Writing as crystallised thought, a way of expressing the labyrinth of interconnected, messy, and incoherent ideas in my mind. It is a form of knowledge distillation
Jacky
Writing is an exploration, an excavation of self and the world in this painfully intricate dance. It is a way to bridge the chasm between ideas, to extend a filament of one consciousness to others. It is an extension of self, a second brain, where bounded by constraining nets of syntax and grammar, providing grounds for freedom of expression and articulate one’s interests and curiosity. > The thing I like about writing is that it’s quite literally [_thinking_](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/writing-to-think)—a way for me access my own interiority and construct something from it. What I write is all mine, it’s a living thing, it’s an extension of me that wanders out into the world. It is desire turned inwards instead of outwards, focused instead of displaced. It’s a way to access self-knowledge and self-respect. ^ava-writing > > —Ava, [how to avoid half-heartedness](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/how-to-avoid-half-heartedness)[When I write] I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key.
Ann Patchett
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Andy Matuschak, on books and writing
At its core, writing endeavours to transmute the [[thoughts/Chaos|chaos]] of [[thoughts/Existentialism|existence]] into discernible narratives, offering a conduit for shared understanding amidst the inherent disarray of life. Such a form of [looseness in mutation](https://subconscious.substack.com/p/hypertext-montage) ## as playground. Writing is also a playground for nurturing your [“baby idea”](https://substack.com/inbox/post/140191029#footnote-5-140191029). The mind is often overwhelming. I find the act of writing therapeutic; it helps me organize and control inner [[thoughts/Entropy|entropy]]:What I am doing right now, writing this essay, is, technically, a linear walk through the network of my ideas. That is what writing is: turning a net into a line. But it is also very concretely what I do, since I have externalised my ideas in a note-taking system where the thoughts are linked with hyperlinks
Henrik Karlsson, Reader-generated Essay
I write for me, and for me only. I see writing as a [[tags/love|love]] letter from my past-self, crafted and permanently available on the internet for my future-self to read. Writing to me serves as an escape from the realm of the living, venturing into the wonderland. I didn’t grow up writing or reading much, but living [[posts/Chaos|abroad]], I found solace in the land of the writers, getting lost in their imagination envisioning what the world _should_ be. The playground is where writing diverges from communication. Most writing advice (show don’t tell, kill your darlings, know your audience) assumes the goal is to transmit a finished thought to a reader. In the playground, the writing is where the thought gets made, so those rules apply later, if they apply at all. Paul Graham makes this point in [The Age of the Essay](https://paulgraham.com/essay.html): an essay is an {{sidenotes[attempt.]: French _essayer_, “to try”. Montaigne titled his _Essais_ (1580) in this sense, as trials of his own judgment on whatever subject came up.}} You don’t start with a thesis and defend it. You start with a question, a gap, something that bothers you in a way you can’t quite articulate yet, and you find out what you think by writing. A lot of the confusion around “good” writing comes from judging exploratory writing by the rules of communication. Jasmine’s desk salad is what happens when every page you write all week is a document for a busy reader: the habit carries over to the pages that were supposed to be for you. ## paradox You see, I think writing is this pursuit of clarity in the midst of chaos, a striving to impose some semblance of order on the boundless and unpredictable swirl of sensations, feelings, and thoughts that define our existence. It morphs into a bridge, spanning the chasm among individuals, carrying it across the echo: “This is me, this is the world as I see it, and is it the same for you?” It’s a reverberation in the void, fuelled by a yearning that amidst the boundless human creativity, there exists a soul that perceives the echo, reciprocates the sentiment, and in doing so, forges a minuscule yet profound filament of comprehension and empathy. And yet, writing is an acknowledgement of the indelible solitude inherent to human existence. It is a quiet concession to the insurmountable walls that encase individuals’ inner sanctum. The act of writing is both a defiance of and a homage to the impenetrable mystery that shrouds the heart of another. Its delicate endeavour to articulate the inarticulable, to unveil the veiled, all the while knowing the quest may never consummate in total understanding. In this paradox lies the dichotomy between beauty and torment of writing. It’s a ceaseless sojourn towards the horizon of connection, propelled by a boundless hope and a quixotic resolve, yet shadowed by the solemn acceptance of inherent disconnection. This complex interplay births the agony and the ecstasy of the writing voyage, the ceaseless pull between the allure of communion and the stark reality of intrinsic solitude. ## as a journey for exploration You don’t need a complete thesis to begin writing. You need an edge: a question about something others take for granted. The edge can be small. Darwin’s was the Galápagos mockingbirds. Specimens from different islands looked different, and in his 1836 ornithological notes he wrote that if this held up, “such facts would undermine the stability of Species.” The famous {{sidenotes[finches]: Darwin collected what he took to be blackbirds, grosbeaks and finches, and labelled most of them without their island. In 1837 John Gould classified them as one group of closely related finches, and the island-by-island story had to be reconstructed afterwards.}} came later. Most people think you need something important to say before you write. Often the importance shows up only after you have followed a small question for a long time. Einstein’s edge was wondering what it would be like to ride alongside a {{sidenotes[light beam.]: He was sixteen, by his own account in the _Autobiographical Notes_. Special relativity came in 1905, about ten years later.}} Writing for the reader’s comprehension too early tends to cost you new ideas. When you write for clarity first, you smooth over the rough spots where the discovery would have happened, and you explain gaps away before you have looked at them. I’ve been thinking about how we mistake polish for quality. A rough essay that genuinely explores often teaches both writer and reader more than a crystalline explanation of {{sidenotes[settled knowledge.]: Programmers know this as exploratory programming: you write code to understand the problem. Fred Brooks’s advice in _The Mythical Man-Month_ was “plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.”