I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.
Dec 16, 2025 23:41It's a struggle, but it's gratifying once things start coming together. What I have on paper tonight is a clean expression of idea I didn't have well-formed when I began this morning.
Some people think we should hand off this painstaking form of labor to LLMs and get back to doing science.
In my case, this painstaking labor in the process through which the science gets done. Science isn't measuring stuff in a lab. It's thinking deeply, extracting the heart of idea from the soup of thoughts running through my mind, molding it, and finding a way to communicate that idea to others.
