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."
IQ tests and most tests seem like good tools if the goal is to select people who are just smart enough but not too smart.
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".
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.
To add, add some "slowness" before starting work - fix the latencies and delays, and plan what you're going to make instead of figuring it out as you go.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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."
IQ tests and most tests seem like good tools if the goal is to select people who are just smart enough but not too smart.
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".
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.
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).
"Dress me slowly that I am in a hurry"
Walk slowly and you'll walk safe and far.
Same thing, but from the trades instead of the military.
* 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.