Write to Find Out
(unless you're Scott Alexander)
I’m still surprised by how long it takes to write a blog post. A typical blog post takes me 2-3 hours to write. A long post can be a half-day affair. I often start on a post an hour before I need to do something else, figuring I’ll be done with some time to spare. Then I end up late for something, or needing to pause my draft and return the next day. This isn’t just because making words that convey an idea to others takes time. The majority of that writing time is actually finding out what I’m thinking/feeling/believing in a coherent way.
It’s said that you never really know something until you’ve tried to teach it to someone else. Only then does it become apparent where you’ve papered over holes in your knowledge and inconsistencies in your beliefs. Do I think I know how a car works? Yeah, basically. If someone asked me “Hey, can you tell me how a car works?” could I actually explain it to them in a way I’d be comfortable with? No I could not.
Writing my thoughts down requires me to do the equivalent of teaching me what I think, so I can then report on what I think to a third party. You would think this is easy, because you would think that you already know what you think. You would often be wrong about this. There have been occasions that I’ve sat down to write something, realized I don’t quite think what I thought I think about a third of the way through, and had to reevaluate and reformulate everything!
When thinking without external aids, a human brain can store 5-7 tokens of information to be processed by our attention. Everything else is biases, emotions, vibes. These are the mental tools that we crafted through a lifetime of applying attention to 5-7 tokens and training our internal AI. Or… just-I, I guess. More complex actions require a lot of caching and constant swapping into working memory. This is where the disconnects between what you think and what you think you think hide. A small shift goes completely unnoticed because the memory swap prevents you from directly comparing the two states of your brain.
Using a blog as a scratch pad, collating many trains of thought and their conclusions into condensed summaries made of sentences and paragraphs, allows you to compare these conclusions and judge them. They are often found wanting.
I’m not a complete mess, of course! (Usually) More commonly, I do think mostly what I thought I thought, but seeing it in its fullness leads to intriguing discoveries that alter my position a bit, and allows me to firm it up. It also helps me to realize why I think those things, how this thought interlocks with the rest of my interface with reality. It is rare that I don’t discover something new about a topic and its relation to my model of the world and/or my model of myself when I write it down.
One can do this in almost any written format. I like blogs, because the external attention pressures me to stay coherent. The feedback cycle is quick enough to be motivating. And it’s not real-time, so I have the ability to delete and rewrite before anyone realizes I’m an incoherent mess of contradictions and passions and ignorance. Saves me a lot of embarrassment!
If you want to find out what you’re thinking, and how much you agree with that knowledge, write it down in a way that tries to explain it to others. The results will surprise you. Just be prepared to be at it for a while.
(as an example, this post is going late too, because I realized that the limitation of 5-7 tokens of working memory is important and I had neglected that in my first-level approximation of this thought. I had to contemplate that further, and then add it in at an earlier part of the post)
Implications
Famously, Scott Alexander writes massive blog posts that are cheesecake-dense with insight-calories, in about two hours. That is absolutely bonkers. For posts of that length, two hours is roughly how long it would take just to type it out and do some quick formatting. This means that Scott Alexander already knows what he’s thinking. I assume just, like, all the time. Maybe he just doesn’t blog about stuff that he doesn’t already know his own thoughts about. That’s pretty darn impressive in its own right. But to know what you know, and want to say about a topic, so deeply that you can simply say it and not be surprised by the extent you were hiding ignorance from yourself is legit stunning to me. This man is freakin’ amazing.
Paul Graham points out that people will soon be writing far less, as AIs do the writing for them. He says that when you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think. When one experiences just how big this writing-->thinking effect is personally, one cannot disagree. I’m not sure most people will be effected much, because most people don’t really write anyway. But maybe I’m wrong about just how much occasional casual composition has on the population, and we’re about to experience a sea-change in public cognition.