The book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts" has an interesting message about how introverts struggle to fit into an image of society where one must be a quick-witted extrovert in order to be successful and powerful. I think it's the same for fast vs slow thinkers. It's important to know your a slow thinker, and accept it as a strength.
But, really, the script you're meant to follow goes like this:
Hey how are you?
Hey, good, how about you?
Pretty good
Edit: let’s also not forget that “howdy” is a shortened version of “how do you do”
It's even more peculiar/banal in French, where the conversation goes:
Salut, ça va?
Ça va, et toi?
Ça va.
ack?
ack!
It's not that they don't notice, it's that "How are you" can be read as either a question or a greeting in modern English.
It's even more pronounced with other phrases. If you're introduced to three people and they respond "Hi", "Hello", "What's up?", it's understood that they're all pretty much saying the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression
See also:
http://www.signosemio.com/jakobson/functions-of-language.asp
There's this sort of...meme, I suppose, of perfect dialogue. You can see it a lot in the way movie characters talk to each other, especially the ones who are supposed to be intellectual. Think of characters like Tyrion Lannister, Robert Ford, Chuck Rhoades or Andy Dufresne.
They're not just preternaturally witty - they have excellent rhetorical poise. They don't open conversations directly, they gracefully meander to their point with some kind of obscure arcana or quiet intensity. They're theatrical in their delivery and flush with metaphors, analogies or double entendres.
That's the way I feel about questions like, "Is your life a rich tapestry?" That's not a question that's asked or spoken, it's a question that's written. It's so pointed and so raw that, at best, you'd think the asker is eccentric. If you're less charitable you'd think they're simply socially awkward. Opening conversations that way is flying too close to the Sun.
I feel that the best way to answer that question is to turn away from the person asking, as if lost in thought. Then you'd make your way to your answer circuitously, by first deflecting to talk about the origin of the word "tapestry" itself alongside some powerful childhood memory about your father or a famous quote made on the eve of war. Finally, you'd arrive at a delightfully disarming answer that gives a real insight into your life and experience.
But in actuality I'd probably be asked that at a social gathering and respond with some sort of befuddled, "Er, what do you mean?" while being utterly taken aback at the penetrating intimacy of the question. Later on I'd probably ask someone, "Hey what's up with that guy, did he self-help book big on provocative conversation starters or something?"
If you really want to go down the route of non-traditional greetings, I'd recommend, "What have you been reading lately?" or "What are you about?" They still require some situational awareness, but they're a lot less risky and polarizing. I enjoyed being asked those when I first heard them.
I know, right? I knew I couldn't be the only person around that gets annoyed when other ask this of me and I have to divert resources the answer the annoyingly irrelevant question.
even more so when after careful considering and answering, the answer is essentially ignored. every. time.
It’s protocol negotiation, volume adjustment, and preparation for transmission.
And I, too, find the exchange irritating and have now taken to a stock response of "hi" as a form of "nonviolent resistance"[01] to the question!
"I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance, Huxley. I am therefore a poor critic: a paper or book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; and therefore I could never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics. My memory is extensive, yet hazy: it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing, or on the other hand in favour of it; and after a time I can generally recollect where to search for my authority. So poor in one sense is my memory, that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry."
My personal take is that it's largely a matter of intellectual values. I think that if I considered memorization to be important when I was younger, I would have gotten better at it, for instance. Instead my values tend to be around understanding the reason something is one way or another. I remember a friend being very surprised when I gave a satisfactory definition of 'common law' (because I tend not to know 'random' things like that)—but the only reason I remembered it clearly is because I understood the role it served. That tends to be the only thing that makes things stick for me.
I think the slowness may in part be due to that too. There are a lot of things that folks will have remembered whole, but I just know how to reason my way back to the result from a smaller set of more fundamental things I've learned.
Very very few. Aside from the fact that if one's determined, they can do it (life doesn't allow or disallow anything -- no one is required to have a nice car or a fancy house or whatever, lots of people make sacrifices for their work), there are also tons of leisurely rich people that are slow thinkers, that have nonetheless contributed remotely comparable of Darwin...
Even if there's plenty of deep thinkers (which is what slow thinking is in my opinion) - there should always be some people with good fortune and circumstances to push at the peripheral. I honestly do not see that today in Silicon Valley - I see a lot of useless bullshit and superficial replacements, there's only a handful of people out there keeping it together.
