Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Deep thinkers write things down
Convenience beats examination
Self-examination loses to convenience almost everywhere. Writing for thirty minutes feels harder than going to the gym. Reading a whole book instead of an outline feels like an unproductive use of time. Talking about interesting ideas over a meal gets treated as impolite or annoying, because it asks other people to think after they have spent an entire week working.
What great minds did
So people go through the motions and convince themselves they are thinking deeply about what they experience. A genuinely deep thinker without a single written line is possible, but analyzing, criticizing, and revising your own thoughts entirely in your head is something very few people can do. The greatest minds in history wrote journal entries, letters, manifestos, articles, and books.
How little time it takes
The amount of time involved is modest. Nobody needs to spend all day writing, reading, or thinking, or to become an academic philosopher. The gap that matters lies between no time at all and a reasonable amount. Billions of people have lived whole lives without a few hours of hard thinking about their beliefs and values, and many of them were denied the chance by war, oppression, and lack of freedom. Billions of others live in hyper-abundant countries with little excuse.
Why does writing sharpen thinking so much?
Cognitive psychologists have long found that producing information yourself sticks better than simply reading it, a result called the generation effect. Slamecka and Graf described it in 1978, after comparing words participants generated themselves with words they only read. Writing adds a further demand, because a thought has to become a complete sentence before it can sit on the page. Gaps and contradictions that stay hidden in a loose mental impression show up once the sentence exists.
How did great thinkers use their notebooks?
Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as a private notebook during military campaigns, and the Greek title translates as To Himself. Seneca worked out his philosophy in letters to a younger friend named Lucilius. Charles Darwin kept a series of notebooks on the transmutation of species, and the page where he first sketched a branching tree of life has the words I think written above it. That sketch dates to 1837.
Why does conversation test ideas better than solitude?
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber proposed in a 2011 paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences that human reasoning evolved mainly for arguing in groups. Their review of experiments found that people are weak at spotting flaws in their own arguments and much sharper at spotting flaws in other people's. A second person supplies the objection that the first person cannot generate alone. Socratic dialogue, the seminar, and the scientific peer review all build that outside objection into the process.
More from Paul Musso
