Folks here mentioned that the core point is not about the need to the importance of reading, but the importance of writing. No, it’s really about becoming better at deep, structured thinking. I think that’s quite a good thing to focus on.
The world we live in is becoming more complex. I think it’s because our communication pipelines now have unlimited IO - there’s too much to consume, too much to process, too many thoughts we feel the need to express in response to all these inputs. All of this at the unforgivably quick eventual constituency cross-region replication guarantees afforded to us by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and many others.
I write more these days.
I don’t share most of what I write.
I write for myself, because I think that writing my thoughts helps to refine these thoughts, retain them for future me, and, on occasion, share them with another person, thru conversion, or by just copy pasting something I wrote.
You don’t need a blog to start writing. Just start writing. VS Code. Notepad. Emacs. A piece of paper. It doesn’t matter. As long as you can do it when you feel like it. Write.
Weatherford, in his Genghis Khan book, says there isn't much surviving text about that period and region. But whar sources he uses in that book are all by "chroniclers" of that era - my understanding is that the chroniclers are average reporters of that period, with a decent patronage; just documenting things on paper as they hear/research/study it; without the intention of publishing for widespread readership.
So here's a random idea based on that: Can we incentivize more people to report on a topic/event today? Just write, do not have to publish.
^ If more people just write commentary/summary like this for whatever they consume, it might double as a decent diversion from just consuming content online. And maybe.. maybe it will make us mindful about what we consume online :D
> average reporters of that period, with a decent patronage; just documenting things on paper as they hear/research/study it; without the intention of publishing for widespread readership.
We don’t really have that anymore though right?
The current internet is economy strongly incentivizes people to write things in favor of engagement.
Sometimes this aligns with ground truth (e.g. Gergely Orosz, who has documented Musk’s Twitter takeover via daily updates). Many times it does not.
Who is supposed to be the historical record keeper, at this time, when trust in record keepers is at an all time low?
I find myself uncomfortable asking such controversial questions, but I do feel like they should be asked
> Who is supposed to be the historical record keeper, at this time, when trust in record keepers is at an all time low?
All of us.
I don't think we need to get hung up on 'who', not really. I mean with regard to historical sources, how we do know that these were always 'true' reporting and not (deliberately or otherwise) untrustworthy, at best misunderstood, by whoever wrote them because they may have not had all the informarion or reporting second/third hand or an agenda.
Sometimes it isn't necessarily what is written as much as it is who wrote it and when and under what circumstances.
Recently I’ve heard it put in the context of how we can use rituals to build up our personal power (in the energy / ability to get things done sense, not the psychotic sense). This prompted me to make a list of things that can be ritualized for this purpose and writing is a big one.
I kind of stumbled upon writing by accident. To me it’s not about ability to get things done (thought it helps). It’s about feeling some semblance of control and structure, something I think so many struggle with in the past few years (Trump, COVID, Ukraine/Russia, recent tech layoffs, etc etc).
As others here mentioned, it’s kind of like programming.
We used it to live in “hello world”.
Now we all got thrown into this crazy distributed microservice world. The language of this new world is still the same. It’s (mostly) English. Except it’s more complex now and you have to be faster and better at writing. So write.
By the way, here’s a thought that worries me - where does “let’s all become good deep structural thinkers by writing a lot” break down? How will we know it happened? What do we do then?
The world we live in is becoming more complex. I think it’s because our communication pipelines now have unlimited IO - there’s too much to consume, too much to process, too many thoughts we feel the need to express in response to all these inputs. All of this at the unforgivably quick eventual constituency cross-region replication guarantees afforded to us by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and many others.
I write more these days.
I don’t share most of what I write.
I write for myself, because I think that writing my thoughts helps to refine these thoughts, retain them for future me, and, on occasion, share them with another person, thru conversion, or by just copy pasting something I wrote.
You don’t need a blog to start writing. Just start writing. VS Code. Notepad. Emacs. A piece of paper. It doesn’t matter. As long as you can do it when you feel like it. Write.