However... poverty of Time is not likely to be the main constraint unless you live in the Middle Ages. Many intellectuals have taken jobs which enable them to kill two birds, merely being physically active and forced to be active by a job that requires it is a genuine cognitive advantage - not to mention the infinite distractions that can smear your available leisure time such that you produce nothing of value. Most aristocrats did not belong to the Royal Society.
No - the real problem is that we're too synchronized. We think alike - we have a 'frame problem' of our own.
Being here on HN or on the Internet in general is not an advantage. It at first appears to be valuable in the sense that you understand what exists and who is doing what, the context. That is I suspect the opposite of what we need for true innovation.
For true innovation you need to connect up with 'the network' once or twice a year - and the rest of the time fuck off and do something good (ideally with a small close knit group).
“[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." Yes? Why is that?" Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]”
― Michael Crichton, The Lost World
Silicon Valley is suffering by being too middle class - the hubris is coming out of the groupthink. I think it takes a peculiar mixture of working class and middle class thinking to do something really good. I don't think that's a new insight, it's in the plot of the 1927 Metropolis but sometimes a cliché is really true. The people I've met at HackerSpaces, the people who impressed me were always adept at dealing with a lot of information - a middle class trait, but had a deep blue streak in their character that is completely absent from the people I went to University with. Matthias Wandel and Bill Gray are examples I think.
Further, the argument goes that there exists a g factor, and performance in a test that is sufficiently complex will be predictive of performance at anything else sufficiently complex ... Yet if we allow time to vary this seems to be so obviously false...
Kind of reminds me of the programming language shootout dilemma . X is better than Y because it does Fibonacci sequences quicker ... mostly has no real world utility
I generally felt that, by the end of the term, I understood the material and simply had more time during the final exam than the midterms.
On the other hand, contrary to the Darwin quote, I scored very high on abstraction capabilities -- although before getting my results, I had assumed I was doing very bad at that.
Conclusion: you probably want to measure all subtests individually to make sense of your strengths and weaknesses.
I have seen nice people with high iq but I think it's more common that they are not great around people.
That only works if you have lots of closely related experience so that the solution is trivial to you anyway, or if you're a genius. Most of the time you end up with shitty "knee-jerk" software that focuses on technical details way too much instead of solving the problem.
I'll think about it, maybe do some experiments / proof-of-concept, then we can talk about it again, then I'll think about your input, and then we can discuss the tasks and sub-tasks once things are starting to make sense.
[There's] a very long and well-established literature in psychology that getting groups of people together is no way to come up with ideas. Creativity is not a team sport. What you're looking for is somebody's individual, intellectual trunk to make new connections and come up with something new.
Let's imagine billions of neurons in my head communicating with stuff they've been talking about all their lives together: there's a high probability that occasionally they'll come up with something new. Let's now think of the line of communication that you and I have got between each other, which is impoverished, because we have to try and translate complex ideas into language, and how many times do you find you've got a good idea, it's almost in symbolic thought inside your head, and you really can't articulate it to someone. And when you do, they get the wrong idea, because really, language can't encapsulate it until it's fully formed. There's no good evidence that I know of that these brainstorming sessions will come up with a solution or a new idea.
John Cleese has a great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
> "If we don't, the executives, like high school kids, will try to bluff their way through a meeting,"
Bezos meetings solve the problem of people not reading the material at all, not the problem of not thinking about the problem.
First thought was "I'll have the answer in six months," when the problems are really understood. No offer on that one, haha.
By 11PM, there was a leading idea, and I took time to think about everything. I questioned everything. Everyone was pestering me, the leader of this event, to acknowledge this was a fantastic solution.
I asked stupid questions, I asked great questions, I took time to think, I measured things, and I got crap for it. Someone even said I drank too much, which had nothing to do with my skepticism.
My conclusion-
>Group think took over badly
>others werent thinking, they gave answers like- 'You Just....' without thinking about how difficult each of the tasks. Or 'Thats not a big deal'.
>Non engineers will not be invited in the future, the gf of an engineer (who is a psychologist) was very persuasive on her idea.
I couldnt believe how strong group think was, it was unanimous. The next morning we woke up and realized the idea wasnt great.
I'll take being a slow thinker.
The author's point being that we should try harder to use our System 2 thought process at the expense of quick turnaround from the System 1 process. I think this is probably a good idea but it can be difficult in practice since it takes more effort to intentionally engage system 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory#Systems
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YshRbqZHYFoEMqFAu/why-truth-...
