Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed | Hacker News Reader

Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed

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233 pointsfeross123 comments

Anecdata, but I really don't think thinking rate is fixed. An easy example is learning a new language - at the beginning you will have a lot of trouble expressing yourself as you grasp for vocabulary and struggle with grammar, but over time these tasks become second nature and you'll be able to think and express yourself much faster.

You can argue that your thinking rate hasn't changed, you've just internalized some concepts and no longer have to actively think about them, but that seems like a disingenuous argument. You could certainly repeat this process for other disciplines and indeed 'think faster' for all intents and purposes.

Of course, this is a clickbait article and I'm wasting my time even responding to this, but I had a visceral reaction to this that I felt I shouldn't ignore.

In that story, isn't the cognition time the same with a bottle neck at the audio output? That would be like saying your computer's CPU is slower because your internet upload speed is low.

You must be running better software than me, last I checked my tongue cannot be actuated independent of my CPU.

For that matter, you can certainly write software that has poor upload speed that improves with processing power, regardless of your internet connection.

We all use slightly different forks from the same software.

I must be running my grandmother's fork, as she taught us: "Turn your tongue seven times before speaking. This way you'll have time to think if you ought to say the things you want to say.".

I think first and then I produce a whole sentence or paragraph. My text or speech is not improvised word for word as I progress. There is a small delay when I convert my French thoughts into English, but that's it.

> You can argue that your thinking rate hasn't changed, you've just internalized some concepts and no longer have to actively think about them, but that seems like a disingenuous argument.

I think this is an important distinction actually.

For instance let's take the example of choosing a tool for a particular job. Over time you teach yourself that tool X is best for a particular type of task, so any time you are faced with that type of task you automatically pull put tool X, without thinking about it. On the surface it looks like you're thinking and deciding very quickly but really you're just taking a shortcut.

Eventually you are faced with a task that looks on the surface like the type of task you use tool X for, so you start working. After a while it turns out that it would be best to use tool Y. Now you've wasted a bunch of time using the wrong tool because you used a shortcut to avoid thinking, instead of taking the time to think.

It's a dumb example but I think it illustrates the difference between "thinking faster" and shortcutting your thinking to reach a conclusion faster.

The reason this is a disingenuous argument is because it endeavors to restrict the definition of 'thinking' strictly to cognition - or further still, to cognition in the absence of recognition, which is actually quite absurd if you think about it. However, by definition thought has no such restriction - recognition and spontaneous ideas should hold as much weight, and can in fact speed up the process of cognition itself [0].

> The difference between "thinking faster" and shortcutting your thinking to reach a conclusion faster.

I don't see any difference between these two things - perhaps you can elaborate. In my opinion if you can shortcut your thinking to reach the same conclusion faster, you are in fact thinking faster for all intents and purposes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zm9sTfWnQ0

I think a definition of thinking close to how the article is using the term is more like:

Thinking is a process of considering options and reaching a conclusion.

Using that definition, or something like it, then I think it's pretty evident that decision making shortcutting is an absence of thinking.

> Thinking is a process of considering options and reaching a conclusion.

Okay, let's take this definition of thinking as our basis. Presumably, a chess grand master is able to do this faster than a novice.

However, by your own argument, you're also calling this an absence of thinking. So, which is it?

A chess grandmaster knows better than to consider every option to the same depth. Pruning is choosing what not to think about. I wouldn't expect grandmasters improve by increasing their positions evaluated/second throughout their career.

As an amateur chess player (2000/rapid/lichess) I wouldn't say the speed or amount of thinking I do has changed as I've gotten better in terms of the number of moves I evaluate. In fact it feels like I frequently think less now than when I was worse.

My brain has compressed/chunked patterns so that I can immediately see what the optimal move or set of candidate moves are instead of having to determine them more computationally.

I'm not sure how that fits into the framework of this article. Something like the number of calculations remains static but total work done per calculation increases.

Much of the debate in this comment thread is a result of these concepts being fuzzily defined in the article itself.

You memoized some of the computation.

"Think rate is fixed" glosses over activities with compounding returns. Learning!

Better abstractions and heuristics can have an enormous impact on problem solving efficiency.

First-principles thinking is a powerful hammer, but it's expensive. Over-use it and you'll get nothing done. Under-use it, and you'll do nothing original. Knowing where to use it is the trick, and that's _also_ a skill that can be improved over time.

Chess GMs certainly prune better, but can also evaluate moves faster because they can easily hold multiple boards in their head. It's common for strong GMs to play 10+ blindfold simul games. Nakamura solving chess puzzles is a sight to see.

How is knowing what to prune not thought?

Sometimes it is, then it would be thinking in this context. Other times it's pattern matching which isn't analytical thinking.

I’m still having a hard time understanding the distinction. How is pattern matching not thinking?

This distinction is captured in "Thinking Fast and Slow"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

Doing less thinking to reach a conclusion quickly isn't the same thing as thinking faster.

It's a meaningful distinction because there are physical and mental costs (calories and stress) to trying to "think faster" that don't accrue the same when making decisions based on learnings.

You've abandoned "thinking is a process of considering options and reaching a conclusion" now.

> making decisions based on learnings

This is the ONLY type of thinking there is. Ergo, you can 'think faster' for any given discipline with practice.

> You've abandoned "thinking is a process of considering options and reaching a conclusion" now

This is a big claim to make without any explanation of why you think that.

I'm forced to conclude you're not discussing in good faith. Bye.

If the process of considering options and reaching the correct conclusion concludes faster and that is our definition of thinking, it should follow that the thinking is faster. Somewhere in your last comment you must've pivoted your definition, because you described it rather as thinking 'less' and saying that it is NOT the same thing as thinking faster. That's perfectly fine, of course, but it left me confused as to what definition you were now using.

