Chatting, writing, thinking, and listening

October 11, 2018

A friend posted this article about the way that Slack killed Hipchat in the Slack group I mentioned yesterday. My reaction was to say something quick and clever back. But I didn’t. Instead, I spent a little time thinking.

I could have thought about almost anything and it would have a been better use of my time (and his) than my quick, reflexive, and fairly mindless reply would have been. Instead, I thought about Slack and considered The Law Of Diminishing Specialization, another article he’d posted. And I thought about making sure that my response had a high ROA. That took some time, and resulted in this:

Quick responses are easy. Chatting is easy. Thinking is hard.

Chat apps like Slack make it too easy to engage in low-effort low-value communication. They don’t help with thinking. Maybe there’s an app for that—one that encourages thinking rather than rewarding mindless reflex. If there is, let me know and I’ll sign up. In the meantime, my attention—while writing this post and around this time—is on improving the quality of my own thinking. I want a higher ROA than I’ve been getting,

Old school chatting (called “talking”) and chat app chatting are alike. We want to give and get quick responses. People don’t seem to want long pauses. Quick responses get points. Witty ones get more points. Quality doesn’t count as much as speed and cleverness.

From Jordan Peterson, I’ve come to a new view of the difficulty of writing—which I’ve bitched about before. Now I see that it’s not writing that’s hard. It’s thinking.

Real conversations with smart, critical thinkers are hard. A good partner won’t let me get away with sloppy thinking or sloppy articulation of my thoughts. They’ll listen to everything I say and how I say it. They’ll challenge me to get it right. Even if they don’t agree, they force me to state my position clearly and honestly so that they can understand it. But most talk is long-form chat, not a real conversation. While one person’s talking the other’s listening for a word or phrase that triggers something and then they’re waiting for the other person to STFU so that they can take them out with a devasting riposte.

Once I’ve written something I have to read it. And then I’ll think: “No it’s not quite right.” So I’ll have to fix it. And that won’t be right either. So I’ll keep working on it. I’ve called that work “rewriting” and sometimes it is. But mostly it’s rethinking. Or new thinking.

Peterson says that when he’s writing, he’ll rewrite the same sentence as many as 50 times(!) and he gives up only when he can’t make it any better. That’ s too high a bar for this blog, but something to aspire to.

Writing is hard because my inner editor doesn’t let me chatter on. Sometimes it interrupts. Mostly it waits for me to finish and then acts like the smart, critical thinker I would be if someone said to me what I’ve just written. My inner editor insists I get it right. Or as right as I can make it.

When I’m writing, my editor listens to me. When I chat I don’t listen. When I talk I don’t listen, either. I need to learn to do that.

In this video this Jordan Peterson talks about what he discovered when he started to listen to himself. (Transcript courtesy of Otter.ai(https://otter.ai), and slightly edited for clarity)

I understood that there was a monstrous element to the human psyche that you needed to respect. And that was part of you. I was trying to figure out who I was, and how that could be fixed. I started to pay very careful attention to what I was saying. I don’t know if that happened voluntarily, or involuntary. I could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche…

…One part was the old me that was talking a lot, and that liked to argue and liked ideas. There was another part that was watching that part with its eyes open, and neutrally judging. And the part that was neutrally judging was watching the part that was talking and going “That isn’t your idea. You don’t really believe that. You don’t really know what you’re talking about. That isn’t true.”

And I thought: “Huh, that’s really interesting.” That was happening to 95% of what I was saying…

So then I had this weird conundrum. Which of those two things is me? Is it the part that’s listening and saying, “No, that’s rubbish. That’s a lie. You’re doing that to impress people. You’re just trying to win the argument.”

Was that me? Or was the part that was going about my normal verbal business me? And I didn’t know. But I decided I would go with the critic.

And then what I tried to do, what I learned to do, I think, was to stop saying things that made me weak. I’m still trying to do that. I’m always feeling when I talk whether or not the words that I’m saying are either making me align or making me come apart. I really do think the alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it. Because I think if you say things that are as true as you can say them, then they come up. They come out of the depths inside of you.

Thinking’s hard.

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