Much like money decoupled selling and buying to move away from bartering, writing decoupled saying and hearing so they didn't have to happen at the same time. The incredible step that happened was not that people had to think a whole lot, it was that thinking that was already happening had to happen once.

> All writing is thinking when done by a human, you’re literally distilling your thoughts into words. You can’t write without thought.

Of course you can. You can write down exactly what you hear, for dictation.

You can write down a stream of consciousness and put barely any thought into it at all.

I can't help but feel most here are massively over estimating human writing. Human writing is, almost universally, terrible. We have entire jobs that are hard to fill just to make things sort of ok. Good writing is a small subset of human output.

Because one can copy a text and write it down and that involves thinking in the sense that anything we do involves thinking fundamentally. But that thinking is different from thinking logically about a concept and writing it down which I think is where you are getting at.

The definition of writing and thinking is too broad in that sentence even though it does apply in several obvious cateogires within that at different levels.

And also "writing helps us think about the world" is too broad again. Why? Why does me writing "apt apt apt apt apt apt apt" help me think about the world? I just wrote it because i felt like writing it. Why wouldn't you consider that writing?