I looked up the Cormac McCarthy essay because it reminded me of this. Then I realized you’d already linked to it.
I wonder if writing just lets you distribute your cognition where your brain needs to only focus on a small part at a time, then you can go back and focus on bits and pieces here and there. Kind of like a Turing machine reading from tape. You can write something down and then iteratively improve on it from there. Perhaps the act of writing forces you into a sort of dialogue with yourself. You write it down, then come back and realize you weren’t as smart as you thought you were when you first wrote it. Or maybe that’s just me.
That McCarthy essay is so good. What I wonder is whether writing is unique in its ability to force us into dialogues with ourselves (which I think is a great way to put it). Paul Graham and others seem to think so, but I’m not so sure.
Good question. I can have a dialogue with myself just walking around, but what's unique about writing is that when adding numbers I'm able to add together a hundred digit string of numbers if I have a pen and paper. I'm unable to add more than a few digits in my head. I assume there's a similar cognitive improvement when working with other topics. It'd be more difficult to quantify the improvement though.
I looked up the Cormac McCarthy essay because it reminded me of this. Then I realized you’d already linked to it.
I wonder if writing just lets you distribute your cognition where your brain needs to only focus on a small part at a time, then you can go back and focus on bits and pieces here and there. Kind of like a Turing machine reading from tape. You can write something down and then iteratively improve on it from there. Perhaps the act of writing forces you into a sort of dialogue with yourself. You write it down, then come back and realize you weren’t as smart as you thought you were when you first wrote it. Or maybe that’s just me.
That McCarthy essay is so good. What I wonder is whether writing is unique in its ability to force us into dialogues with ourselves (which I think is a great way to put it). Paul Graham and others seem to think so, but I’m not so sure.
Good question. I can have a dialogue with myself just walking around, but what's unique about writing is that when adding numbers I'm able to add together a hundred digit string of numbers if I have a pen and paper. I'm unable to add more than a few digits in my head. I assume there's a similar cognitive improvement when working with other topics. It'd be more difficult to quantify the improvement though.