I find the quality of my thinking is much higher when writing by hand, but it’s so slow I feel like I get down a particular path and forget so many of the other things I was considering in parallel.
I can type much faster than I can write but it feels like a messier thought process. It feels more like jamming a gearbox, while writing by hand feels like a smooth shifting bicycle, with the wind in my hair.
Should I try dictation and then writing it down later? Or typing up my handwritten notes after writing them? Any other ideas?
you must be much older than me. i never had a chance to handwrite my notes or thoughts. all goes to straigh to typing. I fear though my generation and future generations are missing out substantially.
> i never had a chance to handwrite my notes or thoughts.
Really? Yet to come across a pen and paper in your however many years of life? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are those things so exceedingly anachronistic to you that you'd be at a loss? I'm sorry, but I feel you're being disingenuous.
I rediscovered this at 27. Used to do everything with a keyboard or recorder. It’s very powerful although I do my handwriting on an iPad with a pencil.
have you seen nassim taleb's recent comments about
this guy? Taleb while harsh, always is truthful to the
truth. I'm too young to know the story behind Hacker News and
ycombinator, but reading some of the recent stuff makes me
question prevailing sentiments about PG.
How about an excercise in writing? Instead of referring to "comments" by someone else, tell us your own thoughts. What is the prevailing sentiment you see? And how do you question it?
I think they're both egomaniacs who treat their own word as gospel. PG is just less brash about it, so comes off as more "reasonable" to many. I think they're both just prime examples of survivorship bias and I try to avoid any of their opinions at all times. Of course, sometimes curiosity takes over, but I never leave feeling good after reading anything they have to say.
read all of PG's stuff.. promise you will think otherwise. Taleb's books is hilarious and insightful but PG's essays convey those same truths and many more in a much more succinct format.
Here is the output of GPT reading and summarizing this (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33748363). Model seems to be hallucinating the author. Any thoughts on how to improve it?
"The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of a science fiction book in which reading has been replaced by a more efficient method of knowledge transfer. He argues that even if such a method existed, it would be insufficient because it would not allow for the kind of discovery that writing does. He concludes that people who want to have ideas can't afford not to read."
i think that's also rubbish, just like PG's written opinion piece.
How on earth did we then get the great work by William Shakespeare.
ShakeSPeare born a time when reading a lot wasn't even possible. There
was little to none good content material out there. He was writing more
than he could have possible read anywhere else.
So you are under the belief that the written output of one man born in 1564 was of greater quantity than all “good” writing prior to his time? Are you sure you thought this through?
no i am not under the belief of anything other than mentioning PG in a slightly bad light will get me downvotes or a ban on this platform.
> So you are under the belief that the written output of one man born in 1564 was of greater quantity than all “good” writing prior to his time? Are you sure you thought this through?
It is not PG, it is your sneering and arrogant attitude that attracts downvotes.
I haven't downvoted you, but if I did, it would be for the tone of your comments alone. I don't care about PG one way or another, but I am sick of the total level of glibness on the Internet, and while I gave up on mainstream social media, I would prefer HN to stay a little bit friendlier and less toxic than Twitter or Reddit.
Shakespeare wrote about Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Henry IV, and so on. How did he learn about these people if there was nothing to read?
u make one hell of a point that i thought about.
this is recursion but in different languages, which is not
really applicable with exception of Richard and Henry.
Read in latin, then translate it to THE ORIGINAL OTHER LANGUAGE ENGLISH.
You are diluting my genuine point that I am making. The content of
way back then was negligible to content that exists now.
In all fairness, the opinion brought forward by your messiah PG is not
really fit for standing judgement because of the point i brought forward.
Good writer, good idea makers exist without the need to have been good at reading.
> The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now
But enough to fill a single person's lifetime regardless? So whether you take Shakespeare or Murakami, their individual perspectives are not that different since either of them could have filled their lifetimes with reading.
> The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now
The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much. This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.
> your messiah PG
This is low-level, disrespectful, intellectually dishonest and a phallacy. GP said nothing about Graham and you are pulling this out of nowhere.
the last point was for a different thread but as u see platform has
been making sure i cant respond in timely fashion to all threads. I sequeezed it in there.
> The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much. This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.
I think it's fair to say that we don't actually know much about Plato. All stories being told about plato are in third person narrative.
I think you are contradicting yourself, Socrates and other ancients were a big proponent of discarding writing in place of dialogue. I think this should suffice as point.
I tweaked the GPT prompt to include the domain name from the story url as additional context. That fixes this one and a few other problematic ones. Here is a typical summary of this story now:
"This is an essay written by Paul Graham in November of 2022. In it, he talks about how reading is necessary not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning to write well. He argues that there is no substitute for reading, and that people who want to have ideas need to be good at reading."
I think there is clear historical evidence that this thesis is, at a minimum, greatly exaggerated. Socrates never wrote, and I think he had more good ideas than Paul Graham ever will. Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful.
I mean, I do personally find that writing is a powerful tool for thinking. Maybe that means that Paul Graham and I are normal, and Socrates and Muhammad were atypical. But maybe it says more about humans-in-our-society than it does about the essential human condition. If humans learned "by tape" (as per the SF books from the Silver Age, referenced in TFA's opening para), maybe idea-production would work along different lines.
I admit, I tend to agree with him about the usefulness of writing. But I think it's just an irrational intuition, not the clear argument he implies.
Socrates had the ancient agora, which was (oversimplifying) a group of experts gathering in the same place bouncing off ideas from each other verbally. It's time to stop discounting the role of one's environment in personal growth.
