I have been writing a lot in my personal private documents about all the things that I have been trying to solve, and all the topics that I am trying to get a better understanding of.

My initial motivation was usually to just write down some interesting thoughts & ideas as I go about my mundane activities (walking, exercising, eating etc) so that I can come back to them later. I noticed that as I was writing down the initial thought, this act of writing usually generates an additional related thought even before I was done completing the sentence, and I will have to write that related idea down too. This goes on and on in a process somewhat akin to a spontaneous generation of a full branch of thoughts of a few hundred words about a topic. Many times I have seemingly uncovered several new insights and inspirations along the way.

This branch of freely written thoughts is far from crystallized by the way. When I went back to my computer and look at the text again, I almost always have to rewrite and reword them better, to rearrange the ideas more coherently and remove the redundant ones. I have to correct some severe logical flaws at times too. It is only through this process of careful editing that I gain confidence that the uncovered insights, ideas and inspirations are well-formed and has potential for real world deployment.

What does this necessity to edit my written thoughts reveal?

• It points clearly to the fact that our thoughts are usually poorly formed, incoherent and full of logical fallacies. Things we assumed ourselves to have a great understanding of are more half-baked, amateurish and sub-standard than we realised.
• That writing down our thoughts and ideas is a good way to materialize them and expose them in their full glory. With nowhere to hide, we are then free to judge them by their own merit and how they come together. We can then organise, prune and edit them to help ourselves understand the topic at hand better in the process of mastering it.
• That using AI to generate essays is a crutch that is detrimental to our thinking ability and learning opportunity through the painful process of writing.

Granted, this piece of writing is not that well-written too. But I don’t aspire to be a writer, just a blogger trying to understand things better.