I don't remember the original source, but in Leslie Lamport's Specifying Systems book, he quoted someone saying "Writing is nature's way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is."
Generally, if you're writing long, rambling posts, there's a good chance that your understanding of the subject that you're writing about is sloppy (not to say you don't understand it, just that your thoughts are all over the place). If you can express what you're writing in a fairly short amount of time, you probably have a relatively good mental model of what it is you're tying to say, and this is a learnable (and useful) skill.
I've found that getting into the practice of writing "notes that I will actually read in the future" has helped a lot with this.
I strongly disagree. A person who loves to read pop sci physics will be much better at writing clear sentences about physics than a physicist, but the physicist will for sure have a better understanding of physics.
The world is very complex and almost nothing in it can accurately be summarised in a short piece of writing. Being able to making decent summaries is useful but it doesn't show mastery of the subject nor does being unable to do so show lack of mastery. Rather many masters feels that the summaries are woefully inaccurate and therefore be unable to write them while many amateurs will make very clear summaries of fields they understand nothing about.
There, I have been both correct and concise. However, I have not been complete.
You are both wrong is still true, but it is not the whole truth and the whole truth depends on the audience and also your intent.
My intent is to make a tongue in cheek point (no offense meant to the parent and gp). The audience you have little control of but you can write with a particular one in mind.
And to elaborate slightly on why your both wrong. It's because you left out the third c - completeness. This will change depending on your audience and what kind of story your are telling.
This 10000%
The guts of a matter can be found in the details and nuance and that’s really hard to boil down. The world is full of recursive rabbit holes wherever you look and we can’t function as humans without some mechanisms to be ok with skipping all the details. We convince ourselves we know something because the stories we tell ourselves about them are concise and make sense. This is no indication of veracity but sufficient for us to go on our merry way. This is an interesting dynamic as it surely is a useful heuristic for operating in a complex world but when we do dive into the details and embrace the nuance we experience a personal scale epistemic rupture and that is not easily communicated to anyone who has not experienced it.
There's some tension between correctness and clarity. Both come in degrees, and writing in the top right quadrant is rare. But holding correctness fixed, I think OP (and Feynman) are right that they go together -- ie Corr(correctness, clarity | correctness) is very high.
(In the general case, though, you may be right. Corr(correctness, clarity) is often negative. But one is a bit more important than the other... simple sentences are a dime a dozen. It's the true ones we care about; only then does clarity enter.)
Interestingly enough, the aforementioned quote was just an epigraph for a section whose penultimate point is that “mathematics is nature’s way of showing how sloppy your writing is”, followed by the ultimate point that “formal mathematics is nature’s way of showing you how sloppy your mathematics is”.
great points; we're constantly constrained by a certain cost-structure. Even if we aim to go beyond languages through the introduction of formalizations (mathematical, physics, etc), formal languages, axiomatic systems, theorem provers, etc, the same constraints are still there, just in more abstracted forms.
That begs the question, are consciousness and qualia constrainted by some forms of languages too? How can we go about describing these constraints? It is perhaps only when we are able to outline them that we'll discover greater truths about languages (e.g. as we conduct experiments to verify our models on consciousness).
I've noticed what often causes rambling is writing a sentence that I'm only 50% sure conveys the idea. I'll keep writing variations of the same core sentence in the hope that one of them will work for the reader.
The thought is clear in my head, but doesn't seem clear on paper. So I just throw a bunch of word spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. It's better to tighten up one really clear sentence, and accept any complex thought will probably go over the heads of some percent of the readers.
This is very insightful. I tend to do this verbally as well, when I’m trying to explain something to people and I can see they don’t get it. In that context I’m trying to learn to stop and say “does that make sense” instead of rephrasing.
I've found that "does that make sense?" only works when the other party is humble and confident enough to say "no". This is rare when you are in an "authority" position (e.g.: teacher, boss) or with certain kinds of people.
Some strategies that worked better for me are:
- To ask them to rephrase/re-explain. This is best when the other party tends to get the general idea but misses key details. You can then fill these key details into their explanation, and they will stick much better.
- To formulate follow-up questions. This is best to explore whether they got the general idea right. If they do, they will be able to infer some simple conclusions/consequences of what you just explained.
- To get them to finish the next sentence. This is best to pace yourself during the explanation itself. When they can't see what comes next, it should either be an important revelation or you are going too fast.
In spirit of the top level comment, you do not do this entirely on purpose. At best you recognize what you are doing and rationilize it, but if you emulate the reader at this moment, you have to have been conscious of the structure and the gaps in it that you are trying to fill.