It's good for situations where the bottleneck is sheer processing speed---math problems on standardized tests, for instance---but many problems in the real world have bottlenecks of perspective, or information. I'd have been a good medical student, but probably a terrible doctor.
I've hammered a lot of screws in my time.
I was going to say something like this until I saw everyone else saying the same thing. This leads to my theory, and some facts.
The geek population has a high percentage of mild autistics. I firmly believe my lack of social skills, and slow thinking, is related to a mild amount of autism. I can't play any games involving fast thinking but I have reason to believe I'm a genius (just saying).
I heard an interview on NPR with Temple Grandin, an autistic author (I highly suggest reading her stuff). One thing she said was that a high percentage of functional autistics were programmers (I know this doesn't mean the converse is true).
She gave a quick single-question test for people to roughly judge autism. I answered on the autistic side. I was at a company lunch with about 5 programmers and 5 marketing people. I asked everyone the question and all the programmers gave the autistic answer and all the marketing people gave the opposite (I know it was probably a bit of coincidence and only one data point).
The test is "Think of a church steeple". I will give the meaning of the answer in a day or so. You need to think without knowing what any answer means.
EDIT: I figured out a way to give the answer without prejudicing your thinking. Don't read the answer below until you have thought of a steeple. The answer is written in reverse.
.citsitua ton ylbaborp era uoy snaem ti elpeets gnitsixe lautca na fo thguoht uoy fi
You can improve your System 1 responses, and there's a decent amount of the book that talks about all the ways System 2 post-hoc justifies the System 1 response, so it's not like System 2 is always going to be better.
Having a good System 1 response is a much clearer way to arrive at a solid decision than only hoping your System 2 is going to catch all of your biases.
Not trying to train your System 1 is, in my opinion, lazy. There are no "fast" or "slow" thinkers (we're all both), just people who have trained their System 1 and people who don't take the time (people with disorders notwithstanding).
I'd like to say I listened to them and applied their ideas systematically, but then the failure to do so is one of the System 1 biases that they all mention... sigh.
I always thought that would have been particularly galling if it had been my interview...
After the interview I ran the problem by a couple very senior front end devs at fang companies and they wouldn't have gotten it either. Before the rejection I thought I might be ok - it's not about getting it correct, they say, it's about the process - but slow thinking is a very real problem in the context of interviews like this.
Later that evening a much better solution occurred to me so I coded it up and emailed it to the interviewers.
I got an offer the next morning.
I feel like this helps me come to better conclusions in the long term. Sometimes, I come to agree with what they've said. Sometimes, I find their conclusions flawed. In some cases, I can tell that it's made people who present arguments that ultimately turn out to be fallacious feel justified in those arguments. The fact that I end our conversation by thanking them for giving me something to think about sometimes feels like I'm endorsing their opinion with my inability to come up with an equally quick retort.
I've never really found a solution to this. At various times in my life, I have tried to hone my ability to make equally quick retorts: but I found that I didn't like who I was as a person when I tried to discuss in that way. My conversations with people became needlessly rhetorical and combative, and that I was often failing to hear what they had to say except in the context of how I could weaken it. On top of that, I became an angrier person in general. All of that felt shitty, and like the opposite of truth-seeking.
For me, it's an unsolved problem. I'm mostly at peace with the fact that I need extra time to chew on opinions presented to me in the heat of the moment, but occasionally I feel deep regret for not having said something on the spot.
Nonverbal conversations tend to help me with this personally - even the few moments you get to better put together how you're feeling/what you're thinking, or the ability to re-read what someone has posted, helps significantly. When it's written/typed conversation, you also don't have to deal with the sometimes disarming nature of people's reactions/facial expressions/distractions of the environment around you. I'm often most impressed with people who can do this sort of quick filtering and refinement of what they intend to say with verbal conversation: it's so alien to what I experience when talking with people face-to-face.
Like you, I also tried to be a quick thinker/talker in situations and disliked who I was becoming. But nowadays I've learned to be ok with it... because I found value in trying to be charismatic so I can rally people around my cause.
Put me in a completely new situation and I'll revert back to listening and thinking slowly. But talk to me about something I'm really passionate about, and I'll be a quick talker. It feels like a flow state.
