9 ms·

Slowness is a virtue

254 points by jakobgreenfeld 10mo ago

qouteall 10mo ago
There are two kinds of slowness. One is trying hard while getting no visible result. Another is procrastination. The article refers to the first
- dontwannahearit 10mo ago
  And the challenge is making management understand the difference!
- ssivark 10mo ago
  But here's the question: how do you tell the difference? Especially when hard-work without visible result / legible failure is hard to communicate...
n4r9 10mo ago
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.
- HPsquared 10mo ago
  If you're doing original work, the plan might change at every step.
- p_v_doom 10mo ago
  Almost everywhere management- whether wearing the skin of agile on top, is still bound to good old school Taylorism. And there is always this complete lack of understanding of the types of work there are and that you cannot cramp work related to complex, novel things in the same way you do something standardized. Alas, business dont care, cause they wont their estimates and roadmaps and plans, and we all pretend it works ...
- woooooo 10mo ago
  FWIW, the ritual of codifying your experimentation like this does still serve a dubious purpose -- it gives your boss a way to talk about it with their boss. This doesn't solve the problem faster, it slows things down in fact, but we live in a society and your boss needs a way to talk about your work.
  - n4r9 10mo ago
    I'm fine with providing status updates and a rough idea of next steps. Less so fully breaking down projects into small items, or building a year(s)-long roadmap based on a quarterly release schedule with committed items etc...
- sundarurfriend 10mo ago
  > The problem is that research work generally takes the following form: > * Come up with 5 possible approaches (2 days) Even that gives you something to talk about, that looks "solution-oriented" in the way managers like; in deep work the first steps can actually be: * Break down the existing approach into its fundamental assumptions and components (3 days) * Try to build a few approaches challenging some assumptions in a useful way, and fail (2 days) * Get a clearer picture of the cloud of possibilities that are more likely to work, and start assembling the pieces from that cloud (3 days) and so on. This is the kind of stuff that's really hard to communicate, and often sounds like you're doing nothing at all in the initial stages, even though that time pays for itself many times more once(/if) you get to take it to completion instead of doing patchwork upon patchwork on a design based on outdated assumptions.
keiferski 10mo ago
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.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- aebtebeten 10mo ago
  See Dijkstra's discussion of the "Buxton Index" in https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD117...: > The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans. For the little grocery shop around the corner it is about 1/2, for the true Christian it is infinity, and for most other entities it is in between: about 4 for the average politician who aims at his re-election, slightly more for most industries, but much less for the managers who have to write quarterly reports. The Buxton Index is an important concept because close co-operation between entities with very different Buxton Indices invariably fails and leads to moral complaints about the partner.
  - chrisweekly 10mo ago
    Thanks for this! A brilliant insight, which I don't think I ever encountered before.
jasode 10mo ago
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".
- alfonsodev 10mo ago
  Totally agree, how I see it, it's related to taking time to sharpen your axe. Having a defined flow that gives you quick feedback quick and doesn't get in the way. I you are writing, then you'd be using an app that you can quickly do what you want, e.g shortcuts for bold, vim/emacs motions, that "things-not-getting-in-the-way" state is what leads to flow state, in my opinion. Muscle memory is action for free, then you can focus on thinking deeper. Same happens with coding, although is more complex and can take time to land in a workflow with tools that allow you to move quick, I'm talking about, logs, debugger (if needed), hot reloading of the website, unit test that run fast, knowing who to ask or where to go for finding references, good documentation, good database client, having prepared shortcuts to everything ... and so on. I think it would be could if people would share their flow-tools with different tech stacks, could benefit a lot of us that have some % of this done, but not 100% there yet.
  - aDyslecticCrow 10mo ago