> Muhammad was not even literate, and unless he was inspired by divinity, his ideas were extremely powerful.
He used to take retreats in the caves near Mecca to meditate and reflect. It was during one of these sessions that he later claimed that he was overwhelmed with the inescapable presence of archangel Gabriel who commanded him to "Read!". This directive of Gabriel to Mohammad is held to be the first verse of the divine revelation in Islam.
Read!
In the Name of your Lord Who created
Created Man(kind) from a clot of blood
Read!
And your Lord is Ar-Rahman
Who Taught by the 'Pen'
Taugh Man(kind) that which he knew not.
[Q.96 'Al-Alaq']
As mentioned in a comment to a dup post, Paul is neglecting the reflect phase. For some this occurs prior to writing. Others, take time when writing to pause and reflect.
p.s.
> Muhammad was not even literate
We do know that he dictated and others wrote messages [correspondences] that were sent. So no records of him writing, but this was not an uneducated man. He was a merchant, traveled, and conversed with other men at markets, oasis rest stops along the trade route. (And he was not a frivolous man.)
The reason Muhammad is said to have been "illiterate" is because Qur'an refers to him (yes, it is the most meta book I've ever read) as "the un-lettered Prophet". "Ummi".
Personally, I think this is a misreading, since these are technical terms (like 'Pen' in above cited verses), and 'letter' refers to the 'mystic letters* given to Moses'.
i.e. Mohammad the Gentile Prophet. The prophet for the un-Lettered, the Gentile.
Oh, definitely. In fact, Qur'an shares the same root as recite/read and one translation for it is The Recitation (also connoting a lecture). But it is addressing a plurality of audiences.
For the messenger recipient of this message, recite is more sensible, since the knowledge that he lacks is imparted directly by an angel, so he doesn't need to lex and parse, and can just relay and recite. Possibly, though this is certainly not the case with him, the messenger doesn't even need to get semantic with a message - just go and deliver it. Like IP. (Though ours likely has various ears doing deep readings..;)
For us, we have to lex and parse (read & eval), and then we can recite (print). Just like a REPL.
So what's interesting here with these opening verses of the Sura Clot of Blood is that in my 'reading' of this book it is an invitation and instruction on how to read this book.
We are urged to read/recite ['the Book'], in/with the name of our Lord. We have a 'Lord', named 'Ar-Rahman, the Infinitely Good, sometimes rendered Most Gracious*. IT's accomplishments we are told include Creating and Teaching. Creating human. How? From a clot of blood. Then teaches it. How? With a Pen.
And after this, this creature called Man has new knowledge, new information, that it didn't have before (or possibly could never hope to independently obtain).
So, continuing my 'reading', I decided to treat this book as a Hypertext. Without nasty markup, however. So the avenue left is that semantics are links, stuff like that. So here, a reasonable place to start doing full text search to look for clusters with 'Ar-Rahman' and 'Teaching'. Because remember, we're supposed to read in/with our Lord's name.
Sure enough, there is a whole Sura called 'Ar-Rahman'. And right off the bat, looks like we took the correct semantic link:
In the name of Allah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim
ar-Rahman
Taught/teaches the Qur'an
Created Man
Taught him eloquence/expression [for reciting]
The movement of the Sun & the Moon
is *Computed*. [new information - it's a simulation]
And the Stars and the Trees [cosmic & life form scale]
prostrate themselves [no freewill for them/deterministic]
And the Heaven IT raised [spatial or mind/conscious expansion]
and *imposed* 'the Balance' [? tbd]
That you not transgress [it regulates]
within the Balance [it's all around us..]
-- how to eval --
And establish weight in justice [evaluate (REPL) with careful weighting (decision trees)]
and do not make deficient/discount
the Balance. [which is the TAO]
-- continue REPL to load full 'read-with' library --
After which you can read the rest with 'the understanding' that you got from 'Ar-Rahman', per instructions of reading in/with this name.
The rest of the Sura is oddly Buddhist in flavor. A list of reminders of various favors of God, punctuated by a repeated chorus pointedly asking, almost in an accusative 'i-told-you-so' voice 'Which of the favors of your lord, you twain deny?' Now keep in mind some of these favors are in Paradise (good stuff) and the others are in Hell (very nasty stuff). But apparently, they are all 'favors'! And a 'twain' is involved. That would be the sentient 'mind' that needs 'duals' to 'read' reality. +/-. top/down. left/right. good/bad. etc.
So. We are in a simulation. It is governed by TAO. Not everything enjoys choice. We do. Duality makes us see a unity as good and bad, while in actuality it is all good. Optimistic readings...
It is a good point, but with time comes change. Plato was an excellent scribe of Socrates and Aristotle after him. Just because Socrates thought it was inhuman to write things down, doesn’t mean his successors did and we are all thankful they did such a diligent job in doing so. But then again the argument of writing things down expands the metaphysics of philosophy, especially Socrates perspective given it’s not in his head.
The linked essay literally claims that, even if times change, humans need to write to generate good ideas. That's why it seemed fair game to mention societies with different norms and different training.
