I also thought about this a lot. Some things about slow thinking are great. I truly believe that it helped me thrive as a software developer.
But social interactions are awkward. I can't really come up with things to say easily and lots of times I can't respond in ways to keep the conversation going. Only after the fact I get lots of ideas of what I could have said. I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.
I'm a tad older, so I stopped caring about it and just accepted my slow thinking. But I'm sure that I also missed out on a lot of opportunities regarding friendships or work. I still think, that others perceive me as awkward or just not fun and it's hard to just ignore that.
Funnily my wife is completely opposite to me and we have the greatest time.
> I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.
As Winston Churchill once said when asked “what are you doing” –> “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”
I’m one of those weirdos who does public speaking sometimes. Even 8 hour workshops. You cannot prepare for an 8 hour speaking engagement. Not really. But you can accumulate a plethora of anecdotes, metaphors, and remarks that you weave into the narrative or in response to questions.
You can build frameworks that are similar to code. Prepared functions/coroutines/objects that you run in appropriate situations. Works pretty well especially in mentoring/teaching/consulting situations. This is also how comedians prep their sets.
The key is that things you say are new to the audience, but not to you. It can be the same metaphor you’ve fine-tuned over dozens of interactions. And the person you’re talking to thinks “Wow that guy is so quick on his feet, how did he come up with that so fast!?”
You can also spot this if you watch talks by popular presenters (Simon Sinek is a good example). You’ll notice the same 2 or 3 core stories getting polished and fine-tuned over years of talks and interviews.
When I was super young, I used to think my dad (who everyone I met seemed to think was extremely funny) had a huge repitoire of hilarious stories, but after a few years I noticed him repeating them and realized he just had a few specific ones that he would re-use with new people, like you mentioned. As someone who tends to be pretty slow to learn how to navigate new social situations, it was eye-opening when I recognized this was something I could do. What's amusing to me at this point is that I'm still not sure he fully realizes that this is something he does sometimes, because he'll still sometimes try to whip out one of the stories when talking to me and then genuinely be surprised when I remind him of some very minor detail about it that he forgot to mention this time he told it.
My dad recently told me a funny story about something that happened to him. Except it actually had happened to me and I had told him about it years before.
I recognize this in my self, so I usually preface the story saying something like "this may or may not have been me, but I'm telling it from the first person". First person stories are funnier. This is part of the "telling a yarn" or "tall tale" tradition I grew up with (in Texas).
Heh, my wife was recently telling a story about how she taught our son how to run into a hug. She did not, I actually did, but I let her have it since she was so excited about it.
Haha, this is my dad too. He doesn’t seem to realize it. It’s me as well. These are stories that tend to strongly relate to our identity. Like, if you get to know me I will talk about meditation or another story like me training with Wim Hof for an experiment at the Radboud Universiteit.
Jeremy Vine once wrote a story about Boris Johnson which I thought was the pinnacle of this. It was published on his Facebook page and I've since lost the link, so you're going to have to read it on Reddit where someone has posted the whole thing again.
It tells the tale of how the man who was going to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used to play the improviser and ex tempore comedian, in a practiced and automatic way.
> “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”
That actually reminds me something I head from Corridor Crew. Wren was referencing Brandon Laatsch (timestamped link to clip [0])
| "Shower thoughts only work, when you put in the work." You have to actually spend time trying to brainstorm something, trying to think of something, and at the end of it you'll've made no progress and be discouraged. But then randomly, later, in the shower, doing something completely unrelated, the idea hits.
It's weird, but I think it works. My best guess is that (part of this can be explained that) by spending time thinking about the solution space, your brain will then subconsciously start to generalize. Which would mean this is, to some extent, a trainable skill. I'm sure Churchill was also a master of moving conversations to topics or subtopics where he could more quickly make off-the-cuff remarks. But I think even the "slowest" person will recognize that they are much quicker in certain categories. Slowness might not mean they lack having thought about those topics, but might just mean they've thought less about quip remarks in that domain (or even quip remarks in general).
I think we would be naive to assume quick responses are a good measure of one's intelligence[1]. I know this is common, but I think it is missing the same thing that quick responses also tend to miss: depth. You can be fast and deep, but more often people are fast and wrong[2]. More complex the topic the easier it is to be unaware of how wrong.
[Edit] I wanted to add that I found this method highly effective during my PhD. It requires a balance of churning the wheels and walking away. Progress is invisible until the finish line is in sight, so you need to spend time pushing even if it looks like you are getting nowhere. But at the same time, you need to walk away. If you keep pushing you'll never have that time for those random thoughts. There's a laundry list of famous physicist[3] who used to "only work" for a few hours a day and then do things like go on long walks or play tennis. I think that fits into this model. It seems to be a critical aspect for any creative work. Honestly, I would find that the most common mistake I would make is sitting at my desk for too long. It results in a narrowing of focus. There's a lot of times we want that narrowing, but there's also plenty of times we want to think more broadly. I think this is very true for programming in general. I can sympathize with managers who look at people doing these things and interpret them as being unproductive. But I think the reality is that productivity is just a really hard thing to measure when you're not a machine stamping out well defined widgets. I think this ends up with us just making fewer "widgets" and of lower quality. I mean it isn't like you can measure quality by anything as simple as the number of lines of code or number of Jira tickets knocked off. Hell, if you are too narrow your solutions are probably creating more tickets than you're knocking off! But that's completely invisible, only measurable post hoc, and even then quite difficult to measure (if not impossible).
We often talk about current "titans" and all of them boast their long hours and "dedication." People like Elon suggesting 120hrs or the growing 996 paradigm. But I'm unconvinced this really checks out. If anything, it appears much more common that Nobel scientists worked fewer hours, not more. We're all not working on Nobel level work, but it does beg the question of what the most effective strategy actually is. Certainly we can't conclude longer hours at the desk yields better output. We can't counterfactually conclude that Dirac would have been even greater had he spent 16 hrs a day working rather than a handful. "More hours" just seems to be a naive oversimplification, highly related to these "shower thoughts"
[3] Dirac is a famous example, who colleagues would also jokingly use the unit "Dirac" in reference to "one word per hour". Notoriously "slow" thinker, but a surefire candidate for one of the smartest humans to ever exist. Poincare famously worked 10am till noon then 5pm till 7pm. Darwin followed a similar model.
People like Elon suggest 120 hrs or 996 for the employees that work under him implementing his ideas-- the people rolling up their sleeves and putting hammers to nails. Most of the people in an org do not need to be involved in deep level thinking.
> nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week
- Elon[0]
Yet... I listed a few... He goes on to suggest 80 is good with spikes into 100. I mean Elon is notorious for putting in those long hours himself[1], but he's definitely wrong in the quote.
So... who do you think those demands are for? He seems pretty clearly to be demanding it from engineers to execs. That also matches the experience of everyone I've known to have worked at SpaceX, including both programmers and aerospace engineers. Same with Tesla.
Also, thought I'd drop a link to this 996 HN post from the other week[2].
Honestly, I'm not sure who you're referring to, because when not taken literally that would seem to cover literally every employee.
Elon does this because being able to order all those people around makes him feel special and important, not because it actually works.
Study after study proves that productivity drops off rapidly when people are tired and stressed - which should be common sense, but apparently it's too common for some of our notables to understand.
So instead of actual work output you get productivity theatre. Everything is dramatic and shouting happens, but - for example - Tesla still doesn't have anything resembling FSD while more modest companies are much further along.
Musk's use of social media and his involvement in recreational activities is way too much for 80h/week. He's clearly more of a 4 day workweek type tho shy about it.
In a way it shows what a craft it is to not only have jokes but also be able to present them again and again in a way that appears fresh.
Being a comedian is hard not because writing jokes are hard but because it's actually an intersection of a number of hard skills that require a LOT of practice to hone.
Do you have any advice for accumulating and sharing relevant anecdotes? I struggle with sharing anecdotes that have an "Aesop", or directly relatable point, even if I've lived such experiences.
> Do you have any advice for accumulating and sharing relevant anecdotes?
For me blogging for the past 15 or so years has been the secret ingredient. I regularly sit down and distill things into an approachable form then send off to my audience to see if it lands. If yes, I mentally add to my reference list. If not, I engage in some clarifying back-n-forth and try again next time.
These days in a more leadership position I get a lot of reps of this synchronously as I work with younger or less experienced folk.
There are sometimes long pauses before my response or even mid-speech, during which I’m thinking about what’s said. But the delay is often interpreted as a cue for someone else to respond or change the subject, which often leads to not being able to say anything that i’ve spent so much glutamate to process.
I used to say “one moment” every 5 seconds while I think, but that was distracting.
Sometimes, I do this thing with my eyes jumping them around as if I’m reading a book; that gives people something to look at while they wait, like a spinner indicator.
As as over-thinker myself something I didn't appreciate until too late in life is the necessity of practice.
If you want to be able to hit a ball it doesn't matter how much thought you put into it - the learning is all about programming your lower instinctive brain and it only has the input device of repetition. This brain level has the ability to work at much lower latency - which is critical for reactive physical tasks.
I suspect it is the same here. You can certainly learn to speak using different levels of your brain as well. Case in point public speaking - the reason this is hard is generally you have to trust your mouth on automatic mode to follow behind and using the thinking part of your brain to better plan (or remember) ahead to build a narrative path.
Yeah. That does work. I do that sometimes, though my eyes start to hurt when I roll them up for that long.
I also find it easier to do something with my eyes than to do nothing while thinking. That’s probably just me.
In the future, I might want an led embedded in one of my temples, that will blink like a network switch port or hdd light that indicates brain activity.
Also filler text while you think is good to practice. “That’s actually a well informed question, what I’ve seen is….” Buys you 5 seconds if you can say it on autopilot and think while your mouth is moving
lol, yeah the trick is to use them as sparingly as possible and have a dozen or so to rotate. I'm not sure if I qualify as a slow thinker the way OP and some others here are discussing it. But, I do frequently need more time to answer complex problems. I've also started just feeling OK telling people I can follow up with them on certain questions as it's too complex to answer off top of my head. As with anything, it's a balance, I find if you can't answer simple questions people will lose confidence in your answers.
That is a hilarious bodymod. And considering that is is possible to get rough brain activity indicators in a non-invasive manner, something like it could actually be made.
To an extent it’s a skill you can practice if not learn.
By nature I’m a slow thinker but I can mode switch if I need to but it’s exhausting after a while in a weird way I put it down to working in the trades before switching to programming full time, some of the fastest funniest people you’ll ever meet are tradesmen on job sites (introversion doesn’t mean poor social skills after all though they get conflated).
If you are generally happy as you are don’t sweat it, be a boring world if we where all the same.
I am also the slow-thinking dev married to a quick thinker, and it's a good pairing. I know couples where they're both quick thinkers and things are so mercurial it's hard to believe they're still together, but maybe the excitement keeps it going.
I enjoy watching Harry Mack videos on YouTube where he freestyles and can work in something that happens like someone walking into the frame into literally the next line of his raps. This capability is so absolutely outside of the realm of possibility for my brain I almost feel like he's a different species.
I‘m very similar. I noticed that people who are very easy to speak to share one trait: they have no shame to tell you the same story multiple times. It bores the hell out of me every times. If i try to do it, i get bored as well.
My boxing coach once described fighting as a conversation. I am inclined to agree.
In boxing you don't have the luxury of taking your time to think otherwise you get punched in the face.
Improving at conversation is like boxing - it can be reduced into structures and scenarios. Combinations and responses can be drilled in. Ultimately once the foundations are bedded in there is plenty of room for self expression and creativity.
The funny thing about social interaction is that we all talk to each other but there are people who live breathe and hone the art whether formally or informally while plenty of us just stumble along doing just good enough...
Due to this, career success is going to be highly dependent on chosen profession. Some professions are inherently more social and require heavy networking. Software and engineering as a whole, is a good profession for slow thinkers to excel. It can also be meritocratic so any personality quirks or pedigrees get normalized when ranking by performance.
I'm self taught programmer, I don't code professionally but feel confident that I can build any software related widget I ever dreamed up. That said, coding interview stuff I have seen is like gibberish and I don't see how it correlates to the day to day job of building software. Maybe some types of software (lower level systems stuff and such come to mind). It seems like everyone online discussing it feels about the same too. So honestly not sure if that's signal or noise for you, lol.
