Written artifacts are landmarks to navigate within a given idea maze.

(This is riffing off an observation from Gordon Brander.)

When we're feeling our way through the idea maze, we hold threads of analysis lightly; a living, evolving, fragile hypothesis.

The more that they seem to help us, the more that they survive disconfirming evidence, the more that they resonate with different people, the more confident we become that the thread is onto something useful.

Once you get confident enough that the idea is durable and useful, you want to freeze it in time; to memorialize it in a way that you can point others to.

This process of crystallizing a living thought into a frozen artifact takes time and effort, but it's worth it when you know it's useful.

By doing this effort you can now transmit the idea, for ~free, into the future and into a significantly larger number of heads much more cheaply.

The document becomes a kind of tombstone for the original thread of analysis; locking it in in a more durable way.

Those tombstones then become landmarks to help you and others navigate that particular idea maze.