Writing and talking allows you to formulate and explore concepts in different ways. Writing forces you to be specific and put thoughts in a linear order. Talking allows you to explore less defined ideas in haphazard ways.

I recently had a meeting where understanding snapped in place right at the end of the meeting. Writing might have gotten us there too, but I'm not convinced that it would have been more efficient. The idea wasn't well defined to start with and we talked about lots of things randomly.

Now writing is needed to make sure that we capture what was discussed and agree on it.

Both has a place in collaboration with other people.

ps. not to make the argument for useless meetings where managers drag you along for body count, I've slept through my share of those. And would probably also sleep through the AI summary of it

Reading is a chore because, in a typical corporate job, you have to do so much of it and the material is generally pretty bland. There's the hundreds of emails per day, the meeting notes, the presentations, the endless stream of messages. Not to mention the code, the docs and all the role specific stuff you'll encounter along the way.

Perhaps we should be pushing people to be more succinct and thoughtful in their writing? Perhaps AI could do that ;)

If it's multiple people tag-teaming in the same doc for meetings it's even better. It's a whole new level of collab during the meeting that helps tighten the relationships and keep track of what's going on. It also captures the tone better.

I get that AIs work best offloading the tedious parts of life, but I guess for me note taking isn't tedious.

This is simply not true. Writing - particularly in the context of instant messages sent during work - cannot convey tone, and it is far less asynchronous than being able to have a conversation with someone.

> A paragraph of the written word is scary to a percentage of the population, certainly most “normal people,” and definitely a large subset of engineers.

What a boringly cynical take, too!

It is though. The amount of thought that can be put into writing is at least 1-2 orders of magnitude greater. The amount of thought that can be put into conversational speech is limited to roughly one second per second.

Writing also has the benefit of maintaining a record of what was said. The number of misunderstandings that could have been a avoided by writing is staggering.

> Writing also has the benefit of maintaining a record of what was said. The number of misunderstandings that could have been a avoided by writing is staggering.

Not everything needs to be recorded - and when it does, one can record the conversation, or take notes.

Not to mention, misunderstandings crop up in text all the time, often due to lack of tone being conveyed

Can you elaborate on this? "Tone" is something that inherently has to be interpreted, so it doesn't make sense that you're attributing this as a quality that shields from misunderstandings.

For example: I can write. Maybe I can write better than a D1 basketball player. Am I smarter than them? ehhh, maybe not. Their "physical intelligence" is far superior to mine. I respect it as equal to my "verbal/writing intelligence." I am scared on the basketball court, it's foreign territory to me because I'm basically a nerd who spent my time reading books. They spent their time moving around on the bball court. The magnitude of the intelligence vector is large, it just points in a totally different direction.

If anything, I think this perspective is sorely missing. People respect reading and writing as an "smart person" activity but I think that's a stultifying perspective. Intelligence is incredibly broad, that's why you have to meet people where they are -- and many times that means communicating in a different way.

However, same as how "kinesthetic intelligence" correlates to basketball, "writing intelligence" correlates to engineering. The best software engineers are good at reading and writing; there are few exceptions in my experience.

Certainly I should have said, writing is superior in this context. We're on the proverbial basketball court in this conversation :)

If you give them something to read and force them to read it, they won’t get half of it because they’re just waiting till the chore is over when they get to the end.

This is not different from talking to someone who is too busy (or just doesn't want) to listen. Writing exists in a form that can always be referenced. There's no risk of playing telephone, no memory required, etc. It'll be waiting for when the person is ready to read it.