原文：https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/writing-to-think

保罗·格雷厄姆指出，写作有助于提炼思维。如果写下的想法总能使它们更加精确和完整，那么没有就某个主题写过文章的人就没有关于它的完全成形的想法。而从不写作的人对任何非平凡的事物都没有完全成形的想法。这一观点强调了写作在思考中的关键作用。

作者描述了写作过程中的挑战，并提到虽然写作可以帮助理清思路，但不是所有写作都能起到这个作用。大多数类型的写作在这方面相当薄弱甚至可能适得其反。作者发现伊姆雷·拉卡托斯的《证明与反驳》通过数学哲学的方法，提供了写作作为思考工具的深刻见解。

精确和明确的表达能够揭示理解的状态，并促进对反馈的有效利用。即使在知之甚少的领域内，明确的表达也能为进一步思考提供基础。通过将模糊的想法具体化，可以更清晰地看出其中的缺陷，从而推动思考的深入。

作者建议通过解释将一个结论展开，这样可以为批评提供更多目标。例如，作者通过质疑女儿购买塑料茶壶的逻辑，推动了她的思考。同样地，作者在决定女儿教育问题时，通过展开和质疑前提，进行了深入的思考，最终改变了最初的结论。

在展开和检验想法的过程中，面对反例是重要的部分。反例分为局部反例和全局反例。局部反例帮助改进解释和理解，而全局反例则可能颠覆整个想法。作者通过具体情况的反例，进一步检验自己的思考模式，最终达到更深层次的理解。

通过写作来思考是一件需要创造力和勇气的事情。为了真正理解并改进自己的思维模式，必须不断展开和检验自己的想法。

When I sit down to write, the meadow is still sunk in darkness, and above it, satellites pass by, one after the other. My thoughts are flighty and shapeless; they morph as I approach them. But when I type, it is as if I pin my thoughts to the table. I can examine them.

当我坐下来写作时，草地仍沉浸在黑暗中，而上方，卫星一一掠过。我的思绪飘忽不定，没有形状；它们在我接近时发生变化。但当我打字时，就好像我把思绪钉在了桌子上。我可以仔细审视它们。

But it is hard to do it right. Not all writing helps me think. Most kinds of writing are rather weak, or even counterproductive, in this regard. You have to approach it in the right way.

但是正确地做到这一点很难。并非所有的写作都能帮助我思考。在这方面，大多数类型的写作都相当薄弱，甚至可能适得其反。你必须用正确的方法来处理它。

Until last fall, I had not seen anyone properly articulate the mental moves that make writing a powerful tool for thought. Writing advice is usually focused on more superficial parts of the craft. Whatever I knew about thinking on the page, I had picked up through trial and error and conversations with other writers.

直到去年秋天，我还没有看到任何人恰当地阐述了使写作成为思维强大工具的心理步骤。写作建议通常集中在技艺的更表面部分。无论我对在纸上思考了解多少，都是通过试错和其他作家的交流中获得的。

But then I read Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations. It is not, at first glance, a book about writing. It is a book of mathematical philosophy. By a Hungarian Stalinist, no less. But it is, if you read it sideways, a profound exploration of the act of writing. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Mathematics is, after all, a subset of writing—it is a way of crafting a language that helps you express and improve thoughts. The main difference, compared to prose writers and poets, is that mathematicians are more rigorous, precise. Because of this precision, reading Lakatos gave me a clearer and more precise understanding of what I do, or strive to do, as I sit down each morning and wrestle with my thoughts.

但后来我读了伊姆雷 · 拉卡托斯的《证明与反驳》。乍一看，它不是一本关于写作的书。它是一本数学哲学的书。更不用说，它是由一位匈牙利斯大林主义者所著。但如果你从侧面阅读，它是对写作行为的深刻探索。这本不应令人惊讶。毕竟，数学是写作的一个子集——它是一种创造语言的方式，帮助你表达和改进思想。与散文作家和诗人相比，主要区别在于数学家更加严谨、精确。由于这种精确性，阅读拉卡托斯让我对每天早上坐下来与自己的思想搏斗时所做的事情，或者努力去做的事情，有了更清晰、更精确的理解。

What follows is a series of meditations about thinking through writing provoked by, but not faithful to, Lakatos’s book. I’ve divided it into two parts. The first part covers the basic mental models that are useful to most people (if you write a diary, for example, and want to get clarity about things in your life). The next part goes into more complex patterns of thinking which I suspect is mostly useful if you do research or engage in some other kind of deep creative work.

