Comment by mjburgess

9 hours ago

So you prefer writing. Either way, writing is dying. It's dying because speaking and meeting can now be transmitted as easily. This itself should, empirically, demonstrate the point. The podcast killed the book, the meeting killed the memo. All around us writing is dying, and writing no one wants to read even more quickly.

Soon, in my view, writing will be seen as an instrumental intermediate artefact for technical or creative workers which is rarely shared and rarely read by anyone else. In other words, all writing will become checklists and scripts. Just as books became podcast scripts, and memos became meeting agenda.

I believe this is because writing and reading was, and is, a great burden to many. If you have some other explanation, so be it. It won't change the direction of the culture.

Prepare, I guess, to read more transcripts.

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mjburgess

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walterbell  8 hours ago

> the meeting killed the memo

Some AWS meetings require the memo.

> writing and reading was, and is, a great burden to many

Other terms for writing and reading:

  • transmission
  • thinking (@paulg essay)
  • memory RL (reinforcement learning)
  • advantage
  • moat

> read more transcripts

Transcripts are primary sources. Sufficiently valuable primary sources can inspire new sources, created by humans through a process that includes, but is not limited to, reading and writing.

nradov  8 hours ago

Another way of looking at that is that if writing is dying then doing it well will become a key competitive advantage. Organizations with culture, processes, and hiring standards focused on effective written communication will be faster and more economically efficient than competitors that rely on meetings (or recordings of meetings). Really crisp writing is especially helpful when prompting an LLM.