility in LLMs, but at the same time I'm concerned about what parts of my cognitive faculties it'll cause to atrophy when overused.
Then again, maybe this is just yet another inevitable (albeit much bigger than the ones before) step on the same path we've been on since the onset of cognitive tradeoff [2] in early humans?
It's worth to distinguish writing for yourself (to think) from communication.
Recently I discovered a lecture about technical writing in academics (from my "writing to think" folder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM) that drove this point home: If you're an academic, your default mode of writing is "writing to think", and you have to make a conscious effort to avoid this mode when you communicate.
I think it also goes the other way: If you mostly write for others (or read what they write or say in public), then you need to make a conscious switch to "writing to think", which is a different skill where you worry less about being misunderstood and more about connecting to your personal knowledge.
Yes. It's time to return to McLuhan. The medium is the message and our current media are a mess.
I don't have instagram, but I sometimes overhear it while relatives are using it. It's a shocking experience. A series or random, wholly unrelated noises play in rapid succession, often ranging from harsh loud screams to the latest pop hit. From the outside looking in, it seems obvious that subjecting yourself to that daily would be cognitively deleterious.
What shocks me is how addictive everything is. It seems like people of mostly any age or persuasion can get into some kind of slop media or another. For video in particular, I refrain from going out of my way to watch any, but sometimes when I happen to see a friend engaged in watching, I start watching too and find it hard to escape. I can't speak to the cognitive effects confidently, but we agree on the vibe that it causes harm.
> And a corollary to this: There is probably an intellectual cost of returning to oral culture, which seems to be what's happening at the moment at a large scale [1].
If you talk about oral culture in the sense of having shorter messages, then it doesn’t necessarily have to be so much worse I think because there is a certain elegance to having clear and short messages. Like Forrest auto reviews on Youtube [1]. It’s so short that it allows more people to watch reviews for many cars. The information density is really high.
What I think is the problem is playing into emotions and especially fear. Once fear and anger kick in it’s really hard to keep thinking logically.
How much productive writing is too much productive writing?
As a teenager I got wound up in the narrative of productivity, note taking, and all that. Since then, I've had to unlearn that writing (well, note-taking) just for the sake of organizing some information nobody will go back to is not the best use for my time. I've discovered that having the best notes doesn't magically make me better prepared to get something done at work. The best way to create something new is to JustDoIt tm (and fail, and do it again, ..). To me, it's important to trust your brain to do the magic. Your job is to help it do it's magic. Paper doesn't think. It may help YOU think, but IT doesn't think.
However, I'm in my 20s, and I do keep a journal and I write frequently. But I've shifted my writing from productivity to emotions. I've found that expressing my own emotions and non-productive thinking on paper helps me understand myself.
I think this is spot on. I’ll add that having journals from different stages in life will be invaluable later on when you want to know how you’ve changed (and, depressingly, how you haven’t changed). For me, stretches of months without journals or photos are simply lost to time.
Work is a different beast! Sharing RFCs can be useful. But it is say 2% of my time. Most is indeed just do it, TM. Writing to organise the things you just wanna do.
Writing is a great technique to better understand subject. When you try to explain it, you start to find all the gaps that need reinforcing. You go read, and come back to continue writing.
> It helps me clarify the issue and I find once I can explain the system or the error clearly the answers (or how to find them) becomes obvious.
This is so true for me too. It’s basically rubber ducking with oneself. Or in preparation for rubber ducking _with_ someone else, writing down my thoughts often helps me figure it out myself.
Exactly, and I also feel like the act of "transferring" one's thoughts to visual symbols (writing, coding, diagramming) helps a lot with mental defrag and garbage collection.
The technology metaphor I've always used is serialization, which I think still makes sense for the action, but I really like defrag and garbage collection as the metaphor for the actual value in the activity, so I'm going to keep that, thanks!
For me the metaphor is DRAM and swap. To hold data in DRAM you have to pay the occasional refresh cycle, or else it may fade away. You swap your thoughts to paper (or disk) to get rid of that nagging feeling that you're about to forget something that could be important. This frees up brain cycles (and memory) to focus on the next thing.
Two days or years later you may skim your past thoughts, and there is some chance that it connects back to whatever is in your working memory right now. Then you can swap it all back in, and you have a chance to make a really non-trivial connection between related topics. Or you may notice that you are going in shallow circles around the same topic every few months, and now you can either put the topic to rest, or swap all instances back in and give them some serious thought and connection.
> You really haven't thought about it hard enough if you haven't tried writing it down.
Absolutely.
Thinking isn't knowing.
Cognitive scientists have the term "illusion of explanatory depth",
the experience we all have where we think we know more than we do.
It's not until we try to explain something that we find our understanding is much more limited than we believed.
My digital strategy is to use my iPad for notes. I can type, record audio (or, I guess, video), or write by hand and all of it is indexed, searchable, and can be shared. If I want to write on paper, I can do that and then "scan" it into the iPad (ie take a picture of it) and again the built-in OCR will index it. With a paper-like screen protector, writing on it is decent.
I don't this is a quaint or antiquated practice. Writing (preferably physically writing) and or typing long essay is extremely standard amoung certain Silicone Valley and Tech circles. Paul Graham is also one of its most vocal advocates.
I use a probably similar workflow (writing about everything, multiple journals - work projects, personal projects, notes taken when reading books, random thoughts, relationship topics etc.) and I feel like electronic vs paper/pen definitely makes a difference. I use both types for different things.
Electronic obviously has the advantage of being able to edit the text in a non-linear fashion, which I think is something necessary for the notes I take for work. Being in the same 'space' as the work I do (so on screen) is also helpful, as well as being able to include things like hyperlinks/chunks of code. Since I type fast, taking digital notes also lets me dump whatever is in my head faster (this is usually relevant for other types than work notes).
Paper on the other hand I feel puts me into a different headspace when writing (might be the lack of a screen, or maybe the slower writing?) and is (usually, not always) more fitting for stuff I write about personal topics or books. Some types of notes (e.g. stuff about music) also benefit from the freedom pen on paper gives you - adding scribbles, drawings, formatting text in non-standard visual ways. Small paper notebooks are of course also much easier to take with you on trips and write on a bus, train, park bench or w/e (I've heard some people use phones but I can't imagine myself writing proper notes on a smartphone keyboard).
I use pen and paper for the majority of my journals and a Remarkable 2 for some.