    The energy threshold for adding a new unit test to the suite and a new row to the docs are vital for it to be done. If I need to install pandoc to test compile a doc change before i submit it for code review with 3 other maintainers, id rather keep my note or useful screenshot to myself. If i need to create a c binding of my function so that pytest can run it through 50 rows of cryptic CMake, I'd rather do happy testing locally and submit it as a "trust me bro". Good and fast international tooling matters massively for good software. And it all comes back to speed and iteration loop. On top of that, slow meticulous work can then be done. 100% test coverage, detailed uml diagrams describing the system, and functional safety risk analysis matrix documents. So speed and slowness supplement in different levels of analysis.
huflungdung 10mo ago
[dead]
noodlebird 10mo ago
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?
- n4r9 10mo ago
  > are all people with IQ supposed to be doing groundbreaking research? I don't know about "supposed to", but... it's a reasonable hope or expectation, right? That someone with extraordinary capabilities would want to use them for some extraordinary benefit for mankind. I appreciate vos Savant's contribution to public knowledge, but if you have the ability to make your name by progressing something extremely challenging (like the Riemann hypothesis) then wouldn't you want to try that? Reminds me of that scene in Good Will Hunting where Sean presses Will on why he sticks to manual labouring when he's far smarter than highly trained university professors.
  - GabriDaFirenze 10mo ago
    I agree that it's a reasonable hope but not an expectation. I don't think it's fair to put that type of pressure on someone, and I don't want to assume that's necessarily what you meant. I don't know if you read "Flowers for Algernon" but that's what I think about when discussing highly/exceptionally intelligent people.
    - n4r9 10mo ago
      That's totally fair. I didn't mean "expectation" in the sense of social pressure, but rather that it's likely that someone would want to use their skills in that way.
ljlolel 10mo ago
[flagged]
block_dagger 10mo ago
Having a website that’s legible with DarkReader is a virtue this article sadly does not espouse.
cogogo 10mo ago
The classic military maxim… slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
- willis936 10mo ago
  I use this one. I've witnessed so much time wasted on broken shit being shipped. Tie your shoelaces and you won't trip on them.
- ilovetux 10mo ago
  I've always heard "slow is steady and steady is fast." Same thing, but from the trades instead of the military.
- 101008 10mo ago
  I know it in Spanish (probably it exists in other languages too?) "Visteme despacio que estoy apurado" "Dress me slowly that I am in a hurry"
  - nakedneuron 10mo ago
    "Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano." Walk slowly and you'll walk safe and far.
  - corford 10mo ago
    Similar English expression: Less haste, more speed
- Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
  If I wasn't in IT I think I'd love the military, not the stupid political stuff and killing people, but the organization, discipline, routine, focus on predictability, protocols, etc. Yeah it's boring if it all works but boring is good. And we've been trying to apply this to software development for ages as well - think "continuous deployment" practices (or its new name, DORA metrics in the 2020's).
  - zwnow 10mo ago
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
socketcluster 10mo ago
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?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- paulcole 10mo ago
  > I like the simple point about the hypothetical IQ test sent one week in advance. It’s a simple point but an incorrect one. If you can work on it for a week, it’s no longer an IQ test. Nobody is saying that the questions on an IQ test are impossible. It’s the fact that there are constraints (time) and that everybody takes the test the same way that makes it an IQ test. Otherwise it’s just a little sheet of kinda tricky puzzles. Would you be a better basketball player if everyone else had to heave from 3/4 court but you could shoot layups? No, you’d be playing by different rules in an essentially different game. You might have more impressive stats but you wouldn’t be better.
zkmon 10mo ago
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.
OutOfHere 10mo ago
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.
- setopt 10mo ago
  In a "righteous world", no one would starve, regardless of their work style and performance.
  - OutOfHere 10mo ago
    Yes, although the fast workers currently intentionally make their slower coworkers starve (also while compromising on quality and innovation), so how about that. They have done this for years. Payback is a part of righteousness.
    - steve_adams_86 10mo ago
      What is righteous about revenge? Does revenge not make you like the people you resent?
nunodonato 10mo ago
This aligns well with Cal Newport's Slow Productivity. Which reminds me, I need to read it during xmas break
isolli 10mo ago
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?
- orlp 10mo ago
