The introduction to the article denies its main point:
> If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it.
It’s a logical error. It’s like saying: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look foolish, therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks foolish. Clearly there are other ways to look foolish.
So even if writing always clarified thought, it’s wrong to infer it’s impossible to have clear thoughts without writing.
But since the writer here committed this mistake, he demonstrated that writing does not always result in clear thought.
Incidentally, I wrote this comment to clarify my thoughts .
No, it's like: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look more foolish - always, no matter what else they did - therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks perfectly foolish.
Or, say, people who have caught a Snorlax have more Pokemon, therefore no one who hasn't caught a Snorlax has all the Pokemon.
This assumes that there's such a thing as a "fully formed idea" (which means an exception to "always" - you can't clarify your thoughts more and more by writing about them forever). If there isn't, it's still true, but it's not saying a whole lot.
Stressing the "always" makes the argument valid only because it's a wordier version of "ideas can always be made more precise and complete, therefore no idea is perfectly precise and complete," which has nothing to do with writing. If we try to salvage the argument by making the assumption that the author obviously meant some ideas are perfect, but only written ideas, this becomes "unwrittendown ideas can always be made more precise and complete, therefore no unwrittendown idea is perfect". Which is vacuously valid in that the antecedent and consequent are identical.
The argument is either merely asserting the conclusion or invalid. I guess it's a matter of judgment which one is the charitable interpretation of the author's meaning.
Perhaps the most charitable interpretation is that the quoted bit isn't intended as an argument at all, just a restatement to cast an already-established conclusion in a different light. It's presented as a "shocking" additional implication, but perhaps it's the shock that's supposed to be novel, not the implication.
I think you're right. But I still think the quote from Graham is terrible writing: confusing, brittle, convoluted, almost as if it was designed to hide something from readers and manipulate them into a different understanding than what it actually claims.
The quote is, as you explain, technically correct due to its use of "always". Take this word away and the sentence is correct English, but the meaning now is incorrect (and would match the interpretation of the comment you replied to). Making the correctness hinge so directly in the subtlety of the presence of the quantifier makes the sentence brittle and convoluted.
It feels almost manipulative, as if the writer hopes the reader won't inspect the sentence so closely (and thus will miss this subtlety) and will understand something slightly different ("if you don't write, it's impossible to have clear thoughts"), so that the conclusion sounds much stronger. And readers do get the incorrect interpretation, as evidenced by the comment you replied to, which attacks the misunderstanding of that sentence.
So while I fully agree with you, I still think the sentence quoted is an example of terribly unhelpful and confusing writing. Especially because the full premise "writing down your ideas _always_ makes them more precise and complete" is debatable (you just need to find one counterexample).
(Incidentally, my recollection of Graham's writing is that this type of misleading sentences (that are technically correct but appear to say something else, something that isn't), as if they were deliberately cultivated.)
A much better sentence would be something like:
* "Writing down your ideas is great to make them more precise and more complete. It's hard to have fully formed ideas about a topic without writing about it." This matches the understanding of a quick glance of the sentence.
* "Writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and complete." Closer to the actual meaning, but doesn't do a slight of hand to hide the main point.
Perhaps it is because of the impossibility of coming to full clarity? It is the process of the truth developing that is more important than any absolute truth, which, it is always clear, turns out to be just a stage of development.
Yay for shorthand. I learned Orthic. Taking notes with pen and paper is now more convenient than taping them into a phone: speed about the same, but you only need one hand, and it's more comfortable.
As a complement, I would also suggest this thoughtful article with a broader perspective, explaining the proper place of SRS in learning to code to a professional level:
Reading the rest of this thread, it seems that the anti-anti-natalists (to which I gravitate more closely) are misrepresenting the anti-natalists' view and that they don't actually expect everyone to be anti-natalist?
The absence of people with bad ideas won't help as much as a surplus of people with good ideas. Since even if we had half the people they could still pollute like crazy.
The environmental argument against kids insults me (not that you should care). As if it's a binary choice between preserving the environment and preserving our species. I like to think that humans of tomorrow will find ways to solve problems we don't yet know how, so that we can save the environment and our species :)
It's not as if less people having kids leads to humanity becoming extinct. We're still growing way too fast. Some people will just want them and that's fine.
It's just something that was previously seen as a virtue (or for example for Catholics almost a holy priority) is now becoming a hobby. And if not everyone takes up that hobby we can be sustainable for a lot longer. Even a population decline wouldn't be bad after we've been growing so hard as a species.
Of course we can't keep growing forever. And hoping the future comes up with a magical answer is exactly how we got into the climate mess we're in right now.
Right, I overstated the implication. More people deciding not to have children does not lead to extinction. It's just that when people say things like "not having kids is good for environment" it comes off as a moral prescription that ought to apply to everyone, and hence those who violate it are the bad guys (selfishly acting to harm the environment). And yet if sustainability -- rather than self-extinction -- is the goal, we need a mix of both types of people.
Am I wrong to interpret it like that?
The ones who insist on having children as an ultimate virtue, I find them to be just as wrong.
Either choice is fine, and the moral objections to either one are unreasonable.
> Eventually the wave of old people is gone and things are back to normal. It's not something we can't overcome.
What do you mean by back to normal ? The African demographic boom, even if we didn't have our own fertility problem, will ensure there will be no back to "normal". History is never about going back to normal
But that's good! Let it peak, drop a bit, and stabilise around 2 billion or so. That would be perfect for long-term sustainability.
