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Comment by MrYellowP | Hacker News Reader

Hm.

This reads like: "What we thought was a slowing down of mental processes was probably actually just thoughtfulness and the avoidance of jumping to conclusions early."

This reminds me of how people believe (i only have anecdotal evidence, but LOTS of it) that reacting faster in conversations means you're more intelligent, when in fact the opposite must be true.

The brain can super easily pattern match in conversations and will, in absolutely most cases , spit something out that fits to the patterns of the words spoken (as evidenced by speaking with people who react quickly, regardless of how stupid the reaction is), but that doesn't make intelligent.

It makes thoughtless.

Even worse than those are the ones who seem incapable of reflecting on their thoughts, insisting that they are correct, actually refusing to put a second or deeper thought on it.

Those are mindless automatons.

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This also provides some arguments against synchronous (video, audio) meetings.

Although it's possible for a group to have a sensible, thoughtful conversation within a synchronous environment, a lot of that requires a calm and slow temperament on the part of (all of!) the participants.

That isn't, in my experience, the reality in most software companies -- people talk quickly and interject. That has the effect of pushing out more thoughtful responses.

> people talk quickly and interject.

Yes. Mindless automatons.

Not really what I'm suggesting; many of the responses (even rapid ones) could be valuable and accurate.

But regardless, it can make it difficult for all opinions to feel heard (and that can lead to other problems).

Depends who this happens with and the context.

I cherish those incredible conversations with some where there was lots of constructive interjection… essentially jamming with ideas.

This hasn’t been the case with those who have a point to prove or are just argumentative.

For exactly that reason I’ve never understood the focus on the in-person hearing in law. Thought I think the preference is the result of preferring speed over quality. As a judge, reading and comprehending twenty pages of well researched legal briefs takes much more time than scheduling a 15 minute hearing (which is also mich less mentally taxing on you, because it’s going to be the parties of the case who are doing most of the talking).

I would think/hope/expect the judge has spent time reading and comprehending the case before that 15 minute meeting. At least in my very limited experience, they manage to pose fairly astute questions in such meetings.

Well, if you're the kind of person who thinks a lot in private -- then, in conversation, you can respond quickly and deeply: because your thinking has already been done.

And for answers of the same depth and calibre, producing them faster is also indicative of more intelligence.

No, actually. This is also just automaticity and thoughtlessness.

The brain needs time to process. The faster you react, the less time the brain has to process things. While I agree that someone taking too much time for processing isn't necessarily "smart", believing that a faster response is indicative of higher intelligence is ass backwards.

In the end, even if the response contains deeper thoughts, it's still a thoughtless response when that response has been created long before the conversation happened.

The point is that the brain needs time to gather and process. The less time you give your brain to do so, the more automatic your behaviour will be.

The fact that most people react quickly is absolutely indicative of them not actually using any higher brain functions while conversing with others. And it's observable in the faces of others. You can see if someone is actually thinking, or not. It's not even hard to notice, you can learn it using a mirror.

Furthermore can you never be sure if the "deep thoughts" are actually ones owns and it's important to verify if a person came up with them ones self, or if they're just someone elses thoughts mindlessly parrotted.

It's important to understand that, what I am talking about, is like a difference between doing something actively and passively.

Or, from a different perspective and directly addressing what you wrote:

> your thinking has already been done.

You, yourself, have written the reason why "producing them faster is also indicative of more intelligence" is wrong, because "the thinking has already been done." equals "there was no thinking involved in coming up with the response."

... and THAT is not intelligent behaviour, it's automaticity.

Automatism of the articulation of things an individual interprets at a much higher level is intelligent behaviour, and a high proportion of synchronous communication is based around establishing/clarifying things the other party is already supposed to have in mind. Someone isn't demonstrating greater intelligence because they can't parse the basic greeting as a single concept so have to retrospectively analyse each individual word of the sentence to infer meaning, because they don't have an existing opinion on an issue (or haven't started thinking about it when it first became the subject of the conversation a minutes earlier) or because they have to iterate through number of possibilities to guess at something somebody else simply recalls or already figured out.

