Speed isn’t everything, and slowness may in fact be more beneficial (2017)

https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/slowness-essence-knowledge

by rzk • 3 years ago

146 70 3 years ago

bps.org.uk

jajag• 3 years ago

Festina lente

dr_dshiv• 3 years ago

Big fan of the Aldine Press. A motto for the Renaissance!

FirmwareBurner• 3 years ago

Sloths are living proof of this.

yamrzou3• 3 years ago

You are joking, but you are right:

From Why Are Sloths So Slow? (https://slothconservation.org/sloths-move-slow/):

The answer is surprisingly simple: Being slow is an incredibly successful strategy for survival. In fact, being slow has helped sloths to survive on this planet for almost 64 million years.

rcme2• 3 years ago

I have the opposite conclusion. Many things have existed for millions of years, the vast majority of which are not slow. Therefore, being slow is a pretty terrible survival strategy. And, in practice, you see evidence of this: faster animals routinely kill slower ones.

justinator• 3 years ago

A correlated idea to this is to practice by going back to the basics, rather than always chase the New Hot Thing.

hospitalJail• 3 years ago

I wonder if the author is unaware Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow has been debunked.

I suppose its a 6 year old article, but I'm still embarrassed when I have thoughts related to that book.

Swizec• 3 years ago

Debunked how? Got links? I'm curious because I remember quite enjoying that book and he did get a Nobel for that whole area of research whereas we're just random HN commenters.

Kranar• 3 years ago

Debunked might too harsh of a claim, but the book does not make any strong testable predictions so that it can either be validated or debunked. The book certainly is not fraudulent in anyway, but the research is of quite limited value. Claims about prospect theory, priming, endowment effects and happiness heavily center around what is referred to as WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), and even more specifically middle class Americans. The work has not found much success generalizing to other cultures or demographics, either geographically or even within ethnic communities within the U.S.

For the most part, the book puts forth some interesting ideas and presents some interesting metaphors and it is certainly more technical than most treatments of this subject, but in terms of actually making concrete statements that can be used to actually understand human psychology, there isn't a whole lot to debunk to begin with.

yCombLinks• 3 years ago

There's 1 specific chapter that he has publicly acknowledged relied on weak data. You're significantly overstating your point. Here's the actual blog post, with Kahneman responding in the comments (publicly confirmed it's him) if you page back : https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...

fredoliveira• 3 years ago

I'm still embarrassed when I have thoughts related to that book

You shouldn't be. The book is rightfully considered one of (if not) the defining works of behavioral psychology and you dismiss it because one chapter's methods came into question?

Read his explanation of the "debunk": https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

I dunno. For me it is a running gag when I go to a McDonald's in a distant city, particularly in a foreign country, and say to somebody who's been waiting in line "... I thought this was supposed to be fast food".

In software development it is quite official that a fast computer is a good thing, I mean, idle minds do the devil's work if your compile takes 40 minutes.

havblue• 3 years ago

From my experience of being an American traveler in Paris, you should be grateful that they're serving you at all!

smaudet• 3 years ago

Your compile should take a minute or so, though. And that's arguably slow.

40 min is order of magnitude slower, but the goal is not to be as slow as possible.

If you have e.g. a hot reload (instant recompile), that's fantastic, but you probably don't actually want to constantly re-configure the code, rather check on various state etc.

You also want to eventually start over as the size of the state changes outside the normal running parameters increases, and that's when you may want a slower recompile.

If it takes only a second, you probably didn't have enough code to work on, and it provides incentive to avoid frequent recompiles and stay in hot-reload. Even in languages without hot reload, this generally holds true.

You want a bit of time to consider which issues to fix, and you want some reason to try to get it right...the tradeoff is generally better code. The alternative is expensive (memory/disk/time) activities such as excessive and incorrect (re)-testing.

Put another way, fast cycle times are only better than slow ones if the quality and feature richness of your codebase is better than slow cycle times.

I would prefer to take 40 minutes and have a compiler spit out a guarantee of correctness than spend two weeks hot reloading junk.

zh3• 3 years ago

Related recent discussion on "Intelligent people take longer to solve hard problems": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434578

michaelteter• 3 years ago

At the highest level, it's difficult to argue that anything actually matters.

So being in a hurry is as pointless as pondering endlessly to make the best choice.

But since we create our own isolated realities, most of which are human-lifetime based, we tend to care about the passage of hours or days. And in that scope, sometimes being quick seems important, but also having perspective and time for reflection can.

There is a time (pardon the pun) for blitz chess, and there's a time for clockless chess. What matters actually is the experience, not the outcome. If we believe that our approach resulted in a better outcome, we are happier.

bob1029• 3 years ago

If we are looking at this from a business perspective (which might map), the actual wizardry is in knowing exactly when to push and when to sleep on something.

