The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point

is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking.

If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more

complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully

formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully

formed ideas about... See more

Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you

wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your

ideas, and now you've expressed them. But you know this isn't true.

You know that putting your ideas into words changed them. And not

just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that

turned out to be too broken... See more