Many people in ancient civilizations were trained in a mostly forgotten art, the recital of long stories, aka 'oral histories'. However, it's doubtful that any one person could retain a whole library of such oral histories, i.e. it was probably closer to one long text per person, given the limitations of human memory. Writing was essentially the creation of an external memory system that other people could refer to. For example, the first records of Icelandic sagas:
“Quantum entanglement” / “quantitative easing” Can we think of a substitute to writing that will allow us to coin these phrases (which in turn sit on a stack of coined sequences of syllables) and make them stick? Speech can communicate writing in its entirety. But in committing to paper, we take these fleeting streams (sequences) of thoughts and sounds, let them live outside our limited working memories, and allow for new meanings and ideas to emerge and breathe and survive. With far greater likelihood and frequency than speech alone. Fascinating to think about what invention might make writing obsolete. Will have to be something that allows for effortless creation and storage of new sequences of old ideas…
IMO, the need to express new ideas by combining or redefining old words is a bug in natural language, rather than a feature. It makes communication less precise and that imprecision is prone to gamesmanship.
An example is the attempt by some, in the US, to redefine the meaning of “equality” in the context of our political system, from the traditional “equality under the law” to “equality of outcome”. This sort of persuasion by redefinition, in which you take a word attached to a popular idea and hijack/redirect it to your pet idea, is a Jedi-mind-trick which is enabled by the ambiguity of natural language.
A more rational system of communication, in which distinct ideas were represented by distinct, immutable symbols, rather than combinations/reuses of old symbols, would make for vastly superior communication—-if we could wrap our brains around such a thing!
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 curiosity is important. If we want to create, reading must have it’s limits, and sometimes pretty harsh limits, else we’ll be infected with others ideas about everything. Some choice quotes on this:
"When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process..." "This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking" - Albert Einstein
"If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts." - Dick Hamming
EDIT: On the other hand, if you first principles all your thinking and just write write write, you may spend hours on something that could be understood and moved on from in seconds. This meme explains the reading/writing spectrum quite well: https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/vwq8yh/this_true/
Hah on the surface I suppose. But I’m not arguing whether people should think for themselves, I’m arguing that it matters when people should think for themselves. If you’re more curious about others ideas on a given topic than your own ideas, then you should absolutely read!
I think this is more about credibility - GP made a pretty good argument without the quotes. But the fact that Albert Einstein supposedly agrees puts a lot more weight onto it.
It's a variant on the 'doubt paradox' (somebody telling you "you should not believe everything people tell you") itself a variant of the Epimenides paradox (simply known as the liar paradox): a bunch of people who have read more than you tell you to be careful about not reading too much.
Good list of quotes! I would add one by Nietzsche:
“Ultimately no one can hear in things―books included―more than he already knows.”
Reading can help you formalize, or put established concepts upon what you have already understood, even if only unconsciously.
I remember the gist of a quote about the need to read as much as possible in a young age to inform a Weltanschauung (world view) from which in adulthood you're supposed to build on, but can't remember any source.
> ..most of us after all are in the business of creating things.. If we want to create, reading must have it’s limits, and sometimes pretty harsh limits, lest we be infected with others ideas about everything.
The point perhaps is what PG is saying "A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing."
Writing is creating and the process of creation is about discovery. When one is sculpting a clay, one is discovering materials and its properties, one is discovering ones emotions, and infact one could be discovering or understanding oneself (this ignoring the pre creation phase where one is discovering and studying art movements, various sculptors, their ideas and techniques...).
Any creation process roughly follows same patterns unless you are a facsimile creator.
Wild guess… Schopenhauer, Einstein, et al, were referring to their peers and associates, many sigmas out on the curve. I’m imagining a sensor of the larger sample reaching the “reading limit”; it would make a neutrino detector look like fireworks at a disco.
The quotes are for the most part about ideas and creativity being stifled by reading, and this can happen to anyone - it's related to the curse of knowledge and the preservation of the beginner's mind.
Reading others' ideas, especially polished ones with a lot of authority behind them, can act as a filter on one's own (delicate, barely formed) ideas. Ideas already have a difficult path into reality, and others' biases and filters are one major contributor.
I regularly choose not to read on a given subject if I have an idea I want to explore or to clarify my own thinking, and only afterwards do I consult what others have said. Usually I wind up in the same place (or a crude version of that) but sometimes I find a new insight and those are worth it!
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 write.
It really forces you to address your ideas more formulaically and concretizes your theses.
Start a blog! If you're reading this chances are you know how to buy a domain and spin up a blog in less than 30 minutes. Try Wordpress, or hugo with templates if you want more control. And if you don't know what to write about, this link was recently shared on HN, I thought it was pretty useful: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/
And yes, it's important to publish it. It makes your thoughts real. And ideas were meant to be shared.
I migrated my own blog to Docusaurus from Blogger about a year and a half ago. I became very enamoured (and still am) with the idea of writing blog posts as markdown, storing them as code and publishing them as a website.
I was delighted at how much Docusaurus aligned with that. So much so that I wrote a guide to help others migrate:
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.
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
You are already so prolific outside HN, have you considered collecting your HN comments in your own space?
Once I started doing this I found HN comments would grow off HN. Now there are a few subjects where I can just point people at a link the next time a subject comes up. And the link has often grown out of repeated iterations of debate on HN and elsewhere.
It doesn't bother me that people forget HN comments. I don't forget them, and that seems the important thing.
You _are_ right that one needs to keep HN at arms length. Over the years I try not to engage in repeated back and forth. I'm not writing primarily for whoever I'm arguing with. I'm writing for the silent readers.
After many years I recently have a way to follow people on HN once again (https://www.hnfollow.com). Since I started following you, I've favorited a couple in particular:
But I think there are others. Your view of your own darlings will be different from others. It might be worth downloading the archive in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389843, just because it's recent and so going to be up to date.
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.
