I’m a very slow thinker (2016)
sivers.org
sivers.org
"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.
(I think it was pretty close to that—but it was also like 6 years ago.)
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...
After 10 years of working as an average programmer for average companies, lots of big clients or governments will consider you for "temporary" roles, which pay very well but give no security. Maybe it takes 100 applications and interacting with recruiters but the opportunity is there.
You wouldn't want your heart,brain,etc operation to be in the hands of someone who isn't that talented but keeps on trying.
I dunno... I can't imagine any of the surgeons or doctors I've seen have been top of their class, at the #1 school in the country. Probably not even top 10. I've probably seen a lot of just average doctors, who probably did an average job at school, and now are pretty average as far as pure talent goes. But I'm still alive, so I guess it's not that bad.
If they tried enough that they got their degree and are known for having a good track record, then I absolutely do.
I'd also take them over a merely "talented" doctor any time.
And personally, I want my heart operated on by the guy that's done hundreds of heart operations, preferably my exact procedure. I want Dr. House to diagnose me, and Todd from Scrubs to actually do the operation. Dr. House's brilliant diagnosis doesn't actually affect my body, the potential problems that genius presents only guide what more sane, stable, dispassionate professional hands actually do to me. Stable dispassion is the realm of persistence.
I see your side more clearly now. You are correct that I was thinking more along the social unity side. Not sure I'd say I agree completely with you, but I see where I was mistaken before.
On the individual note, is it that persistence wins, or that the win is felt with the inevitable mental compromise taken in order to feel one has succeeded? I do see that it's better to try and fail than never try at all, just feel it's 'elitist' to think that persistence wins, as only the wealthy can really persevere. In my mind anyway.
What wealth buys you is the ability to employ someone else to do the grunt work. But to get there the grunt work needs to get done.
It's sad, but this is a fact that so many people discount. It's much easier to think in terms of "the rich asshole" who got all his money from Daddy and didn't have to lift a finger.
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
Compare Rationality Quotient to Intelligence Quotient. You’d think they relate but they don’t ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-differ...
This is without considering give-a-f??k quotient, the most important of all, and that by which every test is confounded.
I could direct you to a survey of studies that would more accurately describe the breadth of IQ assessments [1], but I think using my own IQ examination as an example might be more instructive. I've taken a formally administered IQ assessment under a qualified clinician. This assessment included the usual tests, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Wechsler Memory Scale (among others).
The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale includes composite domains for "Full Scale IQ", "Verbal Comprehension", "Perceptual Reasoning", "Working Memory" and "Processing Speed." Note that mental processing speed is merely one of the measured dimensions of intelligence here. Each of these is given its own percentile score.
Within the Verbal Comprehension Scale domain there are subtests for "Similarities", "Vocabulary" and "Information." Under Percentual Reasoning there are subtests for "Block Design", "Matrix Reasoning" and "Visual Puzzles." Working Memory includes tests for "Digit Span" and "Arithmetic", and finally Processing Speed includes "Symbol Search" and "Coding."
During the verbal comprehension battery, you'd be asked questions such as, "How are an apartment and a house alike", or "What is the definition of this word?" You'll also be assessed on your knowledge of various culturally relevant facts.
Perceptual reasoning will test spatial orientation, integration performance and fine motor skills. This might include arranging blocks of various colors and shapes into different patterns and being asked to find the missing portion in a complex visual pattern.
The working memory examination will test for how much you can focus on simultaneously, and explicitly does not test for your processing speed. You'll be asked about sequences of numbers and tested for both long and short term recollection, as well as how accurately you can mentally perform operations on sequences while keeping them in your mind. That's the digit span test; the arithmetic tests are self-explanatory.
The only portion of the examination which explicitly tests for processing speed are the ones focusing on symbol search and coding. Therein you're asked to quickly scan a group of symbols and find a match of one or two targets, or to copy numbers lexicographically coded to symbols as quickly as possible.
I am interested in what measure of analogous "Turing Completeness" in human intelligence should thus be measured that is not already reflected in the examination I've just outlined. If you'd like to define that as rationality, then that's fine. But as I said before, I don't believe rationality should be coupled with intelligence. And moreover, I don't think "Turing Completeness" is a good analogy for rationality, since computers are (almost definitionally) neither rational nor irrational, regardless of their computational capabilities.
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1. The g-factor premise is that a sufficiently complex test reveals an "underlying" intelligence factor and performance in it will be predictive of performance in other complex tests (whether that's Sudoku or life in general).
2. Mensa in the UK use the Cattell Culture Fair II test which strongly correlates with WAIS without the fanfare (i.e. it's just non-verbal puzzles). Triumph for g-factor, thus I discount your "battery of tests are better or somehow more revealing of the brains potential" argument.
3. One would expect that intelligence and rationality would correlate since it'll directly impact your ability to solve complex situations. It turns out that it doesn't, and I think a notion of arational or irrational intelligence is without sense.