I think this is not really a bad trait. If you think about it from the other person’s perspective, they really don’t expect you to make jokes or entertain them
> they really don’t expect you to make jokes or entertain them
Oh, but they do, if you want to have future conversations with them. As a slow thinker with the same social issues as OP, trust me, they do. Nobody wants to keep talking to someone they consider boring, and first impressions are still the most important impressions.
you can try getting into improv comedy to develop this sort of skill. I'm also generally a slow thinker, but i dont actually think we think slower, I think we have too high a barrier for what we allow ourselves to say. We're afraid of making a mistake or saying something stupid, but most people just blurt out the first thought that percolates from their subconscious.
My wife and I are complete opposites. One of us processes data instantaneously, connecting it to dozens of other topics at the flip of a switch, and integrating broad knowledge. This makes for a great member of, say, a tiger team.
The other thinks slowly, often has no initial opinion, and rarely speaks up, but when they do, the input is flawless and monumental. R&D is their forté.
Neither one is better than the other. The quick thinker handles in-the-moment action well, but is so wrapped up in the “now” that it’s difficult for them to get too deep on a topic. The slow thinker meditates on ideas for a while, carefully chooses (almost always the correct) path, and steadies the course. Prick and pull at this one for a quick thought, and it comes out flatter than you could imagine.
Until we know what actual intelligence is, trying to act like one form is objectively better than another is just silly.
I think lots of the graybeard devs are deep thinkers, not fast thinkers. I think fast thinkers were pulled towards the “move fast and break things”-style companies.
Maybe a nonsequitur but in grad school I was in a study group which naturally split into two. In one group (mine) we'd read a problem and immediately charge in, sometimes have to backtrack, and meander around until the answer revealed itself. In the other they would plan everything out, and figure out what they needed to do, and from that the answer would reveal itself and they would write it all down.
The interesting part is neither group really finished the problem sets faster than the other. Individual problems my group could, if we knew or guessed the right path immediately, be faster. But over the span of a 10 question p-set it would mostly come out in the wash and both groups would finish in roughly the same amount of time.
I often think back on that when reflecting on how I still work that way years later.
I think it can be OK to have a risk if that's the plan of trial and error.
It's when you don't know, or have an inkling of what's wrong but aren't sure where to start probing, that it's better to have a plan or call in experts in an unfamiliar area.
not correcting you, just edifying everybody on the history of forte's place(s) in the English language
in English, there is no word forté because such a word does not exist in French (and English and Italian don't use diacritic accents)
forte pronounced "fort" is the french word for "strength" (feminine form if memory serves)
forte pronounced "fortay" is the italian word for "loud"
the word most people mean most of the time is the French one because that word entered into English back when most latinate words did, with the Norman invasion in 1066. (French didn't use diacritics then either)
only in the music context do we use the Italian word.
one of you uses more test-time compute before giving your answer :)
is the first person actually incapable of thinking deeply or do they just prefer the other way/have a lower barrier for what is worth saying.
I find i like to sit back and think in a group conversation and chime in at the right moment with something insightful, where other people are just going next token prediction stream of concious blabbering.
They can think deeply, it just takes active effort, whereas the broad-and-quick approach comes naturally. Sometimes sitting back and listening can be fun for them.
>I guess if you take a long time to do something, people kind of forget that you're there.
This is so true sadly, group conversations are very exhausting to me. It is a constant back-and-forth and if you want to say something you need to do it "quick" or the topic shifts.
>Also, my ‘processing time’ in conversation is slow. So I’ve realised that I’m better off focusing on writing as a way to communicate. Writing to me feels more suited towards slow, patient thinkers.
I feel the same way, I try to avoid arguments (like something political with friends (harmless, don't worry)) because it takes me too long to say what I want to say, and my sentences jump around awkwardly trying to express the point I want to make. I was also made fun of in school due to that... Also I tend to mispronounce some words then which makes it even more awkward. People often think that if you don't respond to an argument in two seconds you "lose"...
This also got waaay worse when I first drifted into burnout two years ago (still have, not recovered).
> People often think that if you don't respond to an argument in two seconds you "lose"...
This one is especially annoying! A lot of people seem to get away with extremely poorly thought out arguments, relying entirely on logical fallacies, or using factually incorrect information, just because they are able packaging it as a fast comeback. On the other hand, people seem to treat not being able to remember details about something or taking a little time to think before replying as meaning that the underlying facts are incorrect. Surely the underlying facts does not depend on the debaters ability to remember them on the spot, but it seems like a lot of people treat it that way.
Sorry to hear about the burnout. I hope you are on the right way to recovery. Hang on and take care! I hope my 2 cents as an internet stranger can help.
These are symptoms of other people being unable - and/or unwilling - to communicate properly, not you communicating slowly. If people actually cared about having a real back-and-forth conversation - and not just waiting for their time to speak - then a friend talking a bit slowly or jumping around trying to get their point across wouldn't be an issue. Have a bit of patience and take a good-faith interpretation of what they're trying to say...
In my experience, this is how it goes whenever there are more than 2 people in a conversation. The speed of the topic switching defaults to the fastest processor in the group, basically excluding any slow processors from the conversation.
> This is so true sadly, group conversations are very exhausting to me. It is a constant back-and-forth and if you want to say something you need to do it "quick" or the topic shifts.
The exhausting part is that most people like to talk at least as much as they listen, which is hard to do in a group setting.
It also takes me longer to understand things and it takes me longer to get to delivery than many of my peers.
However, I have consistently noticed that the quickness comes at the price of a shallow understanding, and the delivery is also often lacking in those who move fast.
For me, I have to really grok the thing I'm focussing on. I have to internalise it somehow and build a mental model. Once I've done that I am actually faster and more productive than the ones who leap on things quicker.
Me too, the hard part is showing that this slower, more methodical process is more valuable than the flashy, quick shallow approach. And it means I might have to chew on a problem for a bit before delivering anything, even a proposal or design much less a product. But for a longer time scale it does pay off.
Fortunately I've had a few good managers and business partners in my career that recognize the value, but it's far from universal and I sometimes have a hard time communicating it myself in the face of the common move fast agile culture that is so prevalent in most of tech.
Yes, I have also had to have many difficult conversations with managers over the years who were worried that I wasn't going to deliver. All I could do was reassure them that this was my process; it will start slowly but will then accelerate dramatically. Once they've seen it work it gets easier of course!
You may have ADHD. I’ve never described myself as dim-witted, because I’ve never viewed it so negatively, but your description fits me exactly. Even down to the spatial awareness thing and biographical details like switching from math to theoretical physics in college.
I eventually got diagnosed as an adult with ADHD, and got treatment. Stimulants help me be significantly more “quick-witted” to use your terms. I would rather describe “being slow” as being in a constant state of distraction, which prevents me from being efficient with the task at hand. Stimulants fix this.
However having grown up scatterbrained, some aspects of it are now architectural in my brain and aren’t changed by slightly modifying the brain chemistry. I now see that as a superpower through, as it gives me a different perspective for seeing problems, and is great for strategic thinking. Stimulants just give me focused control over it and the ability to turn it off and on as the need arises.
I think I wouldn't be so quick to conclude ADHD or suggest stimulants. I have ADHD too, and I know exactly what you're talking about. Those alarms in your head going off. Where everything is an emergency so nothing is. I'm not so sure it is being "scatterbrained" as much as it is over-parallelism.
But the OP's points have more complexity than they think (in my main comment[0] I mention depth being missing). Let's take the quick math one for example. They made the assumption that a calculation was being made. This seems reasonable, but if you're doing a lot of those calculations you'll memorize them. I interestingly have experimental data on this. After my undergrad I had to get an EKG done and the tech asked me to do some basic math questions to get some readings. Problem is, I could answer her questions but she got almost no signal. They were just too easy for me because I was so familiar with them. You don't need to calculate what's in the cache. So we moved to 2 digit multiplications and signal was mixed. Good correlation with being able to leverage previous calculations. So then I had her and my dad pick 3 random numbers and I would multiply those in my head. That did the trick and she said it light up like a Christmas tree (I do this visually, so it really was using more parts of the brain than she was likely used to seeing).
My point is, there's more nuance to this. Your brain isn't just a computation unit, it has various levels of storage with different speeds and capacities, it has different accelerators and processing units that can be leveraged if programmed in the right way. The problem with the OP's assessment is they've measured output speed and assumed this is enough information to calculate FLOPS, but a slower processor can win that race if it just is pulling from cache. A slower processor can win in aggregate if it has more parallelism. The problem is that they're measuring something different than what they think they're measuring, even if it is right up to a first order approximation.
“May have” doesn’t indicate conclusion - you’re the one being quick. That said, the article really does seem to describe the symptoms of inattentive ADHD with a breadth of cues and close precision.
As to the rest of your comment, not to diminish your experience, it’s really difficult to tell what you’re trying to say, and how that has to do with any of the very specific symptoms and experiences mentioned.
This is my first time hearing about inattentive ADHD, but it seems to describe me pretty well. Do you have experience looking into this as an adult? I feel like there’s such a stigma around ADHD diagnoses and people seeking stimulants.
Not OP, but I was diagnosed as an adult. There are brief screening questionaires therapists or general medicine doctors can use as a quick first step. But when I was given one of these tests, I scored a couple points under the threshhold. Later, when a thorough, proper battery of tests was administered by a psychiatrist at a major university medical center, I was found to have significant ADHD impairment. So if you think you may have ADHD, it's worth seeking out a proper evaluation from a psychiatrist. The battery of tests will take multiple hours.
I haven't had a lot of issues getting treatment after my diagnosis, personally. I know some people do have issues, and there are inconveniences like annual drug tests I have to take, but my only regret is not getting diagnosed ten years earlier.
Hey, thanks for the response. I'm in my mid 30s and have considered myself a "space cadet" my entire life. School was absolutely brutal for me, and I'm still amazed at myself for getting through it. Assumed that most of inability to focus was because of mild depression and anxiety, but I'd like to see if something else is going on. Feels like I've been living in a daze for decades.
Guess I'll reach out to a GP first and see what they think. Appreciate you.
Not much to add vs the other comment. Look into ADHD symptoms - inattentive traits that you relate to are all part of that. Upon reflection you might relate to some other symptoms as well. You might want to read about how all of diagnostic criteria are defined in the DSM-5, which is likely similar to what your psychiatrist will rely for diagnosis.
Disregard the stigma, it is mostly confined to people fully ignorant as to what ADHD is, how stimulant medication works, and its well proven safety profile.
Correct. We are placing different likelihood values. Adastra gave reasons they'd consider an ADHD diagnosis. I game reasons to consider other interpretations. I didn't assume Adastra made a definitive 100% conclusion that OP has ADHD. Not only because I understand qualifying words but because making immutable conclusions is typically dumb and I don't think Adastra is dumb.
> it’s really difficult to tell what you’re trying to say, and how that has to do with any of the very specific symptoms and experiences mentioned.
Look back to my comment and skip to the "My point is" paragraph. If you haven't read the article, I would do that first, because I am picking a specific example from the article. In fact, the main example. They talk quite a bit about doing calculations quickly, including our 3 digit by 3 digit multiplication. Speed isn't enough because you can't distinguish between someone's raw calculation capabilities from use of a different algorithm. In my story I heavily implied I was using a different algorithm to do my calculations, and you bet I was leveraging the reuse of subcalculations.
My comment is saying "I think it is more likely that OP is comparing apples to oranges. They assume they're interchangeable because they're both roundish fruits, but if you're interested in health benefits then you need to consider additional aspects." It's just longer because I'm specifying aspects and providing an example.
Given the whole point of the article is that this person's thinking style isn't dysfunctional, in fact seems to be working out just fine for them, why wouldn't we just look at this and say "this is a normal way for a human being to operate" and refuse to pathologize it? Why drug your way to a different thinking style?
Everyone is on their own journey and there are so many reasons a person might think a particular way.
The comment you are responding to is just trying to explain their own situation and say the person who wrote the article might want to investigate a similar experience compared to their own. I read the article as one where someone is exploring and ADHD is would be exploration. I would specify that ADHD inattentive type is the one that it reads most like to me.
I don't see why you'd want to knock someone's choice of treatment for a particular condition. You might not see a need for a particular treatment option, but many folks get relief from anxiety or other things such as RSD while being medicated for ADHD. They can make their own decisions.
> The comment you are responding to is just trying to explain their own situation and say the person who wrote the article might want to investigate a similar experience compared to their own.