It's a shame you've decided to abandon the argument.

> If the process of considering options and reaching the correct conclusion concludes faster and that is our definition of thinking, it should follow that the thinking is faster.

That doesn't follow because once you've mastered something you consider less options to reach a conclusion than a novice. One reaches the correct conclusion whit less thinking, not faster thinking.

Following your logic a person taking a shortcut from point A to point B is doing the same amount of driving as somebody not taking the shortcut, they are just driving faster.

Think of it like simple decisions. X=>Y

You start with some of them: A=>B, C=>D, B=>C, E=>F, B=>G. You now get A, and need to decide which tool is better: D or F. You start the reasoning: A=>B=>G&C=>D. After 4 reasonings you arrive at the solution: D. If you need to do this reasoning several times, you 'learn' A=>D. Now, when you need to make the same reasoning, you do A=>B&D. You get the same output but twice as fast. You 'learned'. Muscle memory is also a very good example of this.

The objection is that spending more time thinking about something doesn’t guarantee more accurate responses. Often people’s first reaction is correct and they second guess themselves into making the wrong choice, thus so called shortcuts are just as valid as any other kind of thinking.

For the muscle memory example try really paying attention to walking and your going to be less stable.

> Eventually you are faced with a task that looks on the surface like the type of task you use tool X for, so you start working. After a while it turns out that it would be best to use tool Y. Now you've wasted a bunch of time using the wrong tool because you used a shortcut to avoid thinking, instead of taking the time to think.

I'd caution that for many tasks, using a close enough tool can be good enough, and an experienced user of a "close enough" tool may very well get results rapidly.

Regular Expressions are a great example of this. I've done stuff with regular expressions that a proper parser or tool modifying ASTs would be "correct" for[1], and if I learned to use those specialized tools I'd be better off, for that one particular task. But the fact is regular expressions serve to sub-optimally solve a lot of different problems. I'd make the argument that the total time I've spent learning regex's and then solving a lot of problems with them at 80% speed has been a more efficient use of time than if I'd learned a bunch of one off "ideal" tools.

[1] I have a ~bad~ habit of generating large repetitive chunks of code using regexs.

Agreed, you can see it as operating on a compressed version of the original domain. Your symbolic reasoning may not be faster but your symbols change, through your own dictionary optimization.

> It's a dumb example but I think it illustrates the difference between "thinking faster" and shortcutting your thinking to reach a conclusion faster.

As in the old joke:

Q: What's the difference between a novice and an expert?

A: The novice thinks twice before doing something stupid.

I tend to be a proponent of the resource model of cognition. E.g. you have a limited budget of willpower in a given day, and when you run out of it, it becomes much harder to resist that piece of chocolate cake in the fridge.

By the same token, I would find it plausible to believe you have a certain budget of decisions to be made, or problems to be solved in a given period of time before quality goes down.

I think it's likely this is also something like a muscle that can be trained over time.

This is known as decision fatigue - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue

It leads to things like "people who tend to have to make important decisions have fewer clothing sets" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/successful-people-like-barac... )

I would contend that this is part of the reason why it is difficult for people who have to make decisions about "should I pay the rent, groceries, or utilities" to be able to join the white collar jobs - as those are about making decisions. If your will power budget is exhausted on food choices (because you don't have much money), its harder to make good white collar job decisions.

I would furthermore contend that the above is an excellent argument for UBI (though this gets deeper down into politics).

> If your will power budget is exhausted on food choices (because you don't have much money), its harder to make good white collar job decisions.

Don't you think this has a lot more to do with access? I can't imagine there are too many people saying: "I will turn down this high-paying management job because I spent my decision budget at the grocery store"

Outside of Trading Places (with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy), you don't often get the person being offered the high paying position without experience.

Access, I believe, is one part of the issue. I'm thinking more of the "my willpower budget is spent on the grocery vs utility bill" leading to other poor choices that make it more difficult to get a promotion that allows for a more care free life (not worrying about bills).

I believe that there are many parts of social and economic feedback loops that make it harder (and continue to make it harder) for people in environments that are willpower draining to move to jobs where the ability to make good decisions is the key value.

Well thought demonstrably takes effort, a ridiculous amount of your bodies resources is spent on thinking, however it's hard to pin this down in a certain 'rate'.

You could probably show that calories and certain other resources get exhausted by concentrated thought, however in my experience this has little to do with speed of thought and everything to do with depth (the only times I truly felt mentally exhausted was when I was trying to dig up deeply buried fragments of memory to solve a maths problem).

> Of course, this is a clickbait article and I'm wasting my time even responding to this, but I had a visceral reaction to this that I felt I shouldn't ignore.

Hey me too! I'm _phenomenally_ more creative and productive when "in the field" doing experiments, than when I'm at home / at work trying to predict problems and come up with novel solutions. I'm definitely thinking faster and better when equipment is on the line and stakes are higher.

I really do believe I am more _engaged_ in a problem when it's urgent, expensive, and imminent, rather than very far away. Engagement produces better results for me.

Maybe that's because I'm not thinking faster, but I'm thinking with a higher duty cycle on _this one problem_, but that's not a meaningful, operable insight. Like everything on fs that somehow makes HN.

I think the key is to recognize what situations help you be productive, then engineer more of those situations into your life. You don't need to squeeze your brain harder, you need to be in the field more.

As Alan Kay put it: "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."

The brain memoizes learned concepts just like computers often using a LFU-like algorithm at least my brain seems to

be careful of the assumption.

Humans when they are born can understand 10,000 word sounds in multiple languages but as newborns approach the age of 3 their brains delete the un-sued neurons in the language area of the brain...it's why it's harder to learn languages as we age.