I think we can all agree that there are things you should think very deeply about before you even touch your computer or join the conference call. Things like what sorts of vendors and business partners you want to get married to for the next half-decade. If you want to be a Microsoft shop or some OSS champion (both valid in my view!). These kinds of things often times require starting a new company to fix after you commit.

In our domain - the thing you don't want to spend a lot of time worrying about is the entire scope of the actual code/development work. Assuming you are using source control, you have a superpower that allows instant teleportation to any moment in time. The consequences of making a bad choice and acting quickly are negligible, assuming you aren't trying to lose the game on purpose (e.g. master builds straight to prod on unprotected pushes). It only gets to be adverse if you are unable to separate the bad from good ideas afterwards. Not reflecting on your prior works. I believe we'd refer to this as the "technical debt".

I think it was Amazon that does the one-way/two-way door decision test. This is a fair criteria for deciding when to sleep on a proposal or when to shoot and then aim.

pazimzadeh2• 3 years ago

it's difficult to argue that anything actually matters
being in a hurry is as pointless as pondering endlessly to make the best choice

Only during times of abundance (very recently). Historically, survival would be thing that mattered, and time is very important for running away from things, finding antidotes to poisons/disease, social coordination etc..

polynomial• 3 years ago

There is a time for blitz chess, and there's a time for clockless chess.

Arguably, there is more time for blitz chess.

pperi11• 3 years ago

Agreed - the rate at which we're consuming info as humans (FAST) is just harmful. Feels like it's deteriorating our bodies

sb1752• 3 years ago

https://shaanbatra.medium.com/slow-processing-2f1165b80ff0

reaperducer• 3 years ago

"The fastest way to move a cow is slow."

- An old cowboy truism, as related in the current issue of the Navajo Times.

scns3• 3 years ago

"Take your time i'm in a hurry" - The Emperor of China to the guy who helped him dress

smokel5• 3 years ago

Interesting mix of pointers in this article.

What I was looking for, but could not find in the article, is some more information about time perception [1].

It amazes me to no end that time seems to be passing faster and faster now that I grow older. In my youth, 10 minutes used to take ages, but now a month passes in a blink.

If any of you startup guys can find a way to slow this down, I'll buy a subscription.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception

yamrzou3• 3 years ago

You might find this interesting:

Time Perception: Why Time Can Feel So Slow — https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/12/time-perception.php

smokel5• 3 years ago

I do indeed, thank you.

Unfortunately, the question what causes time perception to speed up with age, remains a mystery to me. I don't buy the argument that when we grow older things are less new, and therefore time somehow appears to go faster. For one, I learn more now than I did in my teens, when there was no internet. I also get to meet more people, experience life events, learn about death, etc. All pretty new, yet time seems to only accelerate.

The article also taught me a new term: "Boredom-prone individual". I think it might be an interesting experiment to try to be as bored as possible over the course of a year, and try to become a BPI. Perhaps the lasting effects will make up for the investment!

copperx• 3 years ago

One theory I like is that when young, we see the world in "high FPS" (a rough metaphor for some neurological phenomenon). As we age, the "FPS" slow down, which makes everything seem much faster.

At least in my subjective experience, I can tell that motion seems coarser now that I'm 40. I can still detect the "soap opera" effect when motion smoothing is turned on in a TV, but it's a bit harder to tell than when the feature was introduced.

smokel5• 3 years ago

Interesting. I (also in my 40s) sometimes experience the vividness of reality in a higher quality than usual, and I vaguely recall that my visual experience was always this vivid when I was younger. Most of the time now it seems to be a bit dulled down. I always thought that this is because I probably need glasses. It might also be stress related.

What would cause such a change, and would there be an evolutionary explanation for it? Could it be related to vision only, or does it apply to other sensory input as well?

yamrzou3• 3 years ago

The way I think about it is by making an analogy with sleep: We perceive time to be fastest during sleep, i.e. when there is no sensory input. So the perception of time is actually linked to changes in sensory inputs. My hypothesis is that as we grow older, we become less and less sensitive to stimuli due to familiarity, so we perceive time to be faster.

UniverseHacker• 3 years ago

I've noticed that it slows back down to childhood levels when I am on a really fun vacation, especially one that involves heavy physical activity and fascinating new outdoor environments. I think the novelty, play, and lack of stress combined are able to 'fix' this.

I am convinced the slowing down is essentially cultural, and is a result of how our lives are different as adults- and can be fixed by understanding this.

I think this can be accomplished full time as an adult by not taking things so seriously, and taking a lot more (not physically dangerous) risks. Go on adventures, don't obsess over fear of financial ruin, don't care about status or 'careers' and time will slow down.

As a single dad, I can't really figure out how to do that full time given my responsibilities, but can manage it for stretches of time on weekends and evenings.

polishdude20• 3 years ago

Isn't it just the fact that every moment is somehow compared to our experience of the sum total of all our moments. As you get older, a day becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of time out of your total lived days.

smokel5• 3 years ago

This is a theory that makes some sense, but I don't understand how it would work in my mind.

