Paul Graham, the investor and Silicon Valley VC guy, wrote an essay about AI the other day in which he states the following:
One of the strangest things you learn if you’re a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have a mole they’re worried about; people who are good at setting up computers know how many people aren’t; writers know how many people need help writing.
The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
Quite so.
Last month I read a biography about the French “postmodernist” philosopher and bogeyman Jacques Derrida.
While many respectable intellectuals despise Derrida, understandably, he wrote about a lot of interesting things in interesting ways. Most of these are beyond the scope of a humble email, but when reading Graham’s brief article, one of Derrida’s better-known ideas stood out to me.
If you ever spent any time thinking about this question, you probably believe that speaking comes before writing. Most people never think about anything, so maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, but it makes sense.
When you speak, you’re communicating a thought, idea, concept, belief, or mental image in your head to another person. This thought-model has a long pedigree dating back (at least) to Socrates’s defenses of speech over writing in the 5th century BC.
Writing is just transcribing these thoughts (etc.) out of the verbal mode and into written text.
Derrida didn’t agree, and spent much ink challenging the priority of speech over writing.
I’m inclined to agree with him.
Something strange happens when you write your ideas on the page. The words take on an independent life of their own.
There’s a saying, which I think came from Eudora Welty, which goes: “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” I can personally attest to this weirdness. My ideas begin in simple observations, hunches of intuition, or mental images or thoughts that burst in unannounced.
Ideas never become anything of interest until I do the work of writing them down. Which is a skill unto itself, and quite unlike the skill of talking.
Talking happens in a single moment. Speak, and then it’s gone.
Text endures. This, in fact, was the major reason Socrates didn’t care for written words. A person speaking is present and able to make himself clear. Text is just there, its meaning up to the reader rather than the author.
The point is this:
There are no thoughts separate from the texts that expresses them.
Writing is a more genuine expression of thoughts than anything happening “in the mind” or in speech.
Derrida went so far as to claim that thoughts in a mind are really just the inner voice silently verbalizing.
The text is the true thought.
Speech is a second-rate copy of the written word.
Fascinating stuff, if you’re a certain kind of language nerd. It means that writing is the real skill and venue of good thinking.
It’s also kind of dangerous because it disconnects thoughts from the person doing the thinking. Why do I have to think or know how to think when a machine can create my thoughts for me?
That’s disturbing, and it’s the point Paul Graham’s makes in his essay. He figures that AI is robbing us of this all-too-valuable skill of writing, with ugly consquences:
The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can’t write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can’t write, there will just be good writers and people who can’t write.
I’ve heard tell of Zoomers that are so incapable with words that they’re unable to write prompts to get the robots to plagiarize for them. I don’t think that’s much exaggerated. There was an article going around a few days ago about record numbers of Kiwi students showing up to university as functional illiterates.
Here’s a quote:
New Zealand recently recorded its lowest results to date in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment tests for reading, maths, and science.
I experienced a little of that a decade ago as a teaching assistant and I can imagine it’s gotten worse since then. Kids don’t read, parents don’t read to them, everybody’s addicted to screens, the education system seems more concerned with rainbow flags than teaching cognitive skills, and hardly anybody minus the rare oddballs like Your Truly bothers to write anything down.
It makes me feel like one of those medieval monks who kept the ancient knowledge alive while everyone else became an illiterate peasant working the fields.
If it’s up to us wordsmiths to keep the fires lit during the Winter of Thought, so be it.
That means that real writing is going to become more rare, more scarce, and more valuable in coming years.
We’re going to corner the market not just on effective communication, but on the ideas and thoughts that can be communicated.
I may as well throw in a shameless pitch at this point.
If you’re a small business, entrepreneur, freelancer, or small-time outfit who might benefit from higher-quality thinking and more effective persuasive communication in your operation — or you someone in your network might fit that profile — hit Reply and let’s see what I can do for you.
Matt Perryman