Thinking by Writing

Conclusions from Thinking with Zettelkasten and Workshop vs Library:

  • there's some kind of difference in using language for thinking and for communicating thoughts, be it written or spoken
  • thinking by writing is an example of Extended Mind notion, where thinking happens partially outside of the brain
  • Andy Matuschak argues that most people don't take evergreen notes - ones that will be relevant in weeks, months, years, and for most people taking notes is just a way to close "open loops", instead of "accumulating insight"

    Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects

    — Andy Matuschak - https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes

  • I think there should be some friction to adding new notes, which forces me to re-read and re-think through the material - there's a difference between quick inbox capture, and long-term storage, the friction of migrating from inbox to long-term storage might be a good thing; Tom MacWright has similar intuitions:

    I think there's some notetaking/databasing ideology in which any "friction" between your brain and the notebook is viewed as bad. Which imho is a faulty idea: choosing words and structure in order to represent your thoughts is not a chore, it's part of forming the thoughts

    — Tom MacWright - https://twitter.com/tmcw/status/1233893351981633536

  • thinking about this makes sense, if it improves some other thing - Notes Should Serve a Purpose after all
Canvas for Thinking
  • keeping in mind Thinking by Writing ideas, canvas for thinking should probably be a very personal thing
    • all my attempts so far, to share the work in progress canvases have failed - they seem to be too close to my internal concept map for them to be useful to anyone else in the spatial form
Cognitive Medium
Each Extensions is an Amputation
Epistemic Actions
Great Thoughts
Ideating-Authoring
Software Performance and Thinking
  • thinking by writing makes it easy to think, as there's very small latency to putting things on paper / in text buffer - you don't think about the tool/medium, you think thoughts and use the tools to put them in writing
Thinking About Thinking Requires Something to Think About
  • this is interesting when compared to the concept that thinking requires some kind of externalization - Situated Cognition - the same way we can externalize our thinking to some medium (like Thinking by Writing), we have to have a substrate to think about, to notice the patterns of thinking itself
Thinking and Time
  • tools like writing allow for growing ideas over long periods of time (if deliberately used to do so)
Workshop vs Library