I notice that I have two different speeds of thought: “raw ideas” and “coherent sentences”.
Writing at the speed of raw ideas is an interesting proposition because I don’t think humans have ever actually been able to do that. Checking this assumption, I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute with the un-cited claim that most handwriting tops out around 20wpm.
To my knowledge, the fastest that people ever tried to write by hand was by specialists using shorthand, which surprisingly the same wiki page claims can get up to 350wpm in competitions. That’s a bit like looking at the olympics and saying “humans can run at 27mph”, but setting a bound still seems useful.
For capturing ideas while walking, have you considered using voice recording and/or text-to-speech?
Personally, I touch-type pretty fast because for a few years in middle school, the internet was my primary means of social contact. I more or less learned to type as fast as I wanted to talk. Today, people who hear me typing often express surprise when they discover I was really typing and not just pretending to, because they thought it was too fast; for reference, a free online test just clocked me at 111wpm. I mention this because I do not personally have the problem of thinking in coherent sentences faster than my typing speed. Conversely, I often have to pause to think through what I’d like to say next, because my typing has out-paced the upcoming-sentences buffer in my thoughts.
When brainstorming, I can think ill-formed ideas faster than I can type them, but I address this issue by capturing such ideas using incomplete notes. I find that the process of turning a thought into a coherent sentence helps clarify and define the thought, and that whole process goes slower than my typing speed.
Considering that many of the traditionally extolled benefits of “writing” seem to revolve around that reification of ideas, I don’t think I understand the problem space in the same way you do. Have you identified an input speed that you’d consider adequate? How does the hypothetical adequate speed compare to your speed of speech?
Depending on what I’m talking about, I might speak a lot faster than I can write. I haven’t measured this, though I would guess maybe around 150 words per minute. I write around 80 words per minute.
When I’m speaking I don’t really refine all my thoughts and it’s more of a blurping out of stuff that I iteratively correct as I’m speaking. I might say something like, “Ah, I got the solution. It’s X. Wait, no, actually, this doesn’t work at all. Maybe it is instead Y, because Y doesn’t have this problem. Wait, no, actually I’m trying to get at a solution here, but I don’t even understand the problem yet. Let’s first try to get a better understanding of the problem. ”
I think some people think I’m pretty stupid when I talk like this because most of the things that I’m saying are wrong or obvious in ways that you realize when thinking for 3 seconds. There’s a big difference between doing exploratory thinking where you’re trying to understand something and regurgitating something that you have understood in the past. Most people tend to not do this kind of exploratory reasoning out loud because it can make you look stupid. Well, at least I have never met anybody who does this to the extent that I’m doing it.
Actually, just talking about it makes me realize that I haven’t been doing it as much in recent times. I think in part because some people really, really didn’t like me doing this, and made me feel bad for doing it. I think that made me subconsciously update toward not doing it as much anymore. I think this is bad, especially because I did not even notice that this was happening. Thank you for making me realize that.
I think that when I want to produce high-quality outputs then I am probably a lot slower than when I’m writing just for figuring out what is even going on. When doing exploratory writing I would want to write things down that are like the aforementioned example of: “Ah, I got the solution. It’s X. Wait, no, actually, this doesn’t work at all. Maybe it is instead Y, because Y doesn’t have this problem. Wait, no, actually I’m trying to get at a solution here, but I don’t even understand the problem yet. Let’s first try to get a better understanding of the problem. ”
And these sorts of trains of thought are generated a lot faster than I can type.
A completely different issue here is also that I am often writing in bursts, meaning I don’t have anything to say because I am thinking (possibly non-verbally) and then a finished idea pops into my head that I could articulate with words at over 200 words per minute. So, when I have this sort of break and then go dynamic, my writing speed also slows me down.
I notice that I have two different speeds of thought: “raw ideas” and “coherent sentences”.
Writing at the speed of raw ideas is an interesting proposition because I don’t think humans have ever actually been able to do that. Checking this assumption, I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute with the un-cited claim that most handwriting tops out around 20wpm.
To my knowledge, the fastest that people ever tried to write by hand was by specialists using shorthand, which surprisingly the same wiki page claims can get up to 350wpm in competitions. That’s a bit like looking at the olympics and saying “humans can run at 27mph”, but setting a bound still seems useful.
For capturing ideas while walking, have you considered using voice recording and/or text-to-speech?
Personally, I touch-type pretty fast because for a few years in middle school, the internet was my primary means of social contact. I more or less learned to type as fast as I wanted to talk. Today, people who hear me typing often express surprise when they discover I was really typing and not just pretending to, because they thought it was too fast; for reference, a free online test just clocked me at 111wpm. I mention this because I do not personally have the problem of thinking in coherent sentences faster than my typing speed. Conversely, I often have to pause to think through what I’d like to say next, because my typing has out-paced the upcoming-sentences buffer in my thoughts.
When brainstorming, I can think ill-formed ideas faster than I can type them, but I address this issue by capturing such ideas using incomplete notes. I find that the process of turning a thought into a coherent sentence helps clarify and define the thought, and that whole process goes slower than my typing speed.
Considering that many of the traditionally extolled benefits of “writing” seem to revolve around that reification of ideas, I don’t think I understand the problem space in the same way you do. Have you identified an input speed that you’d consider adequate? How does the hypothetical adequate speed compare to your speed of speech?
Depending on what I’m talking about, I might speak a lot faster than I can write. I haven’t measured this, though I would guess maybe around 150 words per minute. I write around 80 words per minute.
When I’m speaking I don’t really refine all my thoughts and it’s more of a blurping out of stuff that I iteratively correct as I’m speaking. I might say something like, “Ah, I got the solution. It’s X. Wait, no, actually, this doesn’t work at all. Maybe it is instead Y, because Y doesn’t have this problem. Wait, no, actually I’m trying to get at a solution here, but I don’t even understand the problem yet. Let’s first try to get a better understanding of the problem. ”
I think some people think I’m pretty stupid when I talk like this because most of the things that I’m saying are wrong or obvious in ways that you realize when thinking for 3 seconds. There’s a big difference between doing exploratory thinking where you’re trying to understand something and regurgitating something that you have understood in the past. Most people tend to not do this kind of exploratory reasoning out loud because it can make you look stupid. Well, at least I have never met anybody who does this to the extent that I’m doing it.
Actually, just talking about it makes me realize that I haven’t been doing it as much in recent times. I think in part because some people really, really didn’t like me doing this, and made me feel bad for doing it. I think that made me subconsciously update toward not doing it as much anymore. I think this is bad, especially because I did not even notice that this was happening. Thank you for making me realize that.
I think that when I want to produce high-quality outputs then I am probably a lot slower than when I’m writing just for figuring out what is even going on. When doing exploratory writing I would want to write things down that are like the aforementioned example of: “Ah, I got the solution. It’s X. Wait, no, actually, this doesn’t work at all. Maybe it is instead Y, because Y doesn’t have this problem. Wait, no, actually I’m trying to get at a solution here, but I don’t even understand the problem yet. Let’s first try to get a better understanding of the problem. ”
And these sorts of trains of thought are generated a lot faster than I can type.
A completely different issue here is also that I am often writing in bursts, meaning I don’t have anything to say because I am thinking (possibly non-verbally) and then a finished idea pops into my head that I could articulate with words at over 200 words per minute. So, when I have this sort of break and then go dynamic, my writing speed also slows me down.