I appreciate their perspective. I might want to get checked for ADHD at some point as well, if doing that might improve my quality of life down the road then great, if it turns up nothing, then I'd still be glad to have looked into it.
Because inattentive ADD has done real damage to my life, both personally and professionally. It very nearly destroyed my marriage.
I politely suggest that you check your anti-medication bias at the door. OP is describing a lifetime of feeling s/he is a failure and unable to achieve the goals he would otherwise set for themselves. This is classic ADD symptoms, and the only real therapy with lasting results is medication.
For ADD people such as myself, medication is life-altering in a positive way. I clearly divide my life before and after as different eras: before was a lifetime of failure measured against my own goals (not only external / work requirements), and after a still-ongoing period of self-empowerment and growth.
Yet people such as yourself would attempt to guilt trip and shame us from seeking the only thing which actually helps: modifying our brain chemistry. Why? What reason do you have for shutting down discussion of taking medicine to address a medical condition?
I did struggle my whole life with "attention". Like my attention span in meetings is awful. I record everything so I can listen to later. it's time to look for a doctor.
Question: does stimulants interfere in other areas of life in a bad way (like sexual life etc)?
Depends on the drug and dosage. AFAIK stimulants generally don't have severe or long-lasting impact on those areas.
Both Ritalin and Adderall (as well as variants like Vyvanse) are vasoconstrictors and therefore affect blood flow. This leads to some mild discomfort. "Adderall dick" is a temporary condition comparable to "pool shrinkage"; it doesn't affect everyone, depends on the dose, and neither impacts performance--it still responds to sexual stimulation.
Stimulant usage can mildly increase blood pressure, which over the very long term (years, decades) can lead to ED and other more serious issues. However that is part of why these medications require close supervision by the prescribing doctor, who will add other medications like lisinopril to counteract those effects, if observed.
In rare but reported cases it can lead to some weird effects, like dissociating orgasms from physical climax -- you can find lots of self-reports on Reddit about these sorts of things. None of these are permanent and go away when the drug leaves your system.
In the vast majority of patients, none of the above happens, and I'm not aware of a single thing that is permanent (other than the effects of high blood pressure over time if you let that go unwatched). This is unlike, for example, SSRIs which have have permanent effects on sexual well-being. I bring this up because some doctors prescribe SSRIs as a first-line, so they don't have to prescribe controlled substances. Don't let them do this to you -- antidepressants can have some insanely bad (and in some cases, permanent) side effects, drastically alter your personality, and are not considered the standard of care for ADHD.
Thank you for the detailed reply! Really appreciate it.
I take SSRI since 2019 because of generalized anxiety disorder, but I'm much better now, my life changed a lot (for the better) and want to stop to take it or change for something else, because I'm already in a low dose but delayed ejaculation is something that I hate, I never had problems with it and the drug takes it to another level.
So I'll check what is a safe combination to perhaps threat both. My attention span really annoys me.
ChatGPT told me about vortioxetine for attention disorder and anxiety, which I'll discuss with the doc.
Hold on, I'm not saying you should do anything differently than you and your doctor worked out. I have no idea what your situation. I'm reacting to a comment that looked at someone who feels their situation is going just fine and responded by suggesting medication.
I didn't read OP as "feel[ing] their situation is going just fine." That was certainly the tone he was projecting, but the actual content he discussed was a lot of coping strategies for what he sees as his own mental handicap. The purpose of my comment was just to point out, in case he wasn't aware, that it may in fact be a condition that can be medically treated.
To make an absurd comparison, it's as if he wrote a whole blog post about his sailing hobby and how he deals with scurvy on long trips. Maybe there's a lot of innovative tricks he throws in there, along with lowering of expectations -- scheduling the rough legs of the journey to be right after leaving port, before the symptoms set in. The intention of my post was: "have you tried taking vitamin C?"
Stimulants have this effect on ADD people. We don't feel the euphoric highs other people report, nor does it have much in the way of negative side effects. It's a pill I take once a day which gives me control over my life and my well-being. We celebrate neural-diversity and rightly so, but after living many decades of my life as a neuro-atypical person, it is wondrous to be able to just take a pill and be 'normal' for a day, where normal here just means "able to do what I want, when I want to; be aware and present in the moment; and live without regrets."
Sorry for snapping at you earlier, but those of us that choose medication end up having to deal with a lot of this societal judgement crap. Judged by the doctors and pharmacists who treat us as criminals, judged by schools and teachers who think stimulants are overprescribed, and judged by generally everyone when the topic comes up. There's a stigma here and it is a serious issue, so I push back on it when I see it.
> why wouldn't we just look at this and say "this is a normal way for a human being to operate" and refuse to pathologize it
I don't think it's so much about that... it's more that having a label for a common set of behaviors/symptoms can be a shorthand to explain things more succinctly.
Btw, would you say the same thing about clinical depression? Why/why not?
> Why drug your way to a different thinking style?
Because ADHD (and other things) can be crippling when it comes to actually getting IRL shit that needs doing... done. "We live in a society" is a meme, but there's actually a lot of stuff that can present non-trivial hurdles for neuro-divergent people IRL ... like filing taxes, going to an unemployment office, etc. etc.
(Also, that's not quite what the drugs do if you have ADHD, but I digress)
This is an astute point. I’m a mid-40s mech engineer in the Bay Area. HN is my tribe, by and large. I’ve been bombarded with perspectives that ADHD medication is the answer. (Not officially diagnosed, but I’m confident I meet the criteria and very likely “afflicted.”)
The brain is complex—adapted, or maladapted, for different tasks. My working hypothesis: mine is maladapted to the behaviors currently rewarded in corporate America. And I know I’m not Feynman.
So here I am, stuck in a bi-modal world (or maybe just worldview). This piece hits hard.
I mean, medication is the frontline treatment for ADHD. Research has shown it to be the most effective treatment and to be safe with typically mild side-effects. This is the professional opinion of the medical experts who study this disorder. If anything, it's the oft-expressed skepticism towards ADHD medication that is noteworthy and odd.
I don’t think that’s what the parent is describing it at all, not at the end. It’s a framework for understanding OP’s style of thinking, and connecting it to the research literature - sluggish “cognitive tempo” is the clinical jargon.
Well that's sort of the fun things about psychiatric "disorders", in many of them you can genuinely ask is this difference with the brain actually harmful unto itself or is it harmful because of the way society is set up?
I have struggled with this myself with ADHD where I think my brain is great and it is society that is wrong as many of the ways I do things/see things/operate are subtly shunned by society and the way it works. Everything from the typical 9-5 (my brain works best 11-7), to most white collar careers revolving around stationary work at a desk (I love difficult mental work, but think better when I'm moving around), etc.
I don't think my brain is wrong or performing poorly, I excelled at school but did not learn much from lecture style formats (figured out how to study on my own). But I have gone back and forth with medication because it is very, very difficult to construct my life in a way that plays to my strengths when they are so different than the norm. Medication helps my brain fit into society better, but I don't think it improves my brain function.
Parent post clearly explained the advantages and disadvantages of stimulant use and how they are useful in different situations. Nobody is saying it's dysfunctional. This isn't reddit, you don't need to always be searching for something to be outraged about.
TL;DR: The author, by their own words, is simply coping. ADHD is a disorder, not a "different way of thinking" one chooses to "drug your way" out of. Discovering one has ADHD can be a huge relief. Generally, if you have it, you want to know.
---
I disagree with your reading. The article describes the mechanisms the author has developed to cope with their "thinking style." Whether they merely have a unique thought process, or they are suffering from a common mental disability, their optimistic, solution-oriented attitude is adaptive and healthy.
> I'm not a quick witted person. In fact, I’ve always been worried about my brain’s slow processing time.
> But recently, I've realised that slow processing time is not as much of an issue as I thought it was. And even if I was wrong about that, I still think I’d do better for myself by leaning into it, instead of spending energy trying to fight it.
The author has "always" been worried about this. But he's realized it's "not as much of an issue." It reads to me like the author is working to cope with a long-standing difficulty. And they do not say that they have overcome the difficulty, but only that they've found certain approaches to be superior to others.
If the root cause of this long-standing, much-vexing difficulty might be a well-understood condition with standard methods of treatment that have been helpful to many people, it's reasonable to think the author might appreciate that suggestion.
Also, ADHD is not a "different thinking style" anymore than anxiety, depression, or autism are "different thinking styles." It can feel like that to someone who hasn't been diagnosed yet, and even many people diagnosed with ADHD will downplay the condition as being different--not worse. Furthermore, there are even doctors who will indulge in this wishful rhetoric. This is not unlike those in the Deaf community who assert that deafness isn't a disability[1].
In fact, ADHD is a mental disorder. It does not give one special powers of creativity or insight or anything else in compensation for the lack of executive function and emotional regulation. As Dr. Russel Barkley says[2]:
> Now let's be clear, this is a very serious disorder. This is not some trivial little fly-by-night disorder.
> Also, to emphasize something which I don't think is emphasized enough: ADHD is no gift. There is no evidence in any research on any of hundreds of measures that we have taken that show that ADHD predisposes to anything positive in human life. Now let's be clear, ADHD is but a small set of hundreds of psychological abilities that people will have, and many people may be gifted and talented in various aspects of these other human abilities, but never attribute that giftedness or that success to ADHD itself.
I know you hold no malice in your heart, but your comment has drawn several indignant responses because it expresses an attitude that those with ADHD frequently see, and one that easily shades into an outright stigma towards people with ADHD.
I'm not saying that you were saying this, but many people seem to think that people with ADHD are pathologizing normal difficulties and using it to get their hands on fun drugs.
> You get bored at work. Sure, everyone gets bored.
> You have a hard time starting big projects. I can relate.
> You lose track of time sometimes. Me too!
> You know, it kind of seems like you have all the normal struggles in life we all do, but instead of bucking up and just getting stuff done, you've decided to cry to a doctor so you can get cheap addies.
There is nothing admirable about refusing to acknowledge a mental disorder. ADHD is more or less severe in different people, and it's perfectly valid to make an informed choice to forego any treatment for any condition. But it isn't doing the author or anyone else any favors to "refuse to pathologize it" by ignoring the resemblance to a common disorder.
The other part of the puzzle you are missing is that getting diagnosed with ADHD was a hugely positive, life-changing event for many of us who were not diagnosed until adulthood.
To live with undiagnosed ADHD is to live with a condition that makes others see you--and you see yourself--as chronically late and unreliable, unfocused and slow, and disorganized. You are, by all appearances, lazy, irresponsible, and careless: a bad, virtueless person. And over and over again, you fail to reach the eminently achievable goals you set for yourself.
It's an immense relief to discover your life-long shortcomings are not those of a morally defective soul, but of a medically defective brain. And this relief is entirely apart from the hope that medication or another treatment might help.
So perhaps you can now understand why those who have experienced this unburdening are eager to pay it forward. It's not like being diagnosed with cancer. We've always known the struggle. Now we know the enemy with whom we struggle.
Thank you for this long and insightful post. You put into words the frustration that I felt at Patrick's comment (which I apologized for elsewhere), and communicated it far better.
Heh, I'm glad someone read the thing. After reading your later replies to Patrick, I felt my comments were essentially redundant, so it's nice to hear you appreciate them. I doubt Patrick will scale my wall of text, and I don't blame him, but that's what you get when you rile up a hyperfocusing ADHDer.
Someone with many parallel trains of thought is not necessarily inflicted with ADHD. It's natural for some human brains to race a mile a minute while others to plod along slowly and methodically. I've known very smart people on both sides of the spectrum and it's a pretty wide spectrum.
Don't think this is related to ADHD, I have very serious ADHD but I have no issue keeping up in conversations I am interested in.
ADHD is about where you can put your energy / attention, not if you are fast or slow when you focus on something. If you are very fast when you are interested then you aren't a slow thinker, if you struggle keeping up when you aren't interested due to lack of focus then the issue isn't being a slow thinker its the lack of focus.
My experience as well. I was able to mask my ADHD with my high IQ, but I always felt like everyone else got a memo that I had missed, even when I was able to perform at a high level for short amounts of time.
Been diagnosed last year at age 42 and started taking medication. I think both quicker and faster because I don't get side-tracked and lost constantly. I can participate and even lead complicated discussions now when previously I would drift off because of something someone said that reminded me of something that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
If someone feels mentally sluggish it's worth looking into getting checked out.
> I’ve had one interview where I had to do multiplications really quickly, whilst shouting my name, and doing such-and-such random thing every five minutes.
