Writing can be structured thinking
Why did I start writing longer posts on this site again?
I certainly don't write for profit or with mass reach in mind.
However writing is a much underrated tool to aid thinking about whatever in a structured way. People spend a large amount of time listening to podcasts, various video-based social media sites as a form of entertainment and that's certainly okay. You do you. I'm currently typing while listening to music, it's nice.
It gets a little bit lost in these AI slop infested times however that writing isn't just about producing text-based content like some industrial molding facility extruding plastic, but rather that the act of writing helps clarity of thought.
Text as an interface stimulates less senses compared to other types of media, but what it affords is significantly superior ability to seek, precisely outline, and search. What was written? Who is stating that? What does it imply? How does it relate to other thoughts about the topic? Where is the reference to x,y,z? These are all significantly easier to do via writing.
For the same core idea that can be summarized in a couple of paragraphs, basically any youtuber can stretch the topic in video format beyond the 8-10 minute mark.
Mathematicians will probably light the torches and raise the pitchforks at this point - but maths is an example of using specialized syntax to write things down and by doing that, to think in a highly structured way.
One exception when it comes to writing vs visuals: any kind of data representation (graph, chart, etc) is absolutely horrid when forced into text, and usually misleading. Any article that describes a graph with words, instead of directly providing a graph is bad and should not have survived the editing process in that form.
I write a lot to think things through, and now I'm publishing a tiny sliver of that, in case anyone finds it interesting.
