You are what you write——沈向洋
Are Twitter, PowerPoint, Facebook, Instagram and texting eroding our ability to think?
There is a Chinese proverb that says “见文如见人,” which literally means “reading the document is the same as seeing the author.” If we are what we write, then who have we, as a society, become?
I was sitting in a technical review recently, listening to one of our reviewers grill the engineer who was presenting: Why did you choose that design? Why is the service showing bad results? How many users will switch to the solution?
The presenter’s answers lacked depth. It seemed like he hadn’t done enough rigorous thinking, the kind where you sit quietly, sift through research, contemplate options, determine what you know, don’t know and where more work is required. The kind of thinking I did as a young researcher when peers took me and my work apart when I took short cuts. Back then, I practiced a disciplined approach, spending hours just thinking, and even more hours on the hardest part—writing it down.
Today, long-form writing is being replaced. Tweets pass for dialogue. PowerPoint condenses thoughts to bullets. Words have been traded for emojis and GIFs. And we’ve become addicted to the noise. What happens in an Internet minute? 16 million text messages. 1.8 million snaps. 452,000 Tweets. 156 million emails. Who has time to think, let alone write?
And maybe we, in the technology industry, have shaped this reality. We created the phones, apps and 24/7-connected world. We’ve enabled society to put down the pen. The only writing I do today is email or quick WeChat posts.
So now I worry that we’re losing a valuable tool that helps us to think deeply, express who we are at our greatest and expand the intellect of those around us. And for us in the technical community, this is especially troubling. The stakes are higher than ever before with AI. We’re under enormous pressure to ship quickly, to achieve more, faster, but we can’t do this at the expense of the highest engineering quality. We have to think carefully about consequences and alternatives. Who gets blamed when a self-driving car hits someone? The engineer who wrote the code is the driver. Who is accountable for the AI algorithm with bias? The engineer who created the AI.
I see fewer engineers writing and sharing deep thinking, but this is what will lead to far more true innovation across the industry. How will we achieve the big transformative breakthroughs versus the incremental milestones?
By writing. Because the way to think is actually to write.
Putting pen to paper forces you to develop and refine your thinking by iterating, revising and exploring alternatives. Anyone who can think deeply can write beautiful code, inspiring papers or develop the plan to bring the next big thing to life. I encourage you to read Reid Hoffman’s Series B pitch for LinkedIn in which he shares the thinking that helped him succeed. At the time, he shares that a partner in a venture firm was exposed to around 5,000 pitches, looked more closely at 600 to 800, and did between 0 and 2 deals.
Writing offers the possibility to create lasting artifacts. I think of papers I published that endure, albeit perhaps as reference materials. Plenoptic Sampling. Lazy Snapping. Poisson Matting. These are my work’s contribution to the field of computer vision and graphics. They will survive me and, if I’m lucky, even help shape a mind or two.
One of my favorite professors at Carnegie Mellon, Takeo Kanade, said that you have to write research papers like detective novels. You need story, suspense, surprise and ‘aha’ to explain your ideas to peers, to inspire others to contribute and advance your work and the whole field.
Writing is an equalizer to get the best from the whole team. At Amazon, presentations are done with the six-page paper. Meetings kick off with everyone reading followed by comments and questions to the author. Everyone operates from the same context, and introverts, extroverts and non-native speakers have an equal chance to get their thinking across. It’s not about the presenter’s personality, but the words.
Ultimately, writing helps make you successful. You might be the smartest person with the best idea, but if you can’t communicate your thinking in a compelling way, you won’t get far. Two engineers in our AI+R team who inspire me with their regular writing habits are Bill Ramsey and Ronny Kohavi. Bill has written over 250 blog posts at Microsoft, benefitting our entire technical community. With Ronny, you don’t even need to meet him—his highly cited A/B test experimentation papers say it all, and he’s publishing for the benefit of the industry on LinkedIn.
As you’re reading this, you may be logging your objections: I need to drive results, so I need to go straight to code. I’m known for my code, so I don’t need to write papers. I’m not a native speaker, and I speak better with my code. I don’t know what to write about. I don’t have time… But please set them aside—for your own success, for your company’s, for the industry’s advancement—and start writing.
I see so many occasions for building long-form writing back into the engineering culture—planning documents, project proposals, technology LRP’s, review articles—to inspire us to work together, collectively creating and cultivating big ideas and big thinking.
I took a first step recently, writing a research paper with my colleagues Xiaodong He and Di Li, From Eliza to XiaoIce: Challenges and Opportunities with Social Chatbots, for the first time in years, so please no judgment, only constructive feedback!
I challenge everyone reading this piece to write 500 words per week. If you’ve got an idea or you see a problem, write your proposal and share it!
Let’s rewrite our standards for thought leadership and engineering quality by writing more!