You seem to grapple with feeling hypocritical by not having a logical response to something you later find to be wrong, but perhaps your elephant simply wasn't "leaning" in the direction of the wrong-sayer.
I like the idea that the majority of forces acting on a humans actions/behavior are non-verbal; not necessarily big news, but it helps me to justify why I have trouble communicating with friends who are on the bleeding edge of social politics while I spend my weeks writing proprietary code and reading classic fiction novels.
This is why I prefer email over instant messaging, phone calls, or collaborative online chat when asking questions (except trivial questions). I want a considered reply, not something off the cuff.
I think one key difference is just the confidence with which someone is able to give their initial reactions. If you internally feel less confidence, then you will feel as if you don't have an answer, when you really do have some formulation of the answer in your mind, just not one you feel great about yet.
Another key factor is to what extent you've practiced giving a quick answer. For example, it's typically considered a key skill for tech industry product managers, and there's a recipe for quickly converging on some answer in the span of a few minutes. It may not be the best answer, but it's an answer. I guess what I'm saying is that if it matters to you to appear quick, it can be practiced.
But in the vast majority of cases, you don't have to be fast, just aware that you need time. (Exceptions include PM interviews but not actual PM work...)
I (probably wildly) speculate that the people who think they're "fast" remember times when they were fast thinkers, and the people who think they're "slow" remember times when they were slow, even though all of us have experiences with both situations.
See, I read something like this and I think of the Dunning Kruger effect that causes stupid people to think they're smart and smart people to think that they're stupid.
Since then I’ve had the chance in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome,
to meet quite a number of people, both among my “elders” and among young people
in my general age group who were more brilliant, much more ‘gifted’ than I was.
I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas,
juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle–while for myself I felt
clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox
faced with an amorphous mountain of things I had to learn (so I was assured)
things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to
the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright
student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates almost by sleight
of hand, the most forbidding subjects.
In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have
gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still from the perspective or
thirty or thirty five years, I can state that their imprint upon the
mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They’ve done all things,
often beautiful things in a context that was already set out before them, which
they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they’ve remained
prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of
a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have to
rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was
mine: The capacity to be alone.
Since then I’ve had the chance in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my “elders” and among young people in my general age group who were more brilliant, much more ‘gifted’ than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle–while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things I had to learn (so I was assured) things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects.
In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still from the perspective or thirty or thirty five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They’ve done all things, often beautiful things in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they’ve remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: The capacity to be alone.
>A general theory of duality for locally convex spaces had to be worked out: Schwartz and I had started its study for Fréchet spaces and their direct limits, but we had met a series of problems we could not solve. We therefore proposed them to Grothendieck, and the result turned out to exceed our most sanguine expectations. In less than a year, he had solved all our problems by very ingenious new constructions; then, with the techniques he had developed, he started to work on many other questions in functional analysis.
I consider myself quite articulate, but I'm much more comfortable expressing myself in written than in spoken form, mainly because I need and I cherish the extra time that the former medium gives me, to more eloquently structure and refine what's being communicated.
Just because the accelerator pedal is there, doesn't mean you have to floor it all the time.
I jokingly tell people hat I’ll get them an answer in 2 hours. ;)
To that end, you should avoid run-on sentences. Cramming all your thoughts together into one sentence (as you did in your second paragraph) really harms intelligibility.
Also the comma in your last sentence, between "there" and "doesn't", is incredibly awkward and does not belong.
There are no run on sentences in the post you responded to with this. Particularly, the long sentence you call out is not a run-on, just a long sentence with complex structure; it has an unnecessary comma—the last one—but that is different than being a run-on.
Is there any way to improve this? To be honest, I am asking this because I am failing every single interview screening which generally involves trick questions. I would love to know the relation between the two.
The trick is to code a lot outside of the competitions and know all these tricks, as well as to have common snippets of code in your fingertips.
I still find that experience quite useful in my day-to-day programming.
because there are situations that require time-critical decision making and analysis - i speak from a conveniently relevant environment which is the financial markets - and the best of the business here are those who have prepared plan A's to plan Z's well ahead of time.
I can make quick decisions on the fly in a leadership role that I would say are very good, but technical matters (Ex: Solving an engineering textbook problem) can take awhile as I explore how things work.
> If you are someone who has trouble reading or writing proofs because you keep thinking of weird edge cases and have to verify that the proof handles all of them, ...
