Some people want to do philosophy but will barely talk on a philosophy forum because it takes them a lot of time and effort to write anything. They also don’t do enough private writing – notes, journaling, written brainstorming, written pro/con lists, essays, tree diagrams, etc.
That sounds like me.
I did have bad experiences with writing when I was in school. I guess because my goal for writing wasn’t to organize and share my ideas. It was to write what I thought would get a good grade.
I probably don’t keep that in mind enough. I get stuck on a path that’s needlessly difficult instead of looking for a better path forward.
That makes sense. It’s probably not necessary to worry so much about grammar when I’m writing something. And resist the urge to go back and rewrite simple sentences with minor improvements.
Yeah and the biggest errors (in my case) are usually nothing to do with grammar. The grammar isn’t what’s holding me back from making progress.
That sounds much more efficient.
This also sounds like me.
If you’re on a forum with your friends, then it’s even easier.
This makes a lot of sense. It should be pretty easy for me to post a lot.
I think I have often been psychologically blocked from writing how I speak. I’m concerned that the way I speak is just too disorganized. If I write out a quick free write, the style is usually more like a list with a few points on the list that are a little more drawn out. My conversations and personal writings are pretty haphazard. I jump around with lots of tangents and non-sequitors. In order to avoid posting things that are confusing or put undue burden on forum readers, it seems that a fair bit of editing is necessary. I think writing multiple drafts would be a good excercise for me to try instead of editing. However, I think that would take longer so it would not solve the slowness problem that comes from not writing how I speak. And I would still desire come up with a more readable draft that would ultimately be in a form different from how I speak.
Another issue I have is more like writer’s block. I just don’t know if I should even bother saying any of the things that come to my mind on a subject. I get the feeling as I’m writing stuff out that the writing is pretty low value for anyone else to read. That kinda tends me toward writing stuff that I don’t post. To clarify, I haven’t written a lot that I didn’t post but not posting writing does come up. It comes up more as starting to write something and stopping because it seems like not a good thing to write out for a post. I also worry about saying things that are harmful because I don’t trust myself and I’m not good at evaluating that kind of thing.
I can see reasons to not write or post a comment like the one above. It doesn’t really engage directly with the main points of the article or go into specific analysis regarding the details in the article. It also brings up a bunch of personal issues that many forum participants may not benefit from and wouldn’t be interested in. What’s the point of writing a comment like the one above? I guess it helps get me thinking about some of my writing problems and offers up a perspective to others on one person’s issues. The post also didn’t require a big amount of effort or concentration so it’s maybe an example of doing something a little bit more like writing how I speak.
Lots of people have similar problems, and similar concerns and excuses for not writing much or not writing in certain ways, so it’s relevant to others.
I wrote an article suggesting a certain way of posting (writing how you speak) and discussing benefits primarily for the person doing it. You responded with concerns that making those posts would be bad for other people. My article didn’t address that concern (I think, based on skimming and memory). Other people easily could have come up with the same concern about the effect on other people.
Having a quiet forum with few posts, with an atmosphere where everyone is trying so hard to write higher quality posts that they’re unable to say much, is not beneficial for other people. Higher quality posts can actually be harder for people to respond to, which is one of the reasons my essays don’t get many responses. People would benefit from a more relaxed atmosphere, where it’s easier for them to communicate, and they are less worried about living up to some high standards they are trying to set for themselves before having the skill to make those standards reasonably achievable (it’s also unclear that using those standards all the time would be good even with tons of skill – I for one write informally and casually sometimes).
It causes problems to try to use standards when they’re hard because you haven’t already learned enough to pretty easily meet those standards. (See my articles about powering up by doing easy things and how trying to do hard things is inefficient.)