4. However IQ does seem to correlate with the ability to "think quicker" and "cut out the noise". E.g. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/05/23/iq-vision-brai... . If you follow the thread, you'll find that it also comes with disadvantages (e.g. being less able to perceive slow change).
5. I'm using "Turing complete" as a dumb analogy to computing. Something that tests the range of things that you can solve, at any speed. To continue the analogy, if I'm a slow Turing machine but you're a lightening fast pushdown automata, fast as you might be within your domain, there's still a world of things that you can't solve that I can.
6. Anecdotally, I've observed that amongst my guys, being a bad-ass mathematician and being able to actually model or understand the world are separate skills. A narrow example, but an example nontheless, in my opinion Physics > Mathematics in terms of expressing the potential of a rational thinker precisely because it requires more "Turing machine".... to wit, consider all the maths that just never would have happened without the bad-ass physicists (again IMO exactly for the same reason stated).
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.
Common tests don't explicitly measure it, but the test design either implicitly demands processing speed (timed tests, or rapidly spoken prompts/questions) or avoid it.
I have seen nice people with high iq but I think it's more common that they are not great around people.
Personal hypotheses such as this one spread like wildfire online because they're easy to state, play to a narrative and are extremely difficult to disprove. They're stated confidently while skipping over so many little gaps - for example, I don't see anything obvious about how high IQ individuals would stop trying to explain things to low IQ individuals. It makes sense as a heuristic for explaining the behavior of one particular individual who is perhaps a misanthrope or has little patience. But it's very poorly generalizable.
I don't think humility, empathy, and high IQ are mutually exclusive, though given some of my experiences with smart people I can see why you might think that way.
Perhaps it's true for us all, we love to talk about what we do.
Wow that sounds whiny but true.
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.
The difference in rates and understanding of our internal and external informational exchanges is particularly crucial, as noted in the passage quoted above. It's far too easy for bad or extraneous inputs to derail the creative process.
John Cleese has a great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
Again, not that there aren't useful concepts, and his anti-creativity measures strike me as valid.
> "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.
The point of the meeting is not to create new ideas or solve problems. Either the presenter has the solutions or ideas written down or not. Every meeting has a decision maker. The purpose of the meeting is there to make a decision at the end. If there are still open questions, then the decision-maker assigns one or more people to research, and the needed follow-up. At the end of the next meeting, the decision is made.
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.
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.
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 had been stocking groceries for about a month when I had an interesting conversation with two senior employees (20 or 30 years a piece at the job). One of them was telling me that I was doing well but that I needed to start going more quickly. The other saw the mistake in this advice and said something along the lines of, "Well, hold on, though: you know speed comes naturally with practice. He'll get faster once he knows the work better." The other senior employee thought about it for a second, and then agreed in full and admitted their mistake. As a consequence, I focused on learning my work well instead of trying to be fast—and I became one of the fastest stockers in the store within a year.
I don't think you can will speed to happen, or train it specially: it's a consequence of already having solved the problems at hand before, already knowing the solutions and not needing to figure things out in the moment.
So you aren't going to 'get sharper'; you'll just learn particular domains better or not, and the ones you know better you'll be perceived as sharper in.
Hmm, I see I got downvoted. Whatever.
When you start out, you are told to practice your scales by making sure the notes are clean and even in volume.
Doing it fast comes later.
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
I spent about ten minutes searching with the keywords "high functioning autism", "autism employment", "autism programmers", etc and could not dig up any studies substantiating the claims you've mentioned. This is not to say you're lying - I believe you actually did pick them up from somewhere. But I'm deeply skeptical of their clinical veracity and empirical provenance. Given how polarizing autism can be and how difficult it can be to research, I consider it harmful to be confidently describing "theories" like yours without much real support for the claims involved.
In particular, I would strongly advise anyone reading this to resist the temptation to self-diagnose or self-identify (one way or the other!) based on a strange question designed to see if you actually think of a church steeple. If you believe you may be autistic, personally see a professional and try not to read into the popsci promulgated by radio interviews.
Also in defense, I was careful to word everything as suspect, not fact.
I confess my original answer was to remember that old kids song where you make a steeple with your hands and then flip them to see the people. I then thought that I don't actually know what distinguishes a steeple from a plain roof.
Still, that is straying. I'm curious what the original aim was.
as far as what the aim was , I'm not sure exactly. just nice to know people who experience the same thing as me and then musing on it and rambling like i always do
Per the word choice in suffering, I know it is the common word to use for things like this. I'm sure I use it some myself, I just try and avoid it when I can. I have no doubt this affects my methods of thinking. But, having never known the other ones, really, I can't say much else about it.
It is funny how I always thought of myself as just not visual. Never really considered it was because I don't see as much with my eyes closed, per se.
The really mind blowing experience for me, is how I can find things I did in the past and have almost zero memory of the visual aspect of it. I knew I spent time on something, but I don't remember how it looked as a finished thing.