I don't think it's harder per se. But 1h a day (next to work and other stuff) for a new language doesn't compare to 8h+ as a child.

Anecdata: I've had this happen to me. In travel for an old job, I've had the pleasure of spending time in other countries with foreign languages. Any prep study in those languages absolutely paled in comparison with being forced to use the language all day long. It was especially hard when I was tired from a long day of work. However, I now know that was the most important time for me. Those tired moments when I just wanted wine or beer or a taxi ride and didn't want to speak the language anymore but had no other choice were when I really cemented the language in my head. It's incredibly difficult, and expensive, but I really feel that living in the language for a few weeks is worth the effort and time, much more so than any course. That said, take the course for a few months before you get on the ground, it really helps.

I think your instinct is both correct and missing something. At some level, 'thinking' involves transmitting information about the world. Suppose you had a poor model of a new task - the code used to encode information would necessarily be inefficient, since you don't know the probability distribution of anything related to the task. Once you do the task for a while, you get a better sense of the probability distribution of stimuli, and (in theory at least) could develop a more efficient code. Adaptive Huffman coding does exactly this - builds codes on the fly that gradually get more efficient. It's possible that the brain does something qualitatively similar. If so, it would 'look like' information transmission is happening faster.

From this perspective, 'information transmission rate' could actually be constant during learning, when defined as a reduction in subjective uncertainty over time. But because you start with a poor task model, your initial uncertainty is higher when starting learning, due to unfamiliarity with the task, so to an outside observer it looks like information transmission is slower. As your task model improves, your prior for each message matches the environmental statistics better, and information transmission speeds up -- again, just from the perspective of the observer, as your subjective uncertainty now starts low and just goes lower.

Well said. Your comment reminds me of a conversation from 30+ years ago with a work colleague who opined - or shared the opinion, I cannot remember which - that our "input bit rate" was fixed. Young and argumentative, I disputed this, but....

I don't remember all of the arguments in favour, but he pointed out reading: We start sounding out individual letters and eventually progress to scanning whole words or sentences or paragraphs.

It's not that our bit rate changes, it's that our "bit" changes.

Yeah, handwavy I know, I am struggling to recall the conversation.

Essentially, though, consider your point another way: We can only process so many concepts/notions per unit time, and initially, in any subject, our concepts/notions are smaller. As our experience grows, they grow, so our throughput increases, even at the same processing speed.

Sort of like widening a highway to handle more volume at the same speed. Sort of.

In machine learning lingo, you'd have better 'embedding vectors' for the world at large.

This is what Barbara Oakley (of the popular Coursera course "Learning how to Learn") calls chunking. I think of it like changing the word size based on the topic and my understanding of it.

>You can argue that your processor's clock speed hasn't changed, the program has just memoized some intermediate results and no longer has to actively compute them, but that seems like a disingenuous argument.

A disingenuous argument indeed. Almost as if you took the entire premise of the argument you disagree with and put it inside a "you can argue" block which is then dismissed with no rebuttal.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read - Mark Twain

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308324

"Chunking" is an important concept here.

Think about learning to read in.a script you're unfamiliar with (eg Cyrillic if your native language uses Roman script). You need to learn the shape of the letters so you have to keep in mind multiple things just to process one letter.

At some point you're familiar enough with the script that each letter becomes one "chunk" that you can recall and process mentally. This stage is equivalent to sounding out a word by sounding out each letter.

At some point each word becomes a "chunk". Fun fact: they have done tests on reading and if you scramble the letters in text but anchor the first and last letter of each word, most fluent readers can still read the text. [1]

After that groups of words become "chunks" but the barrier here becomes more nebulous.

My point is that the number of chunks your brain can process at a time is relatively fixed (around 5 IIRC).

So I'm not sure that language learning is the counterexample you may believe.

[1]: https://www.treehugger.com/why-your-brain-can-read-jumbled-l...

I think you and the parent are arguing the same thing... you're just coming to a different conclusion (whether this means that thinking rate is fixed or not.)

> You can argue that your thinking rate hasn't changed, you've just internalized some concepts and no longer have to actively think about them, but that seems like a disingenuous argument.

So the number of "chunks" may be fixed, but you are able to absorb and think about the text quicker.

I teach English as a second language. Just an anecdote to add here, there is a lot more background processing than you would imagine here.

Most learner's are trying to parse the new language into their old, and discount context (understandably with English), and that sudden burst your noticing, is that realisation.

I could go on for quite a while about this, but my main point is: learning a new language is a whole bunch of background processes that most people don't realize.

> You can argue that your thinking rate hasn't changed, you've just internalized some concepts and no longer have to actively think about them, but that seems like a disingenuous argument.

The first thing I learned from a second human language teacher was that I'd know when I was becoming fluent-ish when I had a dream in Spanish. At least for second-language teachers, internalizing concepts and not thinking about them is a sign of learning progress. It doesn't seem so disingenuous to me, having internalized a lot of things that felt unfamiliar before and having experienced proficiency improvements as unfamiliarity melted away.

Huh. I've had dreams "in Russian", Greek, Latin, Japanese, and Arabic. I know none of these languages beyond a little counting or a few words, but they seemed very real at the time!

I still think that being able to crack an improvised joke based on the situation one is in is a stronger sign of fluency. But it rests on similar assumptions: having internalized the basic structures of the language to the point where you can spend your cognitive resources on execution.

To add to the other excellent comments here: I've been getting paid to think for most of 30 years now, and I'm absolutely certain that my rate of thinking has decreased over time. Related: the number of different things I can keep in my head at a time has also declined.

It's possible that my somewhat slower rate of thinking is partly or mostly offset by more effective thinking, based on decades of experience, but I'm definitely not sure that's the case.