I understand not doing something because you don’t want to for your own sake or reasons. In my article, I tried to address that by talking about personal benefits. I don’t think it generally makes sense not to do something, which a forum owner recommends and wrote an essay trying to get people to do, just because you think it will be bad for the forum. Let him try the forum culture and atmosphere he wants at his forum, that he thinks will work well. (He has more relevant experience and knows some stuff about forums and philosophy that you don’t, so he could plausibly be right about what would make the forum better.)
That sounds like it might not actually be writing how you speak. Most of the time, people don’t speak in lists.
This sounds like a problem you probably don’t have in some of the situations when you’re speaking with people.
These are great points.
I have also been concerned about posting for similar reasons to you @fire. The question of my post’s value being one. So your comment expressed similar concerns I’ve personally had and resulted in a great response from Elliot. That’s of value to me.
Speaking sounds way faster than writing.
My guess is there are a lot of rules to follow and they’re just not being followed.
Yeah, that sounds right because if I didn’t make a mistake I wouldn’t be going back and fixing the stuff I wrote.
Yeah, changing what I just wrote and trying to fix it sounds like me pretending to be something I’m not.
It is a skill I have now. I think I’m afraid of speaking because I don’t want to do it out of turn or I don’t want to lie. But compared to writing I’m just gonna have the same problems anyways.
I like writing how I think because I can make it sound better than when it came out of my head. But really it doesn’t feel like that always ends up happening.
I definitely tried to have high standards for the forums sake. I think of the forum as a “sanctuary for the best of the human species”, as Atlantis, or as Galt’s Gulch. Which means that it merits great respect, therefore you ought to be serious and live up to it. However, it could be that being more conversational is what the internet forum of Atlantis should be like, at least for some people. But that wasn’t my assumption.
I should think more about productiveness and outcome rather than inherent goodness or purity.
I often think the same of not bothering to say what I thought. I think @Elliot wants us to post more stuff even if it isn’t very original and insightful (Curiosity – Specialist Creators with Small Audiences). Also; Curiosity – Individualized Attention Policy:
Feedback doesn’t have to be clever to be good. You can even just say that you’re not interested in something and why. Or say that you couldn’t think of anything to say about an article and explain your thought process (you shouldn’t give up without doing brainstorming or another specific method which you could then say something about).
Same for me.
I should probably focus more on throughput. Ehh, throughput of what? Posts, comments, practice exercises, projects, getting criticism, fixing errors, writing, getting more thoughts out, braining storming. In general have more activity. Have a motor, have initiative.
Being perfectionist is bad, you’re not productive enough then. You need some level quality to avoid unnecessary errors, but the right balance of quality vs quantity is probably more towards quantity than I have now. That would probably result in much quicker progress.
I have started writing more stuff privately before I post and then be a bit more selective and cut out some stuff when I post it. Write down the stuff I think isn’t useful for others to read but relevant to me. If I only focus on posting I could forget those things when reading articles. I thought of the purpose of the writing to be to respond to the article, but it’s actually to learn from it. In that case there would be some writing only relevant to me.
In general I think it’s better to write more stuff down, have it explicitly said. When the ideas are only in the mind, then it’s easier to evade things, to not notice contradictions, to not come up with more criticism, to not notice inner conflicts. Perhaps as you do it a lot you can trust your mind alone more.
Most people have little experience writing. Many people had negative experiences with writing in school.
I didn’t like writing at school.
People sometimes think it’s embarrassing to not already be a good writer.
I actually don’t have high expectations for my own writing because I wasn’t good at it in school. It may actually be better to not have been good at writing in school. If I was then I could have learned bad habits and thought they were good (like sounding very smart) and then have to lose that self-confidence.
When speaking, people worry about their wording less. But what they say is still mostly understandable. In most cases, more precise wording doesn’t solve or prevent any important problem. It’s not worth the effort. Just speaking normally, without stopping to think about wording, is good enough.
In general I think I’m too focused on local optima. I’m too concerned with making things good rather than having it be good enough and achieve whatever goal it was meant to achieve.
