[HN Gopher] Why write?
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Why write?
Author : Pseudomanifold
Score : 145 points
Date : 2023-06-27 14:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bastian.rieck.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (bastian.rieck.me)
| thinkpad13 wrote:
| the blog is really clean I liek it
| articsputnik wrote:
| The font and the layout are amazing. I was wondering what font
| it is.
| GenericCanadian wrote:
| I started writing when I was teaching newer programmers and I
| found the amount I didn't know how to explain clearly was
| staggering. Things I thought I knew so were actually kind of
| blurry blobs in my mind.
|
| Recently I've been exploring Bevy and rust game development and
| my learning has been so much better when I create docs for
| myself: https://taintedcoders.com/
| mercurialsolo wrote:
| Writing is like extending the context window for our brains
| neural nets. Writing helps us also defragment our brains. We
| write notes for ourselves to empty our brains of the thoughts at
| times.
|
| PG's work back in the day on writing as a form of think is still
| pretty relevant. http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html
| jodrellblank wrote:
| If writing is a form of thinking, and a picture is worth a
| thousand words, does drawing (instead of writing) give a 1000x
| boost to thinking in any way?
| blechinger wrote:
| It can certainly help pierce the shroud of qualia and aid
| knowledge transfer. Other forms of communication like
| diagrams, portrait sketches, and maps prove this out.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Yes, but all you need is arrows; see Category theory ;)
| __loam wrote:
| I love that we can't have a discussion about brains without a
| very poor computer science analogy.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Two other reasons:
|
| 1. You learn what you don't know about the topic or things you
| assumed you understood but really don't (a comment by @Swizec
| identifies the Illusion of explanatory depth; TIL)
|
| 2. You learn what things you thought you "knew" that are either
| contradictory or unfounded.
| herval11 wrote:
| [dead]
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| Good advice. Implicit here is that you really need _something
| motivating_ to write/think about in order to follow this advice.
|
| That's probably obvious, but perhaps relevant for someone who
| comes at this with an ambiguous desire to "write well" but
| without clarity on "about what."
|
| Maybe a trivial point, but that's certainly the starting point of
| any writer's journey: a topic?
| number6 wrote:
| An interesting topic or amalgamation point are weekly notes:
| summarize your week. Most of us on HN work with interesting
| problems and try to solve hard problems.
|
| Write about the stuff you learned in this week or what you
| worked on.
|
| It can be brief and it should e fun. Not homework.
| vinibrito wrote:
| Agree, I'm doing that to write about my indie hacking story,
| it's fun
| number6 wrote:
| Sounds interesting, where can I read it?
| interroboink wrote:
| A trite re-phrasing, which somehow captures some of the advice in
| this article:
|
| Write "why"
|
| (that is: aim express the intuition behind something, rather than
| gory details.)
| nicbou wrote:
| I found that writing forces me to look for a simpler, clearer
| underlying idea. I sometimes have a bunch of disjointed thoughts
| that I feel intensely about, and writing forces me to find a
| theme to bind them together.
|
| Simple ideas sell, and finding them is a valuable skill.
| ahalbert wrote:
| I recently started writing reviews of each book I read. I found
| it helps me retain the contents of the book and often people give
| positive feedback about what they learned from my review.
| dustingetz wrote:
| how many hours do you invest in this per book and per month?
|
| I did this for a few months in 2017 but it was taking like 90
| minutes per chapter, and at full saturday morning 8am
| attention! It's like doing math homework. And math homework is
| not the most important thing I can spend the best 90 minutes of
| my day on.
| ahalbert wrote:
| I don't know, but I wrote nearly 3000 words on the last book
| review I did. I'd say I spend less time than 90 minutes per
| chapter. I'm also sharing the reviews, which I find the most
| rewarding part.
| jnac wrote:
| Is there any review(er) in particular you used as inspiration
| here? Curious if you treat this more as personal notes, or a
| public-facing review?
| ahalbert wrote:
| I do it on my college alum slack channel, but I recently
| wrote one up that made it to the front page of HN:
|
| https://ahalbert.com/reviews/2023/06/04/the_culture_map.html
|
| I took some inspiration from the book review contests of
| "Astral Codex Ten"
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-
| publi...
| number6 wrote:
| I do the same, since the Start of the year. I write personal
| notes and if a book really gets to me I will write a public
| review
| [deleted]
| Swizec wrote:
| Illusion of explanatory depth.
|
| Until you write (or otherwise explain), you really don't know
| whether you even know what you think you do. We humans tend to
| over-estimate how well we understand something. We mentally paper
| over holes in our knowledge and handwave away pesky little
| details, until we try to explain the thing. Then you realize
| _"Wait, those two ideas aren't connecting ..."_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_explanatory_depth
|
| The other big reason, for me, is that without writing it soon
| feels like my head is exploding. So many ideas racing around it
| feels like I can't think straight.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Feynman, in his freshman lectures, had some topic (I don't
| remember what) that he wanted to use as a topic. But he
| couldn't figure out how to explain it to freshmen. He said,
| "That means we don't really understand it."
| racktash wrote:
| It's generally good advice.
|
| Although when I was younger I took it too much to heart and
| became obsessed with having a verbal and written
| understanding of everything when, sometimes, a deeper
| understanding at a subconscious, more intuitive, level is
| more useful. :)
| nicbou wrote:
| Then you write code. I thought I understood how German health
| insurance works until I wrote a calculator for it. Suddenly I
| had to consider far more cases.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Yes. Taking it further, writing isn't just how you express your
| thinking; the writing IS the thinking.
| zvmaz wrote:
| If I want to study something seriously, I formulate questions
| about what I am learning and commit them to Anki cards for
| review. It's anecdotal, but since I have been doing that, I am
| more careful of the content of what I study (I ask to myself:
| Did I understand that right? What does this part mean exactly?
| Isn't there a contradiction there? Let's see...).
| activatedgeek wrote:
| [dead]
| YChacker100 wrote:
| Writing is good to explain an idea that is too hard to just have
| in your head imo
| slothtrop wrote:
| Feynman similarly wrote that writing helps him think. Far and
| away my #1 use for it.
| eequah9L wrote:
| I like how this applies to commit messages and patchset cover
| letters as well. You write the whys and wherefores to both
| explain to others what's going on, as well as to make sure you
| understand yourself. For sure that increases your audience,
| nobody cared about your fix before! And you need to narrate all
| this -- a patch that fixes an issue should read a little bit like
| a whodunnit. What the issue is, how to trigger it, what the
| impact is, how the patch fixes it.
| maxFlow wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning this. I don't get to do much writing in
| my time off work, since that time is devoted to (more) coding
| to try and make my side project into a business. So what I do
| to compensate is I make an effort and write all commit
| messages, descriptions, code review comments and documentation
| as if I were writing for an audience of top engineers auditing
| my work. I find this approach makes me enjoy the process more,
| be more deliberate about my actions, and how I communicate
| them. Even a dull runbook can be beautifully written.
| antirez wrote:
| Writing is a set of techniques that can be learned to communicate
| effectively. That said, reaching excellence requires some talent
| other than the technique, but that's obvious, and common to every
| other activity. It's worth remembering that teaching how to
| communicate effectively is 2500 years old: it started in Sicily
| with sophists, paid teachers of rhetoric in the ancient Greek
| world. We kinda unlearned that writing is a learnable skill.
| shubhamgrg04 wrote:
| Writing is akin to debugging your own thought processes
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