Slowness is a virtue

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.

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"

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?

See Dijkstra's discussion of the "Buxton Index" in 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.