Thing with churches is I never really pay attention to them so I'm also pretty sure I would've thought of my own abstract version of it. I also have a lot of trouble navigating according to landmarks, any buildings or details. I can't remember directions or the path I came from when going again or reversing. I eventually do remember, but compared to people I know it's a lot worse. Everyone else seems to know where church with this and that name is, but I do not.
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.
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.
It's as meaningless an exchange as most greetings (the only meaning being to actually acknowledge and greet the person), but it does mean something literally, and the exchange is technically more complete than when answering "How are you?" with "Hi".
That being said, you'll see someone answering "Salut, ça va?" with "Salut!" quite frequently as well. I would perhaps consider it slightly more of a misstep than in English, but only marginally so.
This isn’t a big distinction because I agree with both of you about the relative meaninglessness of the content of such a greeting in either language.
Because I definitely do that. I'd expect that to be a common idiom in any language. Somewhat surprised to read this exchange seeming to suggest otherwise.
The 'literal translation' would be translating word-by-word, which by definition isn't going to work for idioms:
> idiom > > A group of words established by usage > as having a meaning not deducible from > those of the individual words
Oxford Dictionary
"Ça va" translates literally to "it goes".
So the above exchange would literally translate to:
Hello, it goes?
It goes, and you?
It goes.
"Hey, doing well?" "Doing well, and you?" "Doing well."
Ca va?
Ca va ca va. Ca va?
Ca va.
- Re.
- Re.
Some people hate "Re".
If it's someone you know well or who knows you, in the timings of responses and the expression of the face you are able to pick up how they're feeling, if something is going on in their lives or is bothering them.
It's much less scripted than the American "hi, how are you", which can only have one answer and always need to have the same expression.
ack?
ack!
A: "'sup [man]?" B: "'sup?"
(It's also stated only has like a half-question or less—the usual question lilt is deemphasized.)
as in "You're looking well", "yeah, nah, been a bit crook lately"
"How are you?" "Not bad, yourself?" "Good, so I have this problem..."
"Hey, how was your weekend?" "Not bad actually, you?" "Yeah not bad"
I mean, you clearly have no interest in other person's life, so why have stupid, dull, pointless greetings like that?
It's not easy to translate but I think it's quite similar to the greetings mentioned above. Literally it's something like: Well? You? (and not 'well' in the sense of goodness, but rather questioning)
It's an interesting greeting and as a foreigner seemed very odd at first.
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.
It's a great question because if it draws out a rude response like yours, the questioner knows to not waste more time on small talk.
Would you really accept being asked my imaginary question about your spouses sex life from any ordinary aquaintence? Why not? It's free help! You should always want your spouse to have as full and rich a life as possible, and it's too easy to forget that a big part of their life is actually subject to your level of effort and imagination and bravery.
The original question is essentially personal on the order that we usually place on sexual or health matters.
The best word is "inconsiderate" in that it literally fails to consider, or considers and ignores, that many, perhaps most people's honest answer would have to be no, and further, the process of being asked and answering forces everyone who had to answer "no" or "not enough", to recognize that "no" isn't just a harmless answer like what flavor of ice cream you like, where chocolate or vanilla or "I don't like ice cream" are all equally fine. No they are forced to confront that "no" is a failing, and therefor that they fail at something, and that what they fail at is nothing too important, just life itself.
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.
That is to say, when passing someone in a hall, I want to stick to "hi" or "good morning", and feel uncomfortable if the other person says "how are you?". If it's the start of a conversation, "How are you?" works absolutely fine.
I think the problem is that "How are you?" doesn't finish an exchange nicely. You can easily greet someone in passing with A: "Hi" B: "Hi" <EOL>
It doesn't work (for me, at least) to go A: "How are you?" B: "(Fine.) How are you?" A: (optional)"Fine"
If A responds fine, it feels almost rude to abrubtly finish a conversation that had previously involved both parties asking questions about each other (even though they're really just being used as greetings). If A doesn't respond at all, that's rude for not responding to a question!
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 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.
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.
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.
Exactly. And it sickens me. I'd like the resumes to be scrubbed, zero knowledge of the school someone went to. I see dynamic programming problems used for the same, either you have had them in an academic setting or you probably going in blind.
A more humane and useful questions starts off easy, if they get that, add in extra conditions to make it more difficult and extract more signal. Almost any easy questions can from duh to omg in a handful of criteria.
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.
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.
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)
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."
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.
You may find these book useful:
Competitive Programming 3 by Felix Halim and Steven Halim.
Competitive Programmer’s Handbook (https://cses.fi/book/index.html)
>I have rarely found the need to code one up in my job
Depending on your job profile, these data structures may not be used at all. But programming puzzles have become the norm for interviews in the industry.
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'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.
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.
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.
Don't just do something; sit there!
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 :)
[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 don't know" is unthinking? What does unthinking mean? Or dithering, for that matter?
Why is hesitation relevant here? Why is it bad?
I wonder if this could be related somehow to the Dunning-Kruger effect? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...
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.
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.