接下来是一系列关于通过写作来思考的沉思，这些沉思是由拉卡托斯的书引发的，但并不忠实于原著。我将其分为两部分。第一部分涵盖了对大多数人有用的基本思维模型（例如，如果你写日记，并且想要对生活中的事情有更清晰的认识）。下一部分探讨更复杂的思维模式，我怀疑这些模式主要对从事研究或其他深度创造性工作的人有用。

A warning. If you aim to write and publish stuff, this essay might tie you up in knots. It is about thinking, not about crafting beauty or finishing things in a finite time.

一个警告。如果你打算写作并发表文章，这篇文章可能会让你感到困惑。它关于思考，而不是关于创造美或是在有限时间内完成事情。

为自己设定失败

In a recent interview with Dwarkesh, Patrick Collison explained the value of writing using a metaphor I enjoyed:

在最近与 Dwarkesh 的采访中，Patrick Collison 用了一个我很喜欢的比喻来解释写作的价值：

Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. This often requires breaking old ideas, which is much easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that” or rely on the fact that your short-term memory is too limited for you to notice the contradiction between what you are saying now and what you said 12 minutes ago.

好的思考是超越你目前的理解，触及思想背后的思想。这通常需要打破旧观念，当这些观念像纸上写的那样僵化时，这样做起来就容易多了。在像思考或对话这样流动的媒介中，你总是可以说，“嗯，我不是那个意思”，或者依赖于你的短期记忆太有限，以至于你注意不到你现在说的话和你 12 分钟前说的话之间的矛盾。

When I write, I get to observe the transition from this fluid mode of thinking to the rigid. As I type, I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas. What seemed right in my head fell to pieces on the page.

当我写作时，我能观察到从这种流动的思维模式到僵化的转变。当我打字时，我通常处于流动模式——以思维的速度写作。我对我说的话感到自信。但一旦我停下来，思绪就会凝固，变得僵化在纸上，当我阅读我所写的内容时，我看到我的想法中裂缝在蔓延。在我脑海中看似正确的东西在纸上却支离破碎。

Seeing your ideas crumble can be a frustrating experience, but it is the point if you are writing to think. You want it to break. It is in the cracks the light shines in.

看到你的想法崩溃可能是一种令人沮丧的经历，但如果你是为了思考而写作，这就是重点。你希望它破裂。正是通过这些裂缝，光芒才能照进来。

When I write, I push myself to make definite positive claims. Ambiguity allows thought to remain fluid on the page, floating into a different meaning when put under pressure. This makes it harder to push your thinking deeper. By making clear and sharp claims, I reveal my understanding so that I—or the person I’m writing to—can see the state of my knowledge and direct their feedback to the point where it will help my thinking improve.

当我写作时，我督促自己做出明确的积极主张。模糊性使思想在纸上保持流动，在压力下会漂移成不同的含义。这使得推动你的思考深入变得更加困难。通过做出清晰而尖锐的主张，我揭示了我的理解，以便我——或者我正在写作的对象——可以看到我的知识状态，并将他们的反馈指向有助于我思考改进的点。

This is valuable to do even in areas where you know way too little to “warrant” an opinion. I met a Japanese linguist in the harbor yesterday and talked about the relationship between the Chinese and the Japanese writing systems. This is a topic I had thought about for about twenty seconds before this. “So,” I said after two minutes, “this is a stupid question, but is the relationship between China and Japan like that between Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire?” This is, as it turns out, not a good analogy. But by spelling out my naive understanding, I gave the linguist a good area to work on when he laid out a richer model of the flow of cultural influence in East Asia.

