Why Writing Makes You Learn More

In the late 19th century, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve:

• Within an hour, we forget 50% of new information,

• Within a day, we forget 70%,

• And after a week, we forget 90%.

Plotted on a chart, the forgetting curve looks like this:

In short: we lose information immediately after learning it. Unless we revisit that information over time.

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Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition flips the learning curve on its head. By reviewing information over and over again, you retain more.

By writing the ‘ole fashioned way (line-by-line), you must slow down to wrestle with competing ideas, viewpoints, and primary sources. It’s the platonic ideal of the learning curve.

By contrast, writing with AI creates the illusion of learning. You think you’re learning. You feel like you’re learning. But in reality, you’re bypassing the spaced repetition where learning actually happens.

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(Human) Writing Is Learning

If you’ve developed your own unique writing style, you could train a large language model to mimic that style.

• To the reader, it’d look the same as your writing.

• For the writer, the impact is different.

Writing well requires aesthetic taste to identify which ideas are quality. In the pursuit of writing aesthetically beautiful things, your capacity to create more beautiful things increases.

An essay can literally change your beliefs. Written well, it can change your reader’s beliefs, too.

There’s power in writing. But fewer than ever can write without AI.

Can you?

Thanks for reading!

— Grant Varner