Comment by CSSer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CSSer | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know about y’all but I think I’ve extracted more value out of this platform from the comments I’ve decided not to post than the ones I have. That doesn’t mean I didn’t write them. On the contrary, I’ve done research and written paragraphs in response to many (contextually healthy) arguments on here only to ultimately change my mind when I discovered that outlining and framing my thoughts on the matter critically either wasn’t as persuasive as I had originally thought when I read them back or it just didn’t matter as much to me as my initial emotional response made me think it did. This never would’ve happened if I simply read the comment and let it wash over me.

I read a comment on here recently that included an excerpt from a letter Kurt Vonnegut wrote before his death to some students encouraging them to write a poem, never show it to anyone, tear it up into a million tiny pieces and scatter it into disparate trashcans. He called this an act of “becoming”, and I think he had a point. Perhaps we need to start telling students this less obliquely, but I wouldn’t be surprised if (or at least I believe there’s hope that) many educators are already ahead of me here.

Writing on paper gets bad ideas out of my head better than any other medium.

I honestly think that typing on computing devices and writing on paper are conceptually two separate ideas. And should have a finely measured difference in name.

Programming is often called 'writing a program' and it probably is very similar. There is something about typing on a computer that encourages me to forget what I typed in. Typing on a kb and monitor is like writing in symbolic language to me, even if the words I'm typing are in natural language.

Writing on paper permenantly marks the paper and that makes a massive difference to my mind. It's stored, referrable and my body can also physically destroy it. The muscle linkages to make the shape of a glyph or character with my pen on paper is concrete.

this 100% !

When I write, it's usually to help my brain think: what I write remains a bit longer in my brain (say minutes instead of seconds). Moreover, using pen and paper is so much more "free form" than typing, and instinctive too. If I have to make drawing, a pen and a few seconds are what I need; with a computer I have to figure out what tools to use (program, icons for line drawing, choosing a color). It's so much more productive.

When I type, it's more like instructing the computer what to do.

However, when I write documentation or an email it's more like formalizing a thought that was first thought about in other ways.

This is mostly true when I'm doing hard thinking tasks such as algorithms, maths, arguments, etc.

I wonder if all of this depends on the tasks or my way of working or if this is more universal... Interestingly, there are a lot of maths tutorials on the web where people use notepads or even paper instead of computers when explaining. The opposite is 3Blue1Brown which presents "finished" product, result of typing.

I saw recently someone describe writing for thought as an LLM bigger context window extension.

Ultimately you have to keep less in your head if you put it first in black and white

I also liked the concept pg introduced in his putting ideas into words [1]

About some ideas only being possible to have once you start writing them out, it's hard to keep it all in your head unless you're a savant or somt

1. http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html#f3n

I've been exploring this concept a lot myself. It's more than just the physical (im)permanence of the output. It's how every letter is a purposeful, even the mistakes. Every mark reflects something about the subject, the creator, or both. The work itself may be recognized as art in some form - poetry, essay, etc - but the physical work is also art unto itself, if you consider art as the output of emotions into a form that can be shared.

There's also some research suggesting that the proprioceptive aspect of writing has deep neurological connections to the language centers of the brain. It's unclear if typing would exercise the same connections. Children still learn to write by hand by reproducing the symbols whose meaning they've learned. Perhaps in the future we'll no longer use pencil or pen at all, but for now we have no way to really test if writing by typing is worse or better than handwriting.

I heard someone say "life needs a senior developer mindset", and writing seems to be the way forward for making sense of almost anything.

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