"You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well." - Paul Graham, The Need to Read, 2022

Following are my notes and excursions of thoughts:

The Medium of Thinking

Thinking is a process inside our brain. A thought is the result of thinking, but it still lives inside the brain. Thoughts are transient. To capture the thought, we need to extract it from the brain. Therefore, we need a medium of thinking, a medium that can store and represent the thought in the outside world.

Writing is a medium of thinking, a good one. But is it the only one?

I once thought it was the only one, because I literally think in words. There is this constant monologue inside my brain, and the most natural way to extract it is to write it down.

But then I found out about the condition of anendophasia: a condition of no inner speech. People with anendophasia can still have rich, complicated thought processes. Thoughts in their brain are nonverbal—it can be an image, a concept, or just a feeling.

Since the thought itself can be nonverbal, the external medium can be other things too. Of course it can be. There are so many other mediums in the world: music, paintings, and even dishes can be used to convey thoughts.

LLM & Chain of Thought

Large Language Models, as the name suggests, deal with language. For LLMs, the internal process is done in tokens, very close to the human language, but not quite. Once the internal computation — "thinking" — is done, it outputs words and sentences. In other words, it writes. Writing is the medium for LLM thinking.

The "chain of thought" is another interesting subject. When models write down their reasoning process before answering, they get better results at more complicated problems. This is exactly what Graham discovered in the essay:

A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. - Paul Graham, The Need to Read, 2022

Writing down the thoughts doesn't just capture them; it also develops more thoughts and ideas. Writing extends the thinking process. It enables the writer to push against, revise, backtrack, and rediscover. With writing, thoughts can be iterative.

And Now

Graham's essay was written in 2022, right before the beginning of the AI era. Looking at what we have today, AI can summarize books, do the extended thinking, and write long articles in minutes. "People don't read anymore." With AI, I became more and more impatient. Every time I encounter a wall of text, I have an urge to ask AI for a quick TL;DR summary. Every time I need to write something, I ask AI for a draft.

If we replaced reading, would anyone need to be good at writing? The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas but also a way to have them. - Paul Graham, The Need to Read, 2022

Graham said we still need to read, because it helps us to think and come up with new ideas.

Now that AI can do the thinking, do we still need to read? to write? to think?