Kaj_Sotala comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Thomas 03 June 2013 03:08AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (778)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 10 June 2013 11:23:47AM *  3 points [-]

My experience is that I generally have some kind of fuzzy idea of what I'm going to say before I say it. When I actually speak, sometimes it comes out as a coherent and streamlined sentence whose contents I figure out as a I speak it. At other times - particularly if I'm feeling nervous, or trying to communicate a complicated concept that I haven't expressed in speech before - my fuzzy idea seems to disintegrate at the moment I start talking, and even if I had carefully rehearsed a line many times in my mind, I forget most of it. Out comes either what feels to me like an incoherent jumble, or a lot of "umm, no, wait".

Writing feels a lot easier, possibly because I have the stuff-that-I've-already-written right in front of me and I only need to keep the stuff that I'm about to say in memory, instead of also needing to constantly remind myself about what I've said so far.

ETA: Here's an earlier explanation of how writing sometimes feels like to me.