Writing to think
There are a lot of things that I want to write blog posts about. I find myself feeling like I have something useful to say about a topic, and I want to say it. But when I actually sit down to get started, I run into problems.
Sometimes I don’t know how to explain what I want to say.
Sometimes—no, quite often, I can explain it reasonably well abstractly, but I can’t think of good, concrete examples, and without those the post doesn’t feel good enough to be worth posting.
Sometimes the subject matter feels like it’s not important enough.
Sometimes I feel like I’m on to something, but the subject matter is something I only have an amateur’s understanding of, I don’t want to make noob mistakes in the post, but I also don’t want to spend the time doing the research. Or maybe I still have trouble understanding it even after I do the research.
Sometimes I just question whether or not my idea is actually a good one.
There’s an insight I learned from Paul Graham in The Age of the Essay that I think addresses all of this. A lot of people want to collect their thoughts first before starting the process of putting them down on paper. To address all of the hesitations I mention above before getting started. You don’t want to publish something that has these issues, so you may as well resolve them before you start writing, right? Seems pretty logical.
Here’s the problem though. The act of writing can help you to resolve the issues. Actually, that’s a huge understatement: it’s enormously helpful. Someone who writes in this exploratory sense has a huge leg up on someone who tries to resolve the issues in their head. It’s almost like trying to solve an algebra problem in your head vs. with paper and pencil. Writing seems to have a way of boosting your IQ by 20 points.
Here’s an interesting thought that’s never occurred to me before. There are various bloggers/writers who I keep up with: Scott Alexander, Robin Hanson, Paul Graham, Tim Urban. They’re all smart and have lots of great ideas. I’ve always assumed that in order to be a good writer like them that you have to be smart and have good ideas first. Ie. that it’s a prerequisite. But what if it’s the opposite? What if they’re smart and have good ideas because they spend a lot of time writing? Maybe the arrow of causality is reversed. Strictly speaking, I’m presenting a false dichotomy here. It’s not one or the other. But I suspect that a big reason why these guys are all so smart is because they spend a lot of time writing.
I’m not sure why writing is this powerful. It doesn’t seem like it should be. A small boost makes sense, but a superpower isn’t something I would have predicted in advance.
Here’s my hypothesis though. I think it has to do with working memory and mind wandering. Think of writing as putting a linear sequence of thoughts on paper. What’s the advantage to them being on paper? Why not just think them in your head in that same sequence?
Well, one thing is that you might forget stuff in your head, but if it’s on paper you can refer to it. It doesn’t get lost. It seems like you should be able to maintain a pretty decent sequence of thoughts in your head, but I’m always surprised with how much I struggle to do so.
I’m able to do a much better job of not losing track when I am having a conversation though, as opposed to being alone with my thoughts, so it seems like the raw capacity to keep track is there. I suspect that mind wandering is the bigger issue. Both conversation and writing have a way of bringing you “back on track”. Writing has always felt very meditative to me, and now that finally makes sense: meditation also is about preventing mind wandering and bringing yourself “back on track”.
I hope that this post is the first of many. I want to start writing a lot more. I think that writing is a superpower. I’m on the bandwagon. Why not take advantage of it if it’s available to me? I do have one big hesitation though: publishing.
Writing to think makes sense. But what if the end result still turns out crappy? What if it’s meh? What if it’s good but not great? Should you publish it to the world? I’m someone who leans towards saying no. I like to make sure it’s pretty refined and high quality.
But that leads me to a catch-22: most thoughts I want to explore don’t seem promising enough where I’d end up publishing them. Or, rather, they usually seem like they’d take way too much time to refine. And if I’m not going to publish them, well, why write them up in the first place?
Because of the title of this post: write to think. Duh. That’s what we’ve been talking about this whole time. But somehow the monkey in my brain doesn’t understand that, or just won’t cooperate. I just can’t motivate myself to write if it’s not something I plan on publishing. Most of my ideas don’t seem publish-worthy, so I end up not writing. But this is a very bad state that must change. Writing is a superpower, and I want to use it.
Part of the solution I’m going to attempt is just lowering my standards. Fuck it, you guys are just going to have to deal with my writing being shitty sometimes. I’d like to be able to look through my list of posts and feel content that each and every one is something that I put into the world because I am really proud of it and it deserves to be there, but that mindset just leads me to the catch-22.
Actually, I think it leads to a second catch-22 as well. When I look back at my old posts, I’m horrified by a lot of them, despite the fact that I tried to hold myself to this high standard for publishing. It’s to the point where I want to say “that author is my past self, not current-me, and I don’t want to associate with that past self”. But this post right now is purely exploratory, and it feels like it’s turning into one of my better posts. I suspect that by lowering the bar, it’ll continue to lead to paradoxically high quality posts. To some extent at least.