I also think I don’t always have to go through the whole article/book every time. It’s fine to only comment on parts of it. I don’t have to be so completionist. It could deter from starting and writing anything about an article because I think it would be too much work. Rather I should think about whether making any comments have value, and wold be worth the effort.
Often, the mistake is trying to pretend to be something they’re not. They want to write as if they’re a more advanced philosopher than they are, and that gets them stuck because they don’t know how to do it.
Being honest with myself, I think I do this. I don’t feel bad about admitting this to myself. It’s fine, I want to learn and become an advanced philosopher.
Or you may be able to speak out loud and then write something similar immediately after.
I found this to be quite effective.
Don’t try to create a new way of holding conversations from scratch for philosophy. It’s much more effective to use your pre-existing ability to hold conversations (in person, in voice). That’s like giving yourself a huge head-start instead of starting near zero. Then you can make one adjustment at a time to address problems you encounter until it works well for your philosophy discussions.
The new way of conversation is revolutionary and contains many errors of it’s own. Which makes the existing conversational method better because it has already fixed some errors, even though it wasn’t designed for textual philosophical discussion.
The reason I’ve recommended learning grammar to people is not so they can start at the beginning and build up all the skills needed to hold a written philosophy conversation.
I have a tendency to want to do things from foundations, bottom up approach. I’m aware of Elliot’s arguments against the importance of foundations. That’s an area I should study and reach a more definitive conclusion on.
Sometimes people ask lazy questions on forums and people are annoyed that the questioner didn’t do a simple web search for themselves. I have some concern about being lazy like this if I’m going to write more and faster in a way similar to how I speak. It’s sort of the same thing with prioritizing quality vs quantity. But my concern is also a bit broader than just not doing a web search, I also worry about not doing enough thinking on a topic before posting. It’s a bit like asking better questions.
I see the benefit in just posting whatever thinking I currently have and let some errors be in it. That way others can fix those errors for me. However if those errors could have been fixed by own thinking, then that could be viewed as laziness.
I have a solution. If the required thinking isn’t much, like 5 minutes, then wait with the post. If the required thinking is more than that, then post whatever I have but say that the post is tentative and that I’m doing more thinking and research. Then the reader can decide whether they want to say something or wait until I have done some thinking first. This way I also show more of my process and people can see where I started and what my biases were.
A reason people might want to say something in between is that there is some other error that I didn’t say I was going to research more and is therefore unlikely to be fixed for the next post. For example I would write an essay which has idea A and B. I post the draft and say I’m uncertain of idea B and expect to research it for the next week. Someone might see an error A and see that B is reliant A, then they could point that out and possibly save my time if I figure researching B isn’t worth it after learning more about A. Also just learning more about A can lead to the final essay being better even if B wasn’t reliant on A.
Another idea on posting stuff that isn’t very good: say you have an idea that you’re uncertain about and you think the idea isn’t very good. Well do you have any alternative idea? If it’s the best idea you have then you might have to act on that idea in the future, in that case it would have been better if you had posted about this not very good idea, because then someone could have criticized it and you could have had a new better idea. So post the idea and perhaps you think it’s not that good. If the idea isn’t very original, then maybe you should just state that. Maybe you can’t articulate why you think the idea isn’t very good, then you should probably state that you have some intuition that it isn’t very good. Or maybe just write more conservatively, like use “I think”, “probably” and so on.
Also I think I’ll use speaking out loud when I’m not writing fast, if I’m writing fast responses without speaking out loud then I don’t see much need for speaking out loud.
The issue is writing style. Sometimes people use a slow, careful writing style, agonize over word choices, and edit repeatedly. This extra time spent on writing doesn’t actually do a good job of catching and fixing topical errors. It’s a different activity than doing more thinking or research. It can actually be misleading: polished writing gives the impression of knowing what you’re talking about, having fully-baked ideas, doing appropriate research, etc.
For thinking and research, feel free to spend time on those.