My professional experience is an advantage, but it's also a disadvantage at times. 20-25 years ago, I knew quite a bit about how virtual memory performed on the same program running under HPUX 9 and AIX 4. Woot? (Yes I understand that such 'ancient' knowledge and experience probably produces mental pathways that helpfully apply to more modern considerations. Probably.) (Spoiler: virtual memory performance on HPUX 9 and 10 (at least) was abysmal.)

To the main point of the article: it's complicated, but, agreeing with various sibling comments, I'm pretty certain that the right kinds of pressure/stress, in the right conditions, at the right times, etc etc, will effectively speed up the rate of thought. That agrees with my experience.

Normal disclaimer applies: human brains are radically and often absurdly different, and one person's experience will, on average, shed very little if any light on another person's experiences.

It seems to me what you're saying is that your ability to think like a sprint has degraded but that your ability to think like a marathon has improved. Both of those are measures of speed and can be boiled down to a rate, even though they have very different characteristics.

Both of those can also be quite valuable in different circumstances and completely useless in others. Just a matter of finding the right environment that can make the best use of your thought process at your given stage of experience.

For some time I believed that my rate of thinking had decreased. But that changed for the better. Exercise, healthy food and sleeping schedule, friendly job environment and it turned back to my thirties perfomance, even higher.

My two cents: beware of burn out.

Also take into account your eating habits.

Eat lots of healthy fats and your brain will sing. If you eat a bunch of carbs and little fat, you'll likely experience brain fog.

Yup, this is important stuff. In my case, my diet has been steadily improving, on average, throughout my adult life. My wife and I are now doing roughly 20/4 intermittent fasting most days of the week, and that food is quite healthy.

When making claims like this, please link a reliable source, because I have a hard time believing diet has a statistically significant impact on cognitive performance - excluding caffeine or other stimulants of course.

I have the most reliable source. For me, that would be me. You don't need some double blind study. If what you're trying to achieve is mental acuity, it's self-evident, really. Just test different kinds of food and you will notice.

BTW nostromo, I did write "healthy food" in my other comment ;-)

> I have a hard time believing diet has a statistically significant impact on cognitive performance - excluding caffeine or other stimulants of course

Oh for me it's just the opposite:

Caffeine makes me jumpier, but I'm not at all sure it improves my cognitive performance. Do you have any evidence caffeine has positive impact on cognitive performance?

I'm pretty sure eating healthy improves the clarity of my thinking. When I was young, I'd eaten a bar of chocolate for lunch a couple of times when short of time during a go tournament. This has invariably been a terrible idea and worsened my performance.

I don't have the citations off hand, but

> my rate of thinking has decreased over time

from my neuro 2xx or 3xx courses, this is how it works: crudely, the young brain works faster because it takes into account less information, fewer contingencies, while the older brain does the opposite.

Does that really mean that the rate of thinking is slower though? I would say it just means that the rate of conclusions from all of the thinking might be slower.

Rate of conclusions per unit time sounds like something interesting. Say it takes you 3x longer to arrive at a conclusion than a peer. But, each of those conclusions is 10x more valuable to the product/organization/individual.

Perhaps we also say that some conclusions are bad and bring negative value. It is likely that hasty decisions fall into this camp more frequently than more careful considerations. Just one bad technology decision made flippantly can inflict critical damage.

It is way easier to sink a ship than it is to build a new one. "Slow" thinking is the fastest way when you zoom out to the strategic map.

Reminds me of an experiment where chimps outperform humans in speed with simple mental tasks.

https://www.nature.com/news/2007/071203/full/news.2007.317.h...

Fluid intelligence when younger, crystalized intelligence when older.

Analogize to basketball. Athleticism when younger, saavy when older.

I can't find it now, but someone else on Hacker News a while ago posted a study that backed you up. Age above ~20 made people worse at basically every type of cognition test except for general knowledge.

Edit: Found it. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797614567339

Posted originally in this comment by checkyoursudo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356216

Semi related: There was some study about chess ability of best players that showed up lately. Apparently 35 y.o. is when best players max out their skill. Then it's flat for a while and starts going down in 40s/50s.

Implying that's the optimal balance between thinking ability and time to learn I suppose.

I honestly disagree with every possible interpretation of this article. The amount of work you can do in a unit of time is highly variable: for example, going into a flow state can increase my output by multiples. And your day-to-day cognitive performance can vary enormously as well (I used to play chess for hours every day for example, and some days I was just _better_ than other days. Consistently. In fact, I could even peg it to specific days of the week.) I rarely drink coffee, but when I do it can be like going into another state of consciousness.

There is a productivity curve where if I press too hard or for too long my net output and decision making eventually gets worse, but it's a curve, not a flat line.

You're correct, the article is fundamentally flawed. Your thinking speed is not fixed. A person may not have full control over it, but it is far from fixed.

While it’s arguably perception rather than thinking, experiments purport to show time dilation for race car drivers, pro athletes, gamers, or normals in accidents, allowing the person to self perceive as acting/reacting in a kind of Neo from Matrix slo mo in extremis.

Furthermore, we showed a reduction of perceived frequency for flickering stimuli and an enhanced detection of rapidly presented letters during action preparation, suggesting increased temporal resolution of visual perception during action preparation. We propose that the temporal dilation during action preparation reflects the function of the brain to maximize the capacity of sensory information-acquisition prior to execution of a ballistic movement. This strategy might facilitate changing or inhibiting the planned action in response to last-minute changes in the external environment.

"Our guess is that during the motor preparation, visual information processing in the brain is enhanced. So, maybe, the amount of information coming in is increased. That makes time be perceived longer and slower."

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.133...

