alt Hacker NewsSlowness is a virtue
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Great article. I like the simple point about the hypothetical IQ test sent one week in advance. It makes a strong case about time being the true bottleness. I think this same idea could be applied to most tests.
Implicit in the design of most tests is the idea that a person's ability to quickly solve moderately difficult problems implies a proportional ability to solve very difficult problems if given more time. This is clearly jumping to a conclusion. I doubt there is any credible evidence to support this. My experience tends to suggest the opposite; that more intelligent people need more time to think because their brains have to synthesize more different facts and sources of information. They're doing more work.
We can see it with AI agents as well; they perform better when you give them more time and when they consider the problem from more angles.
It's interesting that we have such bias in our education system because most people would agree that being able to solve new difficult problems is a much more economically valuable skill than being able to quickly solve moderate problems that have already been solved. There is much less economic and social value in solving problems that have already been solved... Yet this is what most tests select for.
It reminds me of the "factory model of schooling." Also there is a George Carlin quote which comes to mind:
"Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation."
I suspect there may be some correlation between High IQ, fast thinking, fast learning and suggestibility (meaning insufficient scrutiny of learned information). What if fast learning comes at the expense of scrutiny? What if fast thinking is tested for as a proxy for fast learning?
What if the tests which our society and economy depend on ultimately select for suggestibility, not intelligence?
While I agree with the spirit of this piece, Andrew Wiles did not publish nothing for 7 years. He had a literal drawer full of pre-prepared papers of which he regularly published one, in order to fulfill his obligations and thus to have the time and freedom to think about what he wanted to think about.
The real tragedy here is the question what all people like him could accomplish if they didn't have to use 3/4 of their time and energy on bureaucracy and jumping through endless stupid hoops. (But oh! What would the world come to, if people didn't have to PROVE that they deserve to do research/eat/live/go to the doctor - in the specific way someone came up with to minimize one kind of error over the other ...! /sarcasm)
"Development is the execution of a map toward a goal while research is the pursuit of a goal without a map". If there is something I can take from this post, it will be this quote.
The classic military maxim… slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
I enjoyed this. At my own workplace it's a challenge to fit my team's work into the wider sprint-based methodology where every project must be refined, estimated, and broken down into items with <2 days effort. That makes a certain amount of sense if, say, you're building a standard web portal. It makes less sense if, say, you're adapting modern hierarchical routing algorithms to take vehicle dimension restrictions into account. It's difficult to express just how nebulous this kind of work can be. Managers like to say "Maybe you don't know how long it will take now, but you can research and prototype for a couple of days and have a better idea". The problem is that research work generally takes the following form:
* Come up with 5 possible approaches (2 days)
* Create benchmark framework & suite (1 day)
* Try out approach A, but realise that it cannot work for subtle technical reasons (2 days)
* Try out approach B (2 days)
* Fail to make approach B performant enough (3 day)
...
You just keep trying directions, refining, following hunches, coming up with new things to try etc... until you (seemingly randomly) land on something that works. This is fundamentally un-estimatable. And yet if you're not doing this sort of work, you will rarely come up with truly novel feats of engineering.
There are two kinds of slowness. One is trying hard while getting no visible result. Another is procrastination. The article refers to the first
I like this post. It reminds me of contemporary programming language research. There are precious few people actually doing interesting stuff in PL research these days that are actually trying to uncover new paradigms that aren't just the same old "we discovered how to do X in Y type system" or "novel technique to generate objects with blah blah constraints".
People doing actually interesting stuff can't get funding, so they have to lone-wolf their entire research or just give up and work on stuff that gets paid, people like
- Jonathan Edwards
- Allen Webster
- Brett Victor
All with seriously intriguing ideas that probably have potential, but nobody seems to want to actually dig in to the stuff. Fortunately, there are guys like Stephen Kell who are kind of doing it even in academia, but I think he's limited too towards working on the boring problems that get funding as well.
This reminds of a question I had when I played chess for a couple of years. I was a lot better (as evidenced by my ELO score on chess.com) when playing long games (1 turn per day) than short games (say half an hour total).
At the time, I read that everybody is better at "slow" chess. But does that explanation make sense? If everybody is better, shouldn't my ELO score have stayed the same?
I think there are two separate things. Slowness of progress in research is good bc it signals high value/difficulty. This I wholeheartedly agree. The other is, the slowness of solving a given problem is good, which is less clear.