  When "everybody is better", you can still increase your relative rank to other people if you benefit even more. For example if I were to give $1 to every person on earth, but $100 million to you, everyone would be richer but you would be a lot richer still.
- fpoling 10mo ago
  With more time the scale of change is very personal. For some people going from 15 minutes to 1 hour gives a massive boost, while other do not improve match. And then some people can loose focus or get distracted during longer plays so for them more time may make they play worse.
- tbrake 10mo ago
  unfamiliar with chess.com but correspondence chess(day/move) and rapid (game 30+0) should fall under two different rating classifications. Having different ratings between them is to be expected. And while people tend to make __better moves__ in slower time controls, their rapid/blitz ratings are usually higher than standard ratings.
dgfl 10mo ago
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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2zwZsjlJ-G4 [2]: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-no-ones-is https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-n...
- neom 10mo ago
  I also didn't enjoy it, sloppy boundary drawing combined with some motivated reasoning. He explicitly distinguishes research from development in paragraph 4, but then spends the rest of the essay treating "fast" and "legible" as inherently inferior without consistently applying his own distinction...like, If you're building a bridge or shipping software, legibility and speed aren't signs you're not pushing boundaries...they're signs you're being competent. also, he seems to suggest that slow thinking is actually a different kind of intelligence that institutions miss. But this conflates processing speed with intellectual ambition, plenty of fast thinkers work on hard, illegible problems.... Plenty of slow thinkers work on trivial ones.
kasperset 10mo ago
"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.
dhruv3006 10mo ago
its a timeless virtue.
pgraf 10mo ago
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. [0] https://megasociety.org/admission/ultra/ https://megasociety.org/admission/ultra/
d-us-vb 10mo ago
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.
- rramadass 10mo ago
  Would you mind posting some links to the notable works of the people you have mentioned?
Davidzheng 10mo ago
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
- DrewADesign 10mo ago
  I haven’t looked into the source study, so who knows if it’s good, but I recall this article about smart people taking longer to provide answers to hard problems because they take more into consideration, but are much more likely to be correct. https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/intelligent-people-slower-solve-hard-problems/ https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/intelligent-people-slower-so...
- lachlan_gray 10mo ago
  I think part of the message is that speed isn't a free lunch. If an intelligence can solve "legible" problems quickly, it's symptomatic of a specific adaption for identifying short paths. So when you factor speed into tests, you're systematically filtering for intelligences that are biased to avoid novelty. Then if someone is slow to solve the same problems, it's actually a signal that they have the opposite bias, to consider more paths. IMO the thing being measured by intelligence tests is something closer to "power" or "competitive advantage".
  - Jensson 10mo ago
    > Then if someone is slow to solve the same problems, it's actually a signal that they have the opposite bias, to consider more paths. No this isn't true, most of the time they just don't consider any paths at all and are just dumb. And the bias towards novelty doesn't make you slow, ADHD is biased towards novelty and people wouldn't call those slow.
klein_phi 10mo ago
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)
lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
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.
shevy-java 10mo ago
"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.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
meander_water 10mo ago
For anyone interested in the history of IQ tests and how broken they are check out The Mismeasure of Man [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
- tptacek 10mo ago
  Ehhhhhh careful, Mismeasure hasn't held up well, and there are better arguments.
  - meander_water 10mo ago
    Oh interesting, can you share any links or books?
    - tptacek 10mo ago
      For modern scientific rebuttals to race science, I'd start with Sasha Gusev and Eric Turkheimer. You'll read about things like missing heritability and the methodological problems of twin studies (which are grave). I'd also read Cosma Shalizi's "g, a statistical myth", which is also fun just from a sort of mid-level math/stat perspective. A classic in the field that still holds up is Ned Block's "Race, Genes, and IQ", written as a response to The Bell Curve. I don't have offhand good links to critiques of Gould that are on any site I would recommend you read.

