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How to think in writing

henrikkarlsson.xyz

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Re: How to think in writing

#71

Post by calf »

treetalker wrote: post #63
bawolff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed i kind of felt similar. I'm just not sure what the thesis of this piece is supposed to be. Is it that to write deeply you should question your assumptions and follow your argument to their logical conclusions? Is there something more that i missed? Surely that goes without saying?

Here’s my (sometimes heavy-handed) restatement. The thesis is marked by asterisks. The author’s expression tends toward the literary and thus reduces clarity by requiring more work from the reader — a point which I find ironic in light of the message conveyed. - - - > When I sit down to write … [m]y thoughts are flighty and shapeless … . But when I type, it is as if I pin my thoughts to the table. I can examine them.…

I think the author is simultaneously reinventing the wheel and overthinking the writing process. Their essay overloads all the work of deep thinking onto the task of writing, which indeed scientists say writing a piece of text is one of the hardest cognitive tasks.

The top-down elaboration of bullet points is what middle-school students should've been taught, outlining.

The conjecturing and counterexamples are reasoning critically about your own ideas.

All of this is easy said but it's all well known and high school education should've taught the basics of this, the rest is just lots of practice.

Re: How to think in writing

#72

Post by DiscourseFan »

supersrdjan wrote: post #58

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…

Perhaps it is because of the impossibility of coming to full clarity? It is the process of the truth developing that is more important than any absolute truth, which, it is always clear, turns out to be just a stage of development.

Re: How to think in writing

#73

Post by chrisjj »

> 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.

Re: How to think in writing

#74

Post by chrisjj »

codelord wrote: post #6

"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.

> Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with this flawed deduction.

... or this writing improved an even more flawed original.

Re: How to think in writing

#75

Post by [deleted] »

treetalker wrote: post #31
codelord wrote: post #6

"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.

To be sure, the quoted text in the parent comment is itself the linked essay’s quotation of Paul Graham. Whether logically rigorous or not, that excerpt seems to be the essay’s author’s way of rhetorically opening his reflections on the idea that writing verbally crystallizes thought. As a reader, I do not believe that the author is making a claim that the quoted Paul Graham statement, reduced to symbolic logic, is i…

[deleted]

Re: How to think in writing

#76

Post by pauln99 »

chrisjj wrote: post #73

> 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.

I think he also said somewhere that people mainly disagree with distorted versions of your ideas...

Re: How to think in writing

#77

Post by layer8 »

pxoe wrote: post #28

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

At least no one notices when you only think in lowercase.

Re: How to think in writing

#78

Post by afc »

card_zero wrote: post #67
supersrdjan wrote: post #58

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…

No, it's like: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look more foolish - always, no matter what else they did - therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks perfectly foolish. Or, say, people who have caught a Snorlax have more Pokemon, therefore no one who hasn't caught a Snorlax has all the Pokemon. This assumes that there's such a thing as a "fully formed idea" (which means an exception to "alway…

I think you're right. But I still think the quote from Graham is terrible writing: confusing, brittle, convoluted, almost as if it was designed to hide something from readers and manipulate them into a different understanding than what it actually claims.

The quote is, as you explain, technically correct due to its use of "always". Take this word away and the sentence is correct English, but the meaning now is incorrect (and would match the interpretation of the comment you replied to). Making the correctness hinge so directly in the subtlety of the presence of the quantifier makes the sentence brittle and convoluted.

It feels almost manipulative, as if the writer hopes the reader won't inspect the sentence so closely (and thus will miss this subtlety) and will understand something slightly different ("if you don't write, it's impossible to have clear thoughts"), so that the conclusion sounds much stronger. And readers do get the incorrect interpretation, as evidenced by the comment you replied to, which attacks the misunderstanding of that sentence.

So while I fully agree with you, I still think the sentence quoted is an example of terribly unhelpful and confusing writing. Especially because the full premise "writing down your ideas _always_ makes them more precise and complete" is debatable (you just need to find one counterexample).

(Incidentally, my recollection of Graham's writing is that this type of misleading sentences (that are technically correct but appear to say something else, something that isn't), as if they were deliberately cultivated.)

A much better sentence would be something like:

* "Writing down your ideas is great to make them more precise and more complete. It's hard to have fully formed ideas about a topic without writing about it." This matches the understanding of a quick glance of the sentence.

* "Writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and complete." Closer to the actual meaning, but doesn't do a slight of hand to hide the main point.

Re: How to think in writing

#79

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Sharlin wrote: post #40
bgoated01 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and even ideas that have been written about can be more precise and complete, perhaps by writing more about them, for example, so no one has fully formed ideas by this logic.

And that’s probably true. I doubt anyone has ever expressed an idea that couldn’t be amended, clarified, or expanded upon in some way.

Depends on the idea. To me the whole article was too generic or handwavy without giving specific examples of what kind of ideas are actually fully formed and which are not.

What is a definition of an idea that is fully formed and that is sufficiently complex enough?

Re: How to think in writing

#80

Post by mewpmewp2 »

chrisjj wrote: post #74
codelord wrote: post #6

"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.

> Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with this flawed deduction. ... or this writing improved an even more flawed original.

Or it gave author unwarranted confidence in a flawed argument on the basis of a flawed assumption.
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