Another part of the solution I’m going to attempt is to view blog posts as my motivation for learning something new. Let me explain. I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago about about learning. I’m the type of person who reads textbooks and likes learning for learning’s sake. He’s the opposite. He needs a more concrete, practical reason. “Learn X because I want to achieve/solve Y, and X will help with that.” I think I need to adopt that mindset more, and maybe publishable-quality blog posts that I’m proud of can be my Y.
I’ve been talking about writing from the perspective of it being a superpower that makes you smarter, more insightful, and a clearer thinker. Those are all things that I care about. However, there are two other reasons to write that I think might be even bigger.
The first is for mental health reasons. This is a great example of something I hesitate to write about because I have no expertise in mental health. But it’s an insanely important topic. “Huge if true”. Anyway, I do have a pretty strong intuition about the importance of writing for mental health, and I have read some books. You could probably say that I have a strong amateur’s understanding of the field. Hopefully I’ll expand on this in the future, but for now check out James Pennebaker’s research and the research on memory reconsolidation if you’re interested.
The second reason other than smarts why I think writing is crazy powerful is because it’s fun! At least for me. But I strongly suspect that it is for you too. If you give it a proper chance. I think it’s a human thing, not a me thing.
I remember when I was in college and started writing blog posts for the first time. I was working on a startup and wanted to write a few posts about the subject matter. But then I lost my mind. I enjoyed it so much that I stopped caring about the startup and started writing posts that had nothing to do with the startup I was working on. I felt guilty because it wasn’t what I was “supposed” to be working on, but hey, whatever works! A strong sense of happiness like that is hard to come by, so I think that there’s wisdom in just running with it.
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That’s definitely true for me. My journey as a writer also follow steps you mention, maybe not in the same order: write fun stuff without worrying → start to worry and write less → realize that a crappy first draft can end up in a drawer or your hard drive → write crappy first drafts so that you have clear ideas for the rewrite of the actual post.
As for why writing is a superpower, I have another hypothesis, in addition to the working memory: writing forces you to commit your ideas to a specific form. While they’re in your head, it’s really easy to adapt them whenever something slightly wrong appears. Same in a conversation: you can explain away, or in a different way, so that in the end it seems the other one has understood you. But paper is ruthless, and writing something down means you can’t get away with changing it without a thought. If it’s wrong, you need to change the words. And that forces you to go further intellectually.
I like that hypothesis of paper being ruthless. I think there’s something there.
seconding that; I often find that I’m forced to confront problems with world-models that I’ve long assumed were true when I try to write them down, and in fact trying to write down a list of reasons for why I believed what I did ended up leading me to the conclusion that Orthodox Judaism is not self-consistent, which eventually brought me here.
100% Agree.
Similarly, I often force myself to write summaries of books I have read. I often “feel” like I learned something even though I can’t articulate what I learned or what I would do with that knowledge. Summaries help ensure that I’m not just taking that feeling of learning something at face value.
Yeah, me too. About writing summaries and about that feeling of having learned something being deceiving. I wonder if the latter is something that has been formally studied at all.
As for writing summaries, it’s something I am hoping to do a lot more of (on top of my desire to write more in a more general sense). I’m planning on writing summaries of the Rationality from AI to Zombies books. Doing so seems like a low hanging fruit that few rationalists have plucked.
I don’t know about formality, but Scott Young has frequently talks about the “Feynman technique” (writing summary as a way to learn) as a way to study.
please do that and post your results here! That seems like an incredible use of time, and a potentially excellent resource for the rationalist community
Just posted Map and Territory: Summary and Thoughts.
Reading through it now, thank you for the excellent work!
Thanks for the compliment :)
Thanks! I plan on writing it as a separate post.
It sounds like you don’t keep an idea book or dairy or anything similar. I’m totally on board with the idea that lowering the bar for publishing posts could actually increase average quality, but another thing you could try to get yourself out of the catch-22 is to keep something like that—if you know you’re writing for yourself, maybe the monkey in the brain would not be so tempted to think it’s pointless if you don’t publish. (Keeping it in a handwritten notebook or something could help tell the monkey that you’re not making a blog post draft, since it would not be easy to copy/paste into LW.)
This could also help inspire more ideas for blog posts.
There is a relevant factor here to consider. When writing for yourself, you need to force yourself less to make things explicit. Things only need to make sense to you. You can often leave some concepts fuzzy, than if you were to write, such that another person can understand the writing.
This has the advantage that you can cover more ground in the same amount of time.
It has the disadvantage, in my model, writing forcing you to make things explicit is one of its major benefits. Making things explicit makes it easier to spot holes in your models.
I do have a bit of an idea book. On LW and Bear Blog I keep some ideas in the drafts.
Still, oddly enough, I have a really hard time bringing myself to use it if I am not planning on it being something that I publish. My monkey is weird.
