Neal Stephenson: preference

Transcript context

…How does longhand improve your thinking or writing process compared to, say, typing? I can type really fast, so it’s easy to just . . . Keyboard goes burrrrr, where stuff gets put down on the screen almost as fast as ideas are coming into my head, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s valuable for a sentence to be lodged in the buffer for a little while because it’s really easy to improve it or even just to get rid of it while it’s between your ears. As soon as you put it down on the screen, even though it is editable and all that, it takes on a kind of permanence. It requires more effort to go back and fix it. I think that the first-draft quality is better. It’s also just faster to edit on paper. I can just draw a box around a paragraph and put a big X through it or cross out a word or write something in. It just takes longer to do all of those things if you’re screwing around with a mouse or whatever. Now, you must have spent a lot of time thinking about communism over the last few years. Why is it, in your view — having come to grips with the topic — that so many American intellectuals became infatuated with Stalinism? Not just agnostic, but positively enthusiastic. This often survived their visits to the Soviet Union. How did that happen? Are we just, as humans, deranged beings?…

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