254 points by jakobgreenfeld 10mo ago

There are two kinds of slowness. One is trying hard while getting no visible result. Another is procrastination. The article refers to the first

dontwannahearit 10mo ago
And the challenge is making management understand the difference!
ssivark 10mo ago
But here's the question: how do you tell the difference? Especially when hard-work without visible result / legible failure is hard to communicate...

n4r9 10mo ago

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.

HPsquared 10mo ago
If you're doing original work, the plan might change at every step.
p_v_doom 10mo ago
Almost everywhere management- whether wearing the skin of agile on top, is still bound to good old school Taylorism. And there is always this complete lack of understanding of the types of work there are and that you cannot cramp work related to complex, novel things in the same way you do something standardized. Alas, business dont care, cause they wont their estimates and roadmaps and plans, and we all pretend it works ...
woooooo 10mo ago
FWIW, the ritual of codifying your experimentation like this does still serve a dubious purpose -- it gives your boss a way to talk about it with their boss. This doesn't solve the problem faster, it slows things down in fact, but we live in a society and your boss needs a way to talk about your work.
- n4r9 10mo ago
  I'm fine with providing status updates and a rough idea of next steps. Less so fully breaking down projects into small items, or building a year(s)-long roadmap based on a quarterly release schedule with committed items etc...
sundarurfriend 10mo ago
> The problem is that research work generally takes the following form: > * Come up with 5 possible approaches (2 days) Even that gives you something to talk about, that looks "solution-oriented" in the way managers like; in deep work the first steps can actually be: * Break down the existing approach into its fundamental assumptions and components (3 days) * Try to build a few approaches challenging some assumptions in a useful way, and fail (2 days) * Get a clearer picture of the cloud of possibilities that are more likely to work, and start assembling the pieces from that cloud (3 days) and so on. This is the kind of stuff that's really hard to communicate, and often sounds like you're doing nothing at all in the initial stages, even though that time pays for itself many times more once(/if) you get to take it to completion instead of doing patchwork upon patchwork on a design based on outdated assumptions.

keiferski 10mo ago

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.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
aebtebeten 10mo ago
See Dijkstra's discussion of the "Buxton Index" in https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD117...: > The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans. For the little grocery shop around the corner it is about 1/2, for the true Christian it is infinity, and for most other entities it is in between: about 4 for the average politician who aims at his re-election, slightly more for most industries, but much less for the managers who have to write quarterly reports. The Buxton Index is an important concept because close co-operation between entities with very different Buxton Indices invariably fails and leads to moral complaints about the partner.
- chrisweekly 10mo ago
  Thanks for this! A brilliant insight, which I don't think I ever encountered before.

jasode 10mo ago

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".

alfonsodev 10mo ago
Totally agree, how I see it, it's related to taking time to sharpen your axe. Having a defined flow that gives you quick feedback quick and doesn't get in the way. I you are writing, then you'd be using an app that you can quickly do what you want, e.g shortcuts for bold, vim/emacs motions, that "things-not-getting-in-the-way" state is what leads to flow state, in my opinion. Muscle memory is action for free, then you can focus on thinking deeper. Same happens with coding, although is more complex and can take time to land in a workflow with tools that allow you to move quick, I'm talking about, logs, debugger (if needed), hot reloading of the website, unit test that run fast, knowing who to ask or where to go for finding references, good documentation, good database client, having prepared shortcuts to everything ... and so on. I think it would be could if people would share their flow-tools with different tech stacks, could benefit a lot of us that have some % of this done, but not 100% there yet.
- aDyslecticCrow 10mo ago
  The energy threshold for adding a new unit test to the suite and a new row to the docs are vital for it to be done. If I need to install pandoc to test compile a doc change before i submit it for code review with 3 other maintainers, id rather keep my note or useful screenshot to myself. If i need to create a c binding of my function so that pytest can run it through 50 rows of cryptic CMake, I'd rather do happy testing locally and submit it as a "trust me bro". Good and fast international tooling matters massively for good software. And it all comes back to speed and iteration loop. On top of that, slow meticulous work can then be done. 100% test coverage, detailed uml diagrams describing the system, and functional safety risk analysis matrix documents. So speed and slowness supplement in different levels of analysis.

