The troll call is still right, but that's also a good point

As engagement bait, as editorial aikido, I just marvel. There’s nothing more to say about it. Its existence is the comment.

Actually I don’t think the NYT piece is bait or troll, it is in fact the correct view of writing. It is not, and has never been, the only mode of critical thought, let alone the best one. It’s one of many modes that is effective in some circumstances. The article, ironically, reads like it was written by someone waking up from a coma of uncritical writing fetishism:

But what if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought? The evidence that supports this belief is thin at best. Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement.

But then he slips right back into it, by retreating to orality and spoken disputation as the new gold standard, based on the thin evidence of an oral examination experiment in his classroom.

In Plato’s “Phaedrus,” Socrates offers a startling criticism of writing. Written words, he claims, are not the true children of knowledge, because writing cannot speak, answer questions or come to its own defense. Only through conversation among minds, he suggests, does reason yield real insight. For the past two millenniums, this appraisal has seemed like a failure to appreciate the power of writing. But perhaps Socrates was right, and we think best by speaking, answering and defending our ideas

It’s still linguistic supremacism if not writing supremacism. Deeply blind to non-verbal intelligences.

Critical thinking is multimodal. Visual, mathematical, mechanical, even musical… there are many. Howard Gardner had a theory of multiple intelligences. And though the case for Goleman’s “emotional intelligence” is much weaker, there is something there too. None dominant generally in all situations. This is why the shape rotators vs. wordcel meme took off. I don’t like STEM-supremacism either, but it was much-needed pushback on the bs theory that critical thinking = writing.

I myself am a case in point. I’ve said I write to think, which is easily misunderstood. It’s just one of the ways I think, a late stage way in the development of an idea. Much of my upstream thinking is visual/diagrammatic or even straight-up mechanical, as in mechanical engineering intuitions developed through literal shape rotation. For example, the organizational analysis I’m best known for (Gervais Principle) probably reads like textual critical analysis of The Office to verbal thinkers/linguistic supremacists, but it wasn’t. I finished the thinking by writing, but I started it in shape-rotator land. It felt like opening the hood to examine the organizational engine. The evidence is all over. The key elements are a hierarchy and lifecycle diagram. The second part rests on a graph, and explicitly appeals to a Newtonian mechanics metaphor.

To the extent I do critical thinking, it’s mostly non-verbal. Words are just the UI. The verbal part of the thinking is crafting a story and conveying emotions with good rhetoric. It’s not where the ideas themselves took shape.

In fact purely textual critical thinking usually strikes me as incredibly shallow and hopelessly lost within whatever tradition it situates itself in.

I stand by the troll call. 

The New York — freaking — Times, pretty much the last print publication still standing strong, puts out a post saying writing is NBD. If the medium is the message, that's a troll.

If Popular Mechanics or Family Handyman or Good Housekeeping published the essay, I would see it differently, but I'm convinced the NYT did this as ragebait. And I tip my hat to them.

But still, I take your larger point. And I don't disagree.

by Venkatesh Rao · quoted from v2

Critical thinking is multimodal. Visual, mathematical, mechanical, even musical… there are many. Howard Gardner had a theory of multiple intelligences. And though the case for Goleman’s “emotional intelligence” is much weaker, there is something there too. None dominant generally in all situations. This is why the shape rotators vs. wordcel meme took off.

There are for sure other kinds of thinking that are just as valuable as writing. No argument. 

Take someone who has decided to remodel their garage or their kitchen themselves. They will make a plan in their head, start working, realize that they have missed 100 details in their plan. They are also going to find other little things they would like to fix or improve. They are probably going to come up with ideas for other projects.

That's all thinking.

Granted. 100%. I didn't say that I thought writing was the only way to think. Just that I do think it's really important.

Really, I just wanted to talk about how I think about writing links, and why I think writers online under-utilize links. 

That said

I used to do a lot of work with poor people in Philadelphia. A big part of that work was helping them prepare to tell their stories to people with authority. It was advocacy. My work was trying to get folks screwed by the system to talk about ways they had been screwed so that maybe the system would treat them differently. Or at least cut that person a break.

Even if they had a good story to tell, it was often hard to get them to tell the story in a way that anyone could follow. First you'd try to get them to tell it to you just in chronological order. They often could not do that. Saying one thing would make them think of another thing. They would jump around. It often wouldn't really make any sense.

This was a problem, because if they couldn't succinctly make it make sense to me — who was on their side and wanted them to win — it for sure wouldn't make sense to someone with power that was skeptical and liked the status quo.

My takeaway from this, and it might be wrong, was that one thing education does is help people put their thoughts in order when they need to do it. For those of us who learned to do that pretty early, it can be hard to appreciate how hard it is for other folks. Especially if our life is such that we don't interact with people with very little education very often, and in very little depth.

That experience did make me conclude that linguistic thinking is in fact really important in this modern world, and that it's a shame if people don't appreciate that.

• Because sometimes you're in the middle of a bad story, and, to get out of it, you need to be able to tell that story in a way that makes a convincing case that it's bad and you're being treated unfairly.
  
• Or sometimes the story you need to be able to tell is why you deserve an opportunity to pivot into a new story. 
  

I can't help but think that writing is unusually good preparation for those sorts of moments.

All that said: Yes. For sure. There are other kinds of thinking, and writing isn't the only kind or even the best kind. I get that. 

There is so much important knowledge that can't be put into words. You can read the recipe but that will tell you very little about eating the cake. And some people can eat the cake and basically reproduce it, without seeing a recipe. That's incredible, and it's also very real thinking. 

—Brady Dale
October 2, 2026