即使在那些你知之甚少、不足以 “有资格” 发表意见的领域，这样做也是有价值的。昨天我在港口遇到了一位日本语言学家，我们谈论了中日书写系统之间的关系。在这之前，我对这个话题只思考了大约二十秒。“所以，” 两分钟后我说，“这是一个愚蠢的问题，但中日之间的关系是否类似于古希腊和罗马帝国之间的关系？” 事实证明，这不是一个好的类比。但通过表达我的天真理解，我为语言学家提供了一个很好的工作领域，当他展开一个更丰富的东亚文化影响流动模型时。

In the terminology of mathematics, what I did here (and in my writing) was to “make a conjecture,” a qualified guess based on limited information. A hypothesis. The mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, whom Johanna and I have written about elsewhere, would always summarize his first impression of a new situation with a conjecture, proclaiming with irrepressible enthusiasm, “It must be true!” Ten seconds later, someone would come up with a counterexample that proved him wrong. But being right wasn’t the point: getting a better understanding was. And he would immediately throw out a new conjecture. (Holden Karnofsky has a blog post about using this technique to learn through writing.)

在数学术语中，我在这里（以及在我的写作中）所做的是 “提出一个猜想”，这是一个基于有限信息的合格猜测。一个假设。数学家亚历山大 · 格罗滕迪克，我和乔安娜在别处写过他，他总是用一个猜想来总结他对新情况的初步印象，充满不可抑制的热情宣称，“它一定是真的！” 十秒钟后，就会有人提出一个反例证明他是错的。但正确与否并不是重点：获得更好的理解才是。然后他会立即提出一个新的猜想。（霍尔顿 · 卡诺夫斯基有一篇关于通过写作使用这种技巧学习的博客文章。）

Forcing the diffuse ideas and impressions in your head into a definite statement is an art form. You have to grab hold of what is floating and make it rigid and sharp. It can feel almost embarrassing–revealing your ignorance with as much vulnerability as possible.

将脑海中模糊的想法和印象转化为明确的陈述是一种艺术形式。你必须抓住那些飘忽不定的东西，并使其变得坚硬和锐利。这可能会让人感到几乎尴尬——尽可能真实地暴露你的无知。

And it is only the first step. Once you have made your thoughts definite, clear, concrete, sharp, and rigid, you also want to unfold them.

而这只是第一步。一旦你使你的思想明确、清晰、具体、尖锐和严格，你也希望展开它们。

扩展前线直到它断裂

By unfolding I mean “interrogating the conclusion to come up with an explanation of why it could be true.” What premises and reasoning chains leads to this conclusion? The explanation isn’t meant to prove that your conclusion was right. It is just a way of unpacking it.

所谓 “展开”，我的意思是 “通过质疑结论来找出它可能为真的解释。” 哪些前提和推理链条导致了这一结论？这个解释并不是为了证明你的结论是正确的。它只是一种拆解结论的方式。

By unfolding a claim into an explanation, you spread it on a “wider front” (to borrow a metaphor from Lakatos), so that the criticism has more targets.

通过将一个主张展开成解释，你将其扩展到一个 “更广阔的前线”（借用拉卡托斯的一个比喻），从而使批评有更多的目标。

I used this tactic in the food store yesterday. Maud, our six-year-old, told me we had to get a pink miniature plastic teapot. I couldn’t come up with a compassionate counterargument, so I said, “Why do you think a plastic teapot is so great?” And she said, “Because it is so beautiful. And I need one in plastic so it doesn’t break. I would use it all the time.” This brought a smile to my face. See—trying to prove her point, she had given me three times as many claims to attack!

昨天我在食品店用了这个策略。我们六岁的女儿莫德告诉我，我们必须买一个粉红色的小型塑料茶壶。我想不出一个有同情心的反驳理由，所以我问：“你为什么认为塑料茶壶这么好？” 她回答说：“因为它很漂亮。我需要一个塑料的，这样它就不会破了。我会一直用它。” 这让我笑了。看——为了证明她的观点，她给了我三倍多的理由来反驳！

Since the goal is to find flaws in our guesses (so that we can change our minds, refine our mental models and our language, and be more right) unfolding a claim through an explanation is progress. Even if the explanation is wrong.