On the other hand, in my own experience, if it's possible that I forgot to mention something and try to tack on the information, it's also quite likely that I lost oversight, that the information was already coded in and I just forgot and thus repeat myself.
For example, I do frequently lose drafts by accident, and I'm particularly happy when I manage to reformulate approximately the same structure, but it has also been the case that I could not even remember what I was going to say. Some other times, I just completely lose it, so to speak, and butcher everything with deranged copy-pastes rearranged in the wrong place. Now my conclusion has been for a long time that this is simply due to a poor working memory, quite analogous to the browser crashes eating my drafts. On the up-side, the aphasia is self-healing to a degree, so I find it is a good memory training when I have to formulate a text before I can get to the writing, but the extent of my abilities is severely limited at that. Inasmuch as this is analogous to the thought process itself, the writing is symptomatic. However, there are also those cases where my thought process was not verbose, so translating from idetic memory to linear text is a huge problem, for example with regards to conjunctions.
On that point you will note if you have ever written involved if-then-else structures, that repition and redundancy is impossible to avoid. Conversely though, recursive algorithms and functional data-structures that do look neat on paper do potentially have much worse run-time complexity, depending on the interpreter, for lack of a better word. More over, to stick with the programming metaphor, text may contain comments on a meta level, but we've all seen those useless comments and unhelpful documentation.
Anyhow, what I was hoping to say was that redundancy has benefits. Scientific papers do it all the time and possibly on purpose. This is in no small part due to the medium. Locality matters, so in dialog you might be told where something was left unclear, or already known, and responses might serve redundancy for you, but in writing maybe there is the expectation of certain conventions. Legal writing, verdicts and such are another fine example of elaborate structure with sometimes staggering amounts of repitition.
Finally, keeping the Title in mind, the itterative method you describe can count as "write more", and if it works like play generally does it will improve and the conclusion will actually be "but shorter" on average. Whereas, if the itterations tend to grow longer, it might be indicative of a lack of understanding indeed.
To brag a little, my favorite feedback on the newsletters I send is "Thanks! Short and sweet, loved it!" to a 1000 word email.
It's okay to write long. But it needs to feel short by being concise.
You can always tell when someone squeezes a 1000 page book into 200 pages. It feels short and insightful. But when they expand a 20 page book into 200 pages, it feels like fluff. You can tell when that happens too.
A good pattern to observe is an author's first and second best seller.
The first is often amazing. A decade of lessons and insights squeezed into a book. The fast followup is usually fluff. 2 years of add-ons expanded into a full book.
Obviously there are subjects where it would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to express in a short format, and obviously if it requires it, then take the amount of space that you need. I think the goal should be "aim for brevity, but be clear."
One of my favorite examples of this are Ron Pressler's "TLA+ in Practice and Theory" posts. It's four extremely long blog posts, but it contains what feels like multiple textbooks' worth of information in there. By comparison to how long it could be, I think it's incredible how concise it is.
> You can always tell when someone squeezes a 1000 page book into 200 pages. It feels short and insightful.
I disagree with this argument. You can most certainly tell when someone is trying to squeeze too much into a too small of a space. The sentences are dense and the information density prohibits actually gleaning anything.
You are right there are limits where too much summarizing drops important details. Generally though I prefer writing where the author had to aggressively kill the unimportant because they ran out of space to the writing that fluffs up to fill more space than it needs.
Twitter threads that are an expert deep dive into some historical event/story, a law, a court case, a mathematical theory, etc are some of my favorite kinds of writing to read.
Each tweet in the thread is often accompanied by a link and/or screen shot of a refernce article or book so I can dive into more source material if I wish... just perfect
There's some truth to the idea. At the same time, I've met plenty of experts who are competent and productive in their work, but incapable of concise communication.
If you sieve through their rambling, you'll notice that they do have a mental model. The problem is that the model is very foreign to other minds, and they do a poor job describing it.
This might be the reason that some people are more comfortable communicating with formulas than verbal descriptions. They are eloquent when they don't have to come up with their own words.
I'll talk to my friends about "my day" every once in a while. Invariably it involves programming and the act of trying to describe what I'm doing is like off-roading: you constantly have to go long ways around things to avoid crossings the conversation can't handle, it's rough and bumpy the whole way, and some destinations simply can not be reached.
In short: I agree that rambling may have more to do with the difficulty of translation than the internal understanding.
I find that you can often use analogies or describe very vaguely to at least make some sense. It does take nuance out of the thing you’re describing but maybe that’s helpful. I’ve had multiple times that I explain in simpler terms, and I come to realize what my idea actually looks like to other people.
