Your description of journaling vs essays resonates with me. At work, my peers have given me feedback that (a) I write good documentation quickly, and (b) I need to write as if my writings will be read widely. These feel very difficult to combine, much more difficult than they “should”. Like I’ve put a lot of levels into “think well; make the transcription of my thoughts as good as possible” but very few into “sanitize and blandify and restructure my thoughts into a form that other people won’t be embarrassed to share with other other people”. That framing, which is how it shows up in my head, is… revealing.
Recently I have noticed that what’s “real” can be hard to find, doing data analysis. The raw data is incomprehensible. The naive summary statistics remove all usefulness. Just the right transform, on just the right scale, throwing away enough unneeded (but how to tell what’s unneeded?) detail, and you’ve got what is very clearly a mixture of a uniform distribution and a normal distribution. And then it feels real. It’s not as simple as abandoning perceptions and interpretations; it’d be like seeing a list of nerve firings or something when looking at a tree. You need some preprocessing to even start engaging.
Your description of journaling vs essays resonates with me. At work, my peers have given me feedback that (a) I write good documentation quickly, and (b) I need to write as if my writings will be read widely. These feel very difficult to combine, much more difficult than they “should”. Like I’ve put a lot of levels into “think well; make the transcription of my thoughts as good as possible” but very few into “sanitize and blandify and restructure my thoughts into a form that other people won’t be embarrassed to share with other other people”. That framing, which is how it shows up in my head, is… revealing.
Recently I have noticed that what’s “real” can be hard to find, doing data analysis. The raw data is incomprehensible. The naive summary statistics remove all usefulness. Just the right transform, on just the right scale, throwing away enough unneeded (but how to tell what’s unneeded?) detail, and you’ve got what is very clearly a mixture of a uniform distribution and a normal distribution. And then it feels real. It’s not as simple as abandoning perceptions and interpretations; it’d be like seeing a list of nerve firings or something when looking at a tree. You need some preprocessing to even start engaging.