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

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

#41

Post by saurik »

smokel wrote: post #28
copperx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

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 exp…

I mean, have you at least tried ruling out the glasses theory?

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

#42

Post by smaudet »

PaulHoule wrote: post #10

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.

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.

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

#43

Post by darkclouds »

jmcphers wrote: post #36
smokel wrote: post #19

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] ht…

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. D…

> 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.

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

#44

Post by epgui »

gmadsen wrote: post #39
dilawar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

And yet it means very little and is a horrible proxy for what we consider “intelligence”.

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

#45

Post by justrealist »

epgui wrote: post #44
gmadsen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And yet it means very little and is a horrible proxy for what we consider “intelligence”.

It's an incredibly good predictor of life outcomes.

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

#47

Post by shard972 »

epgui wrote: post #44
gmadsen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And yet it means very little and is a horrible proxy for what we consider “intelligence”.

[dead]

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

#48

Post by shard972 »

dilawar wrote: post #38
pazimzadeh wrote: post #25

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 an…

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.

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.

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

#49

Post by pillefitz »

justrealist wrote: post #45
epgui wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it means very little and is a horrible proxy for what we consider “intelligence”.

It's an incredibly good predictor of life outcomes.

So is skin color

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

#50

Post by aeternum »

dilawar wrote: post #38
pazimzadeh wrote: post #25

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 an…

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.

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.

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