Learning and thinking and writing (sometimes in public) (Across the Sundering Seas, #16)
Well, dear readers—
The essay I mentioned last week (the piece I thought would be this email this week) has taken on a life of its own, as these things so often do. It’s growing into a substantive (at least: I hope it is substantive) argument about the nature of learning and the relationship of forms like books and lectures to learning. Matuschak’s essay has become a foil for my argument, rather than itself the focus. There is whole (Silicon Valley-typical) frame of thinking about learning I deeply and sharply disagree with, and I mean to give it the best broadside I can. A sense of the direction of the essay as it currently stands:
I am the last to argue that forms do not matter, or that they cannot shape us. To the contrary: forms matter very much, and the things they encourage shape us very deeply. But if we wish to offer a critique of certain forms based on the things toward which they shape us, we need to be clear on three things: first, what the forms actually encourage; and second, how we are actually seeking to be shaped; and third, how we ought to be seeking to be shaped. Books proper are over 1,500 years old. The basic form of a long written document arguing a particular view is another millennium older than that. If the idea is that a few thousand years of humans were just fools… well, isn’t it at least equally possible that it is our own aims that are mis-ordered?
(That paragraph was one of those just-before-bed mental overflows that happens to me sometimes; I’m grateful I wrote it down.)
This in turn has dovetailed quite nicely with some ongoing reflections on how thinking works. My new side project of building a research writing app is in a very real sense an attempt to build a tool for thinking: both thinking for oneself and thinking for others’s sake. Doing that well means considering exactly how effective thinking happens. What are the ways that our tools encourage clear thinking? Equally, what are the ways they inhibit thinking well?
For me (and for no few others throughout history), writing is the single most fruitful form of thinking available. As I put it in my notebook a couple days ago:
It strikes me that careful, active note-taking is just exactly that process [of writing], but in private (even if it does sometimes surface into things we publish as well). The act of committing words to storage—paper has one set of upsides, digital another; and there is very little overlap between the two save that both serve to frame thought—drives one to articulate, to differentiate, to extrapolate, and so on. Writing requires thinking; taking notes (not merely in the sense of transcribing information, but in reflecting on it verbally) is the act of thinking in some sense.
That turn at the end, to “taking notes,” gets at a distinction I have long understood at an unconscious level but have only lately been getting a conscious handle on: between writing and publishing. Much of my thinking-via-writing career over the last decade has found its home in public thinking on my blog. That kind of public thinking through things is valuable, and I don’t regret it in the least. Indeed, it was noting the way that my blog has served as a kind of public-facing Zettelkasten that really got me running down this line of research into research last year.
I have a habit that might not make sense to you. I reread my own blog posts fairly regularly. It’s not vanity — not some weird obsession with my own awesomeness in the form of my own writing or some such nonsense. It’s that in my blog posts over the last decade, I have a pretty serious backlog of what I was thinking about at any given point in time.…
…
…It’s not just that a blog can serve as a place to do some of the fleshing-out of ideas. It’s not just that a blog can be a record of the development of ideas. It can also serve to jog new ideas if you read yourself again, displaced (both literally and temporally) from the original writing of the thing. A blog is kind of like a public notebook, and while it may be useful for others to browse through it, is is useful for me to browse back through it.
One of the things I am perpetually thinking on, for good or for ill, is what the appropriate venue for a given bit of writing is. Should it be public or private? If public, should it be a quick blog post, unpublished, or turned into a full-on essay? Should it go on my website, or in this newsletter, or even somewhere else online? (Should I republish this very piece on my blog, complementary as it is to my ongoing reflections in that space on the same subject?)
On the one hand, this might seem a needless consideration, a waste of mental energy. So indeed it might be, at times. But there is a very significant difference between each of those—in terms of the time investment, for one; but also in terms of audience, and audience really matters! To return to my note I quoted at the beginning (itself now in some strange netherworld of both-private-and-public; for I am not publishing all of it here):
There is an important difference between writing for others and writing for oneself, though. In both cases, one is communicating to another, but in the case of communicating with one’s future self, one can assume a good deal more good will, continuity of thought, shared context, and so on. Notes require less polish and finesse. At the same time, that can breed a kind of laziness: surely I will remember this thing. But if experience is any guide, far more surely will I forget this thing.
I think about this often; I have even begun including on my blog an Assumed Audience heading because of the many problems that arise from having a universal audience. I certainly feel freer scribbling a possibly-garbage thought, or even one simply lacking sufficient nuance for public consumption, in Bear than I do in writing this newsletter, or especially a blog post. Defaulting to public for thinking has severe costs, as our decade-long experiment with social media is making increasingly clear. A blog may have those issues in lesser degree, precisely because it does not have the inherent sociality of Twitter or Facebook, but the issues remain.
I have no easy answers to those questions about how publicly to think at any given instance. None of us do. But the meta-reflection is, I hope, useful. (If not for you, it is for me; in which case perhaps it should have been private? And here is the crux!)
One final thought. I have occasionally wondered: as a complement to my habit of jotting notes on paper and not only with a keyboard… what might be the fruit of analogizing my digital notebooks—from my blog and now also from Bear—by printing them? What new things might I learn from reading them in a different form? For, to return to the point I’m digging into in the essay that is not this issue of the newsletter: different forms do matter, and a book is not the same as a blog.
Happy thinking, readers!