On Writing and Thinking…

This post linked below goes a lot of different directions, but I love this point –

…the printing revolution partially caused the scientific revolution by making knowledge more rigid. Before, if some observation didn’t match some claim, you could always shrug and be like: ‘Well, the person who transcribed that thing made a mistake.' So by making things more rigid, it’s easier to break them.”

(The attribution there is a little convoluted. It’s from an interview where the Stripe CEO is talking about something a French academic said… I think?)

This is how I’ve always looked at writing and why writing about things has been the main driver of my professional/intellectual development. When you write something down, you “commit” to it at some level.

It’s not hard to hold random, unexamined thoughts in your head. They’re not set in stone. It’s easy to keep them, forget them, lie about them, pretend you thought something different, evolve them, etc.

But when you write something down, it’s much more …stark. It’s on a page. It’s a record that other people can read without you there to spin it.

Whenever I write something, there’s this background voice asking me, “Can you defend this?” And often I can’t. I have to back up and figure out where it’s weak, what evidence I need to find, etc.

Sometimes I need to figure out how to rewrite the claim, or distill it down to the point where it IS true, thereby finding all the vagaries and variables that play into it. I end up spinning something around and around and asking myself, “If I was going to attack this, where is the weakest point…”

Many, many times, I’ve walked away from a claim entirely, because once I wrote it down, it didn’t make sense, and I didn’t think I could defend it. Equally as often, I’ll change my main thesis. I can’t count the number of times I’ve changed the subject of a conference talk by the time I get to slide ten because that’s how many slides it took for me to realize I was talking about the wrong thing the whole time.

Ultimately, I think it’s insecurity (narcissism?). I’m vaguely terrified of someone reading something I’ve written and saying, “That’s total crap, and here’s why…” If I was talking, I would just morph my argument in real time, or distract from it, or bring up other evidence for it, or move on to something else, etc. (Politicians are great at this.)

But writing is asynchronous. I’m usually not there to defend it. It has to defend itself. And “training” my writing to defend itself makes me think about it a lot harder than I ever would otherwise.

I remember training someone to use a complicated Excel spreadsheet. I told her, “Everything in Excel is either a calculation or a number you actually typed in a cell. Assuming the calculations are right, then you only need to defend what you typed.”

That’s writing, basically. You can’t blame anything else. You’re forced to defend what you typed, and you’re better off for it.