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

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 Handman 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