Writing is thinking

My blog has had a median of ~2 visitors per day for almost two years (nowadays, it’s only a marginal improvement). And I don’t care.

Writing is thinking. And this blog has served as a public notepad well enough.

As Alexey Guzey points out — perhaps the best indicator of your online writing having benefits is when you are not too embarassed to tell people.

“Oh, BTW, I wrote about this/collected some things on this topic on my blog” — if you notice yourself mentioning these lines, the purpose of your blog is fulfilled. I’ve been able to plug various blog posts as footnotes to various conversations I’ve had with friends and acquaintances.

I now see this as a significant return of my investment into this personal space.

It doesn’t matter! Your blog may have the median of 0 visitors per day (as my blog had for the first two years). Your blog may be ungoogleable. Your blog may have no subscribers. But if you’re not embarrassed to tell people “oh, btw I wrote about this / collected some things on the topic on my blog”, the purpose of the blog is fulfilled, since this is the best indicator of your writing actually being helpful.

Writing is unfun at that given moment, as you need to really stretch yourself with the attempt to put forth on paper, but it’s immensely satisfying after it has been written. Writing, in this regard can be called as Type 2 fun. Also playfully called as ‘suffering fun’— it refers to activities that are miserable or challenging while they’re happening, but enjoyable in retrospect.

I’ve been getting a kick from this Type 2 fun, writing selfishly for my own sake, articulating my thoughts, actions, feelings and opinions.

Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect. It usually begins with the best intentions, and then things get carried away. Riding your bicycle across the country. Doing an ultramarathon. Working out till you puke, and, usually, ice and alpine climbing. Also surely familiar to mothers, at least during childbirth and the dreaded teenage years.

It’s also a meta-skill that has extended to other domains too. I now organise my learning around writing, rather than reading.

Only when it’s a written word, it seems to me that the thoughts get crystallized. Knowledge seems to pass through various forms of solids, liquids, and gases, and when I write them down, it seems to get condensed and solidify for later retrieval.

When I begin to write something down, the ideas seem to be more half-baked, but then when I’ve finally drafted them down, the thoughts seem to solidify, get rigid on the page. It’s as if it’s passing through the three stages of matter, from it’s fuzzy gaseous state, to the sublimated watery liquid states, and then to its final crystallised solid state of an essay.

I also sometimes notice the cracks spreading through my ideas. And what seemed right in my head, might fall into pieces while writing on the page. And that’s a part of the process; writing makes my thinking cleaner. It detects these fractures, and heals them in due course.

Bruno Latour spoke about how he thinks the printing revolution, like Gutenberg’s, 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.

Even if we’re writing something unoriginal, it can still be useful. Mendel’s ideas were only recognised after thirty-four years of its publication when a guy decided to publish his own ‘unoriginal thoughts’ in 1901, helping accelerate and spread Mendel’s ideas. It sometimes gives a new spin to old ideas, thereby helping in the reincarnation of some of them.

DeVries, Correns and Tschermak independently rediscover Mendel’s work. Three botanists - Hugo DeVries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak - independently rediscovered Mendel’s work in the same year, a generation after Mendel published his papers. They helped expand awareness of the Mendelian laws of inheritance in the scientific world.

The three Europeans, unknown to each other, were working on different plant hybrids when they each worked out the laws of inheritance. When they reviewed the literature before publishing their own results, they were startled to find Mendel’s old papers spelling out those laws in detail. Each man announced Mendel’s discoveries and his own work as confirmation of them.

By 1900, cells and chromosomes were sufficiently understood to give Mendel’s abstract ideas a physical context.

I’ve also found myself writing ‘to think’ in both these categories: to be nerdposting as well as to be feelingsposting. Kasra describes feelingsposting as a kind of journalling where your intention is to be vulnerable, and open up a lot more about how you feel. I usually use the /now page on my site to convey some of these raw emotions.

I mostly do ‘nerdposting’, by writing about arguments, explanations, insights in third person. I’ve adopted a format similar to Karnovsky’s Minimal-Trust Investigations, where he talks about how we’ve imbibed beliefs, merely by just trusting people. He believes in an alternative where we could come up with these conclusions group up instead of having to suspend our trust on others, and to dig as deeply into the question as we can.

- I brush my teeth twice a day, even though I've never read a study on the effects of brushing one's teeth, never tried to see what happens when I _don't_ brush my teeth, and have no idea what's in toothpaste. It seems like most reasonable-seeming people think it's worth brushing your teeth, and that's about the only reason I do it.

- I believe climate change is real and important, and that official forecasts of it are probably reasonably close to the best one can do. I have read a bunch of arguments and counterarguments about this, but ultimately I couldn't tell you much about how the climatologists' models actually work, or specifically what is wrong with the various skeptical points people raise. 

Most of my belief in climate change comes from noticing _who_ is on each side of the argument and _how_ they argue, not _what_ they say. So it comes mostly from deciding whom to trust.

Look at this example of how Karnovsky arrives at the conclusion that insecticide-treated nets are a cheap way to treat malaria:

• People sleep under LLINs, which are mosquito nets treated with insecticide (see picture above, taken from here).
• The netting can block mosquitoes from biting people while they sleep. The insecticide also deters and kills mosquitoes.
• A number of studies show that LLINs reduce malaria cases and death. These studies are rigorous - LLINs were randomly distributed to some people and not others, allowing a clean "experiment." (The key studies are summarized in a Cochrane review, the gold standard of evidence reviews, concluding that there is a "saving of 5.6 lives each year for every 1000 children protected.")
• LLINs cost a few dollars, so a charity doing LLIN distribution is probably saving lives very cost-effectively.
• Perhaps the biggest concern is that people might not be using the LLINs properly, or aren't using them at all (e.g., perhaps they're using them for fishing).

Most of my essays here, are based on this framework, and I’ve driven great joy from writing about these topics. If you notice the overall reasoning structure of how he has arrived at the argument for LLINs, he has zeroed in on first-principles, going deep into the sources, and questioning even their derivatives to hone his argument on sound knowledge. Writing using these minimal principal investigations give us protective shield where we’re not merely relying on ‘person A said X, therefore I trust Y’.

Another good reason on why I write to think, is to remove the clogging in my brain.

It sometimes gets to choke, and you sort of have to ‘empty’ your brain onto a page, so that there is room to create new thoughts. Josh Shapiro describes this with an analogy of a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile of piping is packed with wastewater. The waste water should be emptied before the clean water arrives. And because the pipe has only one faucet, there’s no shortcut to achieving clarity other than first emptying the waste water.

And when the pipe is clean, I tend to think better; through writing.