On (not) reading and writing

There's a very simple reason why reading and writing should go hand in hand. If we take writing as an advanced way of thinking and nothing else, by the same token, we can also take reading as an advanced way of watching and learning how other people (preferably expert thinkers) do their thinking.

This applies also to novels, poems and dramas. The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé saw his entire work, even the whole universe, as composing a single book. He said:

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

The point here is not whether you agree with Mallarmé's aesthetics, but rather how one of the most influential poet of the 19th century conceived of poem writing not as essentially different from other writings but rather interconnects with them, integrates with them, so as to become a unity. 

Poets think over technical problems like rhymes, syllables and so on, but they think more over issues of human lives, of social conditions, of "everything in the world" as Mallarmé saw it. 

Or take novelists as examples. They have very specific urges such as to depict the desperation of an outlaw, to show the barrenness of the modern minds, or to give an example of how "the opposite of love is not hate but contemplation." (Dostoyevsky) In other words, the task faced by each novelist is no less concrete and "objective" as the task faced by a rocket scientist, a software engineer, or a business analyst. This means that all these people strive to reach a very specific understanding of their respective issues, that they all have to read around their issues and look for the masters of their fields to get a better understanding of them. There's no way around it but study, mimic, even copy.

This points out a latest trap created by LLMs, especially products like NotebookLM, which is the illusion that we don't have to read first hand anymore, that we just need to stuff all the books we thought we needed before into NotebookLM and wait for it to digest and ruminate for us, while we can just chew its output and get the wisdom all the same. The fact and problem is you don't get any wisdom out of such process. Because what we are reading is not just some takeaway conclusions but the thinking process of the author. By robbing us of the reading process, we are actually deprived of the opportunity to learn how to think like those expert thinkers. I wouldn't even mention the obvious uselessness of AI in writing. And you can see pretty clearly from this standpoint that reading and writing always go hand in hand so that whenever you abandon reading by letting AI products like NotebookLM do the reading for you, in the end you will find writing by yourself so meaningless that you have no other way but to outsource the writing to AIs as well. Till then, there's pretty much nothing left for you to think, and therefore to live anymore.