Hacker News Reader

Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn about this article.

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.

View on HN

> 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.

And how do you avoid having to start with a blank page. I have been reading "How to take smart notes", which delves into Zettelkasten, and the point of writing and linking notes is, indeed to refine your thoughts, and to be able to collect them into a larger essay/article/what have you.

As a self-taught person with an incredible idea-making brain and terrible note-taking skills, it's taken me almost 4 decades to learn that writing is a crucial component of understanding complex systems, and it doesn't start by the essay, which, as you say, only needs one or two simple passes. The essay is the tip of the iceberg, the important stuff is all the research and writing that leads to a topic or theory.

Consider the book Refuse to Choose by the late Barbara Sher. This book helped me fill notebooks where before I would start a notebook and throw it aside after a handful of pages.

https://amzn.to/3RSCGov

Just out of curiosity, having looked at the blurb, I'm left wondering, what do you fill notebooks with?

Planning projects and what you want to do?

From the description, I'd personally think I could be labelled a scanner, but I'm trying to work out if this is a read now or read later book/

At present I'm interested in unpacking more of what's going on in my head and putting it down on paper, and I'm curious to know what reading the book gave you and if it will be useful in pulling out interesting stuff from my thoughts =)...

The book gives you permission to lean into your scanner personality type. It explains that exploring our ideas is often enough and you can do so in a notebook. Interestingly, I eventually complete many of the projects I write about in my Scanners Daybook. It could be that writing them down somehow solidifies the idea and focuses your mind. Still, writing it down is enough in many cases too and I’m perfectly happy to move on, having explored the idea as deeply as I wanted right now.

I think people are overthinking starting. Just write down first two words and then next couple. Don’t even make it a sentence just bag of words on paper then make sentence out of that.

It doesn’t have to be perfect from the first paragraph. You will share fixed up version later.

> Writing helps refine your thoughts.

Very true. Indeed I would go further and say that unless you are capable of expressing your thoughts as words, then those thoughts will have no more substance than steam.

I thought I was a clear thinker until I entered academia. The many reports, instructional materials and academic papers soon enough showed me how wrong I was.

Edit: the illustration to this article is one of the most appropriate I have seen.

Unless you have few, very simple thoughts, feedback is not really effective, nor scalable, compared to self validation for which writing is required.

I would urge you to seek feedback from a more diverse crowd then.

The article talks about counterexamples. It's hubris to think you will find most of the relevant counterexamples on your own. It's also hubris to think you'll do it quicker than others.

As for scalability, I'm confused. If you have a crowd of followers, for example, you'll reach lots of people quickly, whereas by writing for yourself you'll never get feedback from more than one person. It's the perfect example of something that doesn't scale.

Heck even writing a comment on HN often leads to more efficient feedback. Sure, I probably could have thought of everything other commenters point out to me, but it would take much more time and effort, and the effort does not lead to a vastly better understanding. At best only marginally better.

Past a point you're in the zone of diminishing returns. You can spend two hours and get a 5% better understanding or you can talk to someone and in ten minutes get a 20% better understanding.

> If you have a crowd of followers

That's a big if, and that's the problem with relying on feedback. The more specific the topic, the less people you'll find that can give relevant feedback. Even within a team (less people but more specialized in your problem domain), it can be difficult to get relevant feedback.

It still works because it is a form of "rubber-ducking". But the less involved in your topic the "crowd" is, the less efficient it is.

Moreover feedback has the same problem as tests (and code reviews): it can show the existence of an inconsistency or a blind spot, but positive feedback doesn't prove that you are entirely correct.

> positive feedback doesn't prove that you are entirely correct

You often don’t need to be 100% sure that everything is correct before you move from “writing notes” to “doing something”. At that point, I find that note-taking becomes counter-productive because of the time it requires.

I say this as an avid note taker myself: I’ve often caught myself procrastinating by polishing my notes 100%, instead of moving on and getting things done.

> It still works because it is a form of "rubber-ducking". But the less involved in your topic the "crowd" is, the less efficient it is.

Might this be based on some unsound assumptions?

We might have accidentally stumbled into a real-world test of the proposition here. :)

Keep in mind that the topic is thinking in writing (vs "volatile" thinking).I average 25-30 notes per day. Even if I'd ignore it's relatively specialized math and CS, it would take a rather large crowd to review and a lot of context. Meanwhile, like with coding, writing and re-reading notes forces your mind to lay out things with more structure, often uncovering loose ends.

I agree that public forum like HN/Reddit is a good, scalable way to review (some) ideas, but it works for a fraction.

Reminds me of this blog post: https://camhashemi.com/posts/organic-proposals/

> 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've found that the more time you spend "intellectualizing" your own thoughts, it'll become harder to back down, because you get so invested in your ideas.

Obtaining external feedback can significantly enhance the process of validating and challenging those thoughts.

People are remarkably resistance to feedback.

Socrates is kicking from his grave.

If your brain has a blind spot, stop writing English and write code, with test cases that hit all corner cases.

By the very definition, if your brain has a blind spot it'll not think of all the corner cases to test. That's why we do code reviews.

The code will reveal the corner cases to you; you will think of things you didn't think of before writing the code.

Before you write the code, your ideas may be so poor that they don't even hit the happy cases when you try to code them. You go "Oh, what was I thinking; it's obvious now that it could never work that way ..."

Of course, it's coding we are talking about; there will be bugs. Fewer than in some wishful prose, though.

Ah, I see your point now.

Sure, writing code will help you understand the problem better, and may let you see more corner cases. But not all (which was my point).

> The code will reveal the corner cases to you; you will think of things you didn't think of before writing the code.

The step of putting propositions into a proper form such that tests can be written against them is arguably half the benefit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-formed_formula

> He's as smart as I am, so it wasn't an intelligence flaw.

I literally wow-ed out loud.

I've always felt everybody around me is much smarter than me. Now I have found the opposite personality — somebody who is fully confident about themselves.

I get that the comment came across as arrogant. However you misunderstood the point. It's not that I'm very smart, but that a superior intelligence was not the factor in me finding glasses in his reasoning. It can't be, because as I pointed out, my intelligence is not superior to his.

Of course I do get your point that I should consider whether both he and I are simply not that intelligent and that's the reason I find flaws in his arguments. It's logically sound, but I'll cling to my doubts regarding it's accuracy :-)

In some sense, isn't making flawed arguments an intelligence flaw by definition?

That depends on the flaw and whether you'd consider lacking omniscience to be a sign of low intelligence.

Not necessarily.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Logical_truth&d...

https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/

For example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster

Argument is an art of rhetoric, not logic. Many very smart people make flawed arguments, sometimes instinctively, sometimes deliberately.

I'm not saying they should. In fact, I'll now say: they shouldn't. But whatever defect this habit is evidence of, it isn't necessarily a defect of their intelligence. Sometimes, but not always, or even usually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com