If I watch a minute pass by, I am certain that it goes faster than in my youth, but the scaling does not seem to be a linear relationship.

Say at the age of 10, I experience a minute to take 60 es (experienced seconds for a 10 year old kid). At the age of 40, it probably takes ~30 es, but certainly not 15. If we rule out sleep and boring parts of the day, then the numbers may come close.

But how would this work internally? How come all my experiences somehow add up and are projected onto my time perception gauge? Why is this not happening with, say, vision, hearing, temperature, hunger, etc?

jmcphers• 3 years ago

A lot of the reason that time seems to pass more quickly as we age is that we have fewer and fewer novel experiences; when each day resembles the one before it, whole months can disappear in lived monotony.

I like to think of memory as using a sort of compression algorithm. Repeated data gets compressed away; novel data takes up space.

So you can slow down your time perception by making your life less compressible. Do things differently; make bigger changes in your life more often; make more milestones; take more trips; change things up; be random.

darkclouds• 3 years ago

as we age is that we have fewer and fewer novel experiences

Yes. I cant believe how much of my life has been stolen by being kept captive in the UK.

optomas• 3 years ago

A lot of the reason that time seems to pass more quickly as we age is that we have fewer and fewer novel experiences

Experiential reference grows, reducing what "a long time" really means. At ten years old, a year is one tenth your life experience. At fifty years old, it is one fiftieth. Pretty simple.

Agreement on the novel experiences. They do seem to reset the clock.

rjh29• 3 years ago

My years doing the digital nomad thing were pretty slow. 3 months in a foreign country is subjectively way longer than 3 months at home (approx. 2x longer). A change of career/vocation should work the same.

pazimzadeh2• 3 years ago

The literature on intelligence is kind of all over the place

Higher intelligence is thought to be linked with more efficient use of resources rather than just faster or slower thinking:

Diffusion markers of dendritic density and arborization in gray matter predict differences in intelligence https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04268-8

But, larger and faster neurons are found in people with higher IQ?:

Large and fast human pyramidal neurons associate with intelligence https://elifesciences.org/articles/41714

More intelligent people have better neurological integrity and their neural impulses travel faster:

Genetics of Brain Fiber Architecture and Intellectual Performance

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/7/2212

But, intelligent people take longer to solve difficult problems:

Learning how network structure shapes decision-making for bio-inspired computing https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y

dilawar• 3 years ago

Boy, this modern obsession with IQ is no less intense than old Indian obsession with purity. The fact that IQ can't be measured or even defined any better than purity does not take the force away.

Fortunately, IQ based society looks less evil than prurity based. At least your place in society is not strictly fixed by your birth.

gmadsen• 3 years ago

IQ(rather g-score) is the most well understood measurement in all of pyschology..

shard972• 3 years ago

IQ is well defined and can be measured relatively accurately. There is extremely little chance of someone testing 70 IQ vs 130 IQ is going to be "more intelligent" on pretty much any metric you come up.

aeternum• 3 years ago

IQ(g-factor) can definitely be measured even though no single test measures it perfectly.

If you give reasoning tests of all kinds (verbal, spatial, mechanical, numerical, etc.) there is lots of data showing that the the results of those tests tend to be correlated positively.

w0mbat• 3 years ago

I love that this article was posted 6 years late.

nico• 3 years ago

There is a mantra the navy seals use in training: go slow, slow is smooth, smooth is fast

You are supposed to repeat it in stressful situations to hell you come down and avoid making costly mistakes

There is also a saying is Spanish: vísteme despacio que tengo prisa (dress me slowly because I’m in a hurry)

Which essentially advises to slow down when in a hurry

scns3• 3 years ago

Same in practicing a musical instrument. Only after you can play it perfectly very slow, you increase the tempo.

mordechai9000• 3 years ago

Funny, a career mountain guide just told me the same thing last week (slow is steady and steady is fast). And the story he used to illustrate it was about a group of typical amateur climbers he'd guided on Denali, passing a group of navy seals. The navy seals were in much better physical condition, but they weren't pacing themselves and they weren't using the rest step technique.

tjmc• 3 years ago

There's a good example of how fast, intuitive thinking often fails in "Thinking Fast and Slow" (referenced in the article):

A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

ezekiel68• 3 years ago

As for technology implications: the Motorola 68000 CPU runs at 8MHz and was good enough for the Amiga 500.

Sorted. /s

piocaidsn2• 3 years ago

Delving into a subject slowly and thoroughly often leads to a deeper understanding. This applies to learning new skills, absorbing complex information, or appreciating art and culture. Taking time to explore nuances simply enriches ones experiences.

piocaidsn2• 3 years ago

This is true, Some of the most creative ideas and groundbreaking innovations come from periods of reflection and unhurried exploration. Allowing thoughts to simmer and develop over time can lead to more innovative solutions than just rushing into things blindly.

Speed isn’t everything, and slowness may in fact be more beneficial (2017)

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