huflungdung 10mo ago

[dead]

noodlebird 10mo ago

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?

n4r9 10mo ago
> are all people with IQ supposed to be doing groundbreaking research? I don't know about "supposed to", but... it's a reasonable hope or expectation, right? That someone with extraordinary capabilities would want to use them for some extraordinary benefit for mankind. I appreciate vos Savant's contribution to public knowledge, but if you have the ability to make your name by progressing something extremely challenging (like the Riemann hypothesis) then wouldn't you want to try that? Reminds me of that scene in Good Will Hunting where Sean presses Will on why he sticks to manual labouring when he's far smarter than highly trained university professors.
- GabriDaFirenze 10mo ago
  I agree that it's a reasonable hope but not an expectation. I don't think it's fair to put that type of pressure on someone, and I don't want to assume that's necessarily what you meant. I don't know if you read "Flowers for Algernon" but that's what I think about when discussing highly/exceptionally intelligent people.
  - n4r9 10mo ago
    That's totally fair. I didn't mean "expectation" in the sense of social pressure, but rather that it's likely that someone would want to use their skills in that way.

ljlolel 10mo ago

[flagged]

block_dagger 10mo ago

Having a website that’s legible with DarkReader is a virtue this article sadly does not espouse.

cogogo 10mo ago

The classic military maxim… slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

willis936 10mo ago
I use this one. I've witnessed so much time wasted on broken shit being shipped. Tie your shoelaces and you won't trip on them.
ilovetux 10mo ago
I've always heard "slow is steady and steady is fast." Same thing, but from the trades instead of the military.
101008 10mo ago
I know it in Spanish (probably it exists in other languages too?) "Visteme despacio que estoy apurado" "Dress me slowly that I am in a hurry"
- nakedneuron 10mo ago
  "Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano." Walk slowly and you'll walk safe and far.
- corford 10mo ago
  Similar English expression: Less haste, more speed
Cthulhu_ 10mo ago
If I wasn't in IT I think I'd love the military, not the stupid political stuff and killing people, but the organization, discipline, routine, focus on predictability, protocols, etc. Yeah it's boring if it all works but boring is good. And we've been trying to apply this to software development for ages as well - think "continuous deployment" practices (or its new name, DORA metrics in the 2020's).
- zwnow 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

socketcluster 10mo ago

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?

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
paulcole 10mo ago
> I like the simple point about the hypothetical IQ test sent one week in advance. It’s a simple point but an incorrect one. If you can work on it for a week, it’s no longer an IQ test. Nobody is saying that the questions on an IQ test are impossible. It’s the fact that there are constraints (time) and that everybody takes the test the same way that makes it an IQ test. Otherwise it’s just a little sheet of kinda tricky puzzles. Would you be a better basketball player if everyone else had to heave from 3/4 court but you could shoot layups? No, you’d be playing by different rules in an essentially different game. You might have more impressive stats but you wouldn’t be better.

zkmon 10mo ago

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.

