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. 

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• The false equivalence of writing and thinking
• AI as an augmentation tool rather than replacement
• The persistence of deep thinking in management
• Writing's evolution as a thinking tool