I find writing long-hand works best for me. It's slower and that's the point of it. The journey is the process and the goal. The end result is clear, well-formed thoughts. You cannot rush the process to get the end result faster: you'll end up with a jumble of short-hand, bullet points, and half-baked ideas.
I also prefer a page. I can draw diagrams when it suits me. Software forces me to switch tools and my mental context to add diagrams. And they're all clunky besides. I'd rather something more intuitive that doesn't get in my way: a pen and perhaps a ruler, slide, etc on occasion.
The Remarkable software has improved with time and with the addition of the keyboard I can get close to the best of both worlds. I tend to use it for work-focused and project-focused journals. I'll start with free-hand but use the text-conversion and clean things up from there. The free-hand diagramming is much improved now that they've introduced better drawing tools that can force straight shapes from my free-hand ones. And then you get the benefit of being able to search through your documents from a computer.
For my paper journals I have to use a bookshelf and a box of index cards to keep everything organized. For the amount of journals I produce this is sufficient but it's not as convenient as it is on a computer... but personally I don't find I need to maximize convenience in my life, I'm satisfied with some processes and tasks being manual and tedious.
I also like the paper journals because it leaves a physical legacy of my learnings, thoughts, and experiences. I like reading through them on occasion to recall some algorithm I learned years ago that I need to remember or some book I had read in order to recall the salient thoughts and quotes I found interesting. And I hope maybe some day my children or surviving colleagues will find them useful too.
Not op but for me what makes the difference is doing anything at all. Even if one is better than the other, writing down at all has a huge beneficial effect for many.
I find that writing with pen and paper is best for my mind. But, I’m a technologist so I love digital. I use the Kindle Scribe to cover both bases. I’ve written about it here:
I want to get better at taking project notes for work via Obsidian. I'm curious if you have a different page per project or do you just put everything in the same giant log? I like the idea of organizing it, but it takes me a bit of time to find out which notebook it should go under.
The beauty of Obsidian is that you don't have to file under a single notebook/directory. If you have a note that belongs to more than one category you can tag or link to both relevant notebooks.
It doesn't have to be. I don't think there are sufficient empirical studies to suggest writing by hand is better in some dimensions than typing.
I prefer it myself for several reasons. First, it forces me to filter the present jumble of ideas in my head into a linear progression on the page. Second, it helps me resist the temptation to edit myself before I have finished. I tend to be more mindful and focused when writing long-form.
Writing digitally, which I often do, comes with the temptation to edit and succumb to distraction before I've finished a thought. It allows me to explore many branches quickly... but quantity is often not what I'm after.
I think what you consider sufficient has more to do with your personal process and what you hope to achieve with your writing, if that makes sense.
I'm not sure what you deem as "sufficient", but there certainly are studies suggesting that handwriting has some benefit over typing w.r.t. learning and memory [1].
Personally, I've found computer writing is perfectly fine for note taking; but, once I actually want to compose something that I've really thought through, I'll turn to handwriting for complete sentences.
I think the internet generally makes way too much out of which tool you use. Use whatever works for you and what allows you to do it consistently.
There is definitely something about writing by hand that seems to have unique cognitive and memory benefits. But strictly only writing by hand is unnecessary and of course inefficient.
> If you’re repeatedly drawn to a thought, feeling, or belief, write it out. Be fast, be sloppy.
I couldn't agree more here! A friend has wanted to start a writing/journaling habit for a long time, but didn't know what to write about. I told him, don't think to write—write to think [1].
Show up to an empty page, without knowing, is totally acceptable! So is writing things down that make you feel embarrassed, confused, etc.
When I'm journaling, I often find prompts/frameworks helpful for guiding this escape.
I really like Byron Katie's framework, which she calls The Work [2]. After you notice and draw to mind a stressful thought, answer these four questions:
Q1. Is it true?
Q2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
Q3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Q4. Who would you be without that thought?
Then, invert the thought. She writes, "Turn the thought around. Is the opposite as true as or truer than the original thought?"
Derek Sivers also shares some really great questions for journaling for reframing [3].
I absolutely hate to say it but chatbots ARE actually good at therapy, or acting as a sort of interactive journal.
I try to put my thoughts in as clearly and concisely as I can, and it rephrases it back to me and points out angles I hadn't thought of. Plus, I know not only does it not want to judge me, it's literally incapable of judging me unlike a human therapist.
Again I hate how dumb this sounds but I was surprised.
This has been very top of mind recently, to the point where I have started forcing myself to write with a blindfold on so I don't start self-editing before that part of the process. If it's dumb but it works....
There’s a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. One of the main tasks is writing three pages every morning, called The Morning Pages. I personally find the first two pages quite quick and easy, but it’s that third page where the interesting stuff comes out.
I’m nine weeks into the twelve week program and it has taken me on an incredible journey of self discovery. Memories from childhood, dreams and hopes for the future. All of them uncovered to explore.
There’s something beautiful about writing with a fountain pen and paper. Setting aside time every day to dive deep and see what comes out.
I mean, I can, but my handwriting is so bad I can barely read it, even if I've written pretty slowly. Like it was never good, but I could write a lot faster and still be able to read it. Now my slow and careful handwriting is worse than that, even.
It occurred to me some time last year, when reflecting on this, that I've probably averaged fewer than 50 words written by hand per year, not counting my signature, over... like more than a decade. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual annual average over that span is around 25 or 30 words, even. So, no wonder.
A big change from the days of writing several hundreds words in one hour for Blue Book tests, a few times per year!
I think you're still capable, just with that interval between use, you're perma-rusty at handwriting. My own experience is that I have retained the ability to learn scripts well into adulthood.
Within the last few years I've done what I call "installing a font." I was unhappy with my printed letter forms, so I looked up architectural lettering guides and modeled my new printing based on that. I also re-learned how to write cursive, which is always a struggle any time I re-start using it after months of having not.
Yeah, my father had lovely printed penmanship. I've planned on practicing to develop that as I return to reading more (in retirement), both to take notes as I read and learn, and because otherwise my notes will be illegible. My current hand printing or writing is atrocious.
Oddly my handwriting is aesthetically better than ever in old age, but I find I just have no patience left for it. Halfway through scribbling a word my brain is screaming "come on already!" for a keyboard, and by the next word it's completely checked out of whatever thought I was supposed to jot down. It's like watching the most boring scene unfold in slow motion. I've been hearing the handwriting->memory argument for decades, but screw that. Give me >100wpm.
