[carlesfe]

While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this.

We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods.

I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days.

Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write.

Socrates argued that writing would destroy people's memory. He wasn't 100% wrong, yet here we are. The criticism towards the use of LLMs is so deliciously ironic. The analogy with writing... writes itself. Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently.

[Isamu]

You seem to be responding to the reverse, “thinking is writing”, which I agree is not true, you can think without writing.

They are making the point that writing is more than dumping a completed thought. The act of doing that helps you to critique your dumped thoughts, to have more thoughts about your thoughts, to simplify them or expand them.

It’s easier to go meta once you dump your state.

[carlesfe]

I think you are right and I understood it the other way around

Kind of ironic, though - I wrote, but my thinking process wasn't so great :)

Thanks for the correction!

[allturtles]

Before paper became cheap, wax or wooden tablets were used for ephemeral writing.

> I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days.

I seriously doubt that it was ever common for writers to compose a whole book in their head and then write it down. Maybe some writers with exceptional memories did this. But there's a whole book about how War and Peace was written based on textual evidence that wouldn't exist if it had simply popped out of Tolstoy's head fully formed: https://www.amazon.com/Tolstoy-Genesis-Peace-Kathryn-Feuer/d....

[carlesfe]

Not war and peace, which was episodic, but smaller novels were thought out in Tolstoy’s mind before being written wholly. He mentions this in his diaries. Zweig mentions the same, too, but of course his novels are generally much shorter than the two Tolstoy’s masterpieces.

[IggleSniggle]

Holding long epic poems in your memory alone was once a celebrated skill.

[allturtles]

AFAIK the dominant theory is that they weren't memorized as a whole text, but composed on the fly with the help of a memorized set of stock formulas. [0]

[0]: https://poets.org/glossary/oral-formulaic-method

[AceyMan]

So, basically the ancient precursor to the skills of a good rapper.

[wrp]

> writers...developed full books in their mind first

When reading long, closely reasoned passages of medieval philosophy, I've wondered about their development process, when there was no such thing as scratch paper.

> Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently.

People are just glibly saying this sort of thing, but what specifically is coming? I'm now wrestling with the problem of dealing with university students who don't hesitate to lean on LLMs. I'm trying to not be dismissive, but it feels like they are just thinking less, not differently.

[tl]

As a similar but distinct theory, you might find Larry McEnerney‘s work interesting. Writing has two classes: a writing for thought and a writing for communication. Larry uses horizontal and vertical spatial metaphors here. Writing for thought still pre-dates cheap paper (and Socrates), but is mostly a private act. Writing for communication is a broad enough brush to span fiction and journalism. For his part, Larry teaches classes aimed at thesis writers who struggle to bridge the divide of using writing to think about a problem to conveying their answer in a paper.

[malloryerik]

Yeah, LLMs are entirely different from "writing" because they're creative agents. So, writing allows me to give my thoughts several passes, to edit over time. It's like I can have several of me to think, write and edit, spaced over time.

LLMs are like I have someone else to do some or all of the thinking and writing and editing. So I do less thinking.

A bicycle lets my own energy go father. Writing. A car lets me use an entirely different energy source. LLMs. Which one is better for my physical fitness?

Btw the idea about Tolstoy and others keeping those massive books in their head and cranking them out over a month is fascinating. Any evidence or others who imagine the same? In Tolstoy's case, he was a count and surely had the funds, no?

[carlesfe]

I’ve read Tolstoy’s diaries and he mentions the thought process he uses to write small novels. First he thinks about what should happen, then he writes (or dictates) the text. Thinking takes a few weeks, sometimes a month, then writing is pretty quick. There is some editing, but nothing like we do nowadays.

Bigger novels such as war and peace were written episodically.

[ysofunny]

> Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write.

I have a better way to frame this:

Learning your own language and culture is a lifelong process.

A big phase, the adult phase, of learning is learning to write in your language (I'm implying there's more to writing than chosing words; specially in this context of language as thinking)

indeed, a lot of modern people never make it out of this big phase of learning your language. they never go beyond writing = thinking. but some people do learn the next phase

which involves distinguishing language itself from thoughts and ideas (is some idea known? understood? perceived?? but the idea is "the self" or some other complex notion)

so the only quality of the modern era I admit, is that there's a lot of people that only learn rudimentary thinking-writting, and too few people that learn 'advanced' languange-thinking where writing becomes secondary to thinking.

finally, I learned this idea from reading around the meaningness blog/book

[cubefox]

That's true, but I would phrase it from a different perspective:

It's seems clear that abstract thinking in particular is greatly aided by writing, because the written text acts like a thought cache. A bit like an LLM context window which you can fill with lots of compact, compressed "tokens" (words).

Abstract thoughts are "abstract" because they can't be visualized in our mind, so they don't benefit from our intuitive imagination ability (Kant's "Anschauung"). So it is hard to juggle many abstract thoughts in our working memory.

We can also think of the working memory as the CPU registers, which are limited to a very small number, while the content of the CPU cache or RAM corresponds to the stuff we write down.

Our "anschauung" (visual imagination) is perhaps something like a fixed function hardware on a GPU, which is very good at processing complex audiovisual content, i.e. concrete thoughts, but useless for anything else (abstract thoughts).

[slightwinder]

> We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods.

I think you have some misconceptions here. First, the article does not claim that thinking is writing, and especially not that there is no thinking without writing. They only explain that writing is supporting and driving a higher quality of thinking.

Second, paper isn't the only medium to write. And writing isn't the only persistent form of communication to support and improve thinking.

> Thinking used to be detached from writing.

It still is.

[keiferski]

I'm not sure if writers developed the entire book in their head first, but: it was indeed very, very common for people to dictate novels, journal entries, and other "written" works to a secretary, typist, or tape recorder.

Nowadays that seems to be rare, but my impression from reading my journals is that it was often more common to dictate than to physically hand write things.

[carlesfe]

Novels were dictated, that is absolutely correct, but on top of it, the whole plot was developed with a high level of detail before dictation started. There was some editing, of course, but nothing like we do today, where writing books is basically an iterative process. We lean on the written word too much for our thinking (not being critical, just that’s how we are taught)