It seems less likely that time is slowing for them than that their perceived processing frame rate spiked on demand to handle important (life threat?) detail:

These results are in line with the third-person perspective studies on the effect of movement on time. That is, the faster the speed of the car in the video, the more context changes were perceived in the video, aligning nicely with the hypothesis that the number of visual changes drives temporal dilation effects. Although tested in a different context, this explanation find corroborative support in a study (Antonson et al., 2009) on the effect of landscapes on preferred speed in car simulators, with landscapes richer in details (i.e., forests compared to open spaces) associated with slower preferred speeds. Although this effect is typically explained by other, higher-level factors, our study suggests that the rich detail landscapes might cause internal time to run faster due to the higher number of changes, causing participants to drive slower to keep their subjective speed at comfortable levels.

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82851715.pdf

How much of that is because in your non-flow states, you're thinking about something else.

For me, flow is super productive because I'm concentrating only on the task at hand. I may have a thought every couple seconds or so, but if I'm coding in flow, each thought is a new line of code. If I'm playing Civ, each thought is a new move or new building purchased.

If I'm not in flow, there's a good chance that that thought is about the HN story that's sitting on the tab in the background. Or wondering if anyone replied to my comment. Or thinking about how I need to pick up my kid in an hour. Or fretting that I'll never finish my project and I'm going to get fired.

This is also consistent with the effects of coffee and other stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall. These work by boosting attention: they increase dopamine and norepinephrine production within the prefrontal cortex, which is the area of the brain that gives us conscious control over our thoughts.

Exactly, this is pretty much the definition of flow. It amplifies productivity on the task at hand, which seems to be one of the things the OP claims is impossible. On the other hand, even if the article is taking the banal position that your IQ doesn't change, this also seems false - your day to day cognitive ability does vary (even if the average level is stable).

> It amplifies productivity on the task at hand, which seems to be one of the things the OP claims is impossible

This is not what the previous commenter said. They said flow allows you to focus on a single task.

This is not productivity amplification, it's improved time/focus/energy allocation.

I read Slack about the time it was written, and this theme has stuck with me through the years. I start feeling it whenever I'm trying to go faster than I know that I can go. Both the stress and this "law" remind me to pick the high priority thing (requires some wisdom) and the rest will have to wait.

So the minor thing the article leaves out is that DeMarco cites this as Lister's Law: People under time pressure do not think faster. I couldn't find a nice primary source for that. Here's the best I found:

https://medium.com/@jasonrigden/the-eponymous-laws-of-comput...

It's nice from time to time to turn your mind out to pasture and lazily reflect on just whatever. Those times can be surprisingly productive and refreshing.

But for me at least, if I'm trying to drive my brain through productive knowledge work, whether that's designing an api or algorithm or implementation, there is a top speed. And unless I'm kidding myself, I can work at that top speed as a choice of will. And no amount of pressure can make my mind put the pieces together faster. Now pressure to a point will keep me from letting things like HN distract me. Beyond that point, additional pressure will eventually hurt my ability to concentrate, and might even cause me to bail. Just being transparent here.

Edit: BTW, DeMarco's book was written mostly from the perspective of managers and the pressure they place on others as they organize the workplace.

I agree with the point about managers and decision-makers setting the tone with regard to the "hurry up" culture, but I take exception with one line:

> Expecting great things of all your workers

Why is it not OK to expect great things out of everybody on your team? Surely people don't want to feel excluded from the "great performers" group? Surely people don't want to feel that they're not capable of great things?

I'm completely in favor of giving everybody the time and space they need to do their best work, but then to _also_ assume that some people are incapable of producing great work given the time and support they need to achieve it... isn't that the definition of an under-performer?

As decision makers, don't we have an obligation to identify the people who do great work and empower them? Isn't it our job to create the environment in which _everybody_ does great work? Why is it not OK to expect that everybody does great work?

The best teams IMO have about a 10/10/80 split between people who do great work and know it, people who do great work and don't know it, and people who don't do great work (caveat: they should do ACCEPTABLE work) but are aware of their limitations. There's only so much work that you want your talent to be doing and you can try and keep the major touch points to your power players, and then you try to silo off the drudgery to the folks who are happy to have something hard to fail at. The personality type of the good-and-knows-it tends to need to be offset by the humble good-but-unsure types. Heaven forbid you get even one worker who can crank out productivity like no tomorrow and claims to be doing good work because in a vacuum everything is functional but they optimize only to close tasks and leave the system in total disrepair. It takes literal years to clean up some messes, and from experience I tend to prefer working with people who adhere to N > quality(output) > 0 over those at |quality(output)| > N.

Yes, this mirrors directly that old adage from that German general [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...

Thanks for the thoughtful reply; I'd never heard of Hammerstein-Equord before, so that was enlightening.

I think I've lived a charmed life in that, for the past 7 years, I've worked at a company without a bell curve distribution in terms of employees. We're extremely "top heavy" in terms of experience and ability, and there has been a distinct lack of ego as well. At previous companies I would agree with your assessments about types of people, but having seen what's possible when you hire only the best people through your professional networks who only want to work with other talented ego-less individuals, I may be guilty of holding myself to unrealistic expectations.

That said, we're becoming a victim of our own success now and we need to hire outside of our tapped-out professional networks. Perhaps as we achieve a more "normal" distribution, the more "normal" advice will start to apply. A good problem to have, but still a new problem where there wasn't one previously.

>Why is it not OK to expect that everybody does great work?

Because the ways in which this usually manifests is "hurry up" culture. How is "great work" measured and what is the manager's responsibility for assigning/distributing work that is appropriate to each employee?

I'm not sure it's the manager's responsibility to compartmentalize and then assign/distribute work to each employee. Aren't people happier and more productive when they're in charge of their own destiny?