I think the whole “I would stand up and walk out of that interview” trope is a little overused but … I would stand up and walk out of that interview. Was that a real situation?
I’ve never actually done this. But I’ve fantasized about preparing several interview questions for the company I’m interviewing at. They forget that interviews are a two way street.
If I like them (and the process was bearable), I would ask nothing. If I’m mildly annoyed, something “simple” yet patronizing like fizbuzz. If I’m REALLY annoyed then something wildly specific and pedantic.
Interviewer: “do you have any questions for me?”
Why yes, a chicken, fox and sack of flour need to cross a doubly linked list, how would you flip the list inside out from the middle while counting the number of pingpongballs that can fit into 747 VW Beatles.
Never ask nothing if you like them. Always have some keen-sounding questions to ask.
When it comes to hiring decisions if there are tied candidates but only one position it can often come down to candidates A was quiet and didn't ask any questions and seems disinterested, but candidate B had loads of questions to ask at the end and seemed really interested and keen and wanted to know x, y, and z.
Who do you think gets hired in those scenarios.
But yeah it is sometimes tempting to turn the tables :). So far no one has done it to me, but not sure what my response would be. "Haha nice joke! Ok we're outta time thanks for coming!" I guess!
Plus, asking intelligent questions about team dynamics, or how a company prefers to do X workflow, also show that you understand the importance of those things. If I am evaluating a candidate, those types of questions would show additional areas of skill and knowledge that person possesses that may not have already come out through the rest of the interview.
If you already hate them asking no questions is fine - you already know you wouldn't accept the job if offered so you should just say that and ask how quick the interview can end (sometimes they have quotas to fill and since you already have blocked off the time it costs you almost nothing to stay and can be a polite way to help someone else thus doing a good deed).
If you are inclined to like them enough to accept a job you need to ask questions! You need to be sure your inclination is correct. The worst case is you accept a job and realize after a month it is a bad job - all your other leads have gone cold and unemployment won't like you quitting now (check your local rules for if you can collect and if so what, but beware that you may have to keep working while looking for a job which is hard)
Of course there are different situations. If you are signing a 1 month contract you sill are watching your other leads anyway in that month. (or they are paying you enough to take 3-6 months off looking for the next contract)
Oh for sure. Ask questions, just not annoying whiteboard questions. Also I hate this “ask us anything” part of the interview. It’s so performative.
It should be rephrased as “the jeopardy round” since it’s still about the candidate, but phrased backwards. And it’s not a time for REAL questions, it’s a time to show you’re smart and attentive but not TOO smart, you want the interviewer to feel good about themselves so they can feel good about you.
> what my response would be
I don’t ask candidates to do anything I wouldn’t put up with. It would be unusual but I would be game (if they were serious). Fundamentally that’s what my fantasy is about: a world where interviewer and interviewee have mutual respect for each other.
In the recent past I’ve asked candidates to walk me through code they’ve written. I’m super happy to reciprocate for 15 min and I think the candidate (if they’re working with me directly) would get a lot out of it.
I'm sorry, is that 747 different VW Beetles, or one VW Beetle that's scaled up to be 747-sized? If it's scaled up, is it so they have the same length, or area? Neither is relevant (just tell me the area to fill with balls), but I'd like to know, anyway.
It’s a trick question. The number is a distraction. If they don’t ask the model year of the VW Beatle they’re clearly not detail oriented and can’t be trusted. /s
Sure, interviews go both ways, but there’s a major difference in what each side wants from the other. The company wants someone who can deliver software and architecture, which requires substantial vetting. The main thing the employee wants (in most cases) is money, which is far easier to determine the value of (I’d consider “what’s the position pay?” a perfectly reasonable question when interviewing someone).
The employee also wants to understand working conditions like company culture, overtime expectations, etc.theres lots of fuzzier questions you can and should ask in interviews because interviewers will almost never intentionally reveal this information if asked directly.
The pay question is valid, but not appropriate for a technical interview. If someone asked me I wouldn’t even know the answer. That would be a question for the recruiter or possible engineering manager.
I think it’s 100% okay to ask about pay in an interview but not okay if it’s the only thing you ask about.
For me: I care about the day-to-day of who I’m working with and what that dynamic is like (in addition to money and benefits).
The only pay question I can answer is how realistic getting the promised bonus is. I've worked in places where there was a bonus plan that could pay nice, but in practice we got $200 one year, nothing the next, and then it ended. I've worked in places where on a bad year the bonus was $15000 (after taxes and 401k deduction) and it went up in good years. I can't tell you what your pay will be, I know your grade so I could look up the range but I don't remember it (even for my grade I don't remember)
What you really should be asking is what the company is like to work for. Is there set/expected working hours (can you accept those hours). How often are there lunches that in practice are mandatory? Do people really play ping-pong or are the tables just for show / after work. Is there a dress code? How much notice is required for vacations. Will they tell you that you can't take vacation at times, and if so when. What do they expect you to do that isn't in your job description (that is as a programmer are you also expected to talk to customers). What is the dress code. Anything else that might affect your ability to work there.
There are also questions they are not legally allowed to ask (family status, disability not relevant to the job...). However you might want to reveal that you are/have one of those things so they they will pass you over now (they can always find an excuse once they know they won't hire you) if they care instead of latter. Hopefully this never comes up (or if it does they turn out not to care and so hire you anyway) but depending on your situation you might decide it is better to reveal it now rather than dealing with them finding out later. This is food for thought, not something I think is needed.
> The main thing the employee wants (in most cases) is money, which is far easier to determine the value of
Money isn't important if you never see it. If the employer can't solve leetcode on the spot, how are you to believe they will be able to figure out how to make payment?
They studied math, so it was probably for a quantitative finance job where I've seen (quite a few!) other people talk about similar interviews. Stuff like computing standard deviation confidence intervals or deciding which of two strategies are higher expected value with only mental math and a few seconds of thought.
This makes me skeptical of his claim that he is actually slow. I think it's like he felt like he couldn't keep up or imposter syndrome, but this is true of the vast majority of people. Most people find those interviews hard. That is the point...they are supposed to be challenging.
I think it's more like coming up with heuristics to approximate an answer quicky, even if the answer is wrong . With option trading, being able to intuit what the option should be priced at.
Option trading was my first thought too. I went on a tour of the CBOE years ago with some former pit traders and they setup a mock scenario as if we were in the pits during an active trading day, to teach us how all that worked. I was thoroughly impressed by the ability these guys had to do all this math in their head, and maintain the bottom line of a complex position, all while surrounded by chaos.
It wasn’t mid-question, but I once left an interview loop after the worst 1hr session of my life. The interviewer put some React question in front of me then said “okay I’m going to go work now.” ???? I was already there and it was an easy question so I just did it, but after that I emailed the recruiter to say “no thanks” and moved on with my day. Still felt pretty good!
I have always felt that my verbal recall skills and the size of my lexicon do not correspond strongly to the quality of my ideas.
Which is unfortunate because I believe most people over-index on these attributes. folks with extremely high wit and low/average critical thinking, I.e Russel Brand types are extremely persuasive due to their ability to be so _accurate_. But accuracy doesn't matter if you're not shooting at the right target. We confuse accuracy with truthfulness. It is some sort of cognitive fallacy our brains short circuit to.
The best folks in our position can do is find work that allows our results to speak for us. And yes, write. Find the time to write. Strategically position yourself such that the battleground is async written text.
I have thought of myself as a slow thinker but have shifted to the view that it's more about myself putting a higher value on the thoughts that inherently take time to reach.
Other, "quicker" people are satisfied with superficial ideas and sometimes don't even care about factual correctness. But when I finally form my opinion, it is always very considered. When quick people are questioned it's often evident that depth is lacking.
So I am slow only because I do alot more processing, simply put.
True depth of thought is often achieved through exposing your ideas to others. It’s scary and uncomfortable, but ultimately you might spend months refining an argument that the first other person to look at will find a flaw in. We don’t see our own blind spots (by definition).
If you spend months in isolation, true, but if it is a matter of answering something on the spot vs the next day that is not a problem.
But the main point of my comment was that the situations in which I have felt slow, I have later realized that is only because some other people confidently state the first thought that comes to their mind. They are quick to answer but not any quicker to the final conclusion (which may be days away).
And depending on maturity and team dynamics, that may or may not be bad thing. A couple of people confidently spitballing some bullshit between them can reach a solution quite nicely if there is no prestige involved and a shared understanding that "oops, this was wrong, try again" is an expected part of the process.
I am a slow thinker but learnt a trick early on from an American girl I met in a bar: she said that a lot of Americans think and are perceived as quick thinkers but often it's not the case: they just don't stop talking. And if you keep talking, about whatever (no one listens anyway), indeed you get ahead. I met that girl when I was 19, now i'm 50 and still it works well in social settings. People like me at parties as just blabber on wherever you put me. But when you ask me a question about math or software, I am quiet for too long, which makes me better at those than many I think as I see many of my colleages just blabber on about those things too and, while seemingly quick, they are often very wrong and shouldve kept their mouth shut.
As an American I see this a lot (talking to fill the spaces), and it’s really irritating. I have family members who do it, and it’s really hard to have meaningful conversations with them. My relationship with them suffers, too. One of them chastised me once for not sharing information about myself, my reply was “every time I start to you change the subject” … that was met with stunned silence. It got marginally better after but reverted to the mean fairly quickly.
I fully agree, but some people are attracted to this space filling 'switched on' (it's not, I am thinking about something completely different and just generating random output with the speech center of my brain) peolple; it's some kind of a hack to be 'liked' and 'thought off as being a fast thinker'. I never use it with friends or colleagues. But it works very well in interviews, parties, social gatherings, VCs etc.
I sometimes have to yell "shut up" when this gets too much for me. I can't get a word in because they are filling space (sometimes complaining that I don't talk enough).
I write about doing high-risk, impactful and neglected science. Particularly in physics, biophysics and biosecurity. Ex-Cambridge Maths. Ex-Goldman. Currently at hedge fund but no finance content here.
Judging by this person's bio, I am sure he is not actually slow, at least not as defined by IQ. You don't land those jobs and credentials by being slow. Getting a quant job for example requires being able to think fast on one's feet to answer interview questions.
I think it's more like his working memory speed is not up to his satisfaction or subjectively he feels slow, but relative to everyone else or general population, he is not actually slow, much in the same way a runway model may feel fat due to body dysmorphia, but is not actually fat.
My first real struggle with slow processing time was when I started to play competitive volleyball in high school.
the vast majority of people who try a sport will suck at it, and many are still bad even with practice, hence why so few become pro. it has nothing to do with mental slowness.
It's like when Einstein felt he was bad at physics or math. No, he was brilliant at it, but he thought he was not good enough to solve the problem he wanted to solve, which had also vexed everyone else too.
I think the author nearly touches on something when he uses the phrase "slow, patient thinkers" towards the end. He's actually a patient thinker. Sometimes that feels like being slow, because you're not jumping at a constant stream of ideas. But there are problems that patient thinkers will take their time to solve, whilst "quick" thinkers will simply give up or move onto something else.
Yeah this article kind of feels like an NBA benchwarmer complaining how unathletic they are, despite being more athletic than 99.99% of the population.
I went through an autism assessment about a year ago. Part of that was getting an IQ test. I scored well in Verbal Comprehension and Perceptual Reasoning, but struggled more in Processing Speed. This was accounted for by giving two scores, the Full Scale IQ, and the General Ability Index (GAI). The GAI deemphasizes the processing speed, as raw speed to an answer usually isn't that important these days. I was told the having a larger gap between these numbers is one indication that autism might be in the picture.
I feel like I have a lot to say about this because I've actually been at both ends of the spectrum at different points of my life.
Going into college I was an extremely quick witted person, but I was also at the beginning of a depressive episode. Over the course of 10 years (and 8 years of therapy), I developed into the slow thinker that I am now. The reality is: I actually think my quick wittiness was only possible because I was overlooking a ton of mistakes. I was an incredibly certain person, but I didn't have the foundation necessary to be as sure of myself as I was. Going to therapy made me more cautious about thinking I knew how others thought and felt, and I realized that, by being so quick, I was dominating other people and failing to actually gain any real input or information from them.
The best way to describe it is biologically IMO. It's the difference between a precocial and altricial species: A precocial species matures quickly because it has strong instincts. It's born knowing what to do and how to do it, but because it's ruled by its instincts it can't be creative. It responds to each stimulus the same way each time. An altricial species is born with less knowledge. It has to spend time learning, but because it learns, it can pick and choose its response to different stimuli, and so it exhibits greater creativity.
