Thread by @GeniesLoki

This was an interesting exchange. Thoughts to follow in thread.

https://twitter.com/JoshHochschild/status/1322284847101071361

In the context I saw this, it was being painted as a gendered difference. I think it is, but not for the reasons people are treating it as.

The actual reason is that we've put the boundaries of "thinking" in the wrong place.

We tend to only consider it "thinking" if you're doing it on your own off in your own head, but almost everything you do involves thinking, and many other modes of thinking succeed even by the standards you'd want to judge "real thinking" by, they just seem less legitimate.

Easy example: Writing about something is a great way to think about it. Writing is very much a tool for assisted thinking. It is possible to have much better and more interesting thoughts by writing about it than you ever could off in your own head.

So is conversation. A conversation partner is a much more opinionated aid to thinking than writing is, but that has strengths and weaknesses - having a conversation with someone allows you to think things together than neither of you could have thought on your own.

In fact, almost all thinking is a form of conversation with the world: You build on things you have learned from others, and you put it back out into the world where you get feedback on it. The difference between "conversation" and "real thinking" is mostly latency.

Someone who is doing "real thinking" has deliberately separated themselves a bit from the conversation to give them time to reflect.

This is neither better nor worse than the more immediate conversation, they just have different strengths.

But importantly both are thinking and both are good at the same things in a broader sense - they're just variants of the same basic tool.

Despite this we've decided that one is thinking and one is communicating, but this is a completely fake distinction.

Anyway, this is where the gender thing comes in I think: Heavily collaborative work is female coded, and heavily solitary work is male coded. As a result, the more feminine coded something is the more likely it is to be branded "not thinking".

(Of course men can collaborate and women can be solitary thinkers, this is about gender norms rather than actual gendered behaviour, though of course on average people tend to follow the norms)

As is often the way, this sucks for both binary genders, because both sides are being denied a super useful tool. Both more collaborative and more solitary thinking are super useful and it's good to be able to do whichever of these is better suited to the task.

This also sucks for everyone independently of where they are on the spectrum of styles, because it elides the fundamental similarities between communication and thinking in ways that make us worse at both.

BTW to tie this back into the original discussion: School is *terrible* at teaching collaborative thinking. I think there are a variety of reasons for this, but the most prominent one is that it's much harder to grade.