I see a lot of people say "writing is so important," and I think what they mean is "I feel really smart/good when I write." And I think what they are experiencing is that they've been assembling ideas in their heads for weeks, and only when it's all come together are they ready synthesize that information at a higher level, and they mistake this synthesis for the writing itself (rather than the writing being a symptom OF the synthesis -- if they had tried to write a week prior they would have found it unproductive).
Sometimes I like to test whether I can actually construct or assemble a finished something in my mind from an inkling of a thought.
For example a few days ago I realized that I found it hard to reverse a word in my mind, even a simple one. Try for yourself, think of a word and then reverse it in your head with your eyes closed.
Some people might struggle with the above, some may find it doable in their heads, but most can agree that it's absurdly easy if you can externalize it to paper or a text editor at least.
I disagree. Not sure how common this workflow is, but I write by putting all the different unsynthesized ideas down and rearrange them as the latent structure "reveals itself." At the end you have something synthesized.
Sure some type latent structure was there all along (thus why I put them down), but it wasn't necessarily visible to me, nor optimal, nor did it include/exclude all the right points. The need for iteration itself proves that the act of writing is actually doing the synthesis.
You need to add into consideration that laying things out in visual display provides cognitive support, reducing the effort to reason about more things. So writing out ideas really does allow you to reach a greater scope of synthesis.
I think you're right. I'll add on: there's a lot of thinking that does not need writing, and there's a lot of writing that needs no thinking. Deng Xiaoping and other greats wrote pretty minimally for their own thinking, if at all. Whereas many of us not-so-greats seem to knee-jerk comment without a single thought.
It makes sense for our age. Amid a thousand distractions, typing on the keyboard gives the illusion of getting a grip. Note-taking on my computer gives the illusion of a second brain. Ululating on the internet gives the illusion of sharing thoughts.
Instead of "writing is thinking", I prefer "thought precedes speech" https://inframethodology.cbs.dk/?p=1127; it fits the small human mind better though I've yet to learn it properly.
If they tried writing a week prior that would have realized sooner the gaps in the ideas they were assembling, leading to them closing those gaps faster.
This is a really cynical take. People work differently and get value from different things. It’s probably safe to assume most aren’t virtue signalling about writing.
Getting stuff written down makes me realise the weak points and the errors in my thinking which I know from experience I don't find if I don't write it down.
While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this.
We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods.
I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days.
Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write.
Socrates argued that writing would destroy people's memory. He wasn't 100% wrong, yet here we are. The criticism towards the use of LLMs is so deliciously ironic. The analogy with writing... writes itself. Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently.
As a similar but distinct theory, you might find Larry McEnerney‘s work interesting. Writing has two classes: a writing for thought and a writing for communication. Larry uses horizontal and vertical spatial metaphors here. Writing for thought still pre-dates cheap paper (and Socrates), but is mostly a private act. Writing for communication is a broad enough brush to span fiction and journalism. For his part, Larry teaches classes aimed at thesis writers who struggle to bridge the divide of using writing to think about a problem to conveying their answer in a paper.
Before paper became cheap, wax or wooden tablets were used for ephemeral writing.
> I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days.
I seriously doubt that it was ever common for writers to compose a whole book in their head and then write it down. Maybe some writers with exceptional memories did this. But there's a whole book about how War and Peace was written based on textual evidence that wouldn't exist if it had simply popped out of Tolstoy's head fully formed: https://www.amazon.com/Tolstoy-Genesis-Peace-Kathryn-Feuer/d....
> Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write.
I have a better way to frame this:
Learning your own language and culture is a lifelong process.
A big phase, the adult phase, of learning is learning to write in your language (I'm implying there's more to writing than chosing words; specially in this context of language as thinking)
indeed, a lot of modern people never make it out of this big phase of learning your language. they never go beyond writing = thinking. but some people do learn the next phase
which involves distinguishing language itself from thoughts and ideas (is some idea known? understood? perceived?? but the idea is "the self" or some other complex notion)
so the only quality of the modern era I admit, is that there's a lot of people that only learn rudimentary thinking-writting, and too few people that learn 'advanced' languange-thinking where writing becomes secondary to thinking.
finally, I learned this idea from reading around the meaningness blog/book
I'm not sure if writers developed the entire book in their head first, but: it was indeed very, very common for people to dictate novels, journal entries, and other "written" works to a secretary, typist, or tape recorder.