Maybe I've gone too slow and I feel like I'm starting to pick up speed again these days, but I'll never think less of a slow person. Maturation is not necessarily a good thing. IMO the longer you can go without maturing, the better.
If you’re running a team, you owe it to yourself to start looking for these people. Some of the absolute best engineers I’ve ever worked with are of this sort - they get absolutely swamped in group discussions, but when you get them alone and lower the tempo so they can get done processing, they’re often two or three iterations past the group. Don’t let the showy people throw you off - the people who think before talking are worth their weight in gold.
Yeah, I think too many people go into interviews trying to see if the candidate matches their ideal, as opposed to trying to figure out who and what the candidate is. My best hires have all been people with skills and approaches I didn’t know I didn’t have until I got to talk with them.
I can relate 100%. It affects how I perform in coding interviews, and I also need to work around it in my job.
I also have ADHD and a lot of this matches Dr Russell A Barkley's description of ADHD, particularly when he describes it as a performance and executive function disorder - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzBixSjmbc8eFl6UX5_wW.... ADHD includes much more but this "slow thinking" seems to be a prominent feature.
Lots of undiagnosed autistic people in the comments describing autistic masking and burnout.
Autistic burnout is the name for the unexplainable energy drain when you have to interact with people, because while social interactions are usually as effortless and as easy as lifting a finger for neurotypical people, they can feel like lifting a 100lbs stone for you, because you have to constantly remember how to act and at the same time focus on the moment to not miss a social cue, etc. This is called masking and it drains your energy.
Now watch people under this comment claiming they are not autistic, because how they are able to perfectly socialize, because they have learned to keep eye contact by putting a reminder on a post-it note on their desk for a year in the middle school.
Before discovering I'm autistic I was totally dumbfounded: why I was tired as if I ran a marathon after a meetup with friends for just a few hours? Now I know.
What you are describing in paragraph 2 is not specific to autistic people, although it is common. Introverts in particular can also become drained from social activity. There is some overlap.
Masking also is not necessarily the source (or sole source) of social exhaustion and instead the exhaustion may come due to greater sensory sensitivity and/or cognitive processing requirements, which are common in autism. Furthermore; masking has other purposes such as avoiding bullying, social exclusion, and other forms of negative outcomes; the intent and effort varies by the thing being masked and the person.
I believe I'm a slow thinker too and it's always bothered me that in a work context there's an inherent advantage for fast thinkers due to the idea that the optimal way to solve problems is to "just jump on a call/huddle" or hash it out in a meeting. Coupled with the fact that many people never write anything down for asynchronous consumption it can be easy to become a bystander whilst decisions are made.
I feel the exact same. Quick calls and huddles give me anxiety. I can’t think of good ideas until I’ve had solo time to process the problem. Now I’ve resorted to sending my unsolicited ideas hours after one of these calls occurred and to my surprise they’re appreciated by the team so far. Setting a boundary and being vocal about needing heads down time to contribute most effectively could be worth trying.
I take to heart how my stomach reacts whenever I have to jump on a quick call. But you have to do it anyway, and the feeling of having survived those calls is, no doubt, rewarding.
I think of myself as a slow thinker and feel the same as many other comments on this post but I always but this down to being a visual mind and having to draw/picture everything to think it. So in my experience slow thinking is topic dependant; maths, conversations, even code are slow because I have to draw it in my head and it takes time. But give me a spatial/visual problem, like coming up with a plan for garden landscaping, organising room layouts or will this object fit in this space and it takes like 1 micro-second. it's weird.
This is exactly how I'd put it, and also why I absolutely hate context switches. When you're asking me to switch context, for example to a different project, then I have to bring in the project structure, the modules the moving pieces, the problem we're trying to solve, everything before I can remember enough to answer your question.
Totally agree. It takes a while to "load" the project but then once it's loaded moving around a large codebase is a breeze but as soon at the code changes broaden and I slow right down cos I have to rebuild the map with the new additions. only way i can describe it: it's like loading google/apple maps and instead of it showing a low detail view with only the big roads displayed i'm loading the entire super details map, it takes a while but once it's loaded there's 0 lag.
also it's actually reassuring knowing someone else is similar, no-one in my life seems to work the same.
I feel like a simpler explanation is that the author is roughly average in most traits, and comparing themselves to others who are above average in certain traits.
I doubt it's about thinking speed. At times I've thought I was fundamentally deficient in some way, only to realize later that I was catastrophising about a poor performance in something and generalizing that across my entire life.
There is also a lot of variation in our abilities, mostly due to practice. When I've holed myself up in my room working for weeks I lose the ability to socialize in general, let alone make witty comebacks. But once I'm in a social environment for a while I can banter with anybody.
Practice helps of course, but arguing against differences in thinking speed is like arguing against differences in intelligence, or even running speed.
JoelOnSoftware had a great piece back in the day where he mentioned that while he consciously knew what a short sale on an option was, in practice he had to stop and think about how to calculate it, while his financial friends just knew the answer immediately. He drew a comparison to pointers in C, where if you're going to be a C programmer, then pointers should just be intuitively obvious to you and not something you need to think about.
IAW, there are no pure fast or slow thinkers, a lot of this is just how well have you internalized the background material. Having quick repartee in conversation has absolutely no relationship to immediately seeing what the loop variable should be in a programming problem. FizzBuzz isn't quickly solved by decent devs because they think faster, it's quickly solved because it's a trivial problem that doesn't require serious thinking for experienced devs.
When I'm programming for finance or medical, I often have to tell the PM "let's stop here and let me think about this for a day". Because it's not my field, it takes me a while to get my head around it. OTOH, there's very often algorithm conversations where I have to wait for others to catch up.
I'm not sure it is quite that simple. The other day someone asked me about the project I've been working on. The thing I touch nearly every single day and know in intimate detail...
It still took me what felt like a good minute or more of thinking to remember anything about it and more than that to recall specific details of interest. It would take me even longer to think about something that I don't have at the tip of my tongue, so to speak, but I find there is no such thing as an immediate answer for me. That doesn't seem to be true of all others.
I think you're hitting on the fact that there are multiple variables that contribute to "quickness." Having digested a lot of background material is definitely part of it and ties to the higher up posts about e.g. Churchill. Also a way intelligence can correspond to it, in the sense that more intelligent people have often digested more topics. But there also seem to be people who are less distractable, more tuned in to what is going on, and more able to tie current happenings to their body of knowledge and make a joke or whatever.
I resonate highly with this. Especially when brainstorming ideas with my manager. He's very quick with suggestions, and I am always saying ehhh I don't know let me think about it. I have realized that him giving me ideas quickly to iterate on is beneficial because I am always able to refine it.
I still do think it is a deficiency in some sense as I would have loved to be one of those guys who could just grok stuff instantly and contribute quicker
The author uses the following examples to describe slow thinking:
> In a mathematics context, it would be doing mental math to figure out things like the split of a restaurant bill.
> In a social context, it would be coming up with witty responses in conversation.
> In a recall context, it would be quickly remembering facts.
> In a sports context, it would be like a badminton player�s quick ability to hit the shuttle in a gap.
> In a job interview context, it would be solving small scale coding problems and quickly designing algorithm
But they are all in fact completely different kinds of thinking, and an individual may be fast or slow depending on the kind. As an example, I have no trouble with 1), 3) and 4), but am abysmally slow with 2) and 5). Am I a fast thinker or a slow one? I also know why 2) and 5) are slow, because they are human interactions and I spend extra time thinking about whether what I wanted to say may offend the other person. That's not necessarily slow thinking persay, but more so overthinking, resulting in a delayed or absent response.
The thing that resonated the most with me was the idea that slow processors need to focus on strategic thinking. I am a 60 year old and now retired software developer. I keep myself busy by actively continuing to code every day. I definitely have experienced a slowing of thinking in the last ten years. I have read that this could be because I have more information to sift and sort but being honest with myself, the machinery is not as well tuned as it once was.
I am fine with all this. I love coding and I doubt I will ever stop doing it for pleasure. I have had to become more methodical and intentional with my time on the laptop but reflecting on this piece, being more strategic would be a wise thing for me to contemplate on.
I consider myself to be a slow-thinker too. I have several above-average people as friends. New stuff (usually some mathematical topic) that takes me a whole day to internalize the basics, I can tell to them in 15 minutes and they will be able to understand it and to immediately connect it with other topics they know.
I have not attended a special school for mathematically gifted like some of them. In school and during my first year at the university, I used to think that I am just intelligent enough to have an idea how true intellegent one could be...
I was always bad at solving equations with more than 3 unknowns, since this includes enough steps to have a significant probability that I forget a sign or mix something up - even though the algorithm itself was completely clear to me.
Today I acceppted myself much more: I think my real advantages are that I am a) interested in a lot of things and b) I am enduring in reading about a topic. Even if I need to read explanations of 5 different authors to grasp something, I do so. And I care much less today than ealier. However, I still like to be faster at times.
While I think I am a decent programmer/SWE, I do not like pair programming. My path of coding is not linear and most of the stuff I type will be erased until I am confident about my solution.
I'm going to propose an alternative explanation. This distinction doesn't exist, or at least not the way it seems.
The "fast thinkers" aren't thinking. They're just doing. Everyone is not only capable of this, but probably behave this way several times a day on certain tasks without realizing it or how it seems to others.
This is beyond mere practice towards a narrow goal. Certain topics just click better due to seemingly unrelated, yet deeply integrated life experiences.
It's not something to worry about since, as the article states, it doesn't affect outcomes much. If anything, "fast thinking" creates blind spots.
I find myself bimodal, when comparing my "speed" to others in social situations.
If there's something that's novel to me, I feel like I'm slower than the average bear. Not massively slower, but with a desire to take the material aside and spend some time alone with it.
But if it's my home ground, if I've been living inside it, I find few people can keep up with me.
At least part of it is that social interaction takes a bit more processing power. I know I get a bit autistic and info dumpy when I know the ground, and that relieves the social pressure (though I know it costs me points too).
The conversation here has been really interesting since it shows we all have subtly different abilities and issues around slow processing.
I am a senior/staff software engineer with 20 years of experience and who would be considered a top performer. Quick wittedness is something I rely on but technical thinking is always slow. White board interviews are nearly impossible. So finding work is ROUGH.
I wouldn't call my self the class clown, but I am often the first one to crack a joke and people look to me for lighthearted fun. I often hope this will save me in interviews as I rely on my past work and personality are my strong traits. All of the jobs I got through this, or from a personal referral. Never through a technical interview.
My way of coping with this has always been to work more hours then everyone else. It helps that I am also more passionate about what I am working on then those around me. I work on open source in my free time, while my co-workers have barely heard of Linux. If it were not for my love of the craft, I be miserable in this industry.
I first noticed this all when I was a kid and started taking more advanced classes. I’d have to take copious notes and deeply review them after class to make sure I knew what was going on. While my friends would listen once and ace the tests. I was also always behind on reading speed since I had to read things 2 or 3 times before the words really registered in my brain.
As a side note, I recently worked with a real version of the oh-so mythical 10x programmer. And he was a college intern! Running loops around the rest of us at our startup. He was doing the work of several of us older programmers. I think most of it was do to his 0-friction processing of information. Read, assimilate, code. Interesting to watch. They do exist.
Dr. Amen has identified at least seven types of ADHD. I have three of them. I’m a slow thinker, but despite being detail-oriented, am not well-organized, make mistakes, am erratic, fairly unpredictable (if anyone needs me as an entropy source for a TRNG?), procrastinate, am on the autism spectrum, have OCD tendencies, have paranoia (also had hallucinations as side-effect of stimulants), am uncoordinated, have treatment-resistant depression, etc.
So, these “you are X, therefore Y” don’t work for me. A lot of people don’t fall into buckets well.
I find myself in both the spaced-out "slow thinker" and witty "fast thinker" camps depending on the situation I'm in and the people I'm with. I think it's less about mental predisposition like the article says and more about how comfortable I am.
When I'm with old friends, processing time feels snappy because I'm less burdened by anxiety and general mental defense mechanisms. When I'm underprepared for a job interview or with a new group of people, the latent anxiety and subconscious doubt uncontrollably slows down the quick processing part of my brain.