If blogging is like a webpage, then a Zettelkasten is like a Wikipedia for your brains.
Inspired by a thread on HN ~2 years ago, I’ve now written 1,075 interconnected notes, and no longer feel that I forget 80% of any non-fiction book I read.
Linking is key; it allows you to connect any new insight to your existing externalized knowledge base, resulting in deeper understanding and retention.
It also creates the space to connect thoughts across disparate domains, which spawns novel ideas at an even greater rate. For example, I might link an idea about neuroscience to my chess writings that links to a note about workout methods which links to a piano technique note. Now I suddenly see a new connection about applying a piano practice technique to leveling up my chess score.
It has changed the way I read, or consume information generally.
A great book that got me started is Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes
Yes indeed, anytime anything is worth remembering (or connecting with other notes) I write it down. It interrupts reading, so I don’t churn through as many books.
I used to set goals like x books per year, but now I realize it’s a vanity metric and instead read for insights.
I use Obsidian for note taking, which supports images too.
Pondering about trying out Zettelkasten, I'm thinking whether it would make sense to take notes in a sequential log ... like one file per day/week/month/year ... and then regularly, like daily or weekly sort things in to the zettelkasten structure.
Anybody tried that?
AFAIK, this is how many data(base)-systems do to make writing more efficient: Write down into a write-cache of some sort, and then do batch-wise indexing as a separate process.
but do not expect someone to read it! because with GTP-3 automated content creation I'm increasingly less interested in everything which will be or is already heavily affected by it i.e. News articles, blogs and new books...
Yes, for me reading can be replaced and optimized by listening text to speech at speeds at faster than my typical reading. Writing still essentialto retain and formalize ideas. Listening doesn't fully replace reading, still need to go back to text to revist ideas when writing, but listening, at least for me, incentivizes approaching new content in first place.
> 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 got some excellent feedback from my manager’s manager early in my career and it was, paraphrasing, “keep reading, but write more about what you read.”
Publishing doesn’t have to be public either. At a large organization internal communications are plenty sufficient.
Thanks for the inspiration. I've tried starting this in various forms over the years and failed over and over. I guess I haven't fully committed to using my real name as a public persona for authorship. These are the reasons I think I've failed to blog:
Reasons:
1) Indecision - Wordpress has dependency issues that need to be kept up with, as I understand, and there's so many scripts targeting vulnerable packages...so it made sense to use a tech stack like Hugo, except...
2) Tech fatigue - I'm not a programmer, so I've ended up, more than five times, starting test sites with Gatsby or Hugo and gotten frustrated due to my limited JS knowledge, not having a mentor or being in a class (maybe I should revisit the programming class idea). I've been stuck in "dependency hell" and countless "PATH://" problems that resulted in me sudo'ing random commands from StackOverflow posts in the hope to brute force my way out of such problems, not fully cognizant of the risks associated with those issues. And then thinking back, "damn that Hugo site was quite nice, I'd like to revisit it", and when I do, feel completely lost and have to start from scratch again. The result is spending hours a day trying to get some minute design/CSS feature to work with constant tinkering, and that could have been actual writing time! Maybe ADHD is to blame...
3) Fear (of success) - I'm afraid that if I really dig deep into something I'm passionate about that is also controversial, and end up lucky enough to get some attention, that there will be people who will want to target me (i.e. writing letters to my company about how I'm a dangerous conspiracy theorist, etc.) Is this a legitimate fear or just paranoia?
4) Abuse - I'm concerned that if I spill out my soul, my hard work will be ingested by AI-driven tools such as GPT-3 - that the work will somehow lose value if it's published. But by not publishing, there's no exposure to these ideas, and it's basically pointless to not publish, because then no one can read your work and send you email about it.
Honestly, PG's site is design perfection in my view. Are those endnotes he uses doable in the Wordpress environment? Upon writing this, I realize it might be best to bite the bullet and go for a Wordpress.com type of site, seated on a custom domain. I don't know how to make it air-tight from a security perspective though, but maybe that's not as important as I'm thinking it is.
I've noticed SV rich guys never use citations (Sam Altman is another that comes to mind), probably because of the uncritical fawning they receive regardless. Why bother backing up what you say with evidence when the audience doesn't demand it.
Magical brain upload technology would likely require AI, and would almost certainly include assistive cognition - the use of technology to automate and speed up learning and original thought.
We're edging towards a revolution that will be more of a disruption than the invention of print. Instead of thoughts that are "manually" generated and externalised as static symbols - albeit electronically distributed - thinking and learning will be automated and integrated.
You can use Wikipedia to access a lot of human knowledge. But imagine a meta-Wikipedia that would integrate and summarise an entire domain, combined with assistive cognition that made it possible to hold that summary in your head as a single perceptual entity.
You wouldn't just have the skills offered by domain competence, but you would also be able to look for trends and patterns, compare the domain with others, expand the "shape" with new features in creative but congruent ways, and so on.
Related: a GTTW Loop (gripe-think-try-write loop).
When I'm stuck on a technical problem, I start writing a grumpy email to the support-PoC. I anticipate their questions and find the answers and add them into the email. This is repeated as necessary. It's not unusual then that at some point the answer magically drops into my lap and the grumpy email is tossed into the gripe-recycler.
These tidbits always have to be taken in the context they've been said in.
Paul Graham is a venture capitalist in a hyper-connected society, where pretty much everyone can read and write.
When these ancient philosophers preferred oral exchanges over text based communication you've to realize that text wasn't quiet as easily produced and consumed in their society and what they were likely going for was a fluid exchange of ideas, which was pretty hard to do with written words in that age.