Granted, I don't know that there's not something to the idea of some kind of special benefit or effect that only handwriting has. It does feel meaningful and important in some way. But I more strongly suspect that it's a matter of fluency. If someone types fluently enough that the act itself takes no conscious effort or deliberate attention, then maybe they can engage and form associations comparably well as if they were handwriting. Most people, I think, don't -- that is, even if their typing speed is more than adequate for whatever work they do, I'm guessing it remains a bottleneck in this sense. Handwriting is slower, typically, but I don't mean a speed bottleneck, even though speed is part of the point. I mean something more along the lines of whether the conceptual task at hand enjoys dedicated resources, or has to share mental bandwidth, attentional control, working memory, flow, etc. with the mechanical task. I get the same frustration as you, of course: I don't handwrite painstakingly, but I do it slower than I type for sure. Both are low-effort, but handwriting loses out in terms of speed. If my handwriting and typing speeds were the same, but typing were a higher-effort activity for me, it's then that I suspect handwriting would have the advantage. Then, how much faster can the typing get, while remaining high-effort relative to handwriting, before the speed advantage overcomes the cognitive load advantage?
I also find it's a great sanity check. Ideas that seem good in my head often fail when I put them into words. Especially when I outline it in step by step format
I've kept a journal of some sort for the past 10 years. Sometimes they're mostly used for capturing work tasks and working out architectures and designs, but occasionally I'll brain dump a random essay/poem/song/business ideas there, and those can be fun to come back to. I just moved into a new place unpacked them, so I've been paying through them as I get a chance. It's fun to see all the ways that I've changed, but it's actually more interesting to see some of the ways I haven't changed at all. I enjoy the act of writing because it makes me feel like my sense of self is less ethereal. Having something concrete that I made and like, even if it's just for me, is just satisfying.
I'm surprised to not see a mention of "This is Water", the commencement speech by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College, which thesis is that the point of a liberal arts education is to help you escape your default setting.
I think the title of this post may be a reference to "This is Water", since I haven't seen the term "default setting" anywhere else, but I could be mistaken.
First we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.
The same is true with writing — and our modes of writing.
I agree that writing to think is important, and that putting ideas on paper makes an ephemeral idea "real".
However I disagree that "writing things in a blog post / paulg narrative format to be shared with other internet readers" is the best way to turn ephemeral thoughts into solid ideas.
I think using pen and paper, sketching, drawing, scribbling, writing short-form jot notes, writing on the shower glass while steaming away in the shower — I think those forms of writing are how good ideas get captured and solidified.
The paulg kind of writing is merely an exercise in peacocking to the other HN crowds.
---
For designers, the best way is to draw things. If you have a hard time "imagining" a user flow, draw the screens in a flow diagram. If that's hard, draw all the interfaces, cut them out, and put them on a table. Put the pieces on top of each other to approximate how the interface will flow.
Anecdotal: I recently found a little trick that works for me to overcome the horrors of the blank page: I turn my phone (having opened my preferred note-taking solution) into horizontal mode. The keyboard gets larger in width, making it nicer to type, and on my medium-sized phone, it covers enough of the UI that I don't actually see what I type into the textbox, until I close the keyboard again. So I just happily type away and hit save at the end.
I found when I was working on my dissertation that I struggled make progress on the actual writing. No matter how much work I did, I wound up rewriting, editing, re-thinking, deleting, and starting over.
I never fully solved that problem, but I found a workaround that helped: I started writing notes and drafts by hand in cursive with my non-dominant hand.
Writing by hand, by itself, calmed me and focused my mind, whereas writing in a word processor almost always caused a spiral of distraction and increasing agitation.
Increasing the difficulty of the literal, physical writing process helped me, I think, in a few ways. It became much costlier not to commit to a single version of a thought, so I had a strong incentive to pare away some of the noise surrounding it and state it in its most direct, least objectionable form.
I'm also convinced, though I can't prove it, that dramatically slowing the physical act of writing improved my working memory.
That being said, I strongly agree with just about everything this piece says, whether or not one writes by hand. And I would add that writing also forces people to use a wider range of faculties and forms of reasoning. I doubt one could overstate the value of this as intellectual exercise.
This needs to be the default way we instill in young people and to think about learning, as if, "escape your default setting" is akin to "exploration".
Especially in the age of generated written word, the act of writing it yourself _cannot_ be more important.
I picked up handwritten journaling as a way of processing my life. It has been therapeutic through a few incidences in how I'm feeling whether it's about work, family or more personal thoughts. With each stroke, I am challenging myself to write more cleanly and appreciating the subtle beauty as the pen strokes create letters, words, sentences, ideas. I feel more at peace as I let my most challenging thoughts live on paper.
> Writing reveals what you don’t know, what you can’t see when an idea is only held in your head. Biases, blind spots, and assumptions you can’t grasp internally.
I completely agree with this. Often, I think I understand something, but when I try to explain it to others, I quickly realize where my understanding is shaky. The gaps become even more apparent when I attempt to write it down because I have to structure my thoughts logically and precisely. Writing goes a step beyond speaking because it forces me to re-read and refine my ideas, whereas spoken words often disappear without deeper reflection. Oh, even this comment that I'm writing now was edited a couple of times before submitting it. The second half of the comment was added after re-reading the first half.
The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke describes the "4 Ps of Knowing", moving from propositional, up through procedural, perspectival, and participatory.
Most of our thought is propositional: we see a thing, know the thing, and move. Writing moves us up that hierarchy. And sharing that writing—ideally within the context of shared dialogue—moves us even further.
Writing is quite different as a discipline and in its effects when it's for self-discovery, self-analysis, messaging others, etc.
It's like the vast differences between relaxing alone at home, caring for your partner, hosting guests, going to work, taking kids on vacation...
What's helpful in either case is the ritual of entering that domain: you pull yourself together for work, dissolve on the couch, and put on a happy listening face for the kids. The more consistent you are in your rituals, the more quickly and deeply you enter and exit that domain.
That's how to escape mental defaults: have a huge variety of them, widely-spaced, so you can introspect their difference and play their respective lights against their shadows.
I noticed that writing prompts for my 'code bot' gives more structure to my thoughts. I sometimes even delete a prompt because just the writing already gave me new thoughts.
Love it. Your whole website is great. I recently started writing down whatever passing thoughts happen to me in a small notebook. Only a couple of entries now, but it's a start. Unfortunately I was terrible at, or perhaps terrified of, writing at school and college, so I never learned how to be any good at it. I also find that nothing reveals more about what you know about a given topic than looking at an empty page or a blinking cursor. Even writing this comment makes me feel queasy, huh.
