Writing as a Way of Thinking

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I always love an article that confirms my priors, so I was particularly excited to read Paul Graham’s latest essay, "Writes and Write-Nots."

In case you missed the piece, he argues that writing is an extension of thinking. He believes that as a skill, writing well is already very unequally distributed. And in a world with AI, where your writing is instantly up-leveled by bots like ChatGPT, even fewer people will need to learn to write well. Therefore, even fewer people will think well—dividing the world between writers and write-nots and, as a consequence, between thinkers and think-nots.

This piece pinpoints one of the things I love so much about writing: It is a way of thinking for me. But I don’t share his worries about writing or thinking. Here’s my attempt to articulate why. 

Writing is thinking, but thinking is not writing

PG’s argument hinges on a central premise: Writing is thinking. That premise is true as a subset but not as an identity. Writing is thinking, but the converse doesn’t hold: Writing is not the only way to think. 

Consider conversation. Many of history’s most important thinkers, including Socrates and Plato, held that conversation was a much better mode for thinking than writing was. In fact, Plato was suspicious of writing as a tool for thinking because it reduces the need to memorize. And unlike in conversation, a piece of writing cannot talk back to the reader—which he regarded as supremely important. 

Whatever you think of the impact of AI on people’s writing abilities, a highly intelligent conversation partner well-versed in all of human knowledge is quite a good thinking aid. I’ve found this repeatedly with ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice mode, which I’ve used to explore everything from quantum mechanics to philosophy. 

Writing is a way of thinking—one that is particularly valuable to me. But even in a world where writing goes away, many types of thinking will remain, and they’ll be augmented—rather than eliminated—by AI if we so choose.

But there’s a subtler idea in PG’s argument—that a certain kind of thinking is only possible through writing. He doesn’t say specifically what kind of thinking that is, but I can take an educated guess: When you turn the vast, interconnected network of thoughts, feelings, and ideas in your mind into a line of words, you find sequence, order, and story. You expose fallacy and fuzziness. Externalizing your thoughts pins them down, and once they are pinned you can bring your whole mind to bear on them, over and over, to clarify and improve them. 

And writing doesn’t just tell you what you already think somewhere in the cobwebbed attic of your brain. It actively helps you to generate new—and better—thoughts and ideas as you do it.

I believe this is the kind of thinking PG is afraid might go away, or at least become more scarce in an AI-driven future. He likens this to physical strength in pre-industrial times. Everyone used to be strong before the Industrial Revolution as a result of performing manual labor. But now that machines can do a lot of that labor, many people are strong only if they choose to go to the gym.