A lot of smart people tell you to read. It's great advice. Even better is to write. Putting your thoughts into words helps you crystallize your thoughts, scrutinize them, remember them better, etc.
I wish someone had given me the advice to "write more" earlier in my career. (Note that I now maintain a blog and have written a book).
So much this. I've been a lifelong voracious reader and only recently have I started to take writing seriously as a way to determine what I really think. I am now far more articulate, rigorous, and confident in my own beliefs than I have ever been.
Taking the time to write down what I am thinking really puts it up into the light and better equips me for communicating my point of view to others in a way that is robust, concise, and internally consistent. Even if they will never read what I've written.
As much as I enjoy writing to think, simply writing doesn't lead to reality testing -- I've found even greater clarity by trying to add numbers or simulations and trying to program around what I'm writing. Writing with real data intertwined and numbers applied is much better.
That can work, but it depends on what you're writing about. Different methods apply in different situations. But good writing has at the very least the advantage of doing what the article notes: it forces you to take what are vague convictions and impressions and justify them. You start to notice gaps in knowledge, inferential leaps, and logical inconsistencies. Only then, and only in empirical settings, do numbers come into play because they need to be motivated by and understood within some prior context. (Even when your writing begins with some number, that number is contextualized in your mind.) Of course, good writing presupposes humility and integrity or else you risk rationalizing and bullshitting.
> As much as I enjoy writing to think, simply writing doesn't lead to
reality testing
Yes it's possible to get cloistered. But I find writing and
formulating ideas gives way to the ability to say it. What was
ineffable becomes clear language I can test with people to see how
it's received.
Agreed. I'm currently working on a book on statistics[1] and keep discovering slight (and not so slight) misconceptions in my thinking thanks to the "optional" code examples and demonstrations. In the end, it seems the code examples won't be optional at all, but essential for understanding.
It's the same with many science and tech subjects. You don't really know it until you can code it. I'm intentionally converting some of the derivations/experiments into exercises for readers to complete on their own, so they can also benefit from this learning process.
I fully agree with you, but as a warning: most people are lazy, so if valuable points are hidden in exercises for the reader, there is a significant chance that many will miss them
Howard Marks’ book The Most Important Thing has sold three-quarters of a million copies. I don’t know what the list of all-time best-selling investment books looks like, but that is up there.
It's always the same pattern with this blog: find a single success and then generalize it to everything, ignoring the obvious survivorship bias. The vast majority of books do not sell well, no matter what technique is used. Writing for yourself is good, but ideally you want other people to be interested too if your goal is to actually make money.
> Some of what we today consider to be the canon of Western philosophy was never meant to be shared widely. ...Many of Aristotle's "writings" were just student-created notes of his teachings.
He wrote a large number of treatises, they just haven't survived. By contrast, all of Plato's works were preserved.
"Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises and other works covering all areas of philosophy and science. Of those, none survives in finished form. The approximately 30 works through which his thought was conveyed to later centuries consist of lecture notes (by Aristotle or his students) and draft manuscripts edited by ancient scholars, notably Andronicus of Rhodes, the last head of the Lyceum, who arranged, edited, and published Aristotle’s extant works in Rome about 60 BCE."
> They take some vague feeling they’ve been thinking about, dig into a bunch, write down what they’ve discovered, realize half of it doesn’t make sense, delete most of it, write some more, realize the new stuff contradicts itself, panic when they realize they don’t understand the topic as well as they thought they did, talk to other smart people about why that is, learn something new that reminds them of this other thing that might tie into the second paragraph, discover that this thing they believed before they started writing isn’t actually true, realize that if that thing isn’t true then this other thing is probably really important, and so on endlessly.
I love this sentence. It really captures the iterative nature and messiness of learning.
I wish someone had given me the advice to "write more" earlier in my career. (Note that I now maintain a blog and have written a book).