I want to think well, to understand what is even going on in the world. I’d like to make sense. I want to grasp the purposes and patterns of things. I’d most keenly like to make sense for myself, but to make sense for others is also great.
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
– Leslie Lamport
When you express your thoughts, and then take in your expression again, you hone those thoughts. They transform and improve. Sometimes that expression is not literally writing. Sometimes it’s creating a diagram, sometimes it’s playing music or making art. Any concrete expression that you turn around and sense again helps you to further understand the original thought. It’s wildly powerful.
It’s also frequently uncomfortable. Sharpening your understanding requires accepting that your understanding isn’t fully sharp. If you write about a topic important to you (and why would you write about a topic that isn’t?), it’s rather uncomfortable to realize that your initial understanding was hazy, dull, muddy. It’s most uncomfortable to read your own muddy sentences, and recognize that muddiness, and not yet have a sharp conception to replace it with.
Art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.
– Piet Hein
A brutal corollary of Goodhart’s Law is that you cannot achieve your real purposes if you, for too long, get distracted by measures or targets that approximate them. My real purposes here are unclear to me - not yet felt sharply, and not yet reified. I sense that reification would set an inaccurate target. Even gesturing vaguely at that thing seems profoundly challenging.
Occasionally a question arises for me, and I recognize that it’s important. I have stories about why these questions are important, but the stories do not capture the essence of that importance. The question is relevant to some question of great importance. I do not know what the grand question is. I have guesses about the grand question, but the guesses do not capture its essence either. I seem to burn with a problem that cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved.
Creative work is always a conversation. Or it doesn’t happen.
– Andrew Plotkin
I understand this the least of these three, but: writing for an audience, even a very small audience, feels far more motivating and likely to elicit useful understanding than just writing privately.
In combination, all these principles say I should write, on the questions that burn for me, for some audience. For an audience that I can trust, though, not to bend my motivation too far from its core, which I’ve felt happening in plenty of other locations (Twitter, say). I will write in a place conducive to whatever this process seems to be, and I think I have to remain responsible for that place myself.