(this is a work on the philosophy of proving things in mathematics, btw, and they go on to recommend it to those with the above affliction.)
I could recognize the pattern being discussed there as exactly the thing I'd perceived myself running into. Interesting to see it repeated again in your comment :)
Also, and this is difficult to explain, I've noticed that trying to feel euphoric helps with being faster with responses, and being wittier.
I wonder if anyone can confirm that meditation can help in becoming a faster thinker/responder.
I think meditation in general may help to cope with emotions, thus make mind sharper under pressure.
In a business setting, I find that this case is often more of the variety of "they are suggesting the problem, and are implying/expecting someone else to solve it" (where someone _may_ be you)
When someone calls me (it's a recruiter, or other) I've almost always put him/her down with the line: 'Please send me a text message, e.g. an e-mail and call me back tomorrow' or something - I prefer read information first, think over it, and then do the answer.
But I think that's the main objective of phone scammers to fool you around and put the quick (bad) answer on you.
"I don't know" is unthinking? What does unthinking mean? Or dithering, for that matter?
Why is hesitation relevant here? Why is it bad?
In math exams at university, I usually only managed to get about half way through most exam papers. Amazingly, I still managed to pass most math courses. I knew most of the answers but it took me so long to solve them that I could never finish the whole paper.
I had to really know the stuff just to get an average grade.
Everyone is different, and I am sure people will agree or disagree with the point the author makes to varying degrees depending on their own lived experiences and abilities, but after reading this I think it'd be difficult for anyone to not admit that there is most certainly value in taking an asynchronous approach to conversations and discussions.
And man, does this quote provides some hearty food for thought or what: "Your first reaction is usually outdated."
I've always attributed my slowness to my breathing - or more precisely, my incorrect method of breathing. I mostly breathe from the chest instead of, as recommended, from below the rib cage, and more from the belly.
So, how well do you slow thinkers do on interviews. How do you prepare? I'm currently prepping for an interview with one of the larger, popular internet companies. The prepping is going well as far as remembering some of the CS[0] stuff I don't directly use day to day, but I worry that I won't get the solutions fast enough in an interview session.
I'm a respected developer where I work. My coleagues enjoy working with me and like the solutions I come up with. QA rarely has to send bugs back to me[1]. My technical boss, who I think is brilliant, respsects my solutions and generally never needs to change anything. When I am stuck, it's easy for me to ask for help. I say all this because I'm just not sure if it will come across during the interview process because I tend to mull things over a while.
[0] My degree is Computer Engineering so I didn't have as much exposure to CS material to begin with that, well, CS grads would have.
[1] I work with a really cool QA guy. I tell him I like to make him work for those bugs. We get along great and I actually engage with him frequently when I'm building my unit tests.
What's always struck me as odd, is that I'm vastly superior in creativity versus almost everyone I work with or meet. For me, it seems that no one has truly new ideas while they do come to mind for me, out of nowhere. I also get the sense when I'm out driving or walking around that I'm more "aware" of what's around me than others.
That's discounting that seeing people be dumb enough to walk and drive with their face in their phone though, guarantees if you're not one of them, that you have at least a 50 point IQ advantage. :) I can't even really explain the feeling of awareness, but I notice a lot more, a lot faster than most people that I know.
Interesting way to think about it. Exposure to new information elicits a response that’s based on past data and experience, leading to hesitation in reacting quickly.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2MD3NMLBPCqPfnfre/cached-tho...
At the beginning of my career, I have often admired how some of my (freelance consulting) colleagues handle discussions with clients, how they seem to have profound answers to any doubt or question. Over the years I came to realise that most of the questions that come up in such situations are similar and repeating. The difference between those colleagues and me is experience and that they have been in similar situations many more times before.
Sure, some have more talent and social abilities, but I believe it all comes down to practice and has much less to do with pure "thinking strengths or quickness".
I wonder if this could be related somehow to the Dunning-Kruger effect? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...
Shame, because once I understand a complex system (even though it took months to get there) it is usually on a deeper level than most folks. Which leads to those "aha" moments which can and does improve productivity significantly.
It think this is normal through electronic communication. It can be used in rapid form, but it's natural for there to be a long delay too. I prefer email and text for anything remotely important.
That may makes me look like a a "slow" person or someone a bit thick, but then i often come up with interesting questions that makes everyone realize they didn't understand the problem as well as they thought.