title: You are what you write——沈向洋
date: 2018-02-21 13:18:28
tags: [随想,write]
categories: 个人文章
---
Are Twitter, PowerPoint, Facebook, Instagram and texting eroding our ability to think?

There is a Chinese proverb that says “见文如见人,” which literally means “reading the document is the same as seeing the author.” If we are what we write, then who have we, as a society, become?

I was sitting in a technical review recently, listening to one of our reviewers grill the engineer who was presenting: Why did you choose that design? Why is the service showing bad results? How many users will switch to the solution?

The presenter’s answers lacked depth. It seemed like he hadn’t done enough rigorous thinking, the kind where you sit quietly, sift through research, contemplate options, determine what you know, don’t know and where more work is required. The kind of thinking I did as a young researcher when peers took me and my work apart when I took short cuts. Back then, I practiced a disciplined approach, spending hours just thinking, and even more hours on the hardest part—writing it down.

Today, long-form writing is being replaced. Tweets pass for dialogue. PowerPoint condenses thoughts to bullets. Words have been traded for emojis and GIFs. And we’ve become addicted to the noise. What happens in an Internet minute? 16 million text messages. 1.8 million snaps. 452,000 Tweets. 156 million emails. Who has time to think, let alone write?

And maybe we, in the technology industry, have shaped this reality. We created the phones, apps and 24/7-connected world. We’ve enabled society to put down the pen. The only writing I do today is email or quick WeChat posts.

So now I worry that we’re losing a valuable tool that helps us to think deeply, express who we are at our greatest and expand the intellect of those around us. And for us in the technical community, this is especially troubling. The stakes are higher than ever before with AI. We’re under enormous pressure to ship quickly, to achieve more, faster, but we can’t do this at the expense of the highest engineering quality. We have to think carefully about consequences and alternatives. Who gets blamed when a self-driving car hits someone? The engineer who wrote the code is the driver. Who is accountable for the AI algorithm with bias? The engineer who created the AI.

I see fewer engineers writing and sharing deep thinking, but this is what will lead to far more true innovation across the industry. How will we achieve the big transformative breakthroughs versus the incremental milestones?

By writing. Because the way to think is actually to write.

Putting pen to paper forces you to develop and refine your thinking by iterating, revising and exploring alternatives. Anyone who can think deeply can write beautiful code, inspiring papers or develop the plan to bring the next big thing to life. I encourage you to read Reid Hoffman’s Series B pitch for LinkedIn in which he shares the thinking that helped him succeed. At the time, he shares that a partner in a venture firm was exposed to around 5,000 pitches, looked more closely at 600 to 800, and did between 0 and 2 deals.

Writing offers the possibility to create lasting artifacts. I think of papers I published that endure, albeit perhaps as reference materials. Plenoptic Sampling. Lazy Snapping. Poisson Matting. These are my work’s contribution to the field of computer vision and graphics. They will survive me and, if I’m lucky, even help shape a mind or two.

One of my favorite professors at Carnegie Mellon, Takeo Kanade, said that you have to write research papers like detective novels. You need story, suspense, surprise and ‘aha’ to explain your ideas to peers, to inspire others to contribute and advance your work and the whole field.

Writing is an equalizer to get the best from the whole team. At Amazon, presentations are done with the six-page paper. Meetings kick off with everyone reading followed by comments and questions to the author. Everyone operates from the same context, and introverts, extroverts and non-native speakers have an equal chance to get their thinking across. It’s not about the presenter’s personality, but the words.

Ultimately, writing helps make you successful. You might be the smartest person with the best idea, but if you can’t communicate your thinking in a compelling way, you won’t get far. Two engineers in our AI+R team who inspire me with their regular writing habits are Bill Ramsey and Ronny Kohavi. Bill has written over 250 blog posts at Microsoft, benefitting our entire technical community. With Ronny, you don’t even need to meet him—his highly cited A/B test experimentation papers say it all, and he’s publishing for the benefit of the industry on LinkedIn.

As you’re reading this, you may be logging your objections: I need to drive results, so I need to go straight to code. I’m known for my code, so I don’t need to write papers. I’m not a native speaker, and I speak better with my code. I don’t know what to write about. I don’t have time… But please set them aside—for your own success, for your company’s, for the industry’s advancement—and start writing.

I see so many occasions for building long-form writing back into the engineering culture—planning documents, project proposals, technology LRP’s, review articles—to inspire us to work together, collectively creating and cultivating big ideas and big thinking.

I took a first step recently, writing a research paper with my colleagues Xiaodong He and Di Li, From Eliza to XiaoIce: Challenges and Opportunities with Social Chatbots, for the first time in years, so please no judgment, only constructive feedback!

I challenge everyone reading this piece to write 500 words per week. If you’ve got an idea or you see a problem, write your proposal and share it!

Let’s rewrite our standards for thought leadership and engineering quality by writing more!

原文:http://link.zhihu.com/?target=https%3A//www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-what-write-harry-shum%3Ffrom%3Dtimeline%26isappinstalled%3D0

You are what you write——沈向洋的更多相关文章

  1. 沈向洋|微软携手 OpenAI 进一步履行普及且全民化人工智能的使命

    OpenAI 进一步履行普及且全民化人工智能的使命"> 作者简介 沈向洋,微软全球执行副总裁,微软人工智能及微软研究事业部负责人 我们正处于技术发展历程中的关键时刻. 云计算的强大计算 ...