因为目标是找出我们猜测中的缺陷（这样我们才能改变想法，完善我们的心理模型和语言，并且更加正确），通过解释来展开一个主张就是一种进步。即使解释是错误的。

Let me take another example. Before Maud was born, Johanna and I worked as teachers in Sweden. The first conclusion we drew from that experience was that we didn’t want to submit our kids to what we had observed. This way of formulating it (“Not that”) is a bit vague as it only defines where not to look for the solution. It is useful to also attempt a positive formulation. If I were to reconstruct the positive version of our conclusion back then, it was something like, “We need to find (or start) a school where our daughter can pursue her interests at her pace.”

让我再举一个例子。在莫德出生之前，乔安娜和我曾在瑞典担任教师。我们从那次经历中得出的第一个结论是，我们不想让我们的孩子接受我们所观察到的那种教育。这种表述方式（“不是那样”）有点模糊，因为它只定义了不应该去寻找解决方案的地方。尝试积极的表述也是有用的。如果我要重构当时我们结论的积极版本，那大概是，“我们需要找到（或创办）一所学校，让我们的女儿能够按照自己的节奏追求她的兴趣。”

There are several subtle problems with this conclusion. But the point is—these problems didn’t come into view until we had unfolded and probed our original position.

这个结论有几个微妙的问题。但关键是——这些问题直到我们展开并探究了我们最初的立场后才显现出来。

The way we unfolded and improved our conclusion back then was more haphazard than it would have been today. We just talked about it aimlessly, read randomly, and made small notes. This cost us time and caused confusion. These days, I would instead unfold a conclusion like this as a series of bullet points where I spell out the intuition behind my claim in a series of premises. In the case of Maud’s education, this would have looked something like this (note that this is not my current understanding but a reconstruction of what I thought eight years ago):

当时我们展开和改进结论的方式比今天更为随意。我们只是漫无目的地讨论，随意阅读，并做些小笔记。这浪费了我们的时间并造成了混乱。如今，我更倾向于以一系列要点来展开这样的结论，详细阐述我主张背后的直觉依据。以 Maud 的教育为例，这可能会是这样的（请注意，这不是我目前的理解，而是对八年前我所想的重构）：

Once I unfold my understanding in writing, I often see holes right away. I start correcting myself and discarding ideas already while typing. I cut ideas that are obviously flawed. I rewrite what feels ambiguous to make it sharper–more precise, concrete, unhedged, and true to my understanding.

一旦我在写作中展开我的理解，我常常立刻就能看到漏洞。我开始在打字的同时纠正自己并抛弃一些想法。我剔除那些明显有缺陷的想法。我重写那些感觉模糊的部分，使其更加尖锐——更精确、具体、不含糊，并且忠实于我的理解。

The flaws I see immediately, however, are only the more superficial flaws. The deeper patterns take a longer time to emerge—because they are further from my established thoughts and so are harder to articulate.

然而，我立即看到的缺陷只是更表面的缺陷。更深层次的模式需要更长的时间才能显现——因为它们离我已建立的思想更远，因此更难表达。

Often, they occur first as subtle emotional cues. As I reread a passage, I notice a slight tension across my chest or my eyes fog over. For some reason, it doesn’t feel right. There is something wrong here.

通常，它们首先以微妙的情感线索出现。当我重读一段文字时，我会注意到胸部有轻微的紧张感，或者眼睛变得模糊。出于某种原因，感觉不对劲。这里有些不对劲。

These subtle feelings are easy to dismiss (“Eh, words are slippery, I mean something slightly different . . . there is no reason to obsess about this”). But in my experience, it is these subtler problems that tend to open a path beyond my current understanding. I learned this from my wife, Johanna, who will often sit with a draft for several hours, not writing or editing, but simply articulating why something feels off to her. Our best essays have come out of the things she surfaced during those sessions.

这些微妙的感受很容易被忽视（“唉，语言是滑溜的，我的意思是有点不同…… 没有理由对此痴迷”）。但在我的经验中，正是这些更微妙的问题往往能开辟一条超越我当前理解的道路。我从我的妻子 Johanna 那里学到了这一点，她经常花几个小时与草稿坐在一起，不是写作或编辑，而是简单地阐述为什么某些东西对她来说感觉不对。我们最好的文章正是从那些会议中她提出的问题中产生的。

For this reason, I suspect that many of my friends who write and publish rapidly are shortchanging themselves. They generate texts filled with hidden doors and move on before they’ve opened them.