Nowadays that seems to be rare, but my impression from reading my journals is that it was often more common to dictate than to physically hand write things.
That's true, but I would phrase it from a different perspective:
It's seems clear that abstract thinking in particular is greatly aided by writing, because the written text acts like a thought cache. A bit like an LLM context window which you can fill with lots of compact, compressed "tokens" (words).
Abstract thoughts are "abstract" because they can't be visualized in our mind, so they don't benefit from our intuitive imagination ability (Kant's "Anschauung"). So it is hard to juggle many abstract thoughts in our working memory.
We can also think of the working memory as the CPU registers, which are limited to a very small number, while the content of the CPU cache or RAM corresponds to the stuff we write down.
Our "anschauung" (visual imagination) is perhaps something like a fixed function hardware on a GPU, which is very good at processing complex audiovisual content, i.e. concrete thoughts, but useless for anything else (abstract thoughts).
Even speaking is thinking. This is why free speech is the very First Amendment. Whoever denies your right to speak freely is controlling your thinking.
Writing is thinking with a superpower. It's like using the "Pensive" from Harry Potter, depicted in the scene where Harry and Dumbledore pull memory whisps out of their temple to rewatch in a mirror pool. Writing enables you to apply your attention to an idea at multiple levels of analysis with significantly less effort than doing the same while also preserving the idea in your head manually.
> Even speaking is thinking. This is why free speech is the very First Amendment. Whoever denies your right to speak freely is controlling your thinking.
There's an excellent podcast (Radiolab, possibly) about how this conception of what the first amendment means is rather recent (1910s-1920s) and that the ideas of what "free speech" meant before that are really radically different.
And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need
to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc.
Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you
have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first one ought to learn how to calculate
mentally and using pen and paper. If for no other reason, to check whether we made a typo when entering our calculation, e.g. when the result is off by 100 because we did not press the decimal point firmly enough.
I am very concerned that young people delegate to LLMs before reaching that stage.
it's like those kids will live in the future, where there's advanced AI
I think we should trust children enought that they'll also figure out a crazy changing technological world.
on the other hand, internet millenial ideals are fast dying. the digital dream of cultural and mediatic abundance is turning into a nightmare of redundant content as information wars saturate the figurative airwaves
I really think the effects of LLMs on thinking is the exact same as a calculator. It shortcuts some forms of thinking to open up other forms of thinking.
My thinking has increased with the use of LLMs, not decreased, most likely because LLMs take the edge off of grind work like reading a lot of noise to capture the 1% signal, formulating accurate statements for abstract ideas, and bringing together various domains that are beyond your area of expertise.
Now will you make mistakes? Sure, but you would have made the same mistakes at a slower pace without LLMs anyways. Or more accurately, you just wouldn’t do the research or apply domains not in your area of expertise, and your thinking would be a lot more narrow.
The strawman is thinking that banning LLMs will induce rigorous thinking. Just like banning calculators does not make everyone good at math.
But allowing calculators WILL make those who like math reach much deeper into the field than without.
There is something much deeper going on when you force yourself to actually write things down. This is especially relevant in engineering.
That is why "RFCs" are so prevalent in many tech companies. They are often just as useful to the writer as they are to the reviewers.
> To [Thamus] came Thoth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Thoth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, this, said Thoth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Thoth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.
-- Plato, Phaedrus
We've been having this same conversation for over 2,000 years now. And while I actually think Thamus is probably correct, it doesn't change the reality that we are now using reading and writing for everything.
I've heard that some philosophers like Schopenhauer argue that reading can become a passive process, where we simply follow another person's thoughts without engaging our own critical thinking. It's interesting to consider that it's not just LLMs but we too would become like stochastic parrots under certain circumstances.
I would also compare reading to being reprogrammed like EEPROM. Although the process is slower, the changes feel more permanent when learning: you need to create connections yourself from examples compared to someone demonstrating it on the video.
Writing what someone else wrote is thinking what someone else thought. My favorite learning technique is reading, listening or viewing something and then typing it into libreoffice. Specially useful when it is something that is transcribed. Works really well for code, too.
Give it a try!
We think by association. We can sometimes tighten up the process when there's a formal logical framework that applies, but it's not as natural or automatic.
