writing refines thinking, emphasizing that ideas appear complete until they are articulated.
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.
someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial
So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it. —Paul Graham
When I sit down to write, the meadow is still sunk in darkness, and above it, satellites pass by, one after the other. My thoughts are flighty and shapeless; they morph as I approach them. But when I type, it is as if I pin my thoughts to the table. I can examine them.
it is hard to do it right. Not all writing helps me think. Most kinds of writing are rather weak, or even counterproductive, in this regard. You have to approach it in the right way.
Writing advice is usually focused on more superficial parts of the craft. Whatever I knew about thinking on the page, I had picked up through trial and error and conversations with other writers.
Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations. It is not, at first glance, a book about writing. It is a book of mathematical philosophy.
"Proofs and Refutations" by Imre Lakatos is a profound exploration of writing's role in shaping thoughts and understanding.
reading Lakatos gave me a clearer and more precise understanding of what I do, or strive to do, as I sit down each morning and wrestle with my thoughts.
If you aim to write and publish stuff, this essay might tie you up in knots. It is about thinking, not about crafting beauty or finishing things in a finite time.
If you aim to write and publish stuff, this essay might tie you up in knots. It is about thinking, not about crafting beauty or finishing things in a finite time. There is a crack, a crack in everything
Latour spoke about how he thinks the printing revolution, like Gutenberg’s, partially caused the scientific revolution by making knowledge more rigid.
Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought.
In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that” or rely on the fact that your short-term memory is too limited for you to notice the contradiction
I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks
Seeing your ideas crumble can be a frustrating experience, but it is the point if you are writing to think. You want it to break. It is in the cracks the light shines
met a Japanese linguist in the harbor yesterday and talked about the relationship between the Chinese and the Japanese writing systems. This is a topic I had thought about for about twenty seconds before this. “So,” I said after two minutes, “this is a stupid question, but is the relationship between China and Japan like that between Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire?” This is, as it turns out, not a good analogy. But by spelling out my naive understanding, I gave the linguist a good area to work on
Alexander Grothendieck, whom Johanna and I have written about elsewhere, would always summarize his first impression of a new situation with a conjecture, proclaiming with irrepressible enthusiasm, “It must be true!” Ten seconds later, someone would come up with a counterexample that proved him wrong. But being right wasn’t the point: getting a better understanding was.
This way of formulating it (“Not that”) is a bit vague as it only defines where not to look for the solution. It is useful to also attempt a positive formulation.
I suspect that many of my friends who write and publish rapidly are shortchanging themselves.
it is these subtler problems that tend to open a path beyond my current understanding. I learned this from my wife, Johanna, who will often sit with a draft for several hours, not writing or editing, but simply articulating why something feels off to her.
best essays have come out of the things she surfaced during those sessions.
If we are shaped by our peer group, what would the ideal peer group look like?
It is often easier to criticize than it is to synthesize a new position.
Local counterexamples help you improve your explanation and get a better understanding. There is a scene in the last season of Breaking Bad that illustrates this. The main character, whatever his name was, is a teacher that starts a meth lab.
and when asked to defend this decision he unfolds the claim by saying, “I need to support my family.” This is false. There are better ways for him to do that (he has an old friend who offers him money). That is a local counterexample.