To present a counter perspective. I like to believe that I possess a fair crop of sane defaults here and there upstairs.
And there are some things that I refuse to write down. They’re motivated more by a raw feeling than what can be found through their transliteration. Language of the guts gargles into scribbles and scripts.
Lest I be forced to result to pictography. You know sketch pads are also helpful.
Maybe the writer’s resort is toward the days he ain’t writing. Eventually stopping and becoming content.
I had this insight that I thought was evident. "AGI is an interface problem". It made sense in the context. But when I decided to write about it, my initial idea and example were pretty weak. The more I wrote the more I found counterpoints. In fact, writing forced me to think through those arguments and see if the idea can still stand.
Many times, my ideas fade into darkness after a good writing session. But that's how you form a strong opinion.
Writing about writing is in the air! I just published a post with a tongue-in-cheek reference to the A-Team [1] :D
The OP led me to `kupjao`'s series of posts on writing, and I can't help but nod my head in agreement. I'm in the choir they are preaching to!
Little writing habits compound over time to help people (and teams) escape the gravity well of their "default" setting. It isn't rocket science. Just simple bullet-point-ing can be good enough to help a bunch of people...
- conserve personal and collective attention
- power creativity
- grow intellectual capital
- maintain clear situational awareness
- run high-trust workplaces, and
- make high-quality decisions.
etc. etc. etc. because, like I said, I'm sold on the author's premise!
Don’t Eat Before Reading This By Anthony Bourdain
A New York chef spills some trade secrets.
Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream
cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of
beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture,
but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.
Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles
of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff
are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders,
they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times—
superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own.
A good deal has changed since Orwell’s memoir of the months he spent as a dishwasher in “Down and Out in Paris and London.”
Gas ranges and exhaust fans have gone a long way toward increasing the life span of the working culinarian. Nowadays, most
aspiring cooks come into the business because they want to: they have chosen this life, studied for it. Today’s top chefs are like
star athletes. They bounce from kitchen to kitchen—free agents in search of more money, more acclaim.
I’ve been a chef in New York for more than ten years, and, for the decade before that, a dishwasher, a prep drone, a line cook,
and a sous-chef. I came into the business when cooks still smoked on the line and wore headbands. A few years ago, I wasn’t
surprised to hear rumors of a study of the nation’s prison population which reportedly found that the leading civilian occupation
among inmates before they were put behind bars was “cook.” As most of us in the restaurant business know, there is a
powerful strain of criminality in the industry, ranging from the dope-dealing busboy with beeper and cell phone to the
restaurant owner who has two sets of accounting books. In fact, it was the unsavory side of professional cooking that attracted
me to it in the first place. In the early seventies, I dropped out of college and transferred to the Culinary Institute of America. I
wanted it all: the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze, the
camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering chaos. I would climb the chain of command from mal
carne (meaning “bad meat,” or “new guy”) to chefdom—doing whatever it took until I ran my own kitchen and had my own
crew of cutthroats, the culinary equivalent of “The Wild Bunch.”
Am I the only one here for whom writing ends up having the opposite effect?
Whenever I write something it's practically like archiving it on paper - the idea is set aside, now to focus on something else. I almost never happens that I go back to what I've written and process it.
Which is why journaling doesn't seem to be working for me; the only way I can have something manifest is by mulling over it for extended periods of time.
Writing it down is the part where you process it. I've found that if I don't have a need to revisit or continue what I've written down, I am done with it.
Just be aware that once you escape your default setting, you'll come to realize everybody else hasn't.
It'll be like teenage angst at your parents, except it'll be angst at the entire species :)
Anyone that writes and asks earnest questions pretty quickly turns to spirituality, religion, philosophy or pseudo-philosophy/pseudo-science (self-help) because they end up realizing oh - I don't know what's going on at all!
The spiritual path is living with truth of don't know. Religion is choosing to have 'faith' and a set of instructions but really is about huddling with others for warmth and comfort. Philosophy is about attempting to build a logically consistent system of what's going on. Self-help is a set of quick hacks to make one feel better.
Almost all people settle in a modified default setting (self help) and choose to use thinking to do tiny little puzzles instead of asking the deeper questions. They can't handle the angst, they want that human comfort more than they want the truth :)
I heard once that, "Writing is thinking," which has stuck with me throughout my life.
You really haven't thought about it hard enough if you haven't tried writing it down.
I have a whole system of journals that I use to collect my thoughts across various subjects I dabble in. Algorithms: there's a journal for that. Abstract algebra? There's a journal for that. Etc.
At work? I use bullet journal... I add sections in for projects I'm working on. When I'm working on refactoring an old area of the code or investigating a hard-to-diagnose error I start writing. I ask questions, get answers, and I update my project journal. It helps me clarify the issue and I find once I can explain the system or the error clearly the answers (or how to find them) becomes obvious.
It may seem quaint, eccentric, or out-dated but it's a practical, reliable tool. Ask questions and write down the answers. Eventually a coherent narrative and a full thought will form before you.
And a corollary to this: There is probably an intellectual cost of returning to oral culture, which seems to be what's happening at the moment at a large scale [1].
It's been happening with social media already, but having non-human entities take over "written thought" for many is probably going to have pretty significant consequences. I'm finding a lot of utility in LLMs, but at the same time I'm concerned about what parts of my cognitive faculties it'll cause to atrophy when overused.
Then again, maybe this is just yet another inevitable (albeit much bigger than the ones before) step on the same path we've been on since the onset of cognitive tradeoff [2] in early humans?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-02-07/we-re-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_tradeoff_hypothesis
It's worth to distinguish writing for yourself (to think) from communication.
Recently I discovered a lecture about technical writing in academics (from my "writing to think" folder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM) that drove this point home: If you're an academic, your default mode of writing is "writing to think", and you have to make a conscious effort to avoid this mode when you communicate.
I think it also goes the other way: If you mostly write for others (or read what they write or say in public), then you need to make a conscious switch to "writing to think", which is a different skill where you worry less about being misunderstood and more about connecting to your personal knowledge.
Yes. It's time to return to McLuhan. The medium is the message and our current media are a mess.
I don't have instagram, but I sometimes overhear it while relatives are using it. It's a shocking experience. A series or random, wholly unrelated noises play in rapid succession, often ranging from harsh loud screams to the latest pop hit. From the outside looking in, it seems obvious that subjecting yourself to that daily would be cognitively deleterious.