FYI there is an issue where sometimes people don’t get external feedback early enough, but that’s on a different timescale than one writing session. Like if you spent the next month researching something without posting anything about it, and it turned out to be something someone here already knew important criticism of that they could have linked if you had just mentioned it, then that’s inefficient. Similarly, I’ve seen lots of people finish an entire philosophical book before they mention it, and they had some misunderstanding near the beginning which affected their interpretations of most of the rest of the book. So there’s a risk involved with late feedback there. But this is a separate issue than how long you spend in a writing session trying to optimize your wording.
From an AMA on reddit with Scott Alexander:
How do you write so quickly? I find it takes me a dozen or more hours to write anything as thorough as one of your blog posts. (It’s possible that I’m just unusually slow).
I guess I don’t really understand why it takes so many people so long to write. They seem to be able to talk instantaneously, and writing isn’t that different from speech. Why can’t they just say what they want to say, but instead of speaking it aloud, write it down?
Are thoughts conversations with ourselves? I don’t know how good of a writer I am or how good my writing is, but I am able (and have been able for a while) to write a lot on stuff I have a lot of thoughts about. I think part of my success in being able to consistently write has been just writing down my thoughts for myself.
In high school, I read stuff/quotes about how your brain is for having thoughts and not for keeping them. Because of that I started noting down a lot of my thoughts. Maybe thats something people can try? Looking at some of my oldest recorded writings, some of the stuff I wrote was really bad, but it wasn’t meant for anyones eyes just to keep track of some thoughts I had. Then again I think people sometimes don’t value their thoughts too much. I’ve pretty much always valued my thoughts and judgement. There are certain areas of my life where I struggle with valuing my thoughts on something and tell myself thats a bad idea or something. I’d say broadly though I’ve always valued my thoughts on things, so it was easy for me to start recording them.
I started journaling because Elliot recommended it, and I did some other private writing too (I’ve only written and journaled sporadically though). I think the way I’m writing now is more like my private writing style than my speaking style. I don’t speak much English anyway.
I think some thoughts are conversation with ourselves, but not all. Do you imagine pictures/images of things, or only think in words? I don’t think imagined images are conversations.
I wonder if all linguistic/text-like thought can be thought of as conversation. Even if there isn’t back and forth, it can be like a singular comment on something, and would therefore count as a conversation.
I guess there are thoughts that aren’t images or text either. Like you have an idea but can’t really articulate it or have a clear image of what it is. That’s mostly when you’re unclear on something, but it could also be unconscious knowledge which you are able to act out masterfully. I wouldn’t guess all that unconscious knowledge is conversation.
I found this video to be helpful. It’s similar to writing how you speak. It’s about writing in another style (this time like SMS) that is cheaper.
Some are, some aren’t.
While I think writing ideas down is great and valuable, the brain is for both having thoughts and memory. Memory is a major feature too.
I think of it as there being some knowledge you can look up when you need it (from external source), some knowledge you need in order to know that you should look something up, and some knowledge that is so useful you should store it in long-term memory for quick access.
So you need to do some exploration to find the knowledge that lets you know what to look up and when to look it up. Much of the knowledge in a non-fiction book isn’t useful to you at all, and some of it will be useful, but not useful enough to store for long-term memory. Most details are best left in the book, and if you learned some general knowledge from the book you would know when those details would be useful.
Ok, I see I sometimes do that when talking with friends irl. I’m like, “Just say it. Just say the words.”
I do notice I sometimes would start from scratch when I write how I speak and I didn’t like what I wrote. I rather use the whole process again from the start.
Only thing I don’t like right now when writing how I speak is not using a recorder, cuz I would forget all the words I said and try to fill in the blanks with my mind. I like using the recorder, but I also feel embarrassed using it sometimes. Idk I’ll try using the recorder again cuz writing how I speak feels easier lately so I can focus more on the recording part.