I view the manager's role as one that clearly defines and communicates business imperatives and facilitates communication about how to get there. If you're telling people exactly what to do, how does that enable them to do great work? Aren't they just doing what the manager tells them to?

>Aren't people happier and more productive when they're in charge of their own destiny?

Sometimes, but there are also people who just want to accomplish the task at hand and collect a paycheck. And for the enthusiastic employee, a good manager should be able to tell if someone is over-committing themselves and setting themselves up for failure. A good manager should be able to deal with a range of enthusiasm and adjust accordingly.

Only if they are forwarned about not making it instead of given false hope to sell them their position

I like a lot of FS, but this seems particularly incorrect. You can slow down your thinking rate, can you not? That being the case, it seems trivial to me that you can also speed it up.

Perhaps you can't raise your maximum thinking rate, or you can't raise it without introducing errors or reducing criteria, but that is different from saying it is fixed.

Of course, what I'm describing is more of a "decisioning rate" than a thinking rate, but that's exactly how they describe it in the article.

> If you’re a knowledge worker, you can’t pick up the pace of mental discriminations just because you’re under pressure. Chances are good that you’re already going as fast as you can. Because guess what? You can’t voluntarily slow down your thinking, either.

My thinking "rate" definitely slows down when I'm hungry or not well rested. I'm a faster problem solver under pressure but not when panicking. I don't think I'm unusual in this.

I didn't see any references to any research, or really any supporting references at all. The DeMarco examples are all examples of either self defeating multi-tasking or working your team to exhaustion; not things designed to get people to "think faster" that are failing. Yes, "working smarter, not harder" is a good thing in itself but has nothing to do with thinking speed.

I'm not a pro at this but this blog post is not very convincing to me. I have read evidence that people perform often perform cognitive tasks better under light stress, and that stands to reason. It would be a poor brain that did worse at thinking the more you need to do it.

I don't think the claim that the thinking rate is fixed is well-sourced in this blog, but there is various good advice that you can take to at least avoid wasting cycles you have spent. One idea is to try to write down decisions and the reasons for them, and get sign-offs, to prevent relitigating things with yourself or others. I'm sure there are a thousand other ideas that are a little more productive than trying to "reduce the pressure you're under" (as if that's something most of us have control over).

The title doesn't match the premise:

> If you’re a knowledge worker, as an ever-growing proportion of people are, the product of your job is decisions.

Making decisions isn't "thinking", it's just one piece of the puzzle.

I have a concrete example - a trick I used to pull off with a fairly concrete measure - that showed I could make myself think faster, not with decision-making but with more rote thinking tasks:

My first part-time job was as a page at a library, and our primary task was shelving returned books. For most of us, one person could get through a cart in about 45 minutes to an hour: Every book had to be placed in its proper spot by the Dewey Decimal system. I generally took about the same amount of time.

The trick (and I call it that because I made a bet with others once or twice) was that if I pushed myself, I could identify and anticipate where books went at a much faster rate than normal, bringing my time per cart to under a half hour. The only cost was that, once done, I was mentally worn out and finished the night at a slower rate than was normal - but the work itself was no sloppier than usual.

I hear this a lot and I understand people make mistakes trying to rush but this is not accurate for me. I can absolutely will myself to think faster. Maybe this comes with experience doing some meditation but when I have a difficult problem where the solution is not immediately obvious, I can sit in my chair or take a walk and focus very intensely on the problem. I get my whole mind to just focus on this one thing and I keep my mind there without getting distracted or daydreaming. I don’t try to have any kinds of thought in particular. I just focus on the problem. After doing this for a certain amount of time I will come up with my conclusion.

I could do this over a longer period of time and create much less mental strain but when I’m in a time crunch, it’s very useful.

That said if the problem is actually beyond my reach and capabilities I won’t get much of an answer.

Perhaps you are not thinking faster, instead you're doing an excellent job at focusing all of your resources on one problem.

It is the sum of all your thought that is (apparently) fixed, so moving all that thought to one task will have that single task complete faster. It doesn't change how much "thought" you could do at once overall though.

Then this article becomes trivial. Imagine we discussed running, no one would argue that your running speed is fixed, most people agree that one can vary the speed at which they run even though it is perfectly well understood that there is a maximum speed they can do so and a minimum speed. And just like running, the maximum speed that I can run is not a single well defined value. It depends on whether I am running a marathon or a sprint.

Similarly with thinking, I can vary the speed at which I'm thinking depending on whether I am playing bullet chess, speed chess or standard chess. Certainly when playing bullet chess, just like running a sprint, I am operating at my peak speed, but that speed is not sustainable for long periods of time and it's inefficient in terms of energy use, so I get burned out if I have to engage it for a long time.

If I'm running a marathon or thinking about a problem that requires deep and intense focus, I stop operating at my peak speed and instead operate at a long term sustainable speed.

This is the kind of variation that this article misses when it says that our thinking is fixed. It's anything but fixed, it's a fairly complex and poorly understood trade-off.

Exactly. I did indeed see the article as trivial. From the actual article itself :

"If you’re a knowledge worker, you can’t pick up the pace of mental discriminations just because you’re under pressure. Chances are good that you’re already going as fast as you can. Because guess what? You can’t voluntarily slow down your thinking, either."

---

Now we both know that what you say must be true. But it goes beyond anecdotal evidence. We can scan the brain with an fMRI and we see different parts of the brain light up as we think. We're not seeing thinking here - we're seeing the brain cells consume energy.

Wikipedia - "Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.[1][2] This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that region also increases.[3]"

If the brain was always at 100% capacity, your entire fMRI would always show complete engagement.

Like a muscle, you can overexert your brain, so like you say sustainable pace is important.

