brettworks

• An essay on creative mindsets.

“The three years of solitary work at Montpellier had not been wasted in the least: that intellectual isolation was what had allowed [mathematician Alexander Grothendieck] to access the cognitive space where new ideas arise. He had made himself at home there.”

“This might look wasteful if you think what they are doing is research. But it is not if you realize that they are building up their ability to perceive the evolution of their own thought, their capacity for attention.”

“…they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions.”

“Orienting in the right way to your thoughts is a skill. Like all skills, it takes practice. You also need to have a rich mental representation of how it is supposed to feel to embody the state so that you can orient toward that. This feeling is what you use to measure the relative success of whatever techniques you employ.”

• An essay on how we perceive time.

“A person, similarly, can obsess over not wasting time, cultivating a suspicion that every hour could be better spent. But this is its own form of waste. Real efficiency prizes momentum over perfection. It understands that acceptance is the price of progress.”

• An essay on AI’s effects on writing.

“The current frontier AI models are fascinating because they are an entirely new kind of tool, untested and unexplored. They are even more fascinating as implicit puzzles about the nature of consciousness and selfhood.

What they aren’t are replacements for thinking itself, or for the elusive, deeply personal sense of style [Martin] Amis was talking about.”

It’s not just that ‘writing is thinking’ (an oft-repeated phrase these days).

It’s that writing is a special, irreplaceable form of thinking forged from solitary perception and labor—an enormous amount of it—but tested against a reading public. That fusion of aloneness and interiority versus togetherness and exteriority is what makes it fascinating to me. I fear for a world in which people are simply able to create a simulacrum of writing and of thought by inputting a prompt and singly experiencing the result.

In short: the production of writing is deeply solitary and personal, but the consumption of writing is just as deeply public and shared.”