The Need to Read • Hacker News Board

Re: The Need to Read

#111

Post by borroka » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

eatonphil wrote: post #77

Every time I write something I intend to be permanent I reread what I've written multiple times out loud. I find complicated sentences, or related phrases that are unnecessarily far apart, or words that I'd never use in speech. Then I make modifications to minimize these. So even aside from reading what others write, I think you can only write well yourself if you assiduously read what you write.

Editing a few days after writing does wonders to improve the quality of the writing, especially allowing you to find those parts, expressions, words that you do not hear as your own voice. Reading and rereading immediately after writing is certainly helpful, but it presents a "fluency" problem. That is, due to the fatigue of rereading what is still fresh in our minds and in our hands and the increasing familiarity with the text, we bypass some parts of the text while reading.

It's kind of like having a weird uncle in the family: after we see this guy running around the living room naked for some years, we think it's ordinary, fine, ok: "oh, it's just Uncle Bob", we tell ourselves.

Then we go to college, come home for vacation after meeting new people, lost the "familiarity" of family life, and when we finally see Uncle Bob running around the living room naked, our reaction is not one of jovial acceptance like before, but one of horror.

Re: The Need to Read

#112

Post by thunky » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:46 PM UTC

personjerry wrote: post #26

It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing . And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to wr…

> If you want to be a thinker, you have to write.

> Start a blog!

Posting to HN counts as writing, too.

Re: The Need to Read

#113

Post by skydhash » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

johnny_reilly wrote: post #99

personjerry wrote: post #26

It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing . And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to wr…

What Simon said! I've found that blogging hugely helps me clarify my own thinking on a topic, and flush out areas of ignorance. Another excellent option for making getting going with blogging simple is Docusaurus - makes it very easy to get up and running! https://docusaurus.io

My own blog is on bearblog.dev. There's also nicheless.blog if you want a shorter length as a constraint – and excuse ;). I've tried setting a static generator and even wrote my own, but I spent more time fiddling with them than writing. Now I just write. Pretty much raw thoughts like how I would speak with a friend. Doing more structured writing takes all the joy about it for me.

Re: The Need to Read

#114

Post by silvestrov » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

personjerry wrote: post #26

It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing . And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to wr…

When writing you have to actual flesh out the details and figure out what to include and what to omit. It is so easy to skip that in day dreaming.

Thinking is like drawing a bridge on paper. Writing is to actual construct the bridge and test it.

What looks like the strongest bridge (built of paper) is not always the strongest one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtMx7FZUC6A

Re: The Need to Read

#115

Post by amadeuspagel » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

npunt wrote: post #13

There’s much more to the story than writing is a way of thinking, and reading is a big input into writing. Specifically, how each interplay with ideas, as most of us after all are in the business of creating things. And here, the most important bit is not reading, its curiosity. Curiosity about others’ ideas drives reading, curiosity about one’s own ideas drives writing. The time we spend chasing each type of curiosi…

And when Schopenhauer wrote this, it was much harder to find stuff to read, so his advice is all the more important today.

Re: The Need to Read

#116

Post by cbeach » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

Can one think without language? It’s a question my headmaster once posed in a general studies class.

Re: The Need to Read

#117

Post by mdp2021 » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 3:11 PM UTC

personjerry wrote: post #26

It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing . And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to wr…

> If you want to be a thinker, you have to write

It's what was done at school, since primary...

But it was "at school", because the learner is to be guided with critical thinking and ability of assessment, over his own or anybody else's production.

Re: The Need to Read

#118

Post by magicloop » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

I see reading as a knowledge compression function. So it is efficient to read something that the writer otherwise spent a long time assembling.

But reading is just a route to quality thinking. Another route is via technical debate. You verbally describe a problem and solution and then your peers drill into that and offer counterpoints. This is in my experience as beneficial as reading due its interactive aspect - which reading does not offer.

Re: The Need to Read

#119

Post by kragen » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 3:38 PM UTC

thunky wrote: post #112

personjerry wrote: post #26

It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing . And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to wr…

> If you want to be a thinker, you have to write. > Start a blog! Posting to HN counts as writing, too.

posting to hn has its disadvantages

most of the interactions you get are people trying to prove you wrong

this is great when it's with evidence, but half the time instead they accuse you of lying, argue from their own authority, or insult you

the options for including equations, data tables, and diagrams are very limited, and these are important when what you're thinking about is objectively falsifiable propositions

the options for structuring your writing into sections with titles with a table of contents, so readers can navigate an argument that takes more than two minutes to read, are similarly weak

nobody reads what you write after a week, and it's hard for you to even find it yourself

worst of all, if you discover that you were wrong two weeks or more after your initial comment, there's no way to append a correction

Re: The Need to Read

#120

Post by exhaze » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 3:40 PM UTC

Folks here mentioned that the core point is not about the need to the importance of reading, but the importance of writing. No, it’s really about becoming better at deep, structured thinking. I think that’s quite a good thing to focus on.

The world we live in is becoming more complex. I think it’s because our communication pipelines now have unlimited IO - there’s too much to consume, too much to process, too many thoughts we feel the need to express in response to all these inputs. All of this at the unforgivably quick eventual constituency cross-region replication guarantees afforded to us by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and many others.

I write more these days.

I don’t share most of what I write.

I write for myself, because I think that writing my thoughts helps to refine these thoughts, retain them for future me, and, on occasion, share them with another person, thru conversion, or by just copy pasting something I wrote.

You don’t need a blog to start writing. Just start writing. VS Code. Notepad. Emacs. A piece of paper. It doesn’t matter. As long as you can do it when you feel like it. Write.