OutOfHere 10mo ago

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.

setopt 10mo ago
In a "righteous world", no one would starve, regardless of their work style and performance.
- OutOfHere 10mo ago
  Yes, although the fast workers currently intentionally make their slower coworkers starve (also while compromising on quality and innovation), so how about that. They have done this for years. Payback is a part of righteousness.
  - steve_adams_86 10mo ago
    What is righteous about revenge? Does revenge not make you like the people you resent?

nunodonato 10mo ago

This aligns well with Cal Newport's Slow Productivity. Which reminds me, I need to read it during xmas break

isolli 10mo ago

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?

orlp 10mo ago
When "everybody is better", you can still increase your relative rank to other people if you benefit even more. For example if I were to give $1 to every person on earth, but $100 million to you, everyone would be richer but you would be a lot richer still.
fpoling 10mo ago
With more time the scale of change is very personal. For some people going from 15 minutes to 1 hour gives a massive boost, while other do not improve match. And then some people can loose focus or get distracted during longer plays so for them more time may make they play worse.
tbrake 10mo ago
unfamiliar with chess.com but correspondence chess(day/move) and rapid (game 30+0) should fall under two different rating classifications. Having different ratings between them is to be expected. And while people tend to make __better moves__ in slower time controls, their rapid/blitz ratings are usually higher than standard ratings.

dgfl 10mo ago

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 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2zwZsjlJ-G4 [2]: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-no-ones-is https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-n...

neom 10mo ago
I also didn't enjoy it, sloppy boundary drawing combined with some motivated reasoning. He explicitly distinguishes research from development in paragraph 4, but then spends the rest of the essay treating "fast" and "legible" as inherently inferior without consistently applying his own distinction...like, If you're building a bridge or shipping software, legibility and speed aren't signs you're not pushing boundaries...they're signs you're being competent. also, he seems to suggest that slow thinking is actually a different kind of intelligence that institutions miss. But this conflates processing speed with intellectual ambition, plenty of fast thinkers work on hard, illegible problems.... Plenty of slow thinkers work on trivial ones.

kasperset 10mo ago

"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.

dhruv3006 10mo ago

its a timeless virtue.

pgraf 10mo ago

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. [0] https://megasociety.org/admission/ultra/ https://megasociety.org/admission/ultra/

d-us-vb 10mo ago

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.

rramadass 10mo ago
Would you mind posting some links to the notable works of the people you have mentioned?

Davidzheng 10mo ago

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

DrewADesign 10mo ago
I haven’t looked into the source study, so who knows if it’s good, but I recall this article about smart people taking longer to provide answers to hard problems because they take more into consideration, but are much more likely to be correct. https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/intelligent-people-slower-solve-hard-problems/ https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/intelligent-people-slower-so...
lachlan_gray 10mo ago
I think part of the message is that speed isn't a free lunch. If an intelligence can solve "legible" problems quickly, it's symptomatic of a specific adaption for identifying short paths. So when you factor speed into tests, you're systematically filtering for intelligences that are biased to avoid novelty. Then if someone is slow to solve the same problems, it's actually a signal that they have the opposite bias, to consider more paths. IMO the thing being measured by intelligence tests is something closer to "power" or "competitive advantage".
- Jensson 10mo ago
  > Then if someone is slow to solve the same problems, it's actually a signal that they have the opposite bias, to consider more paths. No this isn't true, most of the time they just don't consider any paths at all and are just dumb. And the bias towards novelty doesn't make you slow, ADHD is biased towards novelty and people wouldn't call those slow.

klein_phi 10mo ago

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)

lo_zamoyski 10mo ago

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.

shevy-java 10mo ago

"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.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

meander_water 10mo ago

For anyone interested in the history of IQ tests and how broken they are check out The Mismeasure of Man [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

tptacek 10mo ago
Ehhhhhh careful, Mismeasure hasn't held up well, and there are better arguments.
- meander_water 10mo ago
  Oh interesting, can you share any links or books?
  - tptacek 10mo ago
    For modern scientific rebuttals to race science, I'd start with Sasha Gusev and Eric Turkheimer. You'll read about things like missing heritability and the methodological problems of twin studies (which are grave). I'd also read Cosma Shalizi's "g, a statistical myth", which is also fun just from a sort of mid-level math/stat perspective. A classic in the field that still holds up is Ned Block's "Race, Genes, and IQ", written as a response to The Bell Curve. I don't have offhand good links to critiques of Gould that are on any site I would recommend you read.