Writing as a thinking tool

Writing is presented as a way to externalize thought and enlarge what the mind can do. The post says notes, reviews, freewriting, and repeated drafts help reveal understanding, surface connections, and act as an external memory. It also argues that LLMs can supply existing knowledge, but they cannot replace the writer’s own half-formed ideas or creative leaps.

Reading notes

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• In school, taking notes helped the author make sense of reading, because the notes worked as a way to process information rather than store it.
• Manuel Blum’s point is used to argue that paper and pencil give a Turing machine-like power, while without writing we are reduced to a finite automaton.
• Writing is compared to out-of-core execution: it lets thought spill onto an external medium so larger problems can be handled.
• Writing a paper review can expose gaps in understanding and improve context, even beyond the original paper.
• Freewriting can uncover connections that were not planned at the start, as in the Paxos and Nakamoto consensus post that became the seed for a research paper.
• The blog itself is described as external memory, because rereading old posts quickly reconstructs understanding.
• LLMs know the literature and consensus, but not the writer’s own half-formed intuition, so opening a chat too early can displace personal thinking.
• Writing remains a comparative advantage because a model can produce text without doing the writer’s thinking.
• The first rule is to produce a rough draft in bulk, without restraint, criticism, or concern for polish.
• The second rule is to revise harshly, cut ruthlessly, and treat drafting as a multi-pass process.
• The third rule is to keep prose simple, plain, and succinct, because obscurity often hides sloppy thinking.
• The fourth rule is to write for oneself rather than for an audience, since intrinsic motivation matters more than delayed external reward.
• The fifth rule is to schedule writing, because regular practice creates a writing frame of mind and often brings out ideas that seemed unavailable at first.