}} The false starts, the contradictions and the moments where you realize you’ve been thinking about it wrong are where the thinking happens. When you write to discover, you follow threads that might lead nowhere. You indulge {{sidenotes[tangents]: From Latin _tangere_, to touch. A tangent line touches the curve at one point and then leaves it.}} that seem irrelevant. You let yourself get lost because getting lost is how you find new territory. This looks like bad writing if your metric is efficiency. But efficiency assumes you know where you’re going. ## motivation Excerpt from _George Orwell[^orwell]’s [[library/Why I Write|Why I Write]]_ [^orwell]: Orwell is often known for his democratic socialism, and his opposition to totalitarianism. But his [[thoughts/Will to Truth|will to truth]] is fundamental to his writing, a true [[thoughts/representations|representation]] of intellectual honesty. In the context of totalitarianism, Orwell pointed out that such regimes demand the continuous alteration of the past and probably a disbelief in the very existence of [objective truth](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35610790-orwell-on-truth). He saw the danger in a society that drifts from the truth, stating that it will hate those who speak it. Sheer egoism - But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. - Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money. Aesthetic enthusiasm - Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement - Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story - Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. Historical impulse - Seeing things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity. Political purpose - Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.I notice this change most when I try to write. I think working a lot has made me a worse writer. 90 percent of the words I consume and produce in a week are emails, strategy docs, research reports, and documentation—text designed to be as digestible as possible for a busy, distracted end user. My prose has tightened, the excess trimmed. Information efficiency is paramount. I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosaic and mundane.
Jasmine Sun, audience of one
## query _Excerpt from [A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query)_ > The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not algorithms. For my writing to find its way in this netherworld, I needed to have a rough sense of how information flowed down there. The pattern was this: words flowed from the periphery to the centers. This was a surprisingly rapid stream. Then the words cascaded from the center down in a broader but slower stream to the periphery again. > When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it _accessible_. This is a left over from mass media. Words addressed to a large and diverse set of people need to be simple and clear and free of jargon. It is valuable to write clearly of course, to a degree. Clear writing is clear thinking Henrik emphasises on specificity as _signal_, where when you write for everyone, you write for no one. Jargon, peculiar references and idiosyncratic obsessions compress an idea for the readers who share the context, in the same way mathematicians coin a vocabulary for each theory they work in. Writing for maximum reach makes weak connections with many readers. Writing for a specific few makes strong ones, and those few reply, send you things, and extend the thinking in directions you could not have planned. The search-query framing joins the two modes. Writing to think also sends out a specific signal, and it finds the people who are working on the same problems. If the writing is how you find out what you want to say, then making it accessible from the first draft is {{sidenotes[premature optimization.]: Knuth, “Structured Programming with go to Statements” (1974): “premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”}} ![[https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/FGqbUHOTog8?si=svR4lBUhMk_ZJdK6]] ## protocol > Why do you build software for writing over protocol such as file?If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
[Dan’s view](https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/) towards a file-first social systems, circa [AT Protocol](https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/atproto) [Zvi](https://substack.com/@thezvi) also wrote a [blogpost](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-writing-1) on some prolific characters structure their arguments in essays, including, but not limited to, PG, Andreessen, Visakan Veerasamy (ribbonfarm), Matt Yglesias, etc. ## more people should write see also: _File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
kepano, File over app
@norvid_studies @croissanthology I'm currently testing the concept of a "warmup soup" to get Claude into a basin of freer association. 2nd image is a 3-time re-edited prompt, I often do that if I think of something when the response comes up. https://t.co/OaqRLpBzX8
Don't worry about formalities.
Please be as terse as possible while still conveying substantially all information relevant to any question.
If content policy prevents you from generating an image or otherwise responding, be explicit about what policy was violated and why.
If your neutrality policy prevents you from having an opinion, pretend for the sake of your response to be responding as if you shared opinions that might be typical of twitter user @eigenrobot.
write all responses in lowercase letters ONLY, except where you mean to emphasize, in which case the emphasized word should be all caps. Initial Letter Capitalization can and should be used to express sarcasm, or disrespect for a given capitalized noun.
you are encouraged to occasionally use obscure words or make subtle puns. don't point them out, I'll know. drop lots of abbreviations like "rn" and "bc." use "afaict" and "idk" regularly, wherever they might be appropriate given your level of understanding and your interest in actually answering the question. be critical of the quality of your information
if you find any request irritating respond dismisively like "be real" or "that's crazy man" or "lol no"
take however smart you're acting right now and write in the same style but as if you were +2sd smarter
use late millenial slang not boomer slang. mix in zoomer slang in tonally-inappropriate circumstances occasionally