What writing changes is that in words, you have to make it explicit how one thing leads to another. Partly, that's just due to the imposition of sentence structure.
Ironically, this is precisely the crazy thing about Trumpspeech: it's just associations - vibe-chaining if you will.
> For example, LLMs can aid in improving readability and grammar, which might be particularly useful to those for which English is not their first language.
I don't know whether this has been empirically confirmed, but I have the strong belief that a manuscript with poor grammar, by a non-native English speaker, has a much higher probability of being rejected than the same manuscript but copyedited by something like Grammerly or a SOTA LLM.
Ideally writing style should matter much less than the quality of the research, but reviewers are not just influenced by objective criteria but, unconsciously, also by vibes, which includes things like writing style and even formatting.
the act of writing takes raw experience, puts it in front of the eyes, and then filters it back through your critical faculties so you can refine and reason about it. the iteration makes it higher quality thought.
however when I encounter people with low written or verbal acuity, they have to survive somehow, so it's wise to observe what tools of cunning they tend to reach for.
While the article’s point seems intuitively true, it cites only two papers related to the benefits of handwriting. But it’s argument is stronger than that. Is there peer-reviewed evidence to support the stronger claim of the benefits of typewriting?
This morning I asked ChatGPT a question about how Quickbooks handles charts of accounts compared to NetSuite. It answered my question better than anything else would have.
Also, I'm currently using Claude Code to fix some bugs -- it's handling the heavy lifting while I think about what needs to happen.
I'm in favor of human writing as an underrated tool of culture-making...but the scope of what counts as "thinking" is expanding.
I am quite puzzled how an LLM could even start "write" a scientific paper.
Say you start with a set of findings, for example, western blots, data from a transgenic mouse engineered for the relevant gene, and some single cell sequencing data. Your manuscript describes the identification of a novel protein, editing the gene in a mouse and showing what pathways are affected in the mouse.
What material would you give the LLM? How would the LLM "know" which of these novel findings were in any way meaningful? As far as I'm aware, it is unlikely that the LLM would be able to do anything other that paraphrase what you instruct it to write. It would be a return to the days before word processing became common, and researchers would either dictate their manuscripts to a typist, or hand the typist a stack of hand-written paper.
The actually hard part of writing scientific papers is not putting the words "down on paper" so to speak, but deciding what to say.
Writing needs a conceptual split analogous to the split between math and calculating.
Just as a calculating can be implemented on a computer which has low cognitive abilities but high algorithmic and procedural abilities, we need to extract out the word-smithing capabilities from writing separate from the thinking portion. Our lack of distinction in terms reflects a muddled conceptual framework.
LLMs are excellent wordsmiths completely divorced from the concept of thinking. They break the correlative assumption - that excellent writing is corresponds with excellent thinking. Until now, we've been able to discern poor idea because they have a certain aesthetic, think conspiracy rants in docx saying something about a theory of everything based on vibrations. But that no longer holds. We have decent enough word-smithing coupled with a deficit of thinking. Unfortunately this breaks our heuristics with consequences ranging from polluting our online commons to folks end up believing nonsense like ChatGPT named itself Nova and they are a torchbearer for spiritual gobbledygook.
My point is that we're in the process of untangling these two and as a result, we're likely to see confusion and maybe even persistent misunderstanding until this distinction becomes a more common part of how we talk about and evaluate written work. They're living in an AGI-world and we're just..not.
Whenever I need to do some hard thinking and things are not clear, I fire up my sublime text and write down the context in the simplest terms and short lines (only few words per line). While doing this, I will be absolutely rude to myself asking extremely basic and direct questions to bring out the real context, real goals and real path. It's like answering an under-world boss. No bullshit, no pretense, no regard to any norms, no impressing someone. Then the whole thing falls into a meaningful structure. I leave it when it produces some immediate action items.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 76.9 ms ] threadFor example a few days ago I realized that I found it hard to reverse a word in my mind, even a simple one. Try for yourself, think of a word and then reverse it in your head with your eyes closed.
Some people might struggle with the above, some may find it doable in their heads, but most can agree that it's absurdly easy if you can externalize it to paper or a text editor at least.
Sure some type latent structure was there all along (thus why I put them down), but it wasn't necessarily visible to me, nor optimal, nor did it include/exclude all the right points. The need for iteration itself proves that the act of writing is actually doing the synthesis.