What shocks me is how addictive everything is. It seems like people of mostly any age or persuasion can get into some kind of slop media or another. For video in particular, I refrain from going out of my way to watch any, but sometimes when I happen to see a friend engaged in watching, I start watching too and find it hard to escape. I can't speak to the cognitive effects confidently, but we agree on the vibe that it causes harm.
> And a corollary to this: There is probably an intellectual cost of returning to oral culture, which seems to be what's happening at the moment at a large scale [1].
If you talk about oral culture in the sense of having shorter messages, then it doesn’t necessarily have to be so much worse I think because there is a certain elegance to having clear and short messages. Like Forrest auto reviews on Youtube [1]. It’s so short that it allows more people to watch reviews for many cars. The information density is really high.
What I think is the problem is playing into emotions and especially fear. Once fear and anger kick in it’s really hard to keep thinking logically.
[1]: https://youtube.com/@forrestsautoreviewsofficial
How much productive writing is too much productive writing?
As a teenager I got wound up in the narrative of productivity, note taking, and all that. Since then, I've had to unlearn that writing (well, note-taking) just for the sake of organizing some information nobody will go back to is not the best use for my time. I've discovered that having the best notes doesn't magically make me better prepared to get something done at work. The best way to create something new is to JustDoIt tm (and fail, and do it again, ..). To me, it's important to trust your brain to do the magic. Your job is to help it do it's magic. Paper doesn't think. It may help YOU think, but IT doesn't think.
However, I'm in my 20s, and I do keep a journal and I write frequently. But I've shifted my writing from productivity to emotions. I've found that expressing my own emotions and non-productive thinking on paper helps me understand myself.
I think this is spot on. I’ll add that having journals from different stages in life will be invaluable later on when you want to know how you’ve changed (and, depressingly, how you haven’t changed). For me, stretches of months without journals or photos are simply lost to time.
Work is a different beast! Sharing RFCs can be useful. But it is say 2% of my time. Most is indeed just do it, TM. Writing to organise the things you just wanna do.
Writing is a great technique to better understand subject. When you try to explain it, you start to find all the gaps that need reinforcing. You go read, and come back to continue writing.
> It helps me clarify the issue and I find once I can explain the system or the error clearly the answers (or how to find them) becomes obvious.
This is so true for me too. It’s basically rubber ducking with oneself. Or in preparation for rubber ducking _with_ someone else, writing down my thoughts often helps me figure it out myself.
> "Writing is thinking"
Exactly, and I also feel like the act of "transferring" one's thoughts to visual symbols (writing, coding, diagramming) helps a lot with mental defrag and garbage collection.
The technology metaphor I've always used is serialization, which I think still makes sense for the action, but I really like defrag and garbage collection as the metaphor for the actual value in the activity, so I'm going to keep that, thanks!
For me the metaphor is DRAM and swap. To hold data in DRAM you have to pay the occasional refresh cycle, or else it may fade away. You swap your thoughts to paper (or disk) to get rid of that nagging feeling that you're about to forget something that could be important. This frees up brain cycles (and memory) to focus on the next thing.
Two days or years later you may skim your past thoughts, and there is some chance that it connects back to whatever is in your working memory right now. Then you can swap it all back in, and you have a chance to make a really non-trivial connection between related topics. Or you may notice that you are going in shallow circles around the same topic every few months, and now you can either put the topic to rest, or swap all instances back in and give them some serious thought and connection.
> You really haven't thought about it hard enough if you haven't tried writing it down.
Absolutely. Thinking isn't knowing. Cognitive scientists have the term "illusion of explanatory depth", the experience we all have where we think we know more than we do. It's not until we try to explain something that we find our understanding is much more limited than we believed.
I still have a leather bound journal, but these days I also use Obsidian to make my writing easier to search.
Since it stores everything as markdown files in folders, I can use ripgrep to search for things.
My digital strategy is to use my iPad for notes. I can type, record audio (or, I guess, video), or write by hand and all of it is indexed, searchable, and can be shared. If I want to write on paper, I can do that and then "scan" it into the iPad (ie take a picture of it) and again the built-in OCR will index it. With a paper-like screen protector, writing on it is decent.
I don't this is a quaint or antiquated practice. Writing (preferably physically writing) and or typing long essay is extremely standard amoung certain Silicone Valley and Tech circles. Paul Graham is also one of its most vocal advocates.
Curious as whether writing your journals (work or home) electronically vs paper/pen makes a difference. Interested in your thoughts.
I use a probably similar workflow (writing about everything, multiple journals - work projects, personal projects, notes taken when reading books, random thoughts, relationship topics etc.) and I feel like electronic vs paper/pen definitely makes a difference. I use both types for different things.
Electronic obviously has the advantage of being able to edit the text in a non-linear fashion, which I think is something necessary for the notes I take for work. Being in the same 'space' as the work I do (so on screen) is also helpful, as well as being able to include things like hyperlinks/chunks of code. Since I type fast, taking digital notes also lets me dump whatever is in my head faster (this is usually relevant for other types than work notes).
Paper on the other hand I feel puts me into a different headspace when writing (might be the lack of a screen, or maybe the slower writing?) and is (usually, not always) more fitting for stuff I write about personal topics or books. Some types of notes (e.g. stuff about music) also benefit from the freedom pen on paper gives you - adding scribbles, drawings, formatting text in non-standard visual ways. Small paper notebooks are of course also much easier to take with you on trips and write on a bus, train, park bench or w/e (I've heard some people use phones but I can't imagine myself writing proper notes on a smartphone keyboard).
I use pen and paper for the majority of my journals and a Remarkable 2 for some.
I find writing long-hand works best for me. It's slower and that's the point of it. The journey is the process and the goal. The end result is clear, well-formed thoughts. You cannot rush the process to get the end result faster: you'll end up with a jumble of short-hand, bullet points, and half-baked ideas.
I also prefer a page. I can draw diagrams when it suits me. Software forces me to switch tools and my mental context to add diagrams. And they're all clunky besides. I'd rather something more intuitive that doesn't get in my way: a pen and perhaps a ruler, slide, etc on occasion.
The Remarkable software has improved with time and with the addition of the keyboard I can get close to the best of both worlds. I tend to use it for work-focused and project-focused journals. I'll start with free-hand but use the text-conversion and clean things up from there. The free-hand diagramming is much improved now that they've introduced better drawing tools that can force straight shapes from my free-hand ones. And then you get the benefit of being able to search through your documents from a computer.
