I think “the writing is the thinking” is just combination of selection effects and typical mind fallacy. Of course people who contributed a lot of writing to the Internet are going to be the sort of people who put large weight on writing in their cognitive process.
the act of forcing yourself to write that down into sentences and paragraphs to structure the argument will show you where the holes are in the argument
You should look for both conditions of presence and absence of phenomena. Yes, writing forces me to think, but I spend a lot of my waking time thinking about abstract problems and staring into the wall pondering my thoughts works just as fine. If anything, to write I should stop thinking, because it’s never the case that I finished my understanding and in some moment I should write whatever I have on my mind to have something written.
This is not to undermine the rest of your thesis (LLMs are bad at writing and they are unfaithful in conveying complex thoughts in my experience), but “the writing is the thinking” always sounds to me like an assertion of typical mind fallacy.
For me it depends on the topic. In math, I usually prove something in my mind and then just write it up. But when I’m writing about the world, even if the idea is clear in my mind, the act of writing often uncovers flaws and I have to rethink. And creative writing for me happens directly in words, the meaning comes later.
Very interesting. It may well be that different people function very differently in this way. I think what I wanted to communicate there wasn’t just that writing is an important part of the thinking process (for me), but also that it’s a kind of forcing function. Like, if I just sit down and think about a problem, there will always be gaps until I go off and try to explain my thoughts to someone else, or set them down in words, at which point I have to figure out what I actually think and how things fit together at least well enough to know which words to choose. But maybe some people are really good at doing basically this just in their heads, without any aids.
I think “the writing is the thinking” is just combination of selection effects and typical mind fallacy. Of course people who contributed a lot of writing to the Internet are going to be the sort of people who put large weight on writing in their cognitive process.
You should look for both conditions of presence and absence of phenomena. Yes, writing forces me to think, but I spend a lot of my waking time thinking about abstract problems and staring into the wall pondering my thoughts works just as fine. If anything, to write I should stop thinking, because it’s never the case that I finished my understanding and in some moment I should write whatever I have on my mind to have something written.
This is not to undermine the rest of your thesis (LLMs are bad at writing and they are unfaithful in conveying complex thoughts in my experience), but “the writing is the thinking” always sounds to me like an assertion of typical mind fallacy.
For me it depends on the topic. In math, I usually prove something in my mind and then just write it up. But when I’m writing about the world, even if the idea is clear in my mind, the act of writing often uncovers flaws and I have to rethink. And creative writing for me happens directly in words, the meaning comes later.
Very interesting. It may well be that different people function very differently in this way. I think what I wanted to communicate there wasn’t just that writing is an important part of the thinking process (for me), but also that it’s a kind of forcing function. Like, if I just sit down and think about a problem, there will always be gaps until I go off and try to explain my thoughts to someone else, or set them down in words, at which point I have to figure out what I actually think and how things fit together at least well enough to know which words to choose. But maybe some people are really good at doing basically this just in their heads, without any aids.