This is OT and has probably been covered elsewhere, but why does PG not use https on his site? Also, why does it not trigger showing the 'Toggle Reader View (F9)' button in the Firefox addressbar, if anyone knows?
You can connect via https, but your browser will ask you to trust a Yahoo Store certificate since it has no clue how Yahoo Store might relate to paulgraham.com
If one learns to write by reading, one would learn to 'upload' by 'downloading'.
The method of knowing is not dependent on the medium. I can present the steps in knowing to demonstrate it, but I have already made my point.
Yeah it seems weird to assume that it wouldn't be possible to 'write' that way. In fact it could possibly be far more powerful since you wouldn't be limited by words and language, but could write just about anything the human brain can experience. It's not like those download packages make themselves.
It's almost an 'old writer yells at cloud' type post.
Many of us are programmers. Some of us are also trying to be writers. Trust me: writing is like programming. Reading code is very useful to become a better programmer, but you learn programming mostly by writing code. Similarly you mostly learn how to write prose by writing prose, tons of it. Reading is especially useful if you identify certain books that are very high in style (for me one of such books was "Vite di uomini non illustri" by Giuseppe Pontiggia), for your taste at least, for what you beleive the best writing is. You read these books many times, to understand what's going on, what are the patterns, how to do the same magic. As a casual reader you can read 200 books every year and yet remain a terrible writer.
I wrote eight books, sold about 35 000 copies (fairly huge number for Czechia with its not-quite-11 million people), and I am also a programmer.
The similarities are pretty strong. In both cases, you need to express yourself so that the receiving party may understand you.
That said, human readers are a lot more welcoming and friendly consumers of your written work than computers. Positive feedback from computers is basically nonexistent.
Incredible work! I'm writing my own book (obligatory mailing list link [0] and description [1]) and I wondered how you tackled the mental side? It is a bit of a rollercoaster I am finding. That constant fear gnawing in the back of your head 'is this really any good at all?' :) I suppose it is the price of caring.
Prior to writing my first book, I already published quite a lot of articles, so I knew that there was some non-empty audience set out there :)
I started a crowdfunding project for the first book too, so that the printing and typesetting costs get covered. They were covered fully, so I knew that I won't dip into red numbers as a consequence. (This was a major worry of mine.)
I was still pretty nervous about acceptance, but it turned out OK. Whew.
I suspect this is tongue in cheek, but passing tests aren’t really the computer’s feedback. They’re feedback from Past You, who wrote the tests. The computer is just performing the tests. The tests might be incomplete or even wrong. The code might be horrendous. The computer doesn’t care.
Human feedback on the code, design, usability, appearance, documentation, etc. is all very different from passing tests.
Personally waiting for the day when you can layout your thoughts in a bulletpoint list, and GPT-3/4/5 turns it into a coherent and pleasant to read whole.
Absolutely agree that programming and writing have lots in common. I usually don't write anything longer than a blog post, but even a short blog post takes a lot of time for me. Expressing your thoughts in words is hard! Likewise for programming :-)
When I thought about the similarities I came up with:
- both are about communicating your ideas clearly. For that you need good structure, and having a logical order.
- editing and revising is key. Also, compare with refactoring in coding.
- style - there are lots of ways you can have a unique style, even in programming.
To facilitate writing, 'pages' have to be ubiquitous. There is always something to write about, and ubiquity of pages facilitates the ink on paper, the pixels on screen.
Writing is a medium, and an excellent one at that. I'd agree that writing is a unique medium in generating a special kind of thoughts that are deeply introspective and concept-revealing. But I find that you can view writing not as one medium, but as a host of various submedia.
Typing on a keyboard is very different from writing on a whiteboard. The kinds of thoughts you can host to different 'pages' vary. Even electronic writing can vary depending on the psychological and technological context. Writing on Twitter on mobile varies from writing encrypted notes on your personal machine.
Is one thing better than the other? I don't think we can easily claim such. Use whiteboards when whiteboards are good, use paper when paper is good, use iPads when iPads are good. But access to various hosts for just the right occasion surely nurtures ideas faster in the right medium of growth.
> Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer.
> That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon
Probably just my lived experience, but watching youtube at faster playback speed feels like downloading information. Increasing speeds at parts which I can easily grok and decreasing it when it takes time to understand the content.
194 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadI can type much faster than I can write but it feels like a messier thought process. It feels more like jamming a gearbox, while writing by hand feels like a smooth shifting bicycle, with the wind in my hair.
Should I try dictation and then writing it down later? Or typing up my handwritten notes after writing them? Any other ideas?
Really? Yet to come across a pen and paper in your however many years of life? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are those things so exceedingly anachronistic to you that you'd be at a loss? I'm sorry, but I feel you're being disingenuous.
"The Need to Read is an essay written by Kevin Kelly. In it, he argues that reading is essential not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning how to write. He cites the example of a science fiction book in which reading has been replaced by a more efficient method of knowledge transfer. He argues that even if such a method existed, it would be insufficient because it would not allow for the kind of discovery that writing does. He concludes that people who want to have ideas can't afford not to read."
open to all ideas here
That sounds very surprising to me. I would have strongly expected it continues the story.
> So you are under the belief that the written output of one man born in 1564 was of greater quantity than all “good” writing prior to his time? Are you sure you thought this through?
This is not the point i was trying to make.