For my paper journals I have to use a bookshelf and a box of index cards to keep everything organized. For the amount of journals I produce this is sufficient but it's not as convenient as it is on a computer... but personally I don't find I need to maximize convenience in my life, I'm satisfied with some processes and tasks being manual and tedious.
I also like the paper journals because it leaves a physical legacy of my learnings, thoughts, and experiences. I like reading through them on occasion to recall some algorithm I learned years ago that I need to remember or some book I had read in order to recall the salient thoughts and quotes I found interesting. And I hope maybe some day my children or surviving colleagues will find them useful too.
Not op but for me what makes the difference is doing anything at all. Even if one is better than the other, writing down at all has a huge beneficial effect for many.
I find that writing with pen and paper is best for my mind. But, I’m a technologist so I love digital. I use the Kindle Scribe to cover both bases. I’ve written about it here:
https://notes.joeldare.com/handwritten-notes-on-the-kindle-s...
I want to get better at taking project notes for work via Obsidian. I'm curious if you have a different page per project or do you just put everything in the same giant log? I like the idea of organizing it, but it takes me a bit of time to find out which notebook it should go under.
The beauty of Obsidian is that you don't have to file under a single notebook/directory. If you have a note that belongs to more than one category you can tag or link to both relevant notebooks.
Agentultra was talking about paper notebooks imho.
Does it need to be a handwriting, or computer writing is sufficient?
It doesn't have to be. I don't think there are sufficient empirical studies to suggest writing by hand is better in some dimensions than typing.
I prefer it myself for several reasons. First, it forces me to filter the present jumble of ideas in my head into a linear progression on the page. Second, it helps me resist the temptation to edit myself before I have finished. I tend to be more mindful and focused when writing long-form.
Writing digitally, which I often do, comes with the temptation to edit and succumb to distraction before I've finished a thought. It allows me to explore many branches quickly... but quantity is often not what I'm after.
I think what you consider sufficient has more to do with your personal process and what you hope to achieve with your writing, if that makes sense.
I'm not sure what you deem as "sufficient", but there certainly are studies suggesting that handwriting has some benefit over typing w.r.t. learning and memory [1].
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...
Personally, I've found computer writing is perfectly fine for note taking; but, once I actually want to compose something that I've really thought through, I'll turn to handwriting for complete sentences.
I think the internet generally makes way too much out of which tool you use. Use whatever works for you and what allows you to do it consistently.
There is definitely something about writing by hand that seems to have unique cognitive and memory benefits. But strictly only writing by hand is unnecessary and of course inefficient.
> If you’re repeatedly drawn to a thought, feeling, or belief, write it out. Be fast, be sloppy.
I couldn't agree more here! A friend has wanted to start a writing/journaling habit for a long time, but didn't know what to write about. I told him, don't think to write—write to think [1].
Show up to an empty page, without knowing, is totally acceptable! So is writing things down that make you feel embarrassed, confused, etc.
When I'm journaling, I often find prompts/frameworks helpful for guiding this escape.
I really like Byron Katie's framework, which she calls The Work [2]. After you notice and draw to mind a stressful thought, answer these four questions:
Q1. Is it true? Q2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true? Q3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought? Q4. Who would you be without that thought?
Then, invert the thought. She writes, "Turn the thought around. Is the opposite as true as or truer than the original thought?"
Derek Sivers also shares some really great questions for journaling for reframing [3].
I also show up to the page
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628196
[2] https://thework.com/instruction-the-work-byron-katie/
[3] https://sive.rs/u
I absolutely hate to say it but chatbots ARE actually good at therapy, or acting as a sort of interactive journal.
I try to put my thoughts in as clearly and concisely as I can, and it rephrases it back to me and points out angles I hadn't thought of. Plus, I know not only does it not want to judge me, it's literally incapable of judging me unlike a human therapist.
Again I hate how dumb this sounds but I was surprised.
> Then, invert the thought. She writes, "Turn the thought around. Is the opposite as true as or truer than the original thought?"
Otherwise also related to the concept of inversion[1] and more generally, counterfactuals[2].
[1] https://fs.blog/inversion/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_thinking
> Derek Sivers also shares some really great questions for journaling for reframing [3].
That book is really helpful to me. Thank you for the link!
Thework.com looks like a great resource, thanks for sharing.
This has been very top of mind recently, to the point where I have started forcing myself to write with a blindfold on so I don't start self-editing before that part of the process. If it's dumb but it works....
Anyway, I put the process (quieted typing) up literally yesterday: https://quietedtyping.fyi
It's just taking ten minutes out of your day to do a little 'writing [as] thinking'. I have found it helpful, maybe others will do so as well.
There’s a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. One of the main tasks is writing three pages every morning, called The Morning Pages. I personally find the first two pages quite quick and easy, but it’s that third page where the interesting stuff comes out.
I’m nine weeks into the twelve week program and it has taken me on an incredible journey of self discovery. Memories from childhood, dreams and hopes for the future. All of them uncovered to explore.
There’s something beautiful about writing with a fountain pen and paper. Setting aside time every day to dive deep and see what comes out.
Are you doing the program on your own or part of a class?
I find that, once I write something down, even if I never look at what I wrote, I often don't need a reminder. If I don't write it down, I forget.
And if you literally write it down, with pen on paper, supposedly that's more memorable still.
I need to experiment with this. My memory needs more assistance now that my spring chicken days are behind me.
I've found I can barely write anymore.
I mean, I can, but my handwriting is so bad I can barely read it, even if I've written pretty slowly. Like it was never good, but I could write a lot faster and still be able to read it. Now my slow and careful handwriting is worse than that, even.
It occurred to me some time last year, when reflecting on this, that I've probably averaged fewer than 50 words written by hand per year, not counting my signature, over... like more than a decade. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual annual average over that span is around 25 or 30 words, even. So, no wonder.
A big change from the days of writing several hundreds words in one hour for Blue Book tests, a few times per year!
I think you're still capable, just with that interval between use, you're perma-rusty at handwriting. My own experience is that I have retained the ability to learn scripts well into adulthood.
Within the last few years I've done what I call "installing a font." I was unhappy with my printed letter forms, so I looked up architectural lettering guides and modeled my new printing based on that. I also re-learned how to write cursive, which is always a struggle any time I re-start using it after months of having not.
Yeah, my father had lovely printed penmanship. I've planned on practicing to develop that as I return to reading more (in retirement), both to take notes as I read and learn, and because otherwise my notes will be illegible. My current hand printing or writing is atrocious.