I have basically the same attitude towards writing, and found it really helpful over the years to write with a mind to publish, even if all I was doing was rambling and posting on Facebook to a somewhat limited audience. In fact, for a while my Facebook feed was full of long, rambling posts of me just working out ideas in writing and trying to find ways to express ideas.
Lowering the bar to what you will write and publish if you have this impulse I think is key, though doing that on LW can be a little hard because of downvotes and critical comments, so depending on how you respond to those finding a space where you feel you can just write what you want without consequence first can be really freeing to get things going. For me that was Facebook, but I could imagine it being LW short form, Twitter, or something else.
I’m just getting started with it, but I’m finding my LessWrong Shortform section a fantastic place to publish rambling thoughts, ideas, etc. as well as a great public notebook / journal. The quality standards are higher here on LessWrong than on Facebook, which makes my rambling LW notes / journal entries in the shortform section feel higher quality than they otherwise would be on FB, though I don’t find that an impediment nor source of anxiety for writing, in fact, it’s the other way around. It’s writing actual posts and commenting on other’s posts that generate the most writing related anxiety for me on LW; I suspect the shortform’s immunity from that anxiety comes from its explicit sitewide designation as a low effort, low epistemic standard, blog-y, ramble-y, kind of space.
Cool! In the past LessWrong had posts divided into “main” and “discussion”. Technically you can use discussion for whatever you want: ramblings, questions, etc. But that wasn’t the social norm. I think people still held themselves to a relatively high standard in the discussion section as well.
And I’ve always hypothesized that having sections that are dedicated to eg. shortform or eg. questions would make people a lot more comfortable eg. with off the cuff writing or eg. asking questions. Having a dedicated section just makes it really clear that what you’re doing is ok.
Now I suspect that social norms are the more important piece. Even if shortforms are available and labeled as such, if other people are using it for more well thought out and researched writing, it’s hard to go against the grain and do off the cuff writing their. As I talk about in the OP, I think off the cuff writing is important in helping you think, so I am glad to see you using it that way! Doing so will make LessWrong more like the rationality dojo Eliezer originally envisioned.
That’s really comforting to hear that I’m not the only one with these issues :)
Yeah I considered doing the same but I don’t have any social media accounts and don’t want to create any because it’s too dangerous of a time sink for me.
For some reason “writing to think” never worked well for me. I can only figure out stuff with nonverbal thinking and imagination, then try to put it in words.
Interesting. If anyone else has this experience I’d like to hear it.
There’s elements of both for me. The central thesis or idea always develops from (mostly) nonverbal thinking, but writing helps me define its boundaries and connect it to other mental models I have.
One thing I’ve learnt regarding that is that, if while writing it seems like my central idea itself needs changing, it’s more likely that I’ve just gotten lost in the weeds and need to expand my view, than that the idea itself is wrong. It’s tempting to “change your mind” in the middle of writing, to feel like you’re growing and learning, and but (at least for me) that’s often a result of availability bias and isolated demands of rigor on myself.
Another reason to be less strict about quality before publishing: you’re not a perfect judge of the quality of your own work. Sometimes your writing is better than you think it is, and filtering too hard means that some good writing won’t be published. If you don’t lose any of your bets, you’re not taking enough risks.
Don’t cringe when Looking at old Work
You know, the funny thing is that to get good at writing, writing a lot is actually a good strategy. Holding yourself to a very high can be actively harmful to the goal of writing a lot.
(I don’t expect that you need this advice anymore, but maybe somebody else sees it.)
I think one way to frame this productively might be to have the realization that it is necessary to write a bunch of bad blog posts, in order to get good. Each of these bad blog posts, that you can look back upon, should be seen as a success. They were a necessary step along the way. It might not be apparent how you got better at writing from one blog post to the next, but ultimately the skill that you have reached now is the result of very many of these (at least most of the time) tiny steps.
A Stream model of Content Publishing
I feel like there is a conceptually (but possibly technically challenging) solution to this. You don’t want to push away readers by writing bad posts, and you do not want them to update towards you being dumb. You also don’t want to push away readers by writing about topics that they are not interested in. This would likely happen by default if you write about a wide range of topics.
IIRC somewhere in the Arbital postmortem there is a simple solution to this. Instead of having only one channel to publish your content, create multiple ones.
You could devise a system where you can assign a tag to a post. Readers can then decide for which tags they want to get notifications. This also gives you dynamic filtering of posts. I expect that to be good for exploring the content, e.g. finding older posts that you are likely interested in.
Additionally, you could, for each post, attach the amount of time that you have invested into the post per word written. This is probably a reasonable proxy for quality.
You could also sort each post into 3 bins based on how good you think that post turned out. Or have categories that classify how exploratory some piece of writing is. Is this writing the result of you trying to get a better understanding of something, or does the writing aim to provide the best possible explanation for an important topic that you understand well?