It makes sense for our age. Amid a thousand distractions, typing on the keyboard gives the illusion of getting a grip. Note-taking on my computer gives the illusion of a second brain. Ululating on the internet gives the illusion of sharing thoughts.
Instead of "writing is thinking", I prefer "thought precedes speech" https://inframethodology.cbs.dk/?p=1127; it fits the small human mind better though I've yet to learn it properly.
often when I write an idea down, my "inner critic" process gets more activated upon seeing the textual representation.
thus I find gaps and flaws more easily.
not true for all domains, but many.
Thinking and using ChatGPT are not. Overview ‹ Your Brain on ChatGPT — MIT Media Lab https://share.google/RYjkIU1y4zdsAUDZt
We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods.
I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days.
Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write.
Socrates argued that writing would destroy people's memory. He wasn't 100% wrong, yet here we are. The criticism towards the use of LLMs is so deliciously ironic. The analogy with writing... writes itself. Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently.
> I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days.
I seriously doubt that it was ever common for writers to compose a whole book in their head and then write it down. Maybe some writers with exceptional memories did this. But there's a whole book about how War and Peace was written based on textual evidence that wouldn't exist if it had simply popped out of Tolstoy's head fully formed: https://www.amazon.com/Tolstoy-Genesis-Peace-Kathryn-Feuer/d....
I have a better way to frame this:
Learning your own language and culture is a lifelong process.
A big phase, the adult phase, of learning is learning to write in your language (I'm implying there's more to writing than chosing words; specially in this context of language as thinking)
indeed, a lot of modern people never make it out of this big phase of learning your language. they never go beyond writing = thinking. but some people do learn the next phase
which involves distinguishing language itself from thoughts and ideas (is some idea known? understood? perceived?? but the idea is "the self" or some other complex notion)
so the only quality of the modern era I admit, is that there's a lot of people that only learn rudimentary thinking-writting, and too few people that learn 'advanced' languange-thinking where writing becomes secondary to thinking.
finally, I learned this idea from reading around the meaningness blog/book
Nowadays that seems to be rare, but my impression from reading my journals is that it was often more common to dictate than to physically hand write things.
It's seems clear that abstract thinking in particular is greatly aided by writing, because the written text acts like a thought cache. A bit like an LLM context window which you can fill with lots of compact, compressed "tokens" (words).
Abstract thoughts are "abstract" because they can't be visualized in our mind, so they don't benefit from our intuitive imagination ability (Kant's "Anschauung"). So it is hard to juggle many abstract thoughts in our working memory.
We can also think of the working memory as the CPU registers, which are limited to a very small number, while the content of the CPU cache or RAM corresponds to the stuff we write down.
Our "anschauung" (visual imagination) is perhaps something like a fixed function hardware on a GPU, which is very good at processing complex audiovisual content, i.e. concrete thoughts, but useless for anything else (abstract thoughts).
Writing is thinking with a superpower. It's like using the "Pensive" from Harry Potter, depicted in the scene where Harry and Dumbledore pull memory whisps out of their temple to rewatch in a mirror pool. Writing enables you to apply your attention to an idea at multiple levels of analysis with significantly less effort than doing the same while also preserving the idea in your head manually.
There's an excellent podcast (Radiolab, possibly) about how this conception of what the first amendment means is rather recent (1910s-1920s) and that the ideas of what "free speech" meant before that are really radically different.
And because reading and writing are thinking we must not delegate it to AI models as a matter of habit. In particular, during students' formative time, they need to learn how to think in reading and writing mode - reflecting, note-taking etc.
Compare it with the use of a pocket calculator: once you have a solid grounding, it's fine to use electronic calculators, but first one ought to learn how to calculate mentally and using pen and paper. If for no other reason, to check whether we made a typo when entering our calculation, e.g. when the result is off by 100 because we did not press the decimal point firmly enough.
I am very concerned that young people delegate to LLMs before reaching that stage.
I think we should trust children enought that they'll also figure out a crazy changing technological world.
on the other hand, internet millenial ideals are fast dying. the digital dream of cultural and mediatic abundance is turning into a nightmare of redundant content as information wars saturate the figurative airwaves
My thinking has increased with the use of LLMs, not decreased, most likely because LLMs take the edge off of grind work like reading a lot of noise to capture the 1% signal, formulating accurate statements for abstract ideas, and bringing together various domains that are beyond your area of expertise.