Oddly my handwriting is aesthetically better than ever in old age, but I find I just have no patience left for it. Halfway through scribbling a word my brain is screaming "come on already!" for a keyboard, and by the next word it's completely checked out of whatever thought I was supposed to jot down. It's like watching the most boring scene unfold in slow motion. I've been hearing the handwriting->memory argument for decades, but screw that. Give me >100wpm.
Granted, I don't know that there's not something to the idea of some kind of special benefit or effect that only handwriting has. It does feel meaningful and important in some way. But I more strongly suspect that it's a matter of fluency. If someone types fluently enough that the act itself takes no conscious effort or deliberate attention, then maybe they can engage and form associations comparably well as if they were handwriting. Most people, I think, don't -- that is, even if their typing speed is more than adequate for whatever work they do, I'm guessing it remains a bottleneck in this sense. Handwriting is slower, typically, but I don't mean a speed bottleneck, even though speed is part of the point. I mean something more along the lines of whether the conceptual task at hand enjoys dedicated resources, or has to share mental bandwidth, attentional control, working memory, flow, etc. with the mechanical task. I get the same frustration as you, of course: I don't handwrite painstakingly, but I do it slower than I type for sure. Both are low-effort, but handwriting loses out in terms of speed. If my handwriting and typing speeds were the same, but typing were a higher-effort activity for me, it's then that I suspect handwriting would have the advantage. Then, how much faster can the typing get, while remaining high-effort relative to handwriting, before the speed advantage overcomes the cognitive load advantage?
I feel the exact same way. I see a lot of benefits to writing by hand, but it is just so unbelievably, painfully SLOW, compared to my typing.
"I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it to remember it now." Not sure who said that, but I think of it often.
Well, same blog has an article about that too it seems : https://kupajo.com/write-to-pool-your-shifting-selves/
I also find it's a great sanity check. Ideas that seem good in my head often fail when I put them into words. Especially when I outline it in step by step format
Same. Copious notes in college, and never had to go back and look at 99% of them. It's like writing it scribes it into my brain.
I've kept a journal of some sort for the past 10 years. Sometimes they're mostly used for capturing work tasks and working out architectures and designs, but occasionally I'll brain dump a random essay/poem/song/business ideas there, and those can be fun to come back to. I just moved into a new place unpacked them, so I've been paying through them as I get a chance. It's fun to see all the ways that I've changed, but it's actually more interesting to see some of the ways I haven't changed at all. I enjoy the act of writing because it makes me feel like my sense of self is less ethereal. Having something concrete that I made and like, even if it's just for me, is just satisfying.
I'm surprised to not see a mention of "This is Water", the commencement speech by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College, which thesis is that the point of a liberal arts education is to help you escape your default setting.
http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html
I think the title of this post may be a reference to "This is Water", since I haven't seen the term "default setting" anywhere else, but I could be mistaken.
You couldn't be more correct. I wasn't actively thinking of DFW when I wrote this post, but his stuff is everywhere in my notes.
A DFW post I wrote: https://kupajo.com/david-foster-walleye-sic/
Thanks! Really enjoyed that post as well.
First we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.
The same is true with writing — and our modes of writing.
I agree that writing to think is important, and that putting ideas on paper makes an ephemeral idea "real".
However I disagree that "writing things in a blog post / paulg narrative format to be shared with other internet readers" is the best way to turn ephemeral thoughts into solid ideas.
I think using pen and paper, sketching, drawing, scribbling, writing short-form jot notes, writing on the shower glass while steaming away in the shower — I think those forms of writing are how good ideas get captured and solidified.
The paulg kind of writing is merely an exercise in peacocking to the other HN crowds.
---
For designers, the best way is to draw things. If you have a hard time "imagining" a user flow, draw the screens in a flow diagram. If that's hard, draw all the interfaces, cut them out, and put them on a table. Put the pieces on top of each other to approximate how the interface will flow.
Anecdotal: I recently found a little trick that works for me to overcome the horrors of the blank page: I turn my phone (having opened my preferred note-taking solution) into horizontal mode. The keyboard gets larger in width, making it nicer to type, and on my medium-sized phone, it covers enough of the UI that I don't actually see what I type into the textbox, until I close the keyboard again. So I just happily type away and hit save at the end.
I found when I was working on my dissertation that I struggled make progress on the actual writing. No matter how much work I did, I wound up rewriting, editing, re-thinking, deleting, and starting over.
I never fully solved that problem, but I found a workaround that helped: I started writing notes and drafts by hand in cursive with my non-dominant hand.
Writing by hand, by itself, calmed me and focused my mind, whereas writing in a word processor almost always caused a spiral of distraction and increasing agitation.
Increasing the difficulty of the literal, physical writing process helped me, I think, in a few ways. It became much costlier not to commit to a single version of a thought, so I had a strong incentive to pare away some of the noise surrounding it and state it in its most direct, least objectionable form.
I'm also convinced, though I can't prove it, that dramatically slowing the physical act of writing improved my working memory.
That being said, I strongly agree with just about everything this piece says, whether or not one writes by hand. And I would add that writing also forces people to use a wider range of faculties and forms of reasoning. I doubt one could overstate the value of this as intellectual exercise.
This needs to be the default way we instill in young people and to think about learning, as if, "escape your default setting" is akin to "exploration".
Especially in the age of generated written word, the act of writing it yourself _cannot_ be more important.
I picked up handwritten journaling as a way of processing my life. It has been therapeutic through a few incidences in how I'm feeling whether it's about work, family or more personal thoughts. With each stroke, I am challenging myself to write more cleanly and appreciating the subtle beauty as the pen strokes create letters, words, sentences, ideas. I feel more at peace as I let my most challenging thoughts live on paper.
> Writing reveals what you don’t know, what you can’t see when an idea is only held in your head. Biases, blind spots, and assumptions you can’t grasp internally.
I completely agree with this. Often, I think I understand something, but when I try to explain it to others, I quickly realize where my understanding is shaky. The gaps become even more apparent when I attempt to write it down because I have to structure my thoughts logically and precisely. Writing goes a step beyond speaking because it forces me to re-read and refine my ideas, whereas spoken words often disappear without deeper reflection. Oh, even this comment that I'm writing now was edited a couple of times before submitting it. The second half of the comment was added after re-reading the first half.
The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke describes the "4 Ps of Knowing", moving from propositional, up through procedural, perspectival, and participatory.
Most of our thought is propositional: we see a thing, know the thing, and move. Writing moves us up that hierarchy. And sharing that writing—ideally within the context of shared dialogue—moves us even further.