---

However, if you average over days and weeks, you could say that your level of thought IS fixed at this long term sustainable level. I think that the article is considering a project that is "man-months" long and not just thinking over the course of a minute or a day.

-- Wikipedia link for fMRI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_...

I don't agree with the article that reducing pressure is the most important thing. It's not particularly helpful advice when you do find yourself with a time crunch.

Instead, I'd say there's a difference in quality of thinking. If ten minutes go by while you're trying to make a decision, how many distinct thoughts have you had? Did you just replay a given scenario 8 times over and over in your head? Did you just stress about the worst possible scenario the whole time? Or did you consider things from different directions and dig into possible different outcomes, as well as the input data you have available?

I see it similar to the "do you have ten years of experience, or one year of experience ten times?" saying about what you do (or don't) learn in a job...

> find yourself with a time crunch

It's also important to ask why that time crunch happened. Avoidable mishaps? Random chance? Poor management?

What is really difficult is to reduce pressure so you can think clearly, but maintain a culture of urgency, or perhaps the right word is "momentum".

I'm working in a small team on some software that we'll finish in a year or two and sell for x dollars. We are self funded so every day we spend on the product is another dollar we need to earn to recoup our investment. The longer we take, the greater the risk we won't ever see a return.

The product needs to be good, but we also need to build it fast.

"Haste makes waste."

"Slow is smooth and smooth is fast."

- - - -

Someone hasn't tried hypnosis...

Your conscious mind has very limited capacity, yes, but your unconscious mind has much much greater capacity. You can learn to think with your whole mind and develop preternatural speed (as well as a bunch of other cool capabilities, like being able to induce catatonic trance in just part of your body, enhanced memory, etc.) This takes the form of fast reflexes (a mug gets knocked off the table but you catch it before it hits the floor) and reduced susceptibility to surprise. Additionally, you can tap into the unconscious mind and "offload" thinking, as it were. For example, when playing chess you don't have to think about it, you "just know" which moves to make. The thinking is still happening but it's unconscious so, like all unconscious processes (by definition), you don't feel it.

Anyway, I have no real idea why hypnosis isn't more widely studied and practiced, but using it it is certainly possible to increase your thinking rate. FWIW, the hypnosis books I recommend are: "TRANCE-formations" by Bandler and Grinder, and "Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No Such Thing as Hypnosis?" by Heller.

I tend to think trying to speed up thought in general is a fool’s errand.

However, as others have noted, there are clear exceptions, and training a pathway does indeed speed up thinking on that pathway.

I’ll highlight another example of thinking speed changing:podcasts. Given that I have to listen and comprehend most words, and listened-to words use the same pipeline as thought words (I can’t listen and think words at the same time; at best I can context switch quickly) I think it’s reasonable to say that listening (with comprehension) is thinking.

When I first started listening to podcasts, I started at 1.25x. Then 1.5x. Then 2x. Now I’m at 2-2.5x on everything. I’m disappointed when things like YouTube don’t let me push past 2x (a silly limitation you should fix if any YouTube engineers are reading).

It seems I did train myself to do general-purpose symbolic thinking at 2x. Recall is pretty good, too. I tend to go on walks while I listen, so I get a natural IRL memory palace effect.

Which begs the question: is thinking rate fixed? Probably not actually. I think people tend to underestimate what is possible until they see/experience someone doing it; a self-imposed tyranny of low expectations.

There are browser extensions that allow you to play YouTube videos (and others) past 2x speed. Very useful.

Open devtools console, no need for extensions:

document.querySelectorAll('video').forEach(v => v.playbackRate = 2.5)

Video Speed Controller is one, works on HTML5 Video (including YouTube, but not limited to it).

For FireFox: https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed

I think, forked from Chrome: https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

For text there's a method called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, I wrote a little program to do that and could read visually faster than my internal voice could talk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentati... The article says "RSVP is a scientific method for studying the timing of vision." but FWIW I first heard of it in the context of computer systems that needed to output text without a large screen.

Totally agree knowledge worker's brains need time to percolate on problems, tapping into the subconscious definitely leads to better outcomes on one individuals thought.

However when it comes to organizations, deep thought reaches its limit because one person can't synthesize the whole thing alone and you need to operate as a team. In this environment there's no limit to the amount of wheel-spinning that can happen when you have the wrong people thinking about the wrong things and giving them more space to think just confuses things more. In this case, setting some guardrails in terms of timelines, strategic business, product and technical constraints, and other leadership guidance are key in effective execution. The article does a poor job distinguishing these positive forcing functions from clueless management browbeating people into burnout out of sheer arrogance and ignorance.

Your thinking rate might be fixed (or more likely, decreasing with time), but one thing you can do, which is not mentioned here, is become more efficient.

This means looking for ways to improve the things you do and finding shortcuts so you have to think less. Most commonly, I do this by looking back at how I did a task and writing down things to help me complete it faster next time. Examples:

- write down the common mistakes I've made in the past and use it as a checklist to check before I push code

- create run-books for debugging issues. This is both for specific areas and general process things such as "Make sure you check all the relevant grafana dashes."

- add questions and answers on StackExchange/Quora when I run into problems/questions that take me awhile to resolve.

I can't stand this pseudo Charlie Munger stuff. As a CEO, I have become 20x more efficient at making good enough decisions. I could wait for perfect decisions, but our competitors would ship and wed run out of money. It's such a weird meta interpretation it's so hard to translate to complex knowledge work, and if it doesn't translate to that it seems to work only in your head.

I think this is mostly true and there are plenty of qualifiers. Stress is an excellent example. But in general, you can still apply various forms of leverage and get more results.

eg your ability to calculate in your head is usually limited but if you leverage the use of a calculator you can operate faster.