出于这个原因，我怀疑许多写作和出版迅速的朋友正在亏待自己。他们创作出充满隐秘之门的文本，并在打开它们之前就匆匆离开。

I tend to go through my list of premises and assumptions and ask follow-up questions to myself, to further unfold my conclusion. To continue the example from above, I would take one of the premises and unfold it like this:

我倾向于逐一审视我的前提和假设，并向自己提出后续问题，以进一步展开我的结论。为了继续上面的例子，我会选择其中一个前提并这样展开：

The emotional tone of these questions is, in my head, lovingly curious; I’m not trying to put myself down. I’m trying not to kill ideas. I want to help them evolve and spill forth more insight. Often this dialogue ends with me changing my mind about several premises and coming to a different conclusion, but the original idea remains the seed—no less valuable for having been proven wrong. It takes creativity and boldness to leap out and form a conclusion, and the part that criticizes must understand how dependent it is on the part that throws ideas at the wall. It is often easier to criticize than it is to synthesize a new position.

在我脑海中，这些问题的情感基调是充满爱意的探究；我并不是在自我贬低。我试图不扼杀想法。我希望帮助它们发展并迸发出更多洞见。通常这种对话以我改变对几个前提的看法并得出不同结论结束，但原始想法仍然是种子——即使被证明是错误的，其价值并未减少。跳出来形成结论需要创造力和勇气，批评的部分必须理解它对那些将想法抛向墙壁的部分有多么依赖。批评往往比综合形成新立场更容易。

反例，局部与全局

The sun is above the horizon now, the satellites hid behind a thin layer of orange and pink. A hare raises on his hind legs in the middle of the meadow looking around. I tap the glass and watch his ears turn my way.

太阳现在在地平线之上，卫星隐藏在一层橙色和粉色的薄层后面。一只野兔在草地中央用后腿站立，四处张望。我轻敲玻璃，看着他的耳朵转向我这边。

Now that I have spelled out my position and fixed the obvious flaws, I start probing myself more seriously to see if I can get the argument to break down.

既然我已经阐明了自己的立场并修正了明显的缺陷，我开始更认真地自我审视，看看是否能让论点崩溃。

If one of the premises I have unfolded is a factual claim, I’ll spend a few minutes skimming research in the area to see how well my position holds up. “Oh, it turns out that most homeschooled kids do not have any problems with socialization!” I realized when doing this in relation to Maud’s education. (Though it didn’t take me a few minutes, it took me years in this case. Partly because we were unsystematic, partly because homeschooling is illegal and taboo in Sweden and this had worked itself into my body so that I felt revulsion each time I probed that assumption.) In this case, looking at studies and statistics helped remove several needless assumptions. We changed our conclusion (we left Sweden and now homeschool Maud and her sister).

如果我展开的其中一个前提是一个事实声明，我会花几分钟浏览该领域的研究，看看我的立场有多稳固。“哦，事实证明大多数在家上学的孩子在社交方面没有任何问题！” 我在研究关于 Maud 教育时意识到了这一点。（虽然这没有花我几分钟，但在这个案例中花了好几年。部分因为我们不系统，部分因为在家教育在瑞典是非法和禁忌的，这已经深入我的内心，以至于每次我探究这个假设时都感到厌恶。）在这个案例中，查看研究和统计数据帮助消除了几个不必要的假设。我们改变了我们的结论（我们离开了瑞典，现在在家教育 Maud 和她的妹妹）。

But often the type of problem I like to think about is too personal and messy and qualitative to be resolved cleanly through a statistically significant study. What I do in these situations instead is to consider counterexamples.