Some people bristle at analogies for the highly technical things they do. I think they misunderstand the purpose, or think it mocks the work they've put into understanding the subject. A good analogy creates a bridge toward interest, and interest leads to the focus needed to learn the technical stuff.
English (and presumably other human languages as well) has a lot of opinion pent up in it. Say someone came to my house and then left with a table. Depending on the details, they could have stolen it, they could have bought it, they could be a friend who's borrowing it, it could be a gift to a friend. (There's a ton more possibilities to consider if you're creative.)
Formulas are great at the level of expressing that a table was moved, which is the important piece for some.
That it misses the human element of the feelings surrounding the event is a different kind of eloquence from flowery prose to entertain.
"Generally, if you're writing long, rambling posts, there's a good chance that your understanding of the subject that you're writing about is sloppy "
I don't think that's true. Understanding something and being able to write about it are two different things. It's a good thing to learn to be concise though.
Good writing is often a very small subset of a topic. If you are an expert on a topic it can be very hard to omit a lot of detail you may find important but will just overload people.
Toastmasters taught me a lot about this. A lot of my speeches were 15 minutes long at first. Cutting them down to 5 minutes was very painful but it definitely made them way better
I think that no. Writing is separate skill. It has nothing to do how you internal thinking os nor whether it is sloppy.
It has a lot tondonwith whether you tried to learn writing, found good teachers or other resources. Learning to write won't make your thinking different, but you will be able to express things.
Granted, I'm speaking with no neuroscience or psychological background, but anecdotally I think I completely disagree.
I'm not saying that you should be the next Robert Penn Warren or James Joyce if you're writing about an endofunctor or something, but I genuinely do think that learning how to write fairly well has actually made me understand mathematics and computer science better, in addition to becoming better at explaining it. My thoughts can be all over the place, and even if I know every single "fact" about a subject, I feel like writing about it (and in particular trying to write well about it) helps me fully realize how these facts actually relate to each other, and building a bigger mental picture that I might not otherwise have.
To be clear, I don't think writing is the only way of doing this. I think, for example, getting good at data visualization or learning formal mathematics can also have similar effects in regards to most forms of engineering. I just think that getting good at writing about a subject is a one of many really useful tools for developing an understanding of a subject.
You are saying something different. Writing about something or teaching somebody something can be excellent ways of improving your own understanding of a topic.
Forcing yourself to interact with concepts in different ways improves understanding, definitely.
This doesn’t say that being able to teach or write well about a topic correlates with understanding. Understanding is an effect of writing not the other way around.
If you can't encode it with your neocortex, your neocortex doesn't understand it well enough. You might understand it, but your high level reasoning center does not. Give it a writing hand and pull it out of the tarpit.
I am sure he didn't originate the sentiment but
“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." -- David McCullough
(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)”
I do agree that writing is not _necessary_ to improve your thinking. However, I think that writing about a topic will often if not always improve your understanding of that topic as well as your ability to communicate it.
I think that's because when writing about something you have to be slower, more deliberate and more structured than thinking about something in your head which helps you identify gaps in your understanding which you can easily miss when the idea is in your head.
I think the better way overall though is just to try different methods of thinking and do what works for you. I also think more than one method is almost always better than just using one.
I find that writing and mathematics are just a poor way of trying to structure a context free domain specific language for the problem.
Writing is bad because it needs to fit in a human head and ultimately needs to be spoken by a human mouth. Maths is bad because it is still stuck as being written on blackboards or pen and paper if you're unlucky.
The few times I have build up these dsls formally have let me understand a topic both more deeply and remember it more easily. The downside is that time invested in inventing it in the first place. E.g.
(for-all x (implies
(member x integers)
(exist-unique y
(and (member y integers)
(equal? 0 (+ x y))))))
Is the way to say that all integers have additive inverses. It's ridiculously long but logically sound and quite easy to prove mechanically given that every operator in that sentence also have definitions in that vain.
There are people who are visual thinkers, and people who are more language based. For language based thinkers, writing always helps. For visual thinkers, maybe not always, although I think that combining visual and language thinking is very powerful.
I think I read the quote somewhat differently: if you think clearly, you will write well. Not that writing is necessary for thinking clearly, but thinking clearly is necessary for writing well.
Generally, if you're writing long, rambling posts, there's a good chance that your understanding of the subject that you're writing about is sloppy (not to say you don't understand it, just that your thoughts are all over the place). If you can express what you're writing in a fairly short amount of time, you probably have a relatively good mental model of what it is you're tying to say, and this is a learnable (and useful) skill.
I've found that getting into the practice of writing "notes that I will actually read in the future" has helped a lot with this.