Thinking with Writing: The Maze Analogy
November 22, 2019
According to the Interaction Design Foundation, a forcing function
- forces conscious attention upon something
- disrupts the automatic performance of a task
In my opinion, writing is a forcing function for thinking. It externalizes my thought patterns. Once I crystallize a chain of reasoning, I'm able to inspect it from an elevated, abstracted perspective. I believe this allows me to make faster and more precise improvements to my thinking process.
Maze-solving is one of my favorite metacognition models. I've found this idea to be useful when thinking about thinking. Using the maze analogy in this argument is imprecise but still useful for communicating the general shape of my claim.
Let's contrast two maze-solving strategies:
- walking through the maze
- drawing paths through a map of the maze
I claim that Strategy 1 is inferior. To illustrate, let's say you're evaluating whether you should take turn d in the maze.
If you execute Strategy 1,
- you have to consciously remember decisions made at each upcoming fork in the maze as well as their outcomes
- if you walk along d and later realize it was a suboptimal path, you have to backtrack to d; this is routine effort that wastes energy
- d is difficult to view in context of the maze as a whole
Strategy 2 solves all these issues and conveniently provides a history of attempted maze solutions.
Generally speaking, the parallel to Strategy 1 is a person who only mentally contemplates to develop solutions, and the parallel to Strategy 2 is a person who writes or otherwise externalizes to develop solutions.
Strategy 2 is of course slower and likely has other drawbacks I can't think of. Determining when to apply Strategy 2 is in itself a difficult problem. I imagine an optimal meta-strategy (the strategy for when to use strategies) could probably be determined by experimentation.