Self-Deception
I've always thought 'writing shows you what you think and editing helps you change your mind'—and maybe that’s a decent heuristic—but it’s more complicated than that. I think it’s possible for writing to do the opposite of what we hope, to lead to self-deception. A few thoughts on how:
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Premature convergence: When you start drafting, you unlock a new stream of thoughts, but once you find a new center of gravity (a potential thesis), it’s common for all further thoughts to reinforce the thing you happened to stumble on, regardless of its substance. Beyond a point, writing can ossify & lock you into a frame.
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Aesthetic attachment: Once you’re trying to make a ‘good’ essay around your thesis, it’s easy to become enamored by phrases, sentences, images, and sources. Expression (vibes/voice) is an entirely different thing than thinking. You can dress up a static/wrong thought to be beautiful/persuasive.
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The sunk cost fallacy: after you spend hours on an essay and share it, it’s likely that you’ll continue to believe it. If you’re wrong, you’ll have ‘wasted’ that time. If you change your mind, your readers will have an outdated model of you (OFC, views evolve over time, but I wonder if publishing leads to short-term friction in your evolution).
One possible way around this is to, as soon as you think you found your thesis, to rigorously consider and explore the antithesis (not as a rhetorical strawman, but to really, earnestly, consider the opposite). It means a given draft will be scatter-brained and contradictory, but it’s how you find a synthesis, a more refined thesis. And once you find that, you start over, and repeat, until you end up somewhere that is far more nuanced, interesting, and weird than where you started.
The thing I’m grasping at is that thinking & expression are often at odds, and before you commit to an idea worth expressing, you need to go through rounds of unglamorous self-interrogation. There is probably a mode where thinking _is_expression, but the risk is not wanting to shed something that is elegantly said. One way through this it to get meta and explicitly express your doubt and your evolving POV; I think this is what separates essays from articles and propaganda, and it stops you from brainwashing yourself.