GPT-3 determining the most probable of millions of possible followup word sequences each time the other party emits a new word by comparing it with a vast corpus of mostly irrelevant data isn't reasoning at as high a level as the person who grasps as soon as the other person references $subject that what the other person wants is agreement, and thats as simple as human "automated" responses get (GPT-3 will get there too, via a more circuitous route)

> Well, if you're the kind of person who thinks a lot in private -- then, in conversation, you can respond quickly and deeply: because your thinking has already been done.

I also disagree with this, and I'll provide slightly different reasoning, although I think it does overlap with what you're saying regarding evident utilisation of the mind.

Even if someone has done a lot of thinking about an issue, they may want to take time before responding in a conversation to make sure that they've correctly pattern-matched the circumstances, and to prepare a suitable response for the moment and audience.

At some point I think this is system 1 vs system 2 thinking in that Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast Slow context.

I am really not sure though if any of my thought is something other than lookup tables and types of joins.

Youre ignoring instinctual/creative responses.

Deeply thinking isn't always required to produce high quality ideas (like lightbulb moments)

Our entire working lives are conditioned to jump to conclusions - they want things fast and they want it to agree with the opinion/vision of the boss.

This makes me wonder if ideologues may have certain faster brain patterns or areas with faster activity, compared to those who are say more thoughtful, have further developed critical thinking, are open minded/more open minded?

> when in fact the opposite must be true.

It MUST?

Yes, because the reaction time is indicative of how much time you've spent with the thought.

The worst of the worst are those who react before the other person even ended the sentence. Those people themselves most oftenly consider themselves as intelligent, because - in their minds - they already know "everything".

But, sure ... that's not helpful in regards to your post.

The opposite must be true, because otherwise you give room for the idea that thoughtlessness is intelligence. As the depth of thoughts is a function of time, the longer the brain can "analyse and gather", the better the response will be.

The less time spent, the less time the brain has to "analyse and gather", which means that it will bring up whatever matches the patterns first.

It's quite amazing. We're capable of conversing without needing to actually think about what's being said and people aren't even noticing the fact that they're not actually thinking about what's being said.

If you wish to believe that (consciously or not) reducing ones self to pattern matching in conversations equals (any level of higher) intelligence, then I'm not convinced you have any practical experience on the matter.

Right now, you are just some dude on the internet with a strong opinion, can you back up your assertions with citations?

Anecdotally, I am one of those people who interject when people are talking to me. I know it's a bad habit, but in most cases I DO think faster than almost everyone I meet, and from my perception people take forever to explain their point. Most of the time I know exactly where they are going on the topic, and I bore easily, so find myself interrupting. It is one of my worst traits, but I challenge that it's because I don't think. I think deeply about everything and anything as I have a constant desire to learn regardless of topic. The down side of this is that most people talk absolute rubbish about topics they know nothing about, yet seem to enjoy doing it, and resent being corrected or educated. I had to learn this the hard way. These days I just don't engage in any general conversations with colleagues or acquaintances for this very reason.

Pretty much all know-it-alls think they are smarter that anyone else.

There might be two opposite forces going on here: one delta t is the time required for some deeper thought, the other - negative - delta t is the time saved by predicting what your interlocutor is trying to say.

There's an (unusual, I admit) energy expenditure counter-argument here.

If someone is able to respond near-automatically and produces an accurate, relevant response that progresses a conversation or situation positively (for whatever that means), then the fact that they haven't spent time and mental energy (and in turn, genuine calorific energy) could be seen as a success.

Now I'm not necessarily arguing that it's good or healthy to have less-thoughtful conversations like that; just that there are other perspectives possible here.

(I think that what really matters is the overall level of progress that humanity can make in terms of achievement - and I think that rapid-response conversations are likely to keep us stuck with existing models of insecure, attention-sapping, user-harmful technology)

To be fair that is 99% of the population.

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