The only thing I would argume with is:
> We just talked about it aimlessly, read randomly, and made small notes. This cost us time and caused confusion.
No, this is part of the process. It’s part of noticing and a precursor to the step of examination. This is data gathering.
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The other thing I’ve learned over the years is that this kind of thinking/writing scares people.
I’ve made the mistake of sending an edited analysis to a cofounder. Because they didn’t have a similar practice they couldn’t perceive it as an examination of our startup’s situation, and instead received it as anxiety and uncertainty.
It’s unsettling to question assumptions.
> If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it.
It’s a logical error. It’s like saying: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look foolish, therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks foolish. Clearly there are other ways to look foolish.
So even if writing always clarified thought, it’s wrong to infer it’s impossible to have clear thoughts without writing.
But since the writer here committed this mistake, he demonstrated that writing does not always result in clear thought.
Incidentally, I wrote this comment to clarify my thoughts .
― William Knowlton Zinsser, Writing to Learn
One of the books that got me into writing for myself.
This article is sprinkled with "people this" and "people that" terminology, which is mirrored in our broader culture. But I say it is actually "some people this" and "some people that." Don't be a word-chauvinist.
To be fair, I do appreciate that a lot of the author's sentences started with "When I ..." and similar. Makes it more palatable to me.
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This idea I just wrote down was fully-formed in my mind, and I could have just moved on with my life. I chose to put it into words (and pick those words, and re-edit them, spending my short time on this planet to do so) in order to communicate it to you, dear reader. Not to help me think (:
(though I do sometimes use words to help me think, too. Let's not get too black-and-white about it)
So ... music is trivial?
Dance is trivial?
Sculpture is trivial?
I have to say I think P Graham needs to get out more.
Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with this flawed deduction.
1) that sounds like a Montessori school? 2) I feel like Walter White is one of the more memorable character names (w/ the alliteration, no?)
This is very flawed logic. This assumes that only writing can result in fully formed ideas, and that is simply a false assumption. I can't believe that it was even typed out as-is, it's so wrong. It's wrong on its face. It's wrong if you think about it for 1/10th of a second. It's wrong if you think about it for a minute. It's wrong if you think about it for an hour. It's even wrong if you write it out.
Yes, writing can be a productive focusing mechanism, it can also provide you with good reflections. But so can meditation, so can a good walk. It's a tool, not a requirement. It also has it's own downsides in that it forces you to think a certain constrained way, and while that is also one of its strength, it does limit your ability to think creatively.
Similar to how using ChatGPt to draft writing or code, there is a strong biasing effect pushing you towards something non novel.
That "nontrivial" qualification makes this an unfalsifiable bunkum.
I don't see what "Hungarian" has to do with it, and, though I do see what "Stalinist" might have to do with it, it probably shouldn't. (Someone's politics don't have to be good for them to make a valuable contribution to knowledge.) But, according to Wikipedia, this isn't true literally as written, unless one takes the view "once a Stalinist, always a Stalinist:"
> After his release, Lakatos returned to academic life .... Still nominally a communist, his political views had shifted markedly, and he was involved with at least one dissident student group in the lead-up to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
> ... He received a PhD in philosophy in 1961 from the University of Cambridge; his doctoral thesis was entitled Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery, and his doctoral advisor was R. B. Braithwaite. The book Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, published after his death, is based on this work.
On the one hand, he's right: Writing helps refine your thoughts.
On the other hand, if your goal is to probe the validity of your thoughts, this is painfully inefficient. You'll get much further if you do one or two simple passes on your writing, and then pass what you've written around and ask for feedback.
I think I learned this in one of Haidt's books, and it has jived with my experience: If your brain has a bias or a blind spot, it's fairly unlikely you'll uncover it by pure thought alone. Perhaps if you put in as much effort as this author has, you'll uncover 20-50% more than the average person, which still leaves you with a lot of gaping holes. But outside feedback will uncover them very quickly!
I had a friend who thought like this person, and it was rarely hard to find flaws in his thoughts that he had not considered. He's as smart as I am, so it wasn't an intelligence flaw.