Stardate 20040505.1539

(On Screen): David Boxenhorn posted about me (blush). I don't think everything he concluded was right, but I do think he has done a nice job of pointing out why a lot of my reader mail has annoyed me so much. (I've stored a local copy of his post here, just in case.) Here's the relevant core of it:

The problem is even worse than most of you can imagine, because SDB is a different kind of person from most of you. The Instapundit, for example, has to deal with the same issue, probably to an even greater degree. But I would wager that it takes much less of a toll on him.

You see, there are two kinds of thinkers – detail thinkers, and holistic thinkers. Or, to be more accurate, you can place a person’s thinking somewhere along a spectrum between very detail-oriented and very holistic. Detail thinkers organize their thoughts as a collection of direct relationships: this fact is related to this other fact. Holistic thinkers construct for themselves complex inner models in which they place their facts. So, while “holistic” may sound like a touchy-feely word, and few people may think of SDB as touchy-feely, SDB is definitely an holistic thinker.

And one of the characteristics of holistic thinkers, especially very strongly holistic thinkers like SDB, is an impatience with details. The reason for this, is that holistic thinkers have trouble with (or may be incapable of) quick processing. The Instapundit probably speeds though his emails, deciding with little effort whether or not they are worthy of his attention. SDB is probably incapable of doing this – and that’s his problem.

I don't tend to use words like "holistic", partly because of the new-age connotations and the general association of such words with loonie-left points of view, but at its essence what he's saying is right. It's not true that I have trouble with quick processing, though. Part of why nitpicky reader mail annoys me so much is that it frustrates me.

Back when I was still working, I quite often would spend long periods sitting at my desk with my heels up, wearing headphones, looking blank. Later, I started spending long periods pacing the halls slowly, also looking blank. I never had a manager crab at me and tell me to stop goofing off, because they understood that I was working hard. What I was doing is difficult to describe in words, because it is essentially non-verbal, but I'll try. I was creating simulacra in my head to model problems I needed to solve, or parts of the system I was working on, which I then manipulated as if they really existed. Because of that, I very often discovered problems long before anyone else noticed them, because I found things which others could only find once they had access to working prototypes. The reason I could do that was because I created what amounted to a working prototype, entirely within my head. But that's really a very inadequate description.

The process utilizes a form of "picture thinking". For most people, the subjective experience of thought is a "voice in the head", a stream of words. (When such people imagine telepathy, they think of it as a sort of mental radio where those words are transmitted to the other person.)

But there are some people for whom the subjective experience of thought is visual, a series of pictures and images. What's interesting is that there's no easy way to tell them apart in terms of behavior. They aren't necessarily any less articulate than word thinkers, for instance. Nonetheless, there are differences between those modes of thought.

I can do both. I can switch between them, pretty much at will, and sometimes I do both simultaneously. I use picture thinking to create those mental models, and I sometimes switch to word thinking as part of detailed consideration of small part of it, though depending on what it is sometimes picture thinking works better there as well. One advantage of picture thinking is that it permits me to see more complex relationships and patterns, since it's "multidimensional" (for lack of a better word); word thinking is inherently serial and doesn't deal well with parallelism.

In this post I tried to explain how a lot of my writing gets done, and why it isn't really possible for me to deliberately choose my subject matter. But it may be an exercise in futility to even try to explain this. It may not be something which can be explained.

David compares me to Glenn Reynolds. It's not uncommon for Glenn and I to be used as archetypes of two radically different approaches to political blogging. I once referred to the roles as editors and writers, but others immediately suggested the far nicer terms linkers and thinkers. People read Instapundit in order to see what he's linked to recently, but if someone is a regular reader of USS Clueless, it's because they want to see what I have been thinking about.

It's an acquired taste, I guess; my stuff is certainly not for everyone, and I don't expect it to be. But one of the things which I do quite a lot is to find and point out relationships