My first college girlfriend made me realize that I wasn't a fast thinker. In person our conversations didn't seem problematic to me, but on the phone she would respond too quickly to what I was saying. I wouldn't be able to get into listening mode in time to pick up on the beginning of her replies.
I suppose that different people just have different strengths and mine isn't quick repartee. Another unusual thing I've noticed is my inability to do my best thinking while music is playing. While working briefly at a company to help out some friends I was forced to hear music throughout my time working on location; it was terrible (for me). In school I always did my work in quiet settings.
I was a math major in college and music interfered with my math work more than other subjects. My theory is that math and music both rely on similar mental resources.
I think it can be an error labeling people as "fast" or "slow". I had similar self doubts to the OP during my PhD, where so many people around me would say they "got" a concept and I was just feeling behind. But a few years in, while desperately trying to "catch up" I realized a good portion of the time I was just misinterpreting. Even those tasks aren't as well defined as the OP suggests.
There's another dimension that often is not acknowledged: depth. People have different thresholds at where they're comfortable talking about a topic or saying they "understand". I also don't think there's a strong correlation with the person's intelligence, if anything, a slight bias towards "slower" people being smarter.
- Dumb people might have low thresholds as they are unaware of depth.
- Smart people will have low thresholds because they do better thinking out loud or are just saying they think they have enough to launch off of.
- Dumb people might be slow because they haven't thought about the thing very much.
- Smart people might be slow because they are considering different depths.
You'd never judge how fast someone can run without stating the distance. Your 100m sprint time isn't going to tell us much about your 400m time nor your marathon time, and vise versa.
We all think fast and slow at times (intended), and we're all 4 people in the above list on different topics. I think we should just make sure we're judging people at the right race. The trouble is despite standing in front of you, talking face to face, you don't know if in that time they've run a few meters or a few kilometers. I think we'd all do better if we worried a little less about speed. If your destination is nowhere, you get there in the same time regardless of your speed.
I’ve been thinking about that in the context of hiring. Some companies require a cognitive test, which is often some kind of Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices. Unfortunately, most companies giving these tests do it with a time limit, thus measuring a speed function, and neglecting other dimensions. Some people think fast, others think deep. We need both.
In college I interviewed at a commodity trader and they made us play a group trading game, I bombed because I wanted to make sure every trade I made was profitable/certain, people who made it to the next round moved quick even if they made somewhat questionable trades. That's when I realised I was not meant to be a commodity trader where decisions need to be made in matter of minutes. It was just so different from the business case interviews I was also doing at the same time where you build a thesis and stress test it and look for areas you missed
I'm also a slow thinker, but I'm doing well on these types of tests, because they are very contained and small, plus I have partly learned to sort of relax my brain and let it work more intuitively.
For me at least, the slow thinking comes in part from being overly reflected. Thought can pull me into a seemingly phased out state where I drill down into it or try to find related connections. I also have trouble to go from thought and abstraction to language, because it's always hard to find the right expression that _really_ fits.
So the larger and more disconnected the possible space is that one could explore, the slower I naturally get before expressing myself.
But these matrices and puzzles are very contained and observable in their entirety. Even though solving these isn't my main forte, they also don't necessarily trigger my slowness to the same degree as other tasks.
If someone uses them in a job interview, they would likely make me a bit nervous, because it feels bad to be stuck or unsure when you're solving a puzzle and that can be draining and distracting for long enough to matter if the test is timed.
But I think if they are used with care, the minimum required score is considerate and they are not the only test, then they might be fine or even useful.
I like to think I’m pretty quick at generally getting things done in the context of work, and in my anecdotal experience I can see how it doesn’t actually benefit me all that much.
If I use that capability to work faster/harder/better I still can’t get around the fact that there’s nowhere to be promoted to in my company.
Or there’s the fact that I don’t actually want to be too high of a performer and set high expectations for myself and be saddled with more work.
I also haven’t lucked out with working at the right company at the right time to get promotions. Usually, companies growing fast with a lot of opportunities to make visible impacts allow people to climb the ladder.
I have a family member that did this and now that they’re above the indicator contributor level they report that their job is significantly easier than it used to be, it just has higher stakes and more meetings.
So thinking faster doesn’t magically turn me into a VP or something like that, and thinking fast isn’t even needed for that role.
I am a slow thinker if I need to do some calculations that require a precise answer. For me, it's a memory thing. To be fast you need to memorize patterns, algorithms and data, whether you do it consciously or not. You also need to have a good working memory.
I have a terrible long term memory and about an average working memory.
As a work around, when I don't have to come out with precise answers I got quite good at making aproximations.
As another work around, my brain tries to use data that it can recall with ease such as very fresh data, instead of trying to remember things that might take some time to remember or not remember at all.
While I enjoy debating and long talks about tech, science, culture, history, art etc, I tend to concentrate on stuff I can deduct or think on the moment such as ideas instead of trying to remember stuff.
As a consequence, I tend to suck at job interviews when I am asked to recite things from memory. So before interviews I kind of have to review most asked questions.
I'm a decently fast thinker but a relatively slow learner. I'm good at synthesizing information. It's because I tend to naturally doubt/resist new information and I need to see some proof or utility value before I can fully absorb it. Once I've absorbed information, I can recall it years in the future and can synthesize it with different related information.
I'm grateful for my slow learning because if I had just absorbed everything I was ever told on the first go, I would probably be crazy right now because of how many contradictions I've encountered in the information I've been presented with and how often I've had to re-evaluate my worldview...
You don't want to learn stuff based on what you learned first; what information you retain and decide to build upon should be about what best fits into your existing (hopefully gradually improving) world model.
I think it's great to play to one's strengths, but it's also true that what people perceive as "quick thinking" is often the result of very large amounts of practice. More specifically, people I know who are good at the types of skills described at the beginning of the article (mental math, witty responses, remembering facts, playing badminton to a high level) probably have a knack for them, but there are also types of underlying skills that aren't obvious to someone who hasn't spent a lot of time practicing the activity in question. I'll take two skills that I'm familiar with as cases in point: mental math and tennis (adjacent to badminton).
For mental math, there are all sorts of tricks that allow one to transform the problem into one with fewer values to hold in memory (for instance [1]). There are also lots of different patterns that allow shortcuts in calculation. The more of these one knows (kind of like facts in a trivia contest), the simpler many sorts of mental math problems become. And the more one has practiced, the faster one is at applying them. This is not to say that there aren't people who are exceptionally gifted, but it's also possible to be perceived as "quick-witted" by actually doing a lot of slow thinking ahead of time.
With tennis, sometimes it seems like players have exceptional reaction times (At the highest level, they certainly do!), but one learns over time to move to different areas of the court preemptively based on what the opponent is likely to do. This often shortens the distance one has to run by a step or two, which makes a pretty big difference in reaching difficult balls. Also, time spent practicing with better players who hit harder gradually changes one's perception of ball speed and one's ability to follow the ball all the way to the racket. It's like one's eyes get better, somehow. None of these perceptual changes or positioning habits happen overnight, but with enough stacked skills practiced over time, a person's reaction time appears to get faster even if their absolute reaction time hasn't improved.
Of course there are people with a higher skill ceiling than others, but I also think people write themselves off as being hopeless at something, choose not to practice, and then conclude that they are unsuited to the skill without having better understood what the road to "good" actually looks like.
I fit into this category so much and have noticed that it has certain properties. For example, in areas of expertise it took me longer to master, but now that I'm an expert I'm comparatively faster than other experts in the same field.
My only explanation for this is that being 'slow' left me something of an social outsider, and this gave me more time to immerse myself in the things I cared about, and so I went deeper. This applies to a lot of different things.
That said, this slowness has caused me so much agony over the years! But now, like the author, I lean into it and have found many advantages through it.
I've often associated quick thinking with lack of thinking. It's intuitive and prehaps emotional. In some cases folks I've seen who were 'quick witted' completely lacked a filter and it didn't help them at all.
I dont think slow thinking affects the tasks in the example the same way. I have fairly good reflexes e.g. I am able to return pretty fast shots in ping pong, am able to catch things that slip my grip before they hit the ground etc.
But I am not particularly fast in mental maths.
Depending on how relaxed or engaged I am, I can have a witty reply or no comeback at all. Sometimes I have a reply but it is too sharp for the situation so I hold it back.
I think these engage different classes of thinking.
Its a little unclear in the bulleted list but in the volley ball example it becomes evident the author isn't talking about reflexes.
"Where do I pass the ball to if it comes to me? What is the current formation? Should I try to receive the ball, or will my team-mate go for it?"
There he's describing quick on-the-fly strategic choices eg. what is the best move to make in the next half second? So he can hit the ball but he can't do the quick thinking to know if he should.
I wonder how one can slow down as a fast thinker. In school I used to be very fast with algebra and physics. But the hardest part was to get the numbers right. Just because my brain was too fast to think it through properly. Now when I'm writing code I still sometimes miss this "calculation parts" - some edge cases, maybe syntax, getting the general idea correctly. I did learn to deal with it somehow, but still I wonder how other people deal with it.
I’ll admit that taking a pause and planning isn’t one of my best strengths - I focus too much on experimenting and iteration. I’d love to have OP as a coworker - complementary problem-solving styles.
> The funny part is that now, I come across as 'quicker'. But that's no accident - I'm just reciting things that I've worked on for a long time, slowly, behind the scenes!
Winston Churchill said something to this effect. His quick witted responses were often pre computed in idle time and he would pattern match the situations to see which one fits where/when.
I wonder how much of this is due to our own braking circuit. I guess: me in a confident situation will beat my stressed self every single day. The gap is so large.
Preach on, slow thinker here as well. When it comes to social situations our options are avoid them and look anti-social, or embrace them and appear dim.
We're faster when motivated. If you're young and don't like competition and a team sports is imposed on you, you don't even know that you're supposed to be more motivated than you are, to save your team and crush the other one.
Motivation and training are hugely correlated to speed IMHO.
In my experience, barring actual disability, those who think "slowly" are often just deeper thinkers.
The ability to think very quickly isn't necessarily better, often it's just the ability to care so little about the consequences that you pick a lane quickly and go with it.
And I say this as someone who is a quick thinker and have trouble focusing for extended time...
Nice read. As another commentator mentioned, this is a great real-world application of Kahneman's 'Thinking, Fast and Slow.' The author's examples illustrates how leaning into System 2 thinking can be a powerful strength, not a weakness.
I read the book and many ideas felt like "yes, that sounds reasonable and feels good" but that is a danger of the book. The very seductions it describes applies also to its readers.
Does it? Some of the words are the same but I think they refer to different things. The author of the article is talking about processing speed for tasks that belong in Kahneman's slow system 2, not about some personal preference/aptitude for slow over fast the way Kahneman means it.
Is there actually such a thing as a "slow thinker"? I find it hard to believe that slow thinking skills doesn't heavily correlate with fast thinking skills, is there any evidence of this?
Note you have to rule out stress, since stress is not related to this. Performing badly under pressure just means you are not stress resistant, it doesn't mean you are a slow thinker, you can still think quickly when you are calm.
So to me it seems like labeling yourself as a "slow thinker" is just putting unnecessary limits on yourself. "I am not good at that, I am a slow thinker" is defeatist.
I think I'm a slow thinker. And that's because I have ADHD and a number of learning disabilities including dyslexia and dyscalculia, and also short term memory problems. It takes me twice as long to do things as normal people. I'm smart, but if the game is "do this thing quickly and accurately" then my results will make me seem very dumb. I did manage to get a Ph.D. but only because it's the kind of thing that doesn't require you to be fast and accurate, but slow and deliberate. I can do that very well. But then people see the Ph.D. and think that means I'm a fast thinker, and they are often very disappointed I am not.
So you're right, I do self limit by labeling myself as a slow thinker, but I think it's for the best because otherwise people overestimate me and end up disappointed.
Yeah, it sounds like this label might fit on you, but I'd still be interested in seeing any studies about it.
I do feel that most people who label themselves as "slow thinker" aren't actually having the kind of issues you describe though, similarly how most people say they have "bad memory" even though most people have typical memory.
I think there are two main reasons you tend to be a slow thinker:
1. You're not focused enough. (you pay too much attention to what people think about what you're going to do, instead of focusing on the question itself.)
2. You haven't practiced enough. (This is the first time you've encountered this kind of problem.)
answering a question in 30 seconds vs. 5 minutes of thought is a very salient distinction in school and in some job interviews. it can impress people. so it feels painful to be slow.
all else equal you’d rather be quick. but it’s only a very small advantage for doing most real work.
