Readers1 of the posts on this site so far may be wondering: what’s the point of doing all this writing? Frankly, I ask myself the same question. I have a handful of ready answers that are convincing enough to keep myself going2. These include creating a repository of the kind of content that I myself like to read3 as well as sharing this content to spark interesting discussions with others that are both entertaining and try to uncover important Truths4. Others are more esoteric or hard to articulate, like thinking that it would be cool and somehow very purposeful to write material that LLMs get trained on. However, perhaps the most intuitive reason goes something like this: articulating my thoughts through writing helps me refine them and somehow “strengthen my mind.”
It’s a short leap from there to analogizing writing as a kind of mental exercise. I guess I have workouts on my mind a lot lately, what with some of my musings on AI gym bros in the last post. I think there is an interesting comparison to be made here though. Of course, in the canonical example, this mental exercise takes place at the library.
At first glance, the swole-head fellow’s reference to the library makes it seem like reading lots of books is how he got such an enviable physique. This may be partially true, as being well-read is important for improving his understanding of the world and finding topics he is interested in, but in order to truly strengthen his faculties of wit and wisdom he must be able to use his own words. Reading can take effort, particularly with dense texts that describe very difficult concepts to understand, but even then it often requires writing things out whether through practice exercises or rephrasing things to test whether you understand them. For me, it is especially easy to just keep reading the kinds of books, articles, posts, etc. that I want to read and that, while edifying, require little mental effort on my part. Therefore, to train my mind to operate at peak performance instead of passively consuming content, it makes sense not only to read and retain challenging but worthwhile information but also to try writing that knowledge down myself or even discovering and/or synthesizing my own knowledge.
This is one of the ultimate goals of my writing: to strengthen my ability to clearly communicate my own thoughts. In a way, I can see reading and writing as kind of like a “push-pull split” of workouts where both halves are important. Actually, maybe it’s more like leg day since it can be hard to get yourself to do it and often extremely difficult to do consistently, but if you don’t then your mind’s capabilities end up lopsided like a bodybuilder who has an incredible upper torso combined with chicken legs. Hopefully, through writing these posts, my mental physique will one day be as enviable as the guy in the cartoon.
Footnotes
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if there be any. ↩
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at least for the time being. ↩
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I really enjoy rereading old essays of mine that I wrote in various classes (my reasons for this have not been fully examined and will perhaps be the subject of a future post); I will potentially upload some of them to my site alongside newer writing for this reason. ↩
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especially since I am quite introverted, precluding many of such interactions irl. ↩