To quote Paul Graham: "Writing is thinking. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did: If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking. So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots."
Writing is thinking
81–90 of 135 posts
Re: Writing is thinking
#82While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this. We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods. I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear t…
I'm not sure if writers developed the entire book in their head first, but: it was indeed very, very common for people to dictate novels, journal entries, and other "written" works to a secretary, typist, or tape recorder. Nowadays that seems to be rare, but my impression from reading my journals is that it was often more common to dictate than to physically hand write things.
Novels were dictated, that is absolutely correct, but on top of it, the whole plot was developed with a high level of detail before dictation started. There was some editing, of course, but nothing like we do today, where writing books is basically an iterative process. We lean on the written word too much for our thinking (not being critical, just that’s how we are taught)
Re: Writing is thinking
#83While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this. We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods. I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear t…
Yeah, LLMs are entirely different from "writing" because they're creative agents. So, writing allows me to give my thoughts several passes, to edit over time. It's like I can have several of me to think, write and edit, spaced over time. LLMs are like I have someone else to do some or all of the thinking and writing and editing. So I do less thinking. A bicycle lets my own energy go father. Writing. A car lets me use…
I’ve read Tolstoy’s diaries and he mentions the thought process he uses to write small novels. First he thinks about what should happen, then he writes (or dictates) the text. Thinking takes a few weeks, sometimes a month, then writing is pretty quick. There is some editing, but nothing like we do nowadays.
Bigger novels such as war and peace were written episodically.
Re: Writing is thinking
#84While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this. We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods. I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear t…
Before paper became cheap, wax or wooden tablets were used for ephemeral writing. > I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days. I seriously doubt that it was ever common for writers to compose a whole book in thei…
Not war and peace, which was episodic, but smaller novels were thought out in Tolstoy’s mind before being written wholly. He mentions this in his diaries. Zweig mentions the same, too, but of course his novels are generally much shorter than the two Tolstoy’s masterpieces.
Re: Writing is thinking
#85To write something you must form a "theory of the system", which is orders of magnitude more difficult than feeding on fodder. It's the difference between being fluent in a language and sort of understanding something.
It's quite similar in hard sciences as it's in natural languages. For instance I don't understand Hungarian at all. Few words "igen", "jó napot kívánok" doesn't a knowledge of the language form.
Then German. I had to learn it in school so I have orders of magnitude better grasp at it because I can actually say a few statements that form in my mind: "Nein, ich brauch nicht ein anderes stück Steak". Might not be 100% correct gramatically and vocabulary wise but it conveys the message and also transmits that I understand the context.
And then come English which I speak since 33 years. I actually THINK in English a lot of times and there are concepts I can't easily express in my native Romanian language without resorting to a painfully long and sometimes unsuccessful software-driven (as opposed to FPGA-encoded) translation process.
Re: Writing is thinking
#86To add: Reading is also thinking (ideally). And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc. Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first o…
No , reading is filling up your mind's LLM with the context given by someone else. Your thinking is what happens after reading.
Re: Writing is thinking
#87My experience with writing is that it's often a matter of simply noting down what comes pouring from my subconscious, with the most taxing task being keeping ahold of some given connection, sentiment, or wording (as that subconscious seems to generate more than my working memory can keep track of).
Sometimes I struggle to fit those sentiments and connections to wording that I imagine will make sense, to someone else or even to myself. I guess that would be the, "Writing is thinking," part, but it seems more like, "Effective and coscientious (self-)communication is thinking."
Re: Writing is thinking
#88I've been saying this for years.
Re: Writing is thinking
#89I see a lot of people say "writing is so important," and I think what they mean is "I feel really smart/good when I write." And I think what they are experiencing is that they've been assembling ideas in their heads for weeks, and only when it's all come together are they ready synthesize that information at a higher level, and they mistake this synthesis for the writing itself (rather than the writing being a sympto…
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Re: Writing is thinking
#90A former manager (and editor) used to say writing is discovery which is more or less the same thing. I agree.