Slowness Is a Virtue
Source: Hacker News
Modern culture and the rush for quick answers
Modern culture is focused exclusively on questions that can be answered quickly. In academia, that’s what you can get funding for. Fast questions can be answered within a few weeks, allowing you to publish a paper, collect citations, and present your answer at conferences—building a career.
But the most important questions can’t be answered like that.
Research vs. Development
When you can write down a step‑by‑step plan for how you’re going to answer a question or solve a specific problem, you aren’t doing research but development.
Research means you only have a fuzzy idea of your destination but no clear idea of how you’re going to get there. You’re mostly just following hunches and intuitions. That’s how the biggest leaps forward are achieved.
Development is the execution of a map toward a goal, while research is the pursuit of a goal without a map.
Working on questions you can answer fast means you know what you’re doing, and knowing what you’re doing is a sign you’re not pushing into genuinely new territory.
Slowness as a Virtue
Slowness allows for the exploration of uncharted territory and unexpected discoveries.
- Johann Friedrich Böttger spent almost a decade trying to find a formula that produces gold. He never succeeded, but his relentless experimentation led to the discovery of porcelain.
- Andrew Wiles worked in secret for seven years on Fermat’s Last Theorem, publishing nothing.
- Albert Einstein took around ten years to write down the foundational equation of General Relativity.
In this sense, when it comes to research, speed should be considered an anti‑signal and slowness a virtue.1
Intelligence, IQ, and Speed
Our very definition of intelligence encodes a bias toward speed. The modern definition is extremely narrow: it describes the speed at which you can solve well‑defined problems.
Consider this: if you get access to an IQ test weeks in advance, you could slowly work through all the problems and memorize the solutions. The test would then score you as a genius. This reveals what IQ tests actually measure—it’s not whether you can solve problems, but how fast you solve them. Academic and IQ tests exclusively measure this kind of intelligence.
What these tests completely miss is the ability to select problems worth working on and to choose interesting steps forward in the absence of a well‑defined problem.
As a result, many people live under the illusion that because their intelligence doesn’t fit this narrow definition, they’re not able to contribute something meaningful.
“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
The myth of high‑IQ geniuses
The obsession with IQ partly stems from bad science that was repeated until it became accepted as truth. In the 1950s, Harvard professor Anne Roe claimed to have measured the IQs of Nobel Prize winners, reporting a median of 166. She never used a real IQ test; she invented one from SAT questions, had no comparison group, and the laureates scored only average. She then performed a mysterious statistical conversion to arrive at 166. The inflated number survived, not the raw data.
Einstein never took an IQ test; his school records show a B+ student who failed his college entrance exam on the first try. The numbers often cited for him are invented. Richard Feynman scored a “mere” 125, and Marilyn vos Savant, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest recorded IQ, writes a puzzle column for Parade magazine.
Slow thinkers, on the other hand, have an easier time ignoring legible problems. They’re not constantly tempted by technical puzzles they know they could solve.2
The Sprinter Problem
The obsession with processing speed creates a systemic filter. Because we measure intelligence by how quickly one can reach a known finish line, we exclusively fund the “sprinters.” Sprinters have no incentive to wander into the trackless wilderness of true research, where speed is irrelevant because the direction is unknown.
At the same time, sprinters rise to leadership and design institutions that reward the same legibility they excel at. Over time, our institutions have become nothing but a series of well‑manicured running tracks. By rewarding those who can write down and finish well‑explained plans the fastest, we have built a world that has no room for anyone who doesn’t yet have a plan.
Legibility and speed are connected. Well‑defined problems come with clear milestones, measurable progress, and recognizable success. They’re easy to explain to funding committees, to put on a CV, and to defend in casual conversations.
Illegible Paths and Funding
Because funding committees favor visible, legible progress, many researchers abandon interesting problems they cannot defend or lay out a clear path for. When asked “what are you working on?” they need an answer that immediately makes sense; when asked “how’s it going?” they need visible progress to report. The illegible path offers neither, so most people switch to something they can explain.
As Michael Nielsen put it:
“the most significant creative work is illegible to existing institutions, and so almost unfundable. There is a grain of truth to Groucho’s Law: you should never work on any project for which you can get funding.”
If a project is fundable, the path is already clear enough that it will happen anyway—you’re not needed there.
Through a thousand small moments, the illegible path becomes socially unbearable.3
A Question Worth Sitting With
What problem would you work on if you could delete “legible progress within the next ten years” from your list of requirements?
My mom likes to make fun of me for thinking slowly. She’s not wrong—it’s why I’m boring in conversations and prefer writing, where I can take my time. School almost crushed me until I realized there is no free lunch in either direction and every weakness is a strength. Slow thinking gives you the patience to sit with ambiguous problems that don’t have obvious answers.
Many people know that I don’t like talking about what I’m working on. This is a big reason why: I don’t want to waste any energy defending illegible ideas. The other reason is that talking about plans tricks the brain into feeling like you’ve already made progress. The satisfaction you get from explaining your vision can quickly replace the drive to actually execute it.