Also you can practice various aspects and become more efficient. So learning a technique for calculating faster can actually make you faster. Or you can memorise the Times Table and just lookup the result rather than calculating it.

The actual exploration of options can be accelerated as well. You need to be able to collapse the complexity of the evaluation down and trust this process being accurate. This is not trivial.

Even the impact of stress can be reduced by changing the "stress floor" level of what you've encountered. You can place yourself in multiple stressful situations and practice to get better.

I really would like to see some research on this, as it sounds wrong to me

thinking isn't a linear thing and there are many things you can do to speed up your thinking

  - remove distractions
  - draw and/or write out your thinking especially when trying to conceptualize things
  - structured approach to problems
  - lateral approaches to problems
  - talk with other people
  - do what you do to find the "zone"
  - take breaks

There are many things that change the outcomes of how many decisions you can make in a fixed period of time that aren't just trivially "think harder/faster". Our brains are very non linear, lots of ways we can pre load our minds with problems that produce a better flow of decisions.

I had thought this was about an actual way to measure "thinking rate" and was super interested in what that could be. Disappointed to have landed on a click-bait-y article rehashing an old point that people make worse decisions under pressure.

I am a go player. The whole purpose of training is to improve the thinking rate. We train using slow games to build higher level insights and we train using fast games to transform these insights into automatisms (passive thinking).

This is a typically frustrating fs article.

The article is not about thinking, in general, or about some nebulous thinking rate concept. It's about decision making under pressure.

There is a really good nugget in here. I've know it for a long time - but only intuitively, at first.

> If you want to make better decisions, you need to do everything you can to reduce the pressure you’re under

You need time and mentation to integrate and understand the details of a problem. This is especially the case when the situation is new/unfamiliar (to you, at least) and/or it requires learning new/unfamiliar things. Pressure disrupts your normal cognition

This brought some old memories to the surface. I was hit by a car pretty badly when I was a teenager. I've actually flown above the car and landed into the road, but somehow I've managed to protect my head, so I have a clear memory of this event.

While I was spinning in the air, I saw everything in slow motion for a few seconds. Clearly in slow motion! In fact, it was how I've managed to protect my head when landing. From my personal anecdote, I think think this article's hypothesis is unreasonable. My brain kind of overclocked itself to give me an advantage in that situation.

It's true, but it's not relevant. Take for instance mental arithmetic. Once you have the skill down, there's no real thinking involved anymore. Same with chess. Chess masters generally don't really think deep or hard. They just see and recognize more patterns. No thinking involved.

The trick is to get it (whatever "it" is) "down" to that level. Thinking fast and slow is a book about this topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

In business, many times the lack of any decision (good or bad) wastes valuable time. Especially for leaders, unblocking teams to move forward has real value beyond whether or not the actual decision is optimal. A great many decisions are reversible. If your decision is reversible (even at some expense), it may be better to just decide and move on. In many cases, you don't have perfect information anyway, so trying to make the right decision causes you to delay the very experiments necessary to get you to an optimum outcome.

I completely agree. I try to position 'not taking a decision' as a decision option itself. Often it clarifies how poor that choice is or whether you are micro-optimizing alternatives.

And sometimes it is the better decision to postpone the decision to a moment later in time you have more information.

> Defer tasks that are not on the critical path

The article discards the usefulness of this point, but I’d argue this is the precursor to better prioritisation, and through it to higher productivity. Even if you strictly can’t “speed up” your brain, _what_ you work on is important. If pressure forces you to select higher impact tasks, then that alone is worth the trade off imo.

> Deferring non-critical tasks doesn’t save any time overall, it just pushes work forwards—to the point where those tasks do become critical. Then something else gets deferred.

Spoken like someone who never procrastinated! More than half the time these tasks end up disappearing because not only were they "non-critical" but also they weren't necessary.

When the boss asks for something done faster, I like to reply, "sure, I can do that with a higher error rate."

Thanks, I didn't realize it was broken

Fantastic...... I agree. The wrong decisions I had made was due to pressure in that short duration and if I had taken more time atleast 10mins more, I wouldn't have made that.

Disclosure : decisions were related to stock purchase and sell.....

reminds me of the ancient slogan "Think" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_%28IBM%29

Though, (tongue-in-cheek) points off for not mentioning g factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

Also, mirrors my own experience in terms of my own productivity and how it takes a severe nose dive after hours.

When I'm drunk, I find my thinking rate is slowed by ~20%. Songs that sound normal during normal times sound ~20% too fast.

I wonder if there's any substance to speed up my mind. Coffee?

I've heard that some jugglers use microdoses - or more - of LSD to "slow down time", with positive effects.

I thought this was like medical study...

> The rate at which you make mental discernments is fixed.

Says some self-help blog/podcast? Ok.

How much does it differ between people?

I don’t think this is true. I personally think of it as “going sicko mode”, and it’s the difference between writing as fast as I can for 2 hours straight during an exam, and putting in half as much effort during an entire work day. I can think way harder under pressure. One of the most influential things anyone ever said to me was pointing out how much slower I am during normal work than a high pressure situation. I could write 1000 words in the time between waking up and getting out of bed if I could go sicko mode at will.

This is just extrinsic discipline & motivation.

Sicko mode

Sounds like Flow State to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

tldr: if you're doing something quickly you're more prone to make mistakes.

Did this article present any new information that everyone doesn't already know? Or is the article just re framing the word "thinking" with "rate of change."

Many analogies and quotations don't serve to to present new information. The catharsis of relating something to an unrelated concept makes it feel like new information was presented but in reality you learned nothing new.

Additionally the author makes a claim and instead of using evidence to validate the claim he uses analogies.

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