  2. 首届Ignite China微软技术大会见闻

    10.26-10.28,有幸参加微软在中国北京举办的首届Ignite China技术大会.世界那么大,技术那么多,我想去看看. 为期三天的技术大会在小汤山九华山庄举办,吐槽一下,太特么远了,每天要跑3 ...

  3. 基于canvas实现物理运动效果与动画效果(一)

    一.为什么要写这篇文章 某年某月某时某种原因,我在慕课网上看到了一个大神实现了关于小球的抛物线运动的代码,心中很是欣喜,故而写这篇文章来向这位大神致敬,同时也为了弥补自己在运动效果和动画效果制作方面的 ...

  4. Ignite China微软技术

    首届Ignite China微软技术大会见闻   10.26-10.28,有幸参加微软在中国北京举办的首届Ignite China技术大会.世界那么大,技术那么多,我想去看看. 为期三天的技术大会在小 ...

  5. POPTEST老李推荐:互联网时代100本必读书,来自100位业界大咖推荐 2

    ➤NO.30<移动的力量>[推荐人]刘九如:电子工业出版社副社长兼总编辑邬贺铨:中国工程院院士.原副院长汪力成:华立集团董事局主席➤NO.31<智慧社会>[推荐人]段永朝:财讯 ...

  6. CNCC2017梳理

    大牛云集的中国计算机大会:大会日程表:http://cncc.ccf.org.cn/cn/news/schedule_empty 早上的论坛可以在爱奇艺下载视频 下午的分论坛是多个同时进行的,我也只去 ...

  7. 人工智能背景下的Office 365现状和发展趋势

    作者:陈希章 发表于 2017年7月31日 引子 谈论人工智能是让人兴奋的,因为它具有让人兴奋的两大特征 -- 每个人都似乎知道一点并且以知道一点为荣,但又好像没多少人能真正讲的明白.毫无疑问,我也仅 ...

  8. 聊聊找AI算法岗工作

    https://blog.csdn.net/weixin_42137700/article/details/81628028 首先,本文不是为了增加大家的焦虑感,而是站在一名学生的角度聊聊找AI算法岗 ...

  9. emouse思·睿—评论与观点整理之三

    虽说我主要做的硬件,平时的兴趣爱好比较关注移动互联网,混迹于虎嗅.爱范儿.雷锋网.36Kr.cnBeta.瘾科技.i黑马.TechWeb等这类科技以及创业媒体,遗憾的是系统的去写的并不多,好在还算充分 ...

随机推荐

  1. 配置 RIPv1 和 RIPv2

    拓扑图 场景您是公司的网络管理员.您所管理的小型网络中包含三台路由器,并规划了五个网络.您需要在网络中配置RIP路由协议来实现路由信息的相互传输.最初使用的是RIPv1,后来发现RIPv2更有优势,于 ...

  2. SUSE12Sp3-kafka安装

    1.安装java jdk sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/java #创建目录 将jdk-8u201-linux-x64.tar.gz上传到该目录 cd /user/local/ja ...

  3. [Swift]LeetCode832. 翻转图像 | Flipping an Image

    Given a binary matrix A, we want to flip the image horizontally, then invert it, and return the resu ...

  4. mysql_study_2

    select 代码: CREATE DATABASE mysql_shiyan; use mysql_shiyan; CREATE TABLE department ( dpt_name ) NOT ...

  5. selenium之 chromedriver与chrome版本映射表(更新至v2.43)

    看到网上基本没有最新的chromedriver与chrome的对应关系表,便兴起整理了一份如下,希望对大家有用: chromedriver版本 支持的Chrome版本 chromedriver版本 支 ...

  6. 看完Andoird9.0 Pie的隐藏特性,我买了SSL证书

    今年 8 月,Google 正式公布了 Android 9.0 ,新的甜点名称也正式揭晓——Pie.这次的大版本升级中,藏着一个不起眼的特性:默认使用 HTTPS 为了将所有网络流量从明文(未加密的 ...

  7. PV UV QPS 并发数

    TPS(Transactions Per Second):每秒事务数 QPS(Query Per Second):每秒请求数,QPS其实是衡量吞吐量的一个常用指标,就是说服务器在一秒的时间内处理了多少 ...

  8. .NET Core微服务系列基础文章索引(目录导航Draft版)

    一.为啥要写这个系列? 今年从原来的Team里面被抽出来加入了新的Team,开始做Java微服务的开发工作,接触了Spring Boot, Spring Cloud等技术栈,对微服务这种架构有了一个感 ...

  9. Object Pooling(对象池)实现

    在文章开始之前首先要思考的问题是为什么要建立对象池.这和.NET垃圾回收机制有关,正如下面引用所说,内存不是无限的,垃圾回收器最终要回收对象,释放内存.尽管.NET为垃圾回收已经进行了大量优化,例如将 ...

  10. Python爬虫入门教程 33-100 《海王》评论数据抓取 scrapy

    1. 海王评论数据爬取前分析 海王上映了,然后口碑炸了,对咱来说,多了一个可爬可分析的电影,美哉~ 摘录一个评论 零点场刚看完,温导的电影一直很不错,无论是速7,电锯惊魂还是招魂都很棒.打斗和音效方面 ...