This can't literally be true for anyone, right? By the time you've written down a thought, a dozen more have come and gone, never to be followed up. Writing can perhaps add rigor to thinking, but it's not like thinking in its essentials.
You've written many HN comments. Do you ever, after starting to write a comment, but before hitting submit, have a new thought that changes your mind a bit? Does that ever make you go back to edit what you've written, either before you submit, or shortly after?
Or get so close to the end of the point you're trying to make, and then BAM, you realise an alternate interpretation of the post you're replying to, which, upon further consideration is more likely the intended interpretation of the comment, than what your now almost-completely typed reply was addressing, rendering the reply pointless.
There's so much processing the brain does in the background, that it makes the foreground seem young and foolish.
Honestly friend, this is some exceptional writing (and thus thinking). I read the parent comment and wanted to say roughly the same thing, but you absolutely nailed it.
Sure! I'll even agree (trivially, I guess) that thinking is definitely a part of that process... but that doesn't seem to contradict my earlier comment. I really just mean the "thinking" metaphor for writing is very far from my experience of what ordinary thinking is like -- so much that it seems bizarre to me to conflate them.
I don't see it as a metaphor. Writing and thinking are different. They can affect each other. Writing doesn't usually (ever?) happen without thinking. Thinking can happen without writing but, for me at least, the act of writing promotes a type of thinking that makes it easier to understand, analyze and develop my model of the world.