And I am sure if there is a lot more that you could do. It would probably be important to have a few good default configurations that people can choose between, to not overwhelm them with the available options. E.g. there could be one stream that is about topics you expect LessWrongers to be interested in, from the high-quality post tag category.
Re writing for mental health, the Self Authoring program does this. Essentially it makes you spend quite a few hours simply writing about your past, present, and future under various headings. Apparently this is clinically effective at fixing various mental health issues.
(I tried it, and though I don’t have mental health issues, it provided many insights into myself and I can see how others would find it very useful.)
Cool, good to know!
Thanks for writing this post! I agree with much of what you said and want to add a few thoughts.
I think writing is so powerful because of how it functions as a tool and shapes / impacts those who utilize it, plus, the act of writing generates a product, an object in reality that can be interacted with by oneself and/or others: writing is a cognitive prosthetic that serves as the best method for the recursive improvement of human thoughts over time!
From Cary Wolfe’s “What is Posthumanism”: “In Luhmann as in Derrida, writing takes center stage as the paradigm of communication, but only because it exemplifies a deeper “trace” structure (the grammè of the program, as it were) of meaning— a paradigm whose essential logic is for Luhmann only intensified by the sorts of later technical developments, beginning with printing, in which we have already seen Derrida himself keenly interested in texts like Without Alibi and Archive Fever. In this light, the problem with “oral speech,” as Luhmann describes it, is that it threatens to collapse the difference between information and utterance, performatively subordi- nating information to utterance and presuming their simultaneity— “leaving literally no time for doubt,” as Luhmann puts it40—in precisely the manner analyzed in Derrida’s early critique of the subordination of writing to speaking. But if the value of language is that it is “the medium that increases the understandability of communication be- yond the sphere of perception” (160), then writing is its full realization. “Only writing,” Luhmann observes, “enforces the clear distinction between information and utterance,” and “only writing and printing suggest communicative processes that react, not to the unity of, but to the difference between utterance and information. . . . Writing and printing enforce an experience of the difference that constitutes com- munication: they are, in this precise sense, more communicative forms of communication” (162–63).”
I think the gist of that quote, with a bit more context added and some of those thoughts translated into LW terms, is that:
(1) There are maps and maps are not the territory.
(2) Humans use language to make communicable maps of the territory. The “trace” or grammè are “deeper” non-language maps that can be extracted from language as “felt” or intuited maps of the territory that capture more of it than writing does on its own. You might think of trace and/or grammè as “the underlying meaning” or “analyzed or intuited meaning” that can typically be extracted from written text if one applies a bit of thinking against said text.
(3) Communication involves both information and the transmission, or, utterance, of said information.
(4) Writing and the published word are the most powerful and thus, most communicable forms of communication because other language mediums collapse the difference between information and its utterance or lose too much of the deeper structures (i.e. lost the trace or grammè) whereas writing preserves those structures the most and explicitly preserves the difference between information and its utterance.
(5) To be able to reflect on, apply thought to, etc. communications, one must be able to separate information and utterance, with more deeper thought only possible if there’s a very clear separation between information and utterance in whatever communications one is receiving. As Lumann says in that quote, oral speech doesn’t separate those two things and in fact often totally collapses the difference between them, thus making longer-term access to the information and the deeper structures communicated not possible via oral speech. Writing on the other hand, preserves such things nicely, and allows for unlimited time for reflection and thought to be applied against them, provided the written text survives. Thus, the written and published word is the most communicative form of communication, the only form of communication that explicitly preserves for up to unlimited amounts of time (we have books from 2000 years ago, e.g.) the possibility of thinking about what was communicated.
When you have up to an unlimited amount of time to reflect on, think about, etc. ideas or thoughts, and can channel your thoughts into the written and published word where yourself later on and/or others can apply reflection and thinking on what you had produced, well, now you have a recursive pattern of improvement where each product of thought can generate through human thought applied to it / against it, a new and better product of thought!
Thus, writing is truly humanity’s best tool for improving thinking, because it’s a cognitive prosthetic allowing for unlimited recursive improvement of human thought over time.
I believe that recorded oral speech via music or videos is now allowing other language mediums to have more power and grant access to similar kinds of recursive improvement, but writing still seems to be in a category uniquely its own for how powerful it is. For now, anyways.
I’m very curious to see how improvements in image + video searching, music search, improvements in VR tech, etc. might improve on those mediums ability to share in writing’s power.
Notes: my thoughts on writing are currently very influenced by Cary Wolfe’s “What is Posthumanism”, but I’ve been very influenced by reading many other different products of thought targeted at writing over the years such as Umberto Eco’s “How to Write a Thesis”, hundred of blog posts about writing, A.G. Sertillanges’ “The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods”, casual discussions with friends about writing, Cyril Connolly’s “Enemies of Promise” (this book broke my ability to write for a semester in college, such was its power), and more.