Comment by bayindirh
This is an interesting comment. Esp. when there's concrete and mounting evidence for the benefits of it.
This is an interesting comment. Esp. when there's concrete and mounting evidence for the benefits of it.
This is the problem of today's world in every level. We need to see "direct, immediate practical uses" of something, and if we can't, we deem it's not useful and start to phase it out.
Some people like to write their todo lists on paper, some on their phone. Some people journal to a notebook, some do it in an app. Because we think the usefulness of writing is only the things we write. We ignore its secondary effects.
Writing imposes a speed barrier to brain, slows down the thinking process, esp. if you are writing with a permanent pen (anything sans a pencil). This slowing down allows refinement of the thought, but since it happens automatically, we don't appreciate it. One can type thrice the speed they write. It'd be perfectly legible, but is it perfectly filtered? I strongly doubt that.
I find my ideas are fuller when I write, rather than type. I find my words are more powerful, sentences are shorter yet more meaningful and dense. When I can't quite collect an idea or something gets too scattered, typing it out doesn't help, but getting a paper and writing the idea out allows me to round it instantly.
On longer projects, I keep lab notebooks. I do my design + write my mental process down. This allows me to visit a decision and see why I did it, preventing future errors, plus I have a lessons learnt document. This doesn't work with a keyboard. I tried. Many times.
We humans don't know what we don't know. I didn't know the power of writing until I started doing it regularly. I didn't know how it benefited my concentration until I started to see the effects. I didn't know until I half-filled my first lab notebook and saw the thinking trail and I remembered everything without effort.
Our quest for efficiency and progress is both a blessing and a curse. We abandon things as useless we don't fully understand. Then we wonder about what happened to us. Writing is one of these things we don't fully understand and deem useless because we don't fully grasp what it does. People who understand its importance create things like ReMarkable which is used more and more around me.
I still prefer pen and paper, because I use permanent inks on posh paper, then label the notebooks and visit them when necessary. Less important things are typed on a keyboard, shared on a digital garden, but regardless of how hard I tried, typing away on a wonderfully crafted keyboard in an impeccable app is no substitute for writing, the brain processes writing triggers, the things it unearths or the ideas it allows to be born.
I think comparing a nebulae to a fusion reactor on earth is apt. While former are much more primitive, they form stars. While the latter has all the tech humans can offer, it just creates little sparks compared to the former.
So, we shan't bash things we don't understand fully, and shan't throw stones to others since we all live in houses made of glass.
"Writing imposes a speed barrier to brain" sounds like a bad thing, period.
It's not like you can't impose a speed barrier at will. Plenty of writers or programmers spend time thinking, writing absolutely nothing - regardless of whether they use a mechanical keyboard or a goose feather quill. Humans aren't LLMs - nothing compels them to produce text at all times.
Plenty of writers and programmers also spend a lot of time cutting down and editing what they just wrote - to get sharper prose or more concise and understandable code. Which is NOT something that can be done with a goose quill.
> Plenty of writers and programmers also spend a lot of time cutting down and editing what they just wrote - to get sharper prose or more concise and understandable code. Which is NOT something that can be done with a goose quill.
Disagree. At least for prose, I do my best editing that way. (All right, not a goose quill - I use a ballpoint.)
I find it easier to draw a line through some text than to move the cursor to the start, hold down shift while moving to the end, then hitting backspace or delete. I find it easier to move some text from one place to another by drawing an arrow than by selecting the start, shift selecting the end, ctrl-x, move to the destination, then ctrl-c. And so on.
In short, pen and paper break my mental flow less, so I can put more uninterrupted brain onto the actual editing.
Now, sure, after I'm done with the editing, then I have to go to the actual file, find the start of that text to delete, hold down shift while I move to the end, and all that. But I'm not making the edit decisions while I do that.
This is just what works best for me. If it doesn't for you, that's fine. Don't use it.
Sorry, I don't know how to put it more politely, because I ran out of words. You sound like someone who refuses to believe that vitamins are healthy for the body, because the pills smell funny.
What you said is true though. I also spend some time not writing or typing anything but thinking, but I know where I want to arrive and trying to find a polite and concise path from where I am to the point I'm trying to arrive.
When I'm using pen and paper generally that arrival point is non-existent. IOW, I'm working on much harder problems and hacking a mental path towards somewhere I don't know, so I need to slow down, and chip away a problem step by step.
Some programmers go to a whiteboard, some talk with rubber duckies or their colleagues, to add an external speed brake to the process, because when you tend to think hard, the brain's speed brakes wear down. This is not myth, it's neuroscience. Adderall and Ritalin is used to add these speed brakes to people who born without them. This is a thing. Don't ask me how I know.
"Your first draft will be shit, edit until it makes sense" is the 0th rule of writing anything. What I do is writing that draft on paper, and editing in my mind. Then write the 5th or so draft to the computer.
This allows me to create what I want in less iterations in less time.
What you already said is also true. Humans are not LLMs. We're not copies of machines, or copies of each other, for that matter.
You sound like someone who says "vegetables are natural and healthy and humans ate vegetables since time immemorial and everyone should eat this" and then points to a fucking tomato. Which wasn't even a part of human diet in most of the world until ~4 centuries ago. This is the kind of thing handwriting is.
Really, it just sounds like you like tomatoes way too much. Which is fine. But don't you go around preaching about how tomatoes are a vital part of human diet and everyone should eat them all the time.
There is also "concrete and mounting evidence" for the unacceptable dangers of mass vaccination - according to anti-vaxxers.
If you set out on a mission to find evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find it. The quality of that "evidence" is another matter entirely.
If handwriting is increasingly useless by itself - and we are already in a world where the vast majority of writing is digital - then for it to be worthwhile, the "side benefits" of learning and practicing handwriting must outweigh the benefits of literally any other thing you could be doing instead.
That's a very high bar to clear - and I don't think that the janky evidence we have supports this.
I understand. In the comments there are already links to high quality research, plus experiences of the users.
But as you say, if you set out on a mission to find (or equally ignore) evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find (or ignore) it.
So good luck. What you think might be very different from the reality.
I'll leave it here because it's pretty evident that even if I lie tomes in front of you on that particular subject, your mind is already set in stone on that matter.
I continue to argue that if it were actually, practically useful, it would not be dying. People would just use it all the time because it is so useful. That's not the world we live in.