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How to think in writing

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Re: How to think in writing

#51

Post by kazinator »

BeetleB wrote: post #50
kazinator wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your brain has a blind spot, stop writing English and write code, with test cases that hit all corner cases.

By the very definition, if your brain has a blind spot it'll not think of all the corner cases to test. That's why we do code reviews.

The code will reveal the corner cases to you; you will think of things you didn't think of before writing the code.

Before you write the code, your ideas may be so poor that they don't even hit the happy cases when you try to code them. You go "Oh, what was I thinking; it's obvious now that it could never work that way ..."

Of course, it's coding we are talking about; there will be bugs. Fewer than in some wishful prose, though.

Re: How to think in writing

#52

Post by BeetleB »

kazinator wrote: post #51
BeetleB wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the very definition, if your brain has a blind spot it'll not think of all the corner cases to test. That's why we do code reviews.

The code will reveal the corner cases to you; you will think of things you didn't think of before writing the code. Before you write the code, your ideas may be so poor that they don't even hit the happy cases when you try to code them. You go "Oh, what was I thinking; it's obvious now that it could never work that way ..." Of course, it's coding we are talking about; there will be bugs. Fewer than in some wishful pr…

Ah, I see your point now.

Sure, writing code will help you understand the problem better, and may let you see more corner cases. But not all (which was my point).

Re: How to think in writing

#53

Post by benreesman »

andrei-akopian wrote: post #16

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.

In fairness to the OP, I’d fucking hate to be trying to get my ideas out on the internet when it had to get past like 4 different LLMs to ever see the light of day.

One of the many chilling effects of modern AI is that there’s now a CAPTCHA for writing anything that people read unless you’re really famous or something.

Re: How to think in writing

#54

Post by sph »

BeetleB wrote: post #33

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 experien…

> 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.

And how do you avoid having to start with a blank page. I have been reading "How to take smart notes", which delves into Zettelkasten, and the point of writing and linking notes is, indeed to refine your thoughts, and to be able to collect them into a larger essay/article/what have you.

As a self-taught person with an incredible idea-making brain and terrible note-taking skills, it's taken me almost 4 decades to learn that writing is a crucial component of understanding complex systems, and it doesn't start by the essay, which, as you say, only needs one or two simple passes. The essay is the tip of the iceberg, the important stuff is all the research and writing that leads to a topic or theory.

Re: How to think in writing

#55

Post by toxik »

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.

Re: How to think in writing

#56

Post by astrobe_ »

BeetleB wrote: post #48
random3 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have few, very simple thoughts, feedback is not really effective, nor scalable, compared to self validation for which writing is required.

I would urge you to seek feedback from a more diverse crowd then. The article talks about counterexamples. It's hubris to think you will find most of the relevant counterexamples on your own. It's also hubris to think you'll do it quicker than others. As for scalability, I'm confused. If you have a crowd of followers, for example, you'll reach lots of people quickly, whereas by writing for yourself you'll never get f…

> If you have a crowd of followers

That's a big if, and that's the problem with relying on feedback. The more specific the topic, the less people you'll find that can give relevant feedback. Even within a team (less people but more specialized in your problem domain), it can be difficult to get relevant feedback.

It still works because it is a form of "rubber-ducking". But the less involved in your topic the "crowd" is, the less efficient it is.

Moreover feedback has the same problem as tests (and code reviews): it can show the existence of an inconsistency or a blind spot, but positive feedback doesn't prove that you are entirely correct.

Re: How to think in writing

#57

Post by setopt »

astrobe_ wrote: post #56
BeetleB wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would urge you to seek feedback from a more diverse crowd then. The article talks about counterexamples. It's hubris to think you will find most of the relevant counterexamples on your own. It's also hubris to think you'll do it quicker than others. As for scalability, I'm confused. If you have a crowd of followers, for example, you'll reach lots of people quickly, whereas by writing for yourself you'll never get f…

> If you have a crowd of followers That's a big if , and that's the problem with relying on feedback. The more specific the topic, the less people you'll find that can give relevant feedback. Even within a team (less people but more specialized in your problem domain), it can be difficult to get relevant feedback. It still works because it is a form of "rubber-ducking". But the less involved in your topic the "crowd"…

> positive feedback doesn't prove that you are entirely correct

You often don’t need to be 100% sure that everything is correct before you move from “writing notes” to “doing something”. At that point, I find that note-taking becomes counter-productive because of the time it requires.

I say this as an avid note taker myself: I’ve often caught myself procrastinating by polishing my notes 100%, instead of moving on and getting things done.

Re: How to think in writing

#58

Post by supersrdjan »

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 .

Re: How to think in writing

#59

Post by tuxone »

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.

Re: How to think in writing

#60

Post by jstanley »

BeetleB wrote: post #49
2143 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's as smart as I am, so it wasn't an intelligence flaw. I literally wow-ed out loud. I've always felt everybody around me is much smarter than me. Now I have found the opposite personality — somebody who is fully confident about themselves.

I get that the comment came across as arrogant. However you misunderstood the point. It's not that I'm very smart, but that a superior intelligence was not the factor in me finding glasses in his reasoning. It can't be, because as I pointed out, my intelligence is not superior to his. Of course I do get your point that I should consider whether both he and I are simply not that intelligent and that's the reason I fin…

In some sense, isn't making flawed arguments an intelligence flaw by definition?
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