# Better thinking through writing [Draft]

- What is Writing 
    - writing is any deliberate activity to externalise the thoughts which can later be manipulated
    - I want to separate writing for work vs writing for thinking
    - the obv analogy is fitness for manual labour vs fitness for better health
    - writing is fitness for your brain, writing taking time and effort is a feature not a bug
    - Writing helps organize your thoughts, in fact for any serious thinking writing becomes absolutely critical 
        - thinking is hard and takes time
        - the objective is not to share something with the reader but rather a canvas for your own brain to wrestle with your thinking
- why not just think on your mind 
    - working memory is limited, hence you are artifically limiting yourself when thinking. This leaks through the quality of thoughts and consequently the actions you take in the world.
    - you can't keep track of your thoughts historically across long durations of time
    - you can easily lie to yourself
    - emotions can get in the way
    - you cant get feedback from others
- what do I use writing for 
    - informal notes for learning new concepts
    - organizing my thoughts to make an important decision, listing out the pros and cons and the tradeoffs involved before making a decision. this enables a few
    - convey my thought process
    - a theraputic device to let out my emotions - helps when you feel overwhelmed
- my writing algorithm 
    - it depends on the use case, but it roughly boils down to the following
    - loosely based on babble prune. 
        - explore first, then cut off as much as possible.
        - in explore phase dont care about semantic or syntactical correctness
    - mental dump of various tangents that are fresh on my mind
    - load as much higher order bits of context into my working memory before starting to write
    - try to get a rough shape of what I am trying to convey
- tools 
    - the simpler and robust the system the better. What you think/write is more important than how, but with technology you can use them to aid your writing
    - aim for minimal distractions
    - the tool should not hinder your progress or flow state
    - tool should help you collaborate without friction when needed \[trivial inconviniences\]
    - my way of writing/thinking involves using an outliner heavily (eg. workflowy, dynalist)
- is there a difference between 
    - writing by hand and typing? 
        - there are some studies which
    - writing vs dictating to an AI
- AI x writing 
    - people get an illusion of understanding when they dicsuss ideas with an LLM
    - there is a huge epidemic of people offloading their writing, thereby thinking to llms hence leading to atrophy of thinking in general. Similar to how muscles atrophies without resistance.
    - people who are serious about thinking, would guard and notice this subtlety.
    - like others, I substituted discussions with llms and using the generated text as a product of my thinking. In come
- what does a good AI human symbiosis look like? 
    - you need to own the scaffolding and the though vectors
    - a vector has a magnitude and direction - use llms for magnitude and not for direction
    - own the direction and dont take the magnitude gain from the llm at face value
    - use the llm for critique without being influenced as much as possible
    - an ideal usage would be something like a compiler. Similar to how a C compiler compiles high level code to assembly, a good llm based workflow ought to preserve the semantics of your writing.
    - the more I think about it, I feel convinced that wielding llms would require ICs to develop some managerial/executive thinking 
        - as much as I abhor the M word, we can study an activity without falling for the ugh field beliefs that we have associated to it based on our experience.
        - how do small group of humans run large corps, governments, armies, etc. where they dont have the full context of everything that's happening?