I had no idea how sloppy my thinking was until I started writing.
I think the main benefit of writing is that it makes the implicit explicit. It makes your ideas "solid".
You can look at them and see them clearly. And often you aren't so happy with what you see!
And that's great, because now you can do something about it.
Writing is quite different as a discipline and in its effects when it's for self-discovery, self-analysis, messaging others, etc.
It's like the vast differences between relaxing alone at home, caring for your partner, hosting guests, going to work, taking kids on vacation...
What's helpful in either case is the ritual of entering that domain: you pull yourself together for work, dissolve on the couch, and put on a happy listening face for the kids. The more consistent you are in your rituals, the more quickly and deeply you enter and exit that domain.
That's how to escape mental defaults: have a huge variety of them, widely-spaced, so you can introspect their difference and play their respective lights against their shadows.
Writing is perhaps the most profound tool I have for self improvement.
It sharpens my mind.
It heals my trauma.
It expands my creativity.
I noticed that writing prompts for my 'code bot' gives more structure to my thoughts. I sometimes even delete a prompt because just the writing already gave me new thoughts.
Love it. Your whole website is great. I recently started writing down whatever passing thoughts happen to me in a small notebook. Only a couple of entries now, but it's a start. Unfortunately I was terrible at, or perhaps terrified of, writing at school and college, so I never learned how to be any good at it. I also find that nothing reveals more about what you know about a given topic than looking at an empty page or a blinking cursor. Even writing this comment makes me feel queasy, huh.
To present a counter perspective. I like to believe that I possess a fair crop of sane defaults here and there upstairs.
And there are some things that I refuse to write down. They’re motivated more by a raw feeling than what can be found through their transliteration. Language of the guts gargles into scribbles and scripts.
Lest I be forced to result to pictography. You know sketch pads are also helpful.
Maybe the writer’s resort is toward the days he ain’t writing. Eventually stopping and becoming content.
Another perspective is that Latin and Greek would make a person smarter. Have fun sketching.
I had this insight that I thought was evident. "AGI is an interface problem". It made sense in the context. But when I decided to write about it, my initial idea and example were pretty weak. The more I wrote the more I found counterpoints. In fact, writing forced me to think through those arguments and see if the idea can still stand.
Many times, my ideas fade into darkness after a good writing session. But that's how you form a strong opinion.
> Writing expands your working memory, lets you be more brilliant on paper than you can be in person.
So true!
Loved this article. Learning to love writing is one of my biggest takeaways from my Computer Science PhD program.
pg explores a similar thought in his meta essay about essays: https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
In the essay, pg explores the idea that an essay helps him explore ideas.
Has anyone noticed that once they lose the writing habit that their thinking suffers?
Writing about writing is in the air! I just published a post with a tongue-in-cheek reference to the A-Team [1] :D
The OP led me to `kupjao`'s series of posts on writing, and I can't help but nod my head in agreement. I'm in the choir they are preaching to!
Little writing habits compound over time to help people (and teams) escape the gravity well of their "default" setting. It isn't rocket science. Just simple bullet-point-ing can be good enough to help a bunch of people...
- conserve personal and collective attention
- power creativity
- grow intellectual capital
- maintain clear situational awareness
- run high-trust workplaces, and
- make high-quality decisions.
etc. etc. etc. because, like I said, I'm sold on the author's premise!
[1] "Becoming a software A-Team via writing culture" https://www.evalapply.org/posts/writing-practices-to-10x-eng...
I wanna write like this:
Don’t Eat Before Reading This By Anthony Bourdain A New York chef spills some trade secrets.
Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits. Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times— superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own. A good deal has changed since Orwell’s memoir of the months he spent as a dishwasher in “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Gas ranges and exhaust fans have gone a long way toward increasing the life span of the working culinarian. Nowadays, most aspiring cooks come into the business because they want to: they have chosen this life, studied for it. Today’s top chefs are like star athletes. They bounce from kitchen to kitchen—free agents in search of more money, more acclaim. I’ve been a chef in New York for more than ten years, and, for the decade before that, a dishwasher, a prep drone, a line cook, and a sous-chef. I came into the business when cooks still smoked on the line and wore headbands. A few years ago, I wasn’t surprised to hear rumors of a study of the nation’s prison population which reportedly found that the leading civilian occupation among inmates before they were put behind bars was “cook.” As most of us in the restaurant business know, there is a powerful strain of criminality in the industry, ranging from the dope-dealing busboy with beeper and cell phone to the restaurant owner who has two sets of accounting books. In fact, it was the unsavory side of professional cooking that attracted me to it in the first place. In the early seventies, I dropped out of college and transferred to the Culinary Institute of America. I wanted it all: the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze, the camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering chaos. I would climb the chain of command from mal carne (meaning “bad meat,” or “new guy”) to chefdom—doing whatever it took until I ran my own kitchen and had my own crew of cutthroats, the culinary equivalent of “The Wild Bunch.”
need to go back to stone tablets fr fr
Am I the only one here for whom writing ends up having the opposite effect?
Whenever I write something it's practically like archiving it on paper - the idea is set aside, now to focus on something else. I almost never happens that I go back to what I've written and process it.
Which is why journaling doesn't seem to be working for me; the only way I can have something manifest is by mulling over it for extended periods of time.
Writing it down is the part where you process it. I've found that if I don't have a need to revisit or continue what I've written down, I am done with it.
I think there's something missing if you just write to yourself and it doesn't get read. The Amazon style meetings need to happen more. https://x.com/EdwardTufte/status/1735612294820733170
I'd like to ask the author how they made this amazing, clean blog site.
Kind of you to ask! Just WordPress + a stack I've been using for eons. Easy for me to replicate and portable.
Just be aware that once you escape your default setting, you'll come to realize everybody else hasn't.
It'll be like teenage angst at your parents, except it'll be angst at the entire species :)
Anyone that writes and asks earnest questions pretty quickly turns to spirituality, religion, philosophy or pseudo-philosophy/pseudo-science (self-help) because they end up realizing oh - I don't know what's going on at all!
The spiritual path is living with truth of don't know. Religion is choosing to have 'faith' and a set of instructions but really is about huddling with others for warmth and comfort. Philosophy is about attempting to build a logically consistent system of what's going on. Self-help is a set of quick hacks to make one feel better.
Almost all people settle in a modified default setting (self help) and choose to use thinking to do tiny little puzzles instead of asking the deeper questions. They can't handle the angst, they want that human comfort more than they want the truth :)