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Slowness is a virtue

blog.jakobschwichtenberg.com

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Re: Slowness is a virtue

#51

Post by GabriDaFirenze »

n4r9 wrote: post #12
noodlebird wrote: post #7

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…

> 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 challengi…

I agree that it's a reasonable hope but not an expectation. I don't think it's fair to put that type of pressure on someone, and I don't want to assume that's necessarily what you meant.

I don't know if you read "Flowers for Algernon" but that's what I think about when discussing highly/exceptionally intelligent people.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#53

Post by zwnow »

chrisweekly wrote: post #49
zwnow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish software wasnt like the wild west where everyone can do as they please... Well defined proven standards would be so cool to have, but no, we have like 20 different ways to do auth and none of them are secure, regular switches from favoring SSR to client side rendering back to SSR again. Just to name some examples.

Hmm, I've been doing webdev for a living since 1998, intimately familiar w/ the complete history and modern practices, and I respectful disagree. Pretty sure it's a good thing we're not all forced to do things the same way. And the new SSR with CSR capabilities is not at all the same as the old SSR. You're right that auth is kind of a hot mess though.

> And the new SSR with CSR capabilities is not at all the same as the old SSR

Yea I know its just a display of the industries indecisiveness. Everytime we need something new and fresh some old favorite is revived until after 5 years its old again. I like being able to do things differently, I hate having to implement "security" features knowing all too well that they aren't secure at all. Minimizing attack surface should not be the default. And its not like this is a new problem. For some reason web devs love to work around a problem instead of fixing it.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#54

Post by d-us-vb »

I like this post. It reminds me of contemporary programming language research. There are precious few people actually doing interesting stuff in PL research these days that are actually trying to uncover new paradigms that aren't just the same old "we discovered how to do X in Y type system" or "novel technique to generate objects with blah blah constraints".

People doing actually interesting stuff can't get funding, so they have to lone-wolf their entire research or just give up and work on stuff that gets paid, people like

- Jonathan Edwards

- Allen Webster

- Brett Victor

All with seriously intriguing ideas that probably have potential, but nobody seems to want to actually dig in to the stuff. Fortunately, there are guys like Stephen Kell who are kind of doing it even in academia, but I think he's limited too towards working on the boring problems that get funding as well.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#55

Post by wavemode »

paulcole wrote: post #40
majes wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you be a better basketball player if everyone else had to heave from 3/4 court but you could shoot layups? No, you’d be playing by different rules in an essentially different game. You might have more impressive stats but you wouldn’t be better. I think the correct analogy here is that if everyone had to shoot from 3/4 court, you would likely end up with a different set of superstars than the set of superstar…

No, I don’t think that is the correct analogy. The analogy in the blog post is that you (one person) gets a month headstart on the test. You would look like a genius because you’d outscore everyone else who had the time constraint. Yes, if you play a different game you’ll find different high performers. That is obvious. But it is not what the blog post is saying. It is saying if you let one person play the same game…

This is the passage you're citing:

> Consider this: if you get access to an IQ test weeks in advance, you could slowly work through all the problems and memorize the solutions. The test would then score you as a genius. This reveals what IQ tests actually measure. It’s not whether you can solve problems, but how fast you solve them.

You retort that "if you can work on it for a week, then it's no longer an IQ test", but that retort is one that the author would agree with. The author is simply making the argument that, what IQ measures is not necessarily the same kind of intelligence as what is necessary for success in the real world. He's not actually arguing that people should be allowed to take as long as they want on the test, he's simply using that hypothetical to illustrate "what IQ tests actually measure".

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#56

Post by Davidzheng »

I think there are two separate things. Slowness of progress in research is good bc it signals high value/difficulty. This I wholeheartedly agree. The other is, the slowness of solving a given problem is good, which is less clear.

I think indubitably intelligence should be linked to speed. If you can since everything faster I think smarter is a correct label. What I also think is true is that slowness can be a virtue in solving problems for a person and as a strategy. But this is usually because fast strategies rely on priors/assumptions and ideas which generalize poorly; and often more general and asymptotically faster algorithms are slower when tested on a limited set or on a difficulty level which is too low

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#57

Post by dasil003 »

dawnchorus wrote: post #30
socketcluster wrote: post #17

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…

>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 Do most people agree with that? I agree with that completely, and I have spent a lot of time wishing that most people agreed with that. But my experience is that almost no one agrees with that...ever...in any circumstance.…

Really depends on the problem. Cancer, yes. Banking, no.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#58

Post by n4r9 »

GabriDaFirenze wrote: post #51
n4r9 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 challengi…

I agree that it's a reasonable hope but not an expectation. I don't think it's fair to put that type of pressure on someone, and I don't want to assume that's necessarily what you meant. I don't know if you read "Flowers for Algernon" but that's what I think about when discussing highly/exceptionally intelligent people.

That's totally fair. I didn't mean "expectation" in the sense of social pressure, but rather that it's likely that someone would want to use their skills in that way.

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#59

Post by ranit »

jasode wrote: post #5

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 fee…

The actual link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46270918

Re: Slowness is a virtue

#60

Post by DrewADesign »

Davidzheng wrote: post #56

I think there are two separate things. Slowness of progress in research is good bc it signals high value/difficulty. This I wholeheartedly agree. The other is, the slowness of solving a given problem is good, which is less clear. I think indubitably intelligence should be linked to speed. If you can since everything faster I think smarter is a correct label. What I also think is true is that slowness can be a virtue…

I haven’t looked into the source study, so who knows if it’s good, but I recall this article about smart people taking longer to provide answers to hard problems because they take more into consideration, but are much more likely to be correct.

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/intelligent-people-slower-so...

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