Via Reddit comes this engaging interview with Leslie Lamport, the creator of LaTeX. The interview is ostensibly about Lamport’s work on distributed systems, but what it is really about is writing:
I can offer only two general pieces of advice on how to think. The first is to write. As the cartoonist Guindon once wrote, “writing is nature’s way of showing you how fuzzy your thinking is.” [...]
Writing is difficult for two reasons: (i) writing requires thought and thinking is difficult, and (ii) the physical act of putting thoughts into words is difficult. There’s not much you can do about (i), but there’s a straightforward solution to (ii) — namely, writing. The more you write, the easier the physical process becomes. I recommend that you start practicing with email. Instead of just dashing off an email, write it. Make sure that it expresses exactly what you mean to say, in a way that the reader will be sure to understand it.
The interviewer is a researcher named Mihai Budiu, who, like Lamport, works at Microsoft Research. Mihai kept an intermittent blog for a year or so, now dormant for some time. One day he decided to interview Leslie Lamport. Such are the chance gems the Internet produces.
I particularly like “Thinking is a difficult process that requires a lot of effort. Write a book based on a selection of distorted anecdotes showing that instincts are superior to rational judgment and you get a best seller. Imagine how popular a book would be that urged people to engage in difficult study to develop their ability to think so they could rid themselves of the irrational and often destructive beliefs they now cherish.” Am I the only one who thinks this is a thinly-veiled reference to “Blink” (by Malcolm Gladwell)?
I hadn’t picked the reference the first time through, but yes, you’re probably right. Good catch!
My friend D******* (name redacted in case he gets into trouble at work) thinks it might instead be a reference to Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” (I haven’t heard of the book before, but the write-up on Amazon sounds about right). I guess Lamport’s point is in fact that there are many such examples . . .
Hmm, I’m not so sure. I’ve spent half an hour or so flicking through “Hackers and Painters”; the eponymous essay is available here, and almost the full text of the book is available on Google books here. The book does not really advocate following intuition rather than reason. Graham does argue that hackers are more like painters than scientists or engineers, and so should not be subject to math envy; but the model of a painter he is using is one of an iterative maker of objective artifacts, not an intuitive creator. Graham also suggests that programming languages themselves are the appropriate design tools for programmers, which does conflict with Lamport’s advocacy of formal methods, but again the argument is about tools and styles of reasoning, not intuition. Finally, Graham’s book, although it gives illustrative examples, can hardly be described as being just an assortment of anecdotes.
I emailed Dr. Lamport to ask him whether he was referring to “Blink”, or to “Hackers and Painters”, or to some other book. He graciously replied, at some length, and almost immediately. In short, while the publicity surrounding “Blink” might have inspired the remark, he has not read the book, and was not singling out it, or any particular book. I can also confirm that he practices what he preaches: his emails are very well written.
Ok, ok, blink clearly was more the reference than H&P. But I can’t resist linking to this:
http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Very amusing. But only an amateur would class Paul Johnson as a serious or insightful historian. Many readers lack the background to realise this, and are impressed by Cegłowski’s literary allusion. However, as it happens, I am both a programmer and an historian. So, entertaining though Cegłowski’s essay is, if the reader really wants to see penetrating literary criticism, then they would be better turning to the works of Bill Bryson…