I've personally found that the time taken to think through a discussion is akin to an inverse guassian curve:
- on the left tail are people who know little-to-nothing about (or have little experience with) the given topic and neeed a chunk of time
- then as knowledge and experience increases, less time is needed, eventually peaking out at what appears to be instance understanding + ability to communcate effectively about it
- but then something interesting happens when they get even more experience + knowledge: they now know about all the edge cases, things that go wrong, etc. and once again take more time to think through the topic
I've also found that most everyone is the same in this regard. Every once in a while (like any normal distribution) there's an outlier on one side of the spectrum or the other, but for the most part, everyone is the same.
Where people tend to differ is in their coping skills in such situations. Early in my career I had to learn to ask people to explain their thinking. Later it was me slowing down and realizing there's likely more to it than I think (and for those behind me).
Now it's me telling those at the peak of the curve to slow down, because while they may be right, and -maybe- they've thought it through, that's probably not the case.
TL;DR to anyone who thinks they are a slow thinker - you probably aren't (like imposter syndrome), and just need to learn to slow the room down. Doing so will help you, others behind you, and those in front of you.
I'm also a slow thinker and can relate with the author.
But something stands out to me here: The article doesn't mention making music, drawing or similar.
I started drawing a bit this year with a book that focuses on how it feels to draw and how to think about drawing and it has been quite fun and enlightening. It is hard to describe, because it's a unique experience.
The big lesson here for me is that you can switch thinking or rather brain state modes deliberately as long as you know how they feel. It's almost like switching on your intuition and stop getting bothered by your thoughts.
This intuitive mode is much quicker and more automatic. My theory is that slow thinkers have a harder time to get into that state or generally switching back and forth. That's fine in of itself, everyone has different strengths. But it's also not completely out of reach and it can be enriching to practice that way.
I've noticed this too and it's always bothered me. It isn't true in everything (I love the split decision making when roller skating in a crowded rink), but when it comes to something like learning new mathematics, my wife is so much faster that I feel like I'm in some kind of slow motion bubble. My processing power just isn't there. The bio-CPU is out of date so to speak. I eventually get there, but in a completely different way after putting together sufficient metaphor and then examples. She just...gets it. Then again, I'm much better than her in other ways (I've never met a stranger). I think brains are just weird.
I've been thinking about something related lately.
I've been going through algorithms problems and although I've been a very successful engineer, I feel terrible when solving algorithms problems.
I had a realization, which is that there are two ways to learn:
1. trying to figure out solutions a priori
2. learning from tutorials online or cormen, rivest, stein, etc.
The two approaches are very difficult for me to reconcile. I'm the type of person that always prefers to do (1). That said, a lot of algorithms probably either
1. took a lot of careful studying to figure out
2. were solved by someone who is really brilliant
3. some combination of (1) and (2)
I think we need to remember that in all likelihood, many "solved" problems in technical fields -- which individuals are expected to be able to solve, at least in programming interviews -- probably were solved in the past by taking a lot of careful time by reasonably smart (but not necessarily genius individuals -- though I am sure there are exceptions).
I would much prefer to be able to do (1) for every algorithms problem, but the fact of it is, I think it is near impossible (probably even for very brilliant individuals, maybe folks like Ramanujan excepted -- and even then, he had exposure to building blocks in textbooks).
Calculus is a special case of this, for example. It doubtless took Newton and Leibniz a lot of very careful studying to discover calculus in addition to them being very bright individuals.
Solving a rubik's cube is another example. I suspect (though am not sure) that the the number of individuals who have solved a rubik's cube a priori is extremely tiny. Maybe on the order of dozens (out of hundreds of thousands if not millions?) in the world ever.
I don't think that these issues are clearly articulated enough and it really is a shame.
It's also a tragedy, I think, that we live in a world where:
1. individuals working in technical fields are often expected to be able to know how to do a lot of very hard things that likely took humanity a very very long time to discover
2. there is a tremendous amount of pressure in many contexts to know how to do very hard things in many cases without very much support in learning
For individuals that don't care too much about figuring things out a priori, I think this can be a very very challenging world.
I think one of the ways out is to appreciate the above -- and to carefully, slowly, thoughtfully attempt to reconcile when to try to understand things a priori versus when to try to learn things from principles others have discovered.
The first individuals who were doing things like sorting algorithms, dynamic programming, etc. likely took months if not years to be able to solve problems that are now considered (relatively) trivial and in only a few lines of code.
I think a good, related example to your point is the “2 watched literals” algorithm used in SAT solvers. It uses lazy evaluation to significantly improve the speed of the SAT solver. I implemented an SAT solver a couple of years ago just for learning and when it came to refactoring my code to implement the 2 watched literal I had what felt like a moment of recognition of the cumulative time and effort of many people working in this field of research that it must have taken to arrive at this design. It’s just such an elegant implementation that to me seems it can only have come from deeply understanding the theory and implementation of SAT solvers.
Well, here’s a good one: some people could hugely benefit from slowing down and doing some good old thinking before posting a comment that makes them look like a complete ass.
My observation is that people mostly think at the same speed but some are happy thinking less before they draw conclusions. This often comes across as a skill or being smarter (to be fair it's a legit skill whether you agree with the results it delivers). I find a lot of business and management consulting is like this, people happily jump to the closest pattern whether or not it fits in order to avoid thinking and appear clever, and there's very little appetite to actually think deeply about something because whatever you do will need to be run by other people who don't want to think...
> Over time, I’ve noticed that my friends, split between the ‘quick-witted people’, and the ‘non quick-witted people’ seem to have similar levels of achievement. This is really a comment about distributions. If you select a skill, like math or career or whatever, and look at distribution quick-witted people vs the slow-witted people, then it appears that those distributions actually overlap.
Likely your name attracts downvotes, most HN comments doesn't get any votes at all but likely you attract an extra downvote here and there due to your name.
The sort of people who would downvote me for being some furry really ought to ask themselves, "Why do I reflexively dislike a community that is mostly queer?"
Of course, I suspect most of them already know the answer.
I also thought about this a lot. Some things about slow thinking are great. I truly believe that it helped me thrive as a software developer.
But social interactions are awkward. I can't really come up with things to say easily and lots of times I can't respond in ways to keep the conversation going. Only after the fact I get lots of ideas of what I could have said. I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.
I'm a tad older, so I stopped caring about it and just accepted my slow thinking. But I'm sure that I also missed out on a lot of opportunities regarding friendships or work. I still think, that others perceive me as awkward or just not fun and it's hard to just ignore that.
Funnily my wife is completely opposite to me and we have the greatest time.
> I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.
As Winston Churchill once said when asked “what are you doing” –> “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”
I’m one of those weirdos who does public speaking sometimes. Even 8 hour workshops. You cannot prepare for an 8 hour speaking engagement. Not really. But you can accumulate a plethora of anecdotes, metaphors, and remarks that you weave into the narrative or in response to questions.
You can build frameworks that are similar to code. Prepared functions/coroutines/objects that you run in appropriate situations. Works pretty well especially in mentoring/teaching/consulting situations. This is also how comedians prep their sets.
The key is that things you say are new to the audience, but not to you. It can be the same metaphor you’ve fine-tuned over dozens of interactions. And the person you’re talking to thinks “Wow that guy is so quick on his feet, how did he come up with that so fast!?”
You can also spot this if you watch talks by popular presenters (Simon Sinek is a good example). You’ll notice the same 2 or 3 core stories getting polished and fine-tuned over years of talks and interviews.
When I was super young, I used to think my dad (who everyone I met seemed to think was extremely funny) had a huge repitoire of hilarious stories, but after a few years I noticed him repeating them and realized he just had a few specific ones that he would re-use with new people, like you mentioned. As someone who tends to be pretty slow to learn how to navigate new social situations, it was eye-opening when I recognized this was something I could do. What's amusing to me at this point is that I'm still not sure he fully realizes that this is something he does sometimes, because he'll still sometimes try to whip out one of the stories when talking to me and then genuinely be surprised when I remind him of some very minor detail about it that he forgot to mention this time he told it.
My dad recently told me a funny story about something that happened to him. Except it actually had happened to me and I had told him about it years before.
I recognize this in my self, so I usually preface the story saying something like "this may or may not have been me, but I'm telling it from the first person". First person stories are funnier. This is part of the "telling a yarn" or "tall tale" tradition I grew up with (in Texas).
Better your Dad with a funny story than your boss with a victory tale!
Heh, my wife was recently telling a story about how she taught our son how to run into a hug. She did not, I actually did, but I let her have it since she was so excited about it.
There’s a Father Brown story which has the extreme of that: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/g-k-chesterton/the-secret-...
But in general yes - have a few or tens of stories you’ve rehearsed through long use, and practice ways to segue to one of them.
Once you get a handle for the few topics of small talk, it’s not terribly hard - and is a skill that can be taught and learned.
Don't watch Big Fish unless you're ready to cry.
Haha, this is my dad too. He doesn’t seem to realize it. It’s me as well. These are stories that tend to strongly relate to our identity. Like, if you get to know me I will talk about meditation or another story like me training with Wim Hof for an experiment at the Radboud Universiteit.
My username checks out :P
We relate to our own stories I guess.
Jeremy Vine once wrote a story about Boris Johnson which I thought was the pinnacle of this. It was published on his Facebook page and I've since lost the link, so you're going to have to read it on Reddit where someone has posted the whole thing again.
It is uproariously funny and very relevant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/c1korj/jeremy_v...
It tells the tale of how the man who was going to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used to play the improviser and ex tempore comedian, in a practiced and automatic way.
Here's the original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20281420
I think we would be naive to assume quick responses are a good measure of one's intelligence[1]. I know this is common, but I think it is missing the same thing that quick responses also tend to miss: depth. You can be fast and deep, but more often people are fast and wrong[2]. More complex the topic the easier it is to be unaware of how wrong.
[0] https://youtu.be/9FL7IZavt1I?t=93
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242293
[2] https://0x0.st/KcAU.png
[Edit] I wanted to add that I found this method highly effective during my PhD. It requires a balance of churning the wheels and walking away. Progress is invisible until the finish line is in sight, so you need to spend time pushing even if it looks like you are getting nowhere. But at the same time, you need to walk away. If you keep pushing you'll never have that time for those random thoughts. There's a laundry list of famous physicist[3] who used to "only work" for a few hours a day and then do things like go on long walks or play tennis. I think that fits into this model. It seems to be a critical aspect for any creative work. Honestly, I would find that the most common mistake I would make is sitting at my desk for too long. It results in a narrowing of focus. There's a lot of times we want that narrowing, but there's also plenty of times we want to think more broadly. I think this is very true for programming in general. I can sympathize with managers who look at people doing these things and interpret them as being unproductive. But I think the reality is that productivity is just a really hard thing to measure when you're not a machine stamping out well defined widgets. I think this ends up with us just making fewer "widgets" and of lower quality. I mean it isn't like you can measure quality by anything as simple as the number of lines of code or number of Jira tickets knocked off. Hell, if you are too narrow your solutions are probably creating more tickets than you're knocking off! But that's completely invisible, only measurable post hoc, and even then quite difficult to measure (if not impossible).
We often talk about current "titans" and all of them boast their long hours and "dedication." People like Elon suggesting 120hrs or the growing 996 paradigm. But I'm unconvinced this really checks out. If anything, it appears much more common that Nobel scientists worked fewer hours, not more. We're all not working on Nobel level work, but it does beg the question of what the most effective strategy actually is. Certainly we can't conclude longer hours at the desk yields better output. We can't counterfactually conclude that Dirac would have been even greater had he spent 16 hrs a day working rather than a handful. "More hours" just seems to be a naive oversimplification, highly related to these "shower thoughts"
[3] Dirac is a famous example, who colleagues would also jokingly use the unit "Dirac" in reference to "one word per hour". Notoriously "slow" thinker, but a surefire candidate for one of the smartest humans to ever exist. Poincare famously worked 10am till noon then 5pm till 7pm. Darwin followed a similar model.
People like Elon suggest 120 hrs or 996 for the employees that work under him implementing his ideas-- the people rolling up their sleeves and putting hammers to nails. Most of the people in an org do not need to be involved in deep level thinking.
So... who do you think those demands are for? He seems pretty clearly to be demanding it from engineers to execs. That also matches the experience of everyone I've known to have worked at SpaceX, including both programmers and aerospace engineers. Same with Tesla.
