Slow

Nice post! This rhymes with the ideas Cal Newport presents in Slow Productivity.

In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture.

People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generations building upon previous generations work. It's never "done", always growing and refining and figuring out new things to look at.

I have a few ideas on how to prove Collatz that I have not seen done anywhere [1], and usually (at least for me) that means it's a bad idea, but it's worth a try.

One of the greatest things about humans is our willingness to have multi-generational projects. I think maybe the coolest thing humans have ever done was eliminate smallpox, and that took hundreds of years.

[1] Which I'm going to keep to myself for now because they're not very fleshed out.

>A fun question: of these projects, which required a long time, and which could have been greatly accelerated?

Pretty much everything on the list is a research study of a long-term process that is inherently impossible to accelerate.

From the list, only the Second Avenue Subway and the Sagrada Familia unambiguously qualify as projects that could be greatly accelerated. The SAS was not under active construction for the vast majority of the time between 1942 and 2017 — actual construction only happened for a couple years in the early 70s, then another couple years in the late 80s, and finally from 2011-2017. The fits and starts were due to a combination of bureaucratic red tape, economic woes, and gross incompetence. The Sagrada Familia has also seen only intermittent construction over the last century, primarily because of lack of funding.

For open source, SQLite has pledged long term support through 2050: https://www.sqlite.org/lts.html

I imagine it will go on for much longer, though!

Most democracies have elections every 4 or 5 years. That is good, in that we can get rid of underperforming politicians and parties. But it is bad, in that there isn't a lot of incentive for politicians and parties to plan over a longer timescale than 4 or 5 years.

China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the leadership.