We've seen the same here in Europe. My parents' generation usually had large families, my generation had mostly 1-2 kids, and these days many families have no kids.
Of course poorer countries and countries that are still very religious are a bit behind but they will catch up too. Humanity won't go extinct, there will always be people happy to have children.
Honest questions: Can we maintain our current tech level with 2 billion people?
And if we can't, is that fair to future generations? Aren't we condemning them to a more miserable life? (On the other hand, if 8 billion people leads to destroying the environment, that also leaves them more miserable...)
Of course we can. Even with a lot less. We can automate the hell out of everything :) In fact there's a big concern that there won't be enough work. Even hypercapitalist countries like the US are thinking about UBI now.
Food will be a bigger problem but less people also means less food needed.
That's what they told us in the 60s/70s/80s and we're still working as much while our standards are lowering but ok, we'll automagically fix things, we're just waiting for the right time
Standards are lowering precisely because there are too many people chasing the same ressources... You can't share everything beyond a certain point.
The boomerism view of infinite growth is incredibly stupid especially if you start evaluating material requirement for a standard rich boomer lifestyle.
The only reason we could have so many people on the planet at once is because almost half of them live in poverty, close to animal standard with some human technology sprinkled in some place...
It's just shortsighted to believe that having so many people was sustainable in the first place.
Remove your doomer glasses and be a bit more objective in assessing your countries achievements. Listening to your kind of folk you'd wonder why people risk their lives to migrate here if it was such a hellscape. Some countries are doing what yours did 3 generations ago right now and they don't have a tenth of your inherited guilt, nor a tenth of the media presence
In regard to determining pledges/pricing tiers. Rather than go by a few universal rules of thumb, it might be better to look into what people had been prepared to pay in the past for crowd-funding projects similar to yours.
A few years ago I helped a friend raise 300k on Kickstarter for a board game project. One thing I did was scrape (gently) pledge and backer data from ~100 or so projects that seemed to cater to the same kind of gamer he wanted to attract. Then I plotted to see which pricing range tended to bring in the most revenue.
It's still a judgement call in the end, because each project is unique, but at least you're not shooting in the dark.
This is an extremely good example of why any market research is infinitely better than no market research. It can inform product, technology, budget, and business.
Speaking of research, I'd love to know if anyone's ever done any research into why tabs nowadays almost universally expand to 4 or 8 spaces. Why haven't 5/10 spaces won out? Why not 3/6/9? Why is it powers of 2? It would seem like counting to 8 isn't much more difficult than counting to 10 or to 6. Each of them use less than 4 bits, which is a typical minimal cell of information even in the most primitive computers, if you look at right after the primordial stone age of holding one bit per tube or per magnet.
Early terminals - and the typewriters they were converted out of - did not have tabulation fixed to these amounts. Early code editors did not seem to have such tabstops either. So what gives? Did at some point everyone sit down and decide that tabs were 4 spaces, like in some sort of UN meeting?
I've been trying to get an answer for this for years. Maybe decades. A good answer still eludes me.
Maybe look into the number of characters that can be shown in a line. With 5/10 tabs and 80 chars per line you need to break code into two lines more often than with 4/8.
Although modern mobitors and resolutions are huge, so you could have 200 character lines. But arent they harder to read than shorter lines?
100% agree. We looked at comparable books in terms of how they were pitched to an audience, size, quality, features (slipcase, color, binding, etc.), and went rather low on the retail price in the end, hoping to make it up with quantity, which happened!
Definitely looking at comparable projects helps you figure out potential final dollars you might raise, average rewards, and distribution of rewards.
Orthic has a much greater economy of strokes, so it's as much about convenience as it is about speed. That is, you can write quite quickly without actually rushing.
It also does not take long to learn because many of the consonants are simplified versions of ordinary letters (such as 'C', 'G', 'b', 'n', 'm' and so on), whereas the vowels are just lines.
And so I don't think your recommended strategy would pay off.
I use Orthic to jot down notes. It has been perhaps two years since I implemented it. I view it as a tradeoff - it is way easier and faster to write… but harder and slower to read. This is why I use it for brief notes primarily. Perhaps the most consistent issue is mixing up the letters “e” and “u” but there are other ambiguities that creep up too, so sometimes you have to read a word a few times. I think I am getting better though.
For Japanese train enthusiasts I recommend this Youtube channel with over 1000 cabin-view train ride videos from Japan: https://www.youtube.com/@HKASAMA
I made a little python script/alfred workflow that plays an arbitrary 7 minute segment from an arbitrary clip from that channel. So I have a keyboard shortcut to drop me into a random train ride whenever I want to chill out (without risk of getting sucked into the social media wormhole)
Would you mind sharing your script? I'm quite interested to be honest, I've stopped YouTube completely some weeks ago but this kind of interaction is what was good about it retrospectively :)
> If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it.
It’s a logical error. It’s like saying: people who point out logical errors in internet comments look foolish, therefore no one who hasn’t done that looks foolish. Clearly there are other ways to look foolish.
So even if writing always clarified thought, it’s wrong to infer it’s impossible to have clear thoughts without writing.
But since the writer here committed this mistake, he demonstrated that writing does not always result in clear thought.
Incidentally, I wrote this comment to clarify my thoughts .