但我经常喜欢思考的问题类型太过个人化、混乱且定性，无法通过具有统计显著性的研究来干净利落地解决。在这些情况下，我通常会考虑反例。

I like to visualize concrete situations when I make an argument (in the notes for this essay, for example, I continually compare what I say against past writing projects). This makes it easier for me to think clearly. I am tied back into a lived reality, which is rigid, and do not float off into theory, where I have a solid track record of fooling myself. When I have a concrete situation in mind, I can ask myself, “What is a situation where the opposite happened? Why was that?” I can list the characteristics of the situation that inform my conclusion and then systematically look for cases that have other characteristics. In “Childhoods of exceptional people,” for example, I wrote about parenting from the perspective of concrete biographies. The sample was unsystematic. But once I had extracted what I thought were the common patterns, I asked myself, “So whom does this not apply to?” Then I added the people that came to mind to the sample and ended up with a distribution that was good enough for my purposes.

我喜欢在提出论点时想象具体的情境（例如，在这篇文章的笔记中，我不断将我所说的内容与过去的写作项目进行比较）。这使我更容易清晰地思考。我被拉回到一个僵化的现实生活，而不是飘向理论，在理论中我有欺骗自己的坚实记录。当我心中有一个具体的情境时，我可以问自己：“什么情况下会发生相反的情况？为什么会这样？” 我可以列出影响我结论的情境特征，然后系统地寻找具有其他特征的案例。例如，在《杰出人物的童年》一书中，我从具体的传记角度写了关于育儿的内容。样本是不系统的。但一旦我提取了我认为是共同的模式，我就问自己：“这对谁不适用？” 然后我将想到的人加入样本，最终得到了一个足够好的分布，以满足我的目的。

Counterexamples are useful in two ways. Either you find a counterexample that a) proves one of the premises wrong but b) does not change your mind about the conclusion. Lakatos calls this a local (and non-global) counterexample. This means there is something wrong with your unfolding. Perhaps you need to change that part of the explanation? Or perhaps you can simply drop it, making the mental model simpler and more general? Local counterexamples help you improve your explanation and get a better understanding.

反例有两种用途。要么你找到一个反例，它 a) 证明某个前提错误，但 b) 并不改变你对结论的看法。拉卡托斯称这为局部（而非全局）反例。这意味着你的展开过程有某些问题。也许你需要改变解释的那一部分？或者你可能只需去掉它，使心智模型更简单和更普遍？局部反例帮助你改进解释并获得更好的理解。

There is a scene in the last season of Breaking Bad that illustrates this. The main character, whatever his name was, is a teacher that starts a meth lab. This can be thought of as his conclusion (“I should get into the meth business”) and when asked to defend this decision he unfolds the claim by saying, “I need to support my family.” This is false. There are better ways for him to do that (he has an old friend who offers him money). That is a local counterexample. In the final season, he admits to himself: “I did it because it made me feel alive.” This doesn’t change his conclusion (he does not change his mind about the meth) but it gives him a deeper and more correct understanding of himself.

在《绝命毒师》最后一季中有一个场景说明了这一点。主角，不管他叫什么名字，是一个开始制造冰毒的老师。这可以被认为是他的结论（“我应该进入冰毒生意”），当被要求为这个决定辩护时，他通过说 “我需要养家糊口” 来展开他的主张。这是错误的。有更好的方法让他做到这一点（他有一个老朋友愿意给他钱）。那是一个局部反例。在最后一季，他向自己承认：“我这么做是因为它让我感觉活着。” 这并没有改变他的结论（他没有改变对冰毒的看法），但它让他对自己有了更深层次和更正确的理解。

Other times, the counterexample you find undermines the whole idea—a global counterexample. You unfold your conclusion and discover that one of the premises does not hold up, and there is no way to patch it. The fracture spreads right up to the conclusion. Now—this is what we have been longing for—there is a big hole of confusion where before there was a mental model. It is time to replace it with something more subtle and deep that incorporates the critique.

其他时候，你找到的反例会破坏整个想法——一个全局性的反例。你展开你的结论，发现其中一个前提站不住脚，而且没有办法修补。裂缝一直延伸到结论。现在——这正是我们一直渴望的——在之前有思维模型的地方，出现了一个巨大的困惑空洞。现在是时候用更微妙和深刻的东西来取代它，这些东西要能包含批评。

How to do this, and do it in the most interesting way possible, is the topic of the next part (which I have no idea when I’ll finish).

如何做到这一点，并以最有趣的方式去做，是下一部分的主题（我不知道我什么时候能完成）。