I haven't downvoted you, but if I did, it would be for the tone of your comments alone. I don't care about PG one way or another, but I am sick of the total level of glibness on the Internet, and while I gave up on mainstream social media, I would prefer HN to stay a little bit friendlier and less toxic than Twitter or Reddit.
Good writer, good idea makers exist without the need to have been good at reading.
But enough to fill a single person's lifetime regardless? So whether you take Shakespeare or Murakami, their individual perspectives are not that different since either of them could have filled their lifetimes with reading.
> The content of way back then was negligible to content that exists now
The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much. This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.
> your messiah PG
This is low-level, disrespectful, intellectually dishonest and a phallacy. GP said nothing about Graham and you are pulling this out of nowhere.
> The burden of proof remains on you. You need to find us an example of an outstanding writer who didn't read much. This doesn't even hold for the classics (eg, Marcus Aurelius or Plato) as far as I can tell.
I think it's fair to say that we don't actually know much about Plato. All stories being told about plato are in third person narrative. I think you are contradicting yourself, Socrates and other ancients were a big proponent of discarding writing in place of dialogue. I think this should suffice as point.
"This is an essay written by Paul Graham in November of 2022. In it, he talks about how reading is necessary not just for acquiring knowledge, but for learning to write well. He argues that there is no substitute for reading, and that people who want to have ideas need to be good at reading."
I mean, I do personally find that writing is a powerful tool for thinking. Maybe that means that Paul Graham and I are normal, and Socrates and Muhammad were atypical. But maybe it says more about humans-in-our-society than it does about the essential human condition. If humans learned "by tape" (as per the SF books from the Silver Age, referenced in TFA's opening para), maybe idea-production would work along different lines.
I admit, I tend to agree with him about the usefulness of writing. But I think it's just an irrational intuition, not the clear argument he implies.
He used to take retreats in the caves near Mecca to meditate and reflect. It was during one of these sessions that he later claimed that he was overwhelmed with the inescapable presence of archangel Gabriel who commanded him to "Read!". This directive of Gabriel to Mohammad is held to be the first verse of the divine revelation in Islam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_first_revelation#...As mentioned in a comment to a dup post, Paul is neglecting the reflect phase. For some this occurs prior to writing. Others, take time when writing to pause and reflect.
p.s.
> Muhammad was not even literate
We do know that he dictated and others wrote messages [correspondences] that were sent. So no records of him writing, but this was not an uneducated man. He was a merchant, traveled, and conversed with other men at markets, oasis rest stops along the trade route. (And he was not a frivolous man.)
The reason Muhammad is said to have been "illiterate" is because Qur'an refers to him (yes, it is the most meta book I've ever read) as "the un-lettered Prophet". "Ummi".
Personally, I think this is a misreading, since these are technical terms (like 'Pen' in above cited verses), and 'letter' refers to the 'mystic letters* given to Moses'.
i.e. Mohammad the Gentile Prophet. The prophet for the un-Lettered, the Gentile.
*consult your local Rabbi :)
https://aish.com/the-mystical-power-of-hebrew-letters/
First you load the dataset then you train the model.
For the messenger recipient of this message, recite is more sensible, since the knowledge that he lacks is imparted directly by an angel, so he doesn't need to lex and parse, and can just relay and recite. Possibly, though this is certainly not the case with him, the messenger doesn't even need to get semantic with a message - just go and deliver it. Like IP. (Though ours likely has various ears doing deep readings..;)
For us, we have to lex and parse (read & eval), and then we can recite (print). Just like a REPL.
So what's interesting here with these opening verses of the Sura Clot of Blood is that in my 'reading' of this book it is an invitation and instruction on how to read this book.
We are urged to read/recite ['the Book'], in/with the name of our Lord. We have a 'Lord', named 'Ar-Rahman, the Infinitely Good, sometimes rendered Most Gracious*. IT's accomplishments we are told include Creating and Teaching. Creating human. How? From a clot of blood. Then teaches it. How? With a Pen.
And after this, this creature called Man has new knowledge, new information, that it didn't have before (or possibly could never hope to independently obtain).
So, continuing my 'reading', I decided to treat this book as a Hypertext. Without nasty markup, however. So the avenue left is that semantics are links, stuff like that. So here, a reasonable place to start doing full text search to look for clusters with 'Ar-Rahman' and 'Teaching'. Because remember, we're supposed to read in/with our Lord's name.
Sure enough, there is a whole Sura called 'Ar-Rahman'. And right off the bat, looks like we took the correct semantic link:
After which you can read the rest with 'the understanding' that you got from 'Ar-Rahman', per instructions of reading in/with this name.The rest of the Sura is oddly Buddhist in flavor. A list of reminders of various favors of God, punctuated by a repeated chorus pointedly asking, almost in an accusative 'i-told-you-so' voice 'Which of the favors of your lord, you twain deny?' Now keep in mind some of these favors are in Paradise (good stuff) and the others are in Hell (very nasty stuff). But apparently, they are all 'favors'! And a 'twain' is involved. That would be the sentient 'mind' that needs 'duals' to 'read' reality. +/-. top/down. left/right. good/bad. etc.
So. We are in a simulation. It is governed by TAO. Not everything enjoys choice. We do. Duality makes us see a unity as good and bad, while in actuality it is all good. Optimistic readings...
https://retrospectjournal.com/2016/10/10/from-oral-to-writte...
Mind maps, sketches, doodles, mocks, are ineffably (pun intended) great at having good ideas.