Also, thought I'd drop a link to this 996 HN post from the other week[2].
Honestly, I'm not sure who you're referring to, because when not taken literally that would seem to cover literally every employee.
[0] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1067173497909141504
[1] https://www.financialexpress.com/trending/my-workload-went-f...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049
Elon does this because being able to order all those people around makes him feel special and important, not because it actually works.
Study after study proves that productivity drops off rapidly when people are tired and stressed - which should be common sense, but apparently it's too common for some of our notables to understand.
So instead of actual work output you get productivity theatre. Everything is dramatic and shouting happens, but - for example - Tesla still doesn't have anything resembling FSD while more modest companies are much further along.
It's juvenile machismo, not adult management.
Musk's use of social media and his involvement in recreational activities is way too much for 80h/week. He's clearly more of a 4 day workweek type tho shy about it.
I once had the opportunity at a comedy festival to see John Mulaney’s same set twice, and it’s pretty wild to see with your own eyes.
In a way it shows what a craft it is to not only have jokes but also be able to present them again and again in a way that appears fresh.
Being a comedian is hard not because writing jokes are hard but because it's actually an intersection of a number of hard skills that require a LOT of practice to hone.
Why would it be wild? Very few live performances of any type are pure improvisation.
Because of how formulaic it is?
Do you have any advice for accumulating and sharing relevant anecdotes? I struggle with sharing anecdotes that have an "Aesop", or directly relatable point, even if I've lived such experiences.
> Do you have any advice for accumulating and sharing relevant anecdotes?
For me blogging for the past 15 or so years has been the secret ingredient. I regularly sit down and distill things into an approachable form then send off to my audience to see if it lands. If yes, I mentally add to my reference list. If not, I engage in some clarifying back-n-forth and try again next time.
These days in a more leadership position I get a lot of reps of this synchronously as I work with younger or less experienced folk.
I also often don’t have timely responses.
There are sometimes long pauses before my response or even mid-speech, during which I’m thinking about what’s said. But the delay is often interpreted as a cue for someone else to respond or change the subject, which often leads to not being able to say anything that i’ve spent so much glutamate to process.
I used to say “one moment” every 5 seconds while I think, but that was distracting.
Sometimes, I do this thing with my eyes jumping them around as if I’m reading a book; that gives people something to look at while they wait, like a spinner indicator.
As as over-thinker myself something I didn't appreciate until too late in life is the necessity of practice.
If you want to be able to hit a ball it doesn't matter how much thought you put into it - the learning is all about programming your lower instinctive brain and it only has the input device of repetition. This brain level has the ability to work at much lower latency - which is critical for reactive physical tasks.
I suspect it is the same here. You can certainly learn to speak using different levels of your brain as well. Case in point public speaking - the reason this is hard is generally you have to trust your mouth on automatic mode to follow behind and using the thinking part of your brain to better plan (or remember) ahead to build a narrative path.
There are body language cues that show you are thinking. Try looking up (like you're looking into your brain).
Yeah. That does work. I do that sometimes, though my eyes start to hurt when I roll them up for that long.
I also find it easier to do something with my eyes than to do nothing while thinking. That’s probably just me.
In the future, I might want an led embedded in one of my temples, that will blink like a network switch port or hdd light that indicates brain activity.
Also filler text while you think is good to practice. “That’s actually a well informed question, what I’ve seen is….” Buys you 5 seconds if you can say it on autopilot and think while your mouth is moving
I worked with a guy who would always start with “to a first approximation…”
After a while it started to grate on me because it came across as “here comes my poorly formed first thought”
lol, yeah the trick is to use them as sparingly as possible and have a dozen or so to rotate. I'm not sure if I qualify as a slow thinker the way OP and some others here are discussing it. But, I do frequently need more time to answer complex problems. I've also started just feeling OK telling people I can follow up with them on certain questions as it's too complex to answer off top of my head. As with anything, it's a balance, I find if you can't answer simple questions people will lose confidence in your answers.
That is a hilarious bodymod. And considering that is is possible to get rough brain activity indicators in a non-invasive manner, something like it could actually be made.
To an extent it’s a skill you can practice if not learn.
By nature I’m a slow thinker but I can mode switch if I need to but it’s exhausting after a while in a weird way I put it down to working in the trades before switching to programming full time, some of the fastest funniest people you’ll ever meet are tradesmen on job sites (introversion doesn’t mean poor social skills after all though they get conflated).
If you are generally happy as you are don’t sweat it, be a boring world if we where all the same.
I am also the slow-thinking dev married to a quick thinker, and it's a good pairing. I know couples where they're both quick thinkers and things are so mercurial it's hard to believe they're still together, but maybe the excitement keeps it going.
I enjoy watching Harry Mack videos on YouTube where he freestyles and can work in something that happens like someone walking into the frame into literally the next line of his raps. This capability is so absolutely outside of the realm of possibility for my brain I almost feel like he's a different species.
I‘m very similar. I noticed that people who are very easy to speak to share one trait: they have no shame to tell you the same story multiple times. It bores the hell out of me every times. If i try to do it, i get bored as well.
My boxing coach once described fighting as a conversation. I am inclined to agree.
In boxing you don't have the luxury of taking your time to think otherwise you get punched in the face.
Improving at conversation is like boxing - it can be reduced into structures and scenarios. Combinations and responses can be drilled in. Ultimately once the foundations are bedded in there is plenty of room for self expression and creativity.
The funny thing about social interaction is that we all talk to each other but there are people who live breathe and hone the art whether formally or informally while plenty of us just stumble along doing just good enough...
>> I still think, that others perceive me as awkward or just not fun and it's hard to just ignore that.
Most likely they don’t care as much as you think. They are probably thinking about what they should say next
Due to this, career success is going to be highly dependent on chosen profession. Some professions are inherently more social and require heavy networking. Software and engineering as a whole, is a good profession for slow thinkers to excel. It can also be meritocratic so any personality quirks or pedigrees get normalized when ranking by performance.
For me is has been quite the opposite. Im a top performing senior/staff engineer. But always struggle to get through coding interviews.
I'm self taught programmer, I don't code professionally but feel confident that I can build any software related widget I ever dreamed up. That said, coding interview stuff I have seen is like gibberish and I don't see how it correlates to the day to day job of building software. Maybe some types of software (lower level systems stuff and such come to mind). It seems like everyone online discussing it feels about the same too. So honestly not sure if that's signal or noise for you, lol.
I could have written these exact words. Marriage needs a certain balance you know ;)
I think this is not really a bad trait. If you think about it from the other person’s perspective, they really don’t expect you to make jokes or entertain them
> they really don’t expect you to make jokes or entertain them
Oh, but they do, if you want to have future conversations with them. As a slow thinker with the same social issues as OP, trust me, they do. Nobody wants to keep talking to someone they consider boring, and first impressions are still the most important impressions.
As someone who believed both versions of this in different parts of my life, I’m pretty convinced that it is a choice to believe in either one
You're pretty much hosed for any FAANG leetcode interviews, though. Unless you're a superstar performer otherwise.
you can try getting into improv comedy to develop this sort of skill. I'm also generally a slow thinker, but i dont actually think we think slower, I think we have too high a barrier for what we allow ourselves to say. We're afraid of making a mistake or saying something stupid, but most people just blurt out the first thought that percolates from their subconscious.
My wife and I are complete opposites. One of us processes data instantaneously, connecting it to dozens of other topics at the flip of a switch, and integrating broad knowledge. This makes for a great member of, say, a tiger team.
The other thinks slowly, often has no initial opinion, and rarely speaks up, but when they do, the input is flawless and monumental. R&D is their forté.
Neither one is better than the other. The quick thinker handles in-the-moment action well, but is so wrapped up in the “now” that it’s difficult for them to get too deep on a topic. The slow thinker meditates on ideas for a while, carefully chooses (almost always the correct) path, and steadies the course. Prick and pull at this one for a quick thought, and it comes out flatter than you could imagine.
Until we know what actual intelligence is, trying to act like one form is objectively better than another is just silly.
I think lots of the graybeard devs are deep thinkers, not fast thinkers. I think fast thinkers were pulled towards the “move fast and break things”-style companies.
Maybe a nonsequitur but in grad school I was in a study group which naturally split into two. In one group (mine) we'd read a problem and immediately charge in, sometimes have to backtrack, and meander around until the answer revealed itself. In the other they would plan everything out, and figure out what they needed to do, and from that the answer would reveal itself and they would write it all down.
The interesting part is neither group really finished the problem sets faster than the other. Individual problems my group could, if we knew or guessed the right path immediately, be faster. But over the span of a 10 question p-set it would mostly come out in the wash and both groups would finish in roughly the same amount of time.
I often think back on that when reflecting on how I still work that way years later.
I think it can be OK to have a risk if that's the plan of trial and error.
It's when you don't know, or have an inkling of what's wrong but aren't sure where to start probing, that it's better to have a plan or call in experts in an unfamiliar area.
>R&D is their forté
not correcting you, just edifying everybody on the history of forte's place(s) in the English language
in English, there is no word forté because such a word does not exist in French (and English and Italian don't use diacritic accents)
forte pronounced "fort" is the french word for "strength" (feminine form if memory serves)
forte pronounced "fortay" is the italian word for "loud"
the word most people mean most of the time is the French one because that word entered into English back when most latinate words did, with the Norman invasion in 1066. (French didn't use diacritics then either)
only in the music context do we use the Italian word.
Interesting! Grew up attending chorus for years and years, so the music form is the only one I’ve ever seen :)
I think everyone is capable of both and should strive to go for both, it's just a toolbox. I certainly have flip flopped between them over the years.
one of you uses more test-time compute before giving your answer :)
is the first person actually incapable of thinking deeply or do they just prefer the other way/have a lower barrier for what is worth saying.
I find i like to sit back and think in a group conversation and chime in at the right moment with something insightful, where other people are just going next token prediction stream of concious blabbering.
They can think deeply, it just takes active effort, whereas the broad-and-quick approach comes naturally. Sometimes sitting back and listening can be fun for them.
>Until we know what actual intelligence is....
Under rated line.
We dont know what intelligence is, let alone if AI is it...
>I guess if you take a long time to do something, people kind of forget that you're there.
This is so true sadly, group conversations are very exhausting to me. It is a constant back-and-forth and if you want to say something you need to do it "quick" or the topic shifts.
>Also, my ‘processing time’ in conversation is slow. So I’ve realised that I’m better off focusing on writing as a way to communicate. Writing to me feels more suited towards slow, patient thinkers.
I feel the same way, I try to avoid arguments (like something political with friends (harmless, don't worry)) because it takes me too long to say what I want to say, and my sentences jump around awkwardly trying to express the point I want to make. I was also made fun of in school due to that... Also I tend to mispronounce some words then which makes it even more awkward. People often think that if you don't respond to an argument in two seconds you "lose"...
This also got waaay worse when I first drifted into burnout two years ago (still have, not recovered).
> People often think that if you don't respond to an argument in two seconds you "lose"...
This one is especially annoying! A lot of people seem to get away with extremely poorly thought out arguments, relying entirely on logical fallacies, or using factually incorrect information, just because they are able packaging it as a fast comeback. On the other hand, people seem to treat not being able to remember details about something or taking a little time to think before replying as meaning that the underlying facts are incorrect. Surely the underlying facts does not depend on the debaters ability to remember them on the spot, but it seems like a lot of people treat it that way.
Sorry to hear about the burnout. I hope you are on the right way to recovery. Hang on and take care! I hope my 2 cents as an internet stranger can help.
Thank you, I'm working on it. It's a rocky path and very difficult to find another job.
don't blur the line between a burnout and a shit market tho. The problem is not on you
Yeah took me some time to adjust to that :/
These are symptoms of other people being unable - and/or unwilling - to communicate properly, not you communicating slowly. If people actually cared about having a real back-and-forth conversation - and not just waiting for their time to speak - then a friend talking a bit slowly or jumping around trying to get their point across wouldn't be an issue. Have a bit of patience and take a good-faith interpretation of what they're trying to say...
In my experience, this is how it goes whenever there are more than 2 people in a conversation. The speed of the topic switching defaults to the fastest processor in the group, basically excluding any slow processors from the conversation.
> This is so true sadly, group conversations are very exhausting to me. It is a constant back-and-forth and if you want to say something you need to do it "quick" or the topic shifts.
The exhausting part is that most people like to talk at least as much as they listen, which is hard to do in a group setting.
It also takes