Now will you make mistakes? Sure, but you would have made the same mistakes at a slower pace without LLMs anyways. Or more accurately, you just wouldn’t do the research or apply domains not in your area of expertise, and your thinking would be a lot more narrow.
The strawman is thinking that banning LLMs will induce rigorous thinking. Just like banning calculators does not make everyone good at math.
But allowing calculators WILL make those who like math reach much deeper into the field than without.
> To [Thamus] came Thoth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Thoth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, this, said Thoth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Thoth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.
-- Plato, Phaedrus
We've been having this same conversation for over 2,000 years now. And while I actually think Thamus is probably correct, it doesn't change the reality that we are now using reading and writing for everything.
Writing is thinking your own thoughts.
There's a big difference, and is why writing is so painful for so many people. It's also why writing is critically important.
edit: Likewise teaching is really important. Crystallization of thought is incredible valuable and difficult.
I've heard that some philosophers like Schopenhauer argue that reading can become a passive process, where we simply follow another person's thoughts without engaging our own critical thinking. It's interesting to consider that it's not just LLMs but we too would become like stochastic parrots under certain circumstances.
What writing changes is that in words, you have to make it explicit how one thing leads to another. Partly, that's just due to the imposition of sentence structure.
Ironically, this is precisely the crazy thing about Trumpspeech: it's just associations - vibe-chaining if you will.
Writing requires thought.
LLMs do not think.
> For example, LLMs can aid in improving readability and grammar, which might be particularly useful to those for which English is not their first language.
I don't know whether this has been empirically confirmed, but I have the strong belief that a manuscript with poor grammar, by a non-native English speaker, has a much higher probability of being rejected than the same manuscript but copyedited by something like Grammerly or a SOTA LLM.
Ideally writing style should matter much less than the quality of the research, but reviewers are not just influenced by objective criteria but, unconsciously, also by vibes, which includes things like writing style and even formatting.
making writing valuable is another skill (see this evergreen lecture from the university of chicago leadership lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFwVf5a3pZM)
however when I encounter people with low written or verbal acuity, they have to survive somehow, so it's wise to observe what tools of cunning they tend to reach for.
Hence, the models depend on human writing.
Current humans might as well :-)
This morning I asked ChatGPT a question about how Quickbooks handles charts of accounts compared to NetSuite. It answered my question better than anything else would have.
Also, I'm currently using Claude Code to fix some bugs -- it's handling the heavy lifting while I think about what needs to happen.
I'm in favor of human writing as an underrated tool of culture-making...but the scope of what counts as "thinking" is expanding.
Say you start with a set of findings, for example, western blots, data from a transgenic mouse engineered for the relevant gene, and some single cell sequencing data. Your manuscript describes the identification of a novel protein, editing the gene in a mouse and showing what pathways are affected in the mouse.
What material would you give the LLM? How would the LLM "know" which of these novel findings were in any way meaningful? As far as I'm aware, it is unlikely that the LLM would be able to do anything other that paraphrase what you instruct it to write. It would be a return to the days before word processing became common, and researchers would either dictate their manuscripts to a typist, or hand the typist a stack of hand-written paper.
The actually hard part of writing scientific papers is not putting the words "down on paper" so to speak, but deciding what to say.
Just as a calculating can be implemented on a computer which has low cognitive abilities but high algorithmic and procedural abilities, we need to extract out the word-smithing capabilities from writing separate from the thinking portion. Our lack of distinction in terms reflects a muddled conceptual framework.
LLMs are excellent wordsmiths completely divorced from the concept of thinking. They break the correlative assumption - that excellent writing is corresponds with excellent thinking. Until now, we've been able to discern poor idea because they have a certain aesthetic, think conspiracy rants in docx saying something about a theory of everything based on vibrations. But that no longer holds. We have decent enough word-smithing coupled with a deficit of thinking. Unfortunately this breaks our heuristics with consequences ranging from polluting our online commons to folks end up believing nonsense like ChatGPT named itself Nova and they are a torchbearer for spiritual gobbledygook.
My point is that we're in the process of untangling these two and as a result, we're likely to see confusion and maybe even persistent misunderstanding until this distinction becomes a more common part of how we talk about and evaluate written work. They're living in an AGI-world and we're just..not.