An example is the attempt by some, in the US, to redefine the meaning of “equality” in the context of our political system, from the traditional “equality under the law” to “equality of outcome”. This sort of persuasion by redefinition, in which you take a word attached to a popular idea and hijack/redirect it to your pet idea, is a Jedi-mind-trick which is enabled by the ambiguity of natural language.
A more rational system of communication, in which distinct ideas were represented by distinct, immutable symbols, rather than combinations/reuses of old symbols, would make for vastly superior communication—-if we could wrap our brains around such a thing!
The time we spend chasing each type of curiosity is important. If we want to create, reading must have it’s limits, and sometimes pretty harsh limits, else we’ll be infected with others ideas about everything. Some choice quotes on this:
"When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process..." "This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking" - Albert Einstein
"If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts." - Dick Hamming
EDIT: On the other hand, if you first principles all your thinking and just write write write, you may spend hours on something that could be understood and moved on from in seconds. This meme explains the reading/writing spectrum quite well: https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/vwq8yh/this_true/
“Ultimately no one can hear in things―books included―more than he already knows.”
Reading can help you formalize, or put established concepts upon what you have already understood, even if only unconsciously.
I remember the gist of a quote about the need to read as much as possible in a young age to inform a Weltanschauung (world view) from which in adulthood you're supposed to build on, but can't remember any source.
The point perhaps is what PG is saying "A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing."
Writing is creating and the process of creation is about discovery. When one is sculpting a clay, one is discovering materials and its properties, one is discovering ones emotions, and infact one could be discovering or understanding oneself (this ignoring the pre creation phase where one is discovering and studying art movements, various sculptors, their ideas and techniques...).
Any creation process roughly follows same patterns unless you are a facsimile creator.
Reading others' ideas, especially polished ones with a lot of authority behind them, can act as a filter on one's own (delicate, barely formed) ideas. Ideas already have a difficult path into reality, and others' biases and filters are one major contributor.
I regularly choose not to read on a given subject if I have an idea I want to explore or to clarify my own thinking, and only afterwards do I consult what others have said. Usually I wind up in the same place (or a crude version of that) but sometimes I find a new insight and those are worth it!
“I’m one of the few people you’ll meet who’s written more books than they’ve read.” —Garth Merenghi
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 write.
It really forces you to address your ideas more formulaically and concretizes your theses.
Start a blog! If you're reading this chances are you know how to buy a domain and spin up a blog in less than 30 minutes. Try Wordpress, or hugo with templates if you want more control. And if you don't know what to write about, this link was recently shared on HN, I thought it was pretty useful: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/
And yes, it's important to publish it. It makes your thoughts real. And ideas were meant to be shared.
Another excellent option for making getting going with blogging simple is Docusaurus - makes it very easy to get up and running!
https://docusaurus.io
I migrated my own blog to Docusaurus from Blogger about a year and a half ago. I became very enamoured (and still am) with the idea of writing blog posts as markdown, storing them as code and publishing them as a website.
I was delighted at how much Docusaurus aligned with that. So much so that I wrote a guide to help others migrate:
https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/definitive-guide-to-migrating-...
> Start a blog!
Posting to HN counts as writing, too.
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
posting here makes my life worse
Once I started doing this I found HN comments would grow off HN. Now there are a few subjects where I can just point people at a link the next time a subject comes up. And the link has often grown out of repeated iterations of debate on HN and elsewhere.
It doesn't bother me that people forget HN comments. I don't forget them, and that seems the important thing.
You _are_ right that one needs to keep HN at arms length. Over the years I try not to engage in repeated back and forth. I'm not writing primarily for whoever I'm arguing with. I'm writing for the silent readers.
i did edit some hn comments into dercuano, derctuo, and dernocua
which comments of mine here do you think would be worth saving
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33641298#33644090
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679360#33684545
But I think there are others. Your view of your own darlings will be different from others. It might be worth downloading the archive in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389843, just because it's recent and so going to be up to date.
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
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.
Inspired by a thread on HN ~2 years ago, I’ve now written 1,075 interconnected notes, and no longer feel that I forget 80% of any non-fiction book I read.
Linking is key; it allows you to connect any new insight to your existing externalized knowledge base, resulting in deeper understanding and retention.
It also creates the space to connect thoughts across disparate domains, which spawns novel ideas at an even greater rate. For example, I might link an idea about neuroscience to my chess writings that links to a note about workout methods which links to a piano technique note. Now I suddenly see a new connection about applying a piano practice technique to leveling up my chess score.
It has changed the way I read, or consume information generally.
A great book that got me started is Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes
I used to set goals like x books per year, but now I realize it’s a vanity metric and instead read for insights.
I use Obsidian for note taking, which supports images too.
Did you use any particular book or blog post when mapping the method to the app? I've found one book, but not sure if good https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Obsidian-ebook/d...
Anybody tried that?
AFAIK, this is how many data(base)-systems do to make writing more efficient: Write down into a write-cache of some sort, and then do batch-wise indexing as a separate process.
Thoughts?
but do not expect someone to read it! because with GTP-3 automated content creation I'm increasingly less interested in everything which will be or is already heavily affected by it i.e. News articles, blogs and new books...
I got some excellent feedback from my manager’s manager early in my career and it was, paraphrasing, “keep reading, but write more about what you read.”
Publishing doesn’t have to be public either. At a large organization internal communications are plenty sufficient.
Reasons: 1) Indecision - Wordpress has dependency issues that need to be kept up with, as I understand, and there's so many scripts targeting vulnerable packages...so it made sense to use a tech stack like Hugo, except...
2) Tech fatigue - I'm not a programmer, so I've ended up, more than five times, starting test sites with Gatsby or Hugo and gotten frustrated due to my limited JS knowledge, not having a mentor or being in a class (maybe I should revisit the programming class idea). I've been stuck in "dependency hell" and countless "PATH://" problems that resulted in me sudo'ing random commands from StackOverflow posts in the hope to brute force my way out of such problems, not fully cognizant of the risks associated with those issues. And then thinking back, "damn that Hugo site was quite nice, I'd like to revisit it", and when I do, feel completely lost and have to start from scratch again. The result is spending hours a day trying to get some minute design/CSS feature to work with constant tinkering, and that could have been actual writing time! Maybe ADHD is to blame...
3) Fear (of success) - I'm afraid that if I really dig deep into something I'm passionate about that is also controversial, and end up lucky enough to get some attention, that there will be people who will want to target me (i.e. writing letters to my company about how I'm a dangerous conspiracy theorist, etc.) Is this a legitimate fear or just paranoia?
4) Abuse - I'm concerned that if I spill out my soul, my hard work will be ingested by AI-driven tools such as GPT-3 - that the work will somehow lose value if it's published. But by not publishing, there's no exposure to these ideas, and it's basically pointless to not publish, because then no one can read your work and send you email about it.
Honestly, PG's site is design perfection in my view. Are those endnotes he uses doable in the Wordpress environment? Upon writing this, I realize it might be best to bite the bullet and go for a Wordpress.com type of site, seated on a custom domain. I don't know how to make it air-tight from a security perspective though, but maybe that's not as important as I'm thinking it is.
It's a really good read.
Magical brain upload technology would likely require AI, and would almost certainly include assistive cognition - the use of technology to automate and speed up learning and original thought.
We're edging towards a revolution that will be more of a disruption than the invention of print. Instead of thoughts that are "manually" generated and externalised as static symbols - albeit electronically distributed - thinking and learning will be automated and integrated.
You can use Wikipedia to access a lot of human knowledge. But imagine a meta-Wikipedia that would integrate and summarise an entire domain, combined with assistive cognition that made it possible to hold that summary in your head as a single perceptual entity.
You wouldn't just have the skills offered by domain competence, but you would also be able to look for trends and patterns, compare the domain with others, expand the "shape" with new features in creative but congruent ways, and so on.
[1] http://www.literaturepage.com/read/francis-bacon-essays-102....
When I'm stuck on a technical problem, I start writing a grumpy email to the support-PoC. I anticipate their questions and find the answers and add them into the email. This is repeated as necessary. It's not unusual then that at some point the answer magically drops into my lap and the grumpy email is tossed into the gripe-recycler.
What about socrates, epictete etc ? Who rejected the very idea of writing in favor of oral teaching. They seemed to be pretty good at thinking.
Beware the writing excess Paul
Paul Graham is a venture capitalist in a hyper-connected society, where pretty much everyone can read and write.
When these ancient philosophers preferred oral exchanges over text based communication you've to realize that text wasn't quiet as easily produced and consumed in their society and what they were likely going for was a fluid exchange of ideas, which was pretty hard to do with written words in that age.
Reading doesn’t have to be back to back books or papers. Blogs, tutorials, comments also count!
It's almost an 'old writer yells at cloud' type post.
EDIT: more about that on my blog if you care -> http://antirez.com/news/136
The similarities are pretty strong. In both cases, you need to express yourself so that the receiving party may understand you.
That said, human readers are a lot more welcoming and friendly consumers of your written work than computers. Positive feedback from computers is basically nonexistent.
[0]:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSen0gefOrPWi6ZtEQ25... [1]:https://ljs.io/book.html
I started a crowdfunding project for the first book too, so that the printing and typesetting costs get covered. They were covered fully, so I knew that I won't dip into red numbers as a consequence. (This was a major worry of mine.)
I was still pretty nervous about acceptance, but it turned out OK. Whew.
412 tests passed, 0 warnings, 0 errors.
That said, receiving an e-mail like "I spent a week reading all your books, PLEASE WRITE SOME MORE" is much more satisfying.
Human feedback on the code, design, usability, appearance, documentation, etc. is all very different from passing tests.
Right now I am sitting in a train to southern Moravia, a long-time reader has invited me to a pork feast. That is not what computers do.
https://keysleft.com/
When I thought about the similarities I came up with:
- both are about communicating your ideas clearly. For that you need good structure, and having a logical order.
- editing and revising is key. Also, compare with refactoring in coding.
- style - there are lots of ways you can have a unique style, even in programming.
More here: https://henrikwarne.com/2019/03/30/programming-math-or-writi...
Writing is a medium, and an excellent one at that. I'd agree that writing is a unique medium in generating a special kind of thoughts that are deeply introspective and concept-revealing. But I find that you can view writing not as one medium, but as a host of various submedia.
Typing on a keyboard is very different from writing on a whiteboard. The kinds of thoughts you can host to different 'pages' vary. Even electronic writing can vary depending on the psychological and technological context. Writing on Twitter on mobile varies from writing encrypted notes on your personal machine.
Is one thing better than the other? I don't think we can easily claim such. Use whiteboards when whiteboards are good, use paper when paper is good, use iPads when iPads are good. But access to various hosts for just the right occasion surely nurtures ideas faster in the right medium of growth.
> That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon
Probably just my lived experience, but watching youtube at faster playback speed feels like downloading information. Increasing speeds at parts which I can easily grok and decreasing it when it takes time to understand the content.