I think indubitably intelligence should be linked to speed. If you can since everything faster I think smarter is a correct label. What I also think is true is that slowness can be a virtue in solving problems for a person and as a strategy. But this is usually because fast strategies rely on priors/assumptions and ideas which generalize poorly; and often more general and asymptotically faster algorithms are slower when tested on a limited set or on a difficulty level which is too low
Bad article. The thesis may even be valuable, but it’s riddled with falsehoods trying to prove the point. It reads more as the usual person disliking the idea of IQ and trying to bash its foundation. Some actual facts are:
1. Einstein was a great student (as common sense would expect) [1]. Top in his class in ETHZ, and the supposed failed exam is because he tried to do the exam earlier than intended. He had great, although not flawless, grades all the way through. He wasn’t a mindless robot and clearly got some feathers ruffed by not showing up for classes, but his academic record is exactly what you would expect from a brilliant but somewhat nonconformist mind. He may not have been Von Neumann or Terence Tao, I suppose.
2. The main “source” of the article is an even more flawed blog post [2], which again just bashes on IQ with no sliver of proof that I can see other than waving hands in the hair while saying “dubious statistical transformations”, as if that wasn’t the only possible way to do these kinds of tests. Please prove me wrong and show me some proper study in there, I can’t see it but I’m from mobile.
Disappointing. What’s the point of it? Quote actual scientists, for example Higgs, who are on record saying that modern academic culture is too short term focused. Basically everyone I’ve ever spoken to about it in academia agrees. Might be a biased sample, but I think it’s more that everyone realizes we’ve dug ourselves into a hole that’s not so easy to escape.
[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2zwZsjlJ-G4
[2]: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-n...
The quip about IQ tests might be true for common range IQ tests, but IQ tests that test for very high IQ like the Ultra test [0] are untimed and unsupervised.
This aligns well with Cal Newport's Slow Productivity. Which reminds me, I need to read it during xmas break
Good post, but I wish he had delved more into how modern institutions could be revamped to allow for slow, long term thinking.
I think there is an assumption that institutions inherently are short term optimized, but I don’t know if that’s actually true, or merely a more recent phenomenon.
My guess is that you’d need to deliberately be “less than hyper rational” when doling out funding, because otherwise you end up following the metrics mentioned in the post. In other words, you might need to give out income randomly to everyone that meets certain criteria, rather than optimizing for the absolute best choice. The nature of inflation and increasing costs of living also becomes a problem, as whatever mechanism you’re using to fund “long term” work needs to be increasing every year.
"Development is the execution of a map toward a goal while research is the pursuit of a goal without a map."
Uhm? That's not my definition of development. Actually the word itself has different meansing - see development biology, from a fertilised egg to some adult animal. But even if the context here is meant for planning research, ALL research also has steps. For instance if you write for a grant, you have to lay down the idea(s) in more details, then after you gotten the grant (hopefully), you will continue to do more planning. So there are definitely planned steps here too. You just can not always plan results or success; see the discovery of penicillin. While it was not 100% random, it was still more of a side-finding than a planned finding.
Also, slowness ... I don't think slowness in and by itself is a virtue. Some things are more complicated and take time to realise. See how Darwin drew the first tree of life with a pencil or pen. Reaching this point in time took some prior thinking.
like the idea of the article. however, it gave me bad vibes. this “virtues” only use is to have moral high ground over other “virtues” instead of deconstructing intelligence as a whole.
why is it bad that the person with the highest IQ does puzzle columns? are all people with IQ supposed to be doing groundbreaking research? can you only do groundbreaking research if you’re intelligent?
i think the real virtue here is not “slowness” but rather persistence. what do you think?
One relevant distinction: those who follow the rules, and those who discover them. Or the theory builders and the problem solvers.
Consider something like set theory. When set theory entered a period of crisis in the early 20th century, there were those who mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers who tried to determine what a good formalization of the notion of set is. Russell and Leśniewski come to mind, for example. Naturally, this isn't just a matter of coming up with any collection of axioms. It involves analyzing the concept of "set".
This is different from the Erdos's of the world.
Having a website that’s legible with DarkReader is a virtue this article sadly does not espouse.
I saw another post here saying speed-work is important. It's neither slow-work or speed-work. Stop making these generic blind rules. Just go by what's needed for the context. Keep your eyes open, not to these kind of rules, but to what's going on around.
its a timeless virtue.
All of the fast work will ideally soon be automated, leaving the fast workers with nothing to do but starve. In a righteous world, the slow workers who can change how the fast work is done will ultimately win.
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The timing of this article and the submission seems to coincide (and possibly a reaction) to the other story on HN frontpage: Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) (jsomers.net)
To clarify, some are misunderstanding James Somers to be advocating sloppy low quality work, as if he's recommending speed>quality. He's saying something else: remove latencies and delays to shorten feedback loops. Faster feedback cycles leads to more repetitions which leads to higher quality.
"slowness being a virtue" is not the opposite of Somer's recommendation about "working quickly".