> Writing helps us think about the world, it’s a pivotal intellectual technology.

Much like money decoupled selling and buying to move away from bartering, writing decoupled saying and hearing so they didn't have to happen at the same time. The incredible step that happened was not that people had to think a whole lot, it was that thinking that was already happening had to happen once.

> All writing is thinking when done by a human, you’re literally distilling your thoughts into words. You can’t write without thought.

Of course you can. You can write down exactly what you hear, for dictation.

You can write down a stream of consciousness and put barely any thought into it at all.

I can't help but feel most here are massively over estimating human writing. Human writing is, almost universally, terrible. We have entire jobs that are hard to fill just to make things sort of ok. Good writing is a small subset of human output.