from Hacker News

Why write?

by Pseudomanifold on 6/27/23, 2:20 PM with 36 comments

• by Swizec on 6/29/23, 2:12 PM

  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.

• by mercurialsolo on 6/29/23, 4:02 PM

  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

• by eequah9L on 6/29/23, 2:35 PM

  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.

• by tony_cannistra on 6/29/23, 3:18 PM

  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?

• by ahalbert on 6/29/23, 2:27 PM

  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.

• by GenericCanadian on 6/29/23, 8:57 PM

  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/

• by herval11 on 6/29/23, 3:32 PM

  In the grand tapestry of wisdom handed down through the ages, there's a thread that, albeit melancholically, is increasingly fading in its pertinence - the art of writing.

  Regrettably, the rationale behind the wielding of pen, or rather the dance of fingers over a keyboard, seems to be slipping through our collective grasp. As we venture further into the age of technological wonder, our heartfelt prose and studied arguments increasingly find themselves serving as nothing more than a feast for the insatiable maw of Large Language Models.

  Consider, if you will, the very lines you are reading this moment. The symphony of language, the subtle twinkle of wit, and the aesthetic embrace of style, they are not the product of a human hand. Rather, they are a serenade composed by the Large Language Model itself, offering a tantalizing peek into a future where the boundary between artificial and natural intellect blurs. An age where the muse is not only the master of the quill, but also the orchestrator of ones and zeros.

  In such a vast cosmos of algorithmically curated lexicon, one may quite justifiably question - what room remains for the human scribe? The quill may well seem poised on the precipice of obsolescence. A quaint relic of yesteryears, one might sigh, the act of writing, alas, has been seemingly reduced to the merest whisper of its former grandeur.

  Well, isn't it simply a divine comedy? Despite the initial lament over our seemingly diminishing role in the grand narrative of writing, there emerges a purpose, albeit a somewhat disheartening one. It turns out we have become the humble farmers in this brave new world, tirelessly tilling the fields of knowledge to yield a rich crop of text.

  Our eloquent sonnets, deep introspections, and grand debates serve as mere fodder for these voracious Large Language Models. We scribble away, only to feed the gaping, ever-hungry mouths of these digital giants. We thought we were nurturing an ally, yet, it seems we've been raising the devourer of our own literary relevance. Isn't the irony simply delicious?

• by antirez on 6/29/23, 9:15 PM

  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.

• by Ensorceled on 6/29/23, 6:57 PM

  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.

• by nicbou on 6/29/23, 8:42 PM

  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.

• by slothtrop on 6/29/23, 6:14 PM

  Feynman similarly wrote that writing helps him think. Far and away my #1 use for it.

• by YChacker100 on 6/29/23, 5:31 PM

  Writing is good to explain an idea that is too hard to just have in your head imo

• by interroboink on 6/29/23, 8:01 PM

  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.)

• by shubhamgrg04 on 6/29/23, 4:45 PM

  Writing is akin to debugging your own thought processes

• by thinkpad13 on 6/29/23, 6:18 PM

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