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Why write?

bastian.rieck.me

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Re: Why write?

#31

Post by nicbou »

Swizec wrote: post #2

Illusion of explanatory depth. Until you write (or otherwise explain), you really don’t know whether you even know what you think you do. We humans tend to over-estimate how well we understand something. We mentally paper over holes in our knowledge and handwave away pesky little details, until we try to explain the thing. Then you realize ”Wait, those two ideas aren’t connecting …” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illu…

Then you write code. I thought I understood how German health insurance works until I wrote a calculator for it. Suddenly I had to consider far more cases.

Re: Why write?

#32

Post by PartiallyTyped »

jodrellblank wrote: post #28
mercurialsolo wrote: post #17

Writing is like extending the context window for our brains neural nets. Writing helps us also defragment our brains. We write notes for ourselves to empty our brains of the thoughts at times. PG's work back in the day on writing as a form of think is still pretty relevant. http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html

If writing is a form of thinking, and a picture is worth a thousand words, does drawing (instead of writing) give a 1000x boost to thinking in any way?

Yes, but all you need is arrows; see Category theory ;)

Re: Why write?

#33

Post by GenericCanadian »

I started writing when I was teaching newer programmers and I found the amount I didn't know how to explain clearly was staggering. Things I thought I knew so were actually kind of blurry blobs in my mind.

Recently I've been exploring Bevy and rust game development and my learning has been so much better when I create docs for myself: https://taintedcoders.com/

Re: Why write?

#35

Post by antirez »

Writing is a set of techniques that can be learned to communicate effectively. That said, reaching excellence requires some talent other than the technique, but that's obvious, and common to every other activity. It's worth remembering that teaching how to communicate effectively is 2500 years old: it started in Sicily with sophists, paid teachers of rhetoric in the ancient Greek world. We kinda unlearned that writing is a learnable skill.

Re: Why write?

#36

Post by __loam »

mercurialsolo wrote: post #17

Writing is like extending the context window for our brains neural nets. Writing helps us also defragment our brains. We write notes for ourselves to empty our brains of the thoughts at times. PG's work back in the day on writing as a form of think is still pretty relevant. http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html

I love that we can't have a discussion about brains without a very poor computer science analogy.

Re: Why write?

#37

Post by ahalbert »

dustingetz wrote: post #26
ahalbert wrote: post #3

I recently started writing reviews of each book I read. I found it helps me retain the contents of the book and often people give positive feedback about what they learned from my review.

how many hours do you invest in this per book and per month? I did this for a few months in 2017 but it was taking like 90 minutes per chapter, and at full saturday morning 8am attention! It's like doing math homework. And math homework is not the most important thing I can spend the best 90 minutes of my day on.

I don't know, but I wrote nearly 3000 words on the last book review I did. I'd say I spend less time than 90 minutes per chapter. I'm also sharing the reviews, which I find the most rewarding part.

Re: Why write?

#38

Post by Pseudomanifold »

articsputnik wrote: post #34
thinkpad13 wrote: post #24

the blog is really clean I liek it

The font and the layout are amazing. I was wondering what font it is.

Author here :-) Thanks a lot---the font is Gentium Book Basic. If you are interested in the layout, send me an e-mail or a DM; I can share the theme.

Re: Why write?

#39

Post by npsimons »

jnac wrote: post #6
ahalbert wrote: post #3

I recently started writing reviews of each book I read. I found it helps me retain the contents of the book and often people give positive feedback about what they learned from my review.

Is there any review(er) in particular you used as inspiration here? Curious if you treat this more as personal notes, or a public-facing review?

Not GP, but https://fourminutebooks.com comes to mind. It's also just incredibly useful to get a "4 minute precis" and decide whether or not it's worth it to you to spend more time on that book.
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