by Kyle Munkittrick
There is an anti-AI meme going around claiming that “Writing is Thinking.”
Counterpoint: No, it’s not.
Before you accuse me of straw-manning, I want to be clear: “Writing is thinking” is not my phrasing. It is the headline for several articles and posts and is reinforced by those who repost it.
Paul Graham says Leslie Lamport stated it best:
“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”
This is the one of two conclusions that follow from taking the statement “Writing is thinking” as metaphysically true. The other is the opposite. Thus:
- If you’re not writing, then you’re not thinking
- If you are writing, then you are thinking
Both of these seem obviously false. It’s possible to think without writing, otherwise Socrates was incapable of thought. It’s possible to write without thinking, as we have all witnessed far too often. Some of you may think that second scenario is being demonstrated by me right now.
Or are you not able to think that until you’ve written it?
There are all sorts of other weird conclusions this leads to. For example, it means no one is thinking when listening to a debate or during a seminar discussion or listening to a podcast. Strangely, it means you’re not thinking when you’re reading. Does anyone believe that? Does Paul Graham actually think that his Conversation With Tyler episode didn’t involve the act of thinking on his part, Tyler’s, or the audience?
Don’t be absurd, you say. Of course he doesn’t think that.
There is evidence that Graham, in fact, doesn’t think that. He alludes to it before quoting Lamport, when he says:
“In fact there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.”
Maybe, you argue, what he is saying is that writing forces good, clear, deep thinking. Writing is a privileged sort of thinking. Better thinking. Thinking plus. He sort of says this in his other essays “Good Writing” and “Putting Ideas into Words”. In the latter, Graham says:
“I’m not saying that writing is the best way to explore all ideas. If you have ideas about architecture, presumably the best way to explore them is to build actual buildings. What I’m saying is that however much you learn from exploring ideas in other ways, you’ll still learn new things from writing about them.”
The authors in the viral Nature article make a similar argument:
“Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner. By writing it down, we can sort years of research, data and analysis into an actual story, thereby identifying our main message and the influence of our work. This is not merely a philosophical observation; it is backed by scientific evidence.”
But both Graham and Nature are engaged in a kind of question begging here. Writing is a better form of thinking because we have to think better when we write. Do you? Really? Are you sure?
If writing is ‘better’ thinking, then why do none of these essays on how “writing is thinking” address the fact that a whole lot of writing is not thinking? Are these writers, in fact, not thinking? They should be, right? Writing, they claim, is a forcing mechanism for good thought! Alas.
What’s important here is that whether or not Graham, Nature, or others believe “Writing is Thinking” to be ontologically true (I doubt they do) they are lazily amplifying and repeating a meme conveying that message via their writing, which, ironically, undermines both the meme itself and their more nuanced claims elsewhere.
Writing can be hugely edifying. It can also be garbage in, garbage out. Let’s take AI. Chatting with an AI all day involves a lot of reading and writing. Whether it’s edifying or psychosis-inducing seems to be a skill issue, not inherent in the AI or the phenomenology of written language.
Or look at the perennial names on the New York Times bestsellers list, people whose names are fixtures, who drop banger after banger and are read by millions. Those people are writing a lot. They are read a lot. And yet my suspicion is that a lot of the “Writing is Thinking” people do not believe those at the top of the charts are our deepest or best thinkers, nor are their fans.
So if writing isn’t thinking, then what is thinking and how does AI threaten it? Well. Maybe reading is thinking? Paul Graham seems to like reading!
Ezra Klein touched just this in his chat with David Perell. In the case you’re worried Klein or Perell are AI apologists, please note the video is entitled “The Case Against Writing with AI”.
Apropos, Klein starts by critiquing AI. He says having AI do the reading for you by summarizing things harms your thinking. His argument is around embodied cognition and wrestling with the text. Reading a book that takes 2 hours doesn’t just mean you’re spending 2 hours to get the knowledge, it also means you’re thinking about that topic for 2 hours. The reading of the text and engaging with it (underlining, circling) is the thinking.
Perell lights up at this and paraphrases the process by describing a book as a ‘container for thinking’. Perell came up with that great metaphor when talking, which, as you might note, is neither reading nor writing. Impressive, yet sadly, it seems, impossible.
Klein goes on to say that the process of writing will sometimes change his mind, but not in a good way. Writing tempts him to convince himself of a point so that the essay “hits.” Social media writing often feels this way. Whether it’s a tweet or Substack note, or a long diatribe, the writing does not seem to be thinking so much as it is confabulation or motivated reasoning. The act of writing does force clarity, but sometimes it forces false clarity when clarity is not available or desirable. That is, writing can make your thinking worse.
OK, so the metaphorical claim “Writing is thinking” clearly isn’t true and the weaker “Writing forces better thinking” doesn’t seem true either. Why is this anti-AI meme so, well, memetic? Like many hyperbolic claims, there is a kernel of truth under there. Let’s dig it out.
To do that, let’s first try to take the strongest implicit argument here, which is something like, “If AI is doing the writing for you, then you aren’t getting the benefits of writing, which are many.” This generalizes, of course, to “If AI does the work for you, then you don’t get the edifying benefits of doing that work.” Dan Shipper at Every takes this to its logical conclusion within the context of AI, arguing that we’ll move from content-creator style thinking to manager-style thinking with AI. That is, our thinking muscles won’t get weaker, we’ll just use them differently (Shipper also agrees with a bunch of my points above, which was a delight because I found his essay well after I’d drafted them!).
This fear that AI will degrade thinking is, I suspect, a projection of a larger fear of cultural decadence. Writing, particularly strong writing, has been a proxy for intelligence and thoughtfulness for a long time. A talented, prolific, entertaining writer is a kind of scaled intelligence. A well-crafted essay, novel, or even poem can project ideas, religion, emotion, and concepts across space and time. Writing is marvelous. Not because it is thinking, but because, when done well, writing elegantly conveys thinking. To have an idea is one thing, to communicate it another, to do so convincingly another thing still, and to make it real and persistent in the world, by physical work or by having it resonate in other minds, is yet another thing still. All these steps require effort. All require thought.
AI puts the chain-of-effort at risk. Suddenly ideas can, in a sense, come from nowhere. Or AI can let idiots with scary ideas be prolific and eloquent. But just because writing is a helpful method for you to think does not mean it will help others to do so.
The good news is that using AI to write is not, necessarily, a threat to thinking because, simply put: thinking is thinking. There are lots of ways to help you do it. Writing certainly is one! As are reading, drawing, discussing, making, listening, watching, doing, tasting, joking, feeling, and moving (and probably a good number I haven’t thought of, despite being engaged in the act of writing and my very best efforts). Each of these can be sufficient on its own or function as an augment or scaffolding or icebreaker.
But also, seriously, thinking is thinking. The act of just sitting there and staring into space and putting your mind to something is literally the thing we claim to be doing. We see people doing this all the time! You can picture someone thinking. There is a fairly famous statue of it!
While yes, using AI to write or read (or do many things) for you might undermine those things’ ability to help you think, AI might also free people up in other ways. AI writing might let those who never mastered the skill (or mastered a second language) be able to better convey their ideas. Maybe by making writing faster, those who think best by coding or carving or simply cogitating will have more time to think the way they think best. Maybe in reading what the AI had written, then, and only then, will someone realize what they thought was not, in fact, what they thought.
Listen, I get it. We’re all worried about AI for one reason or another. As someone who loves writing and very badly likes to think I’m occasionally good at it, I’d love for it to have a premium on Thinking Good. But it doesn’t. And we all, deep down, know that.
Ultimately, you have to choose to think. How you do it and with what tools can and often will help you think better, but only if you put in the effort. Thinking is work. Sometimes making work easier makes the results of that work worse, sometimes better. It depends—on you. You matter. And that nuance, I think, matters too.
So my ask for the great defenders of writing vis-a-vis thinking, please broaden your horizons a bit and, maybe, go back to basics. If you want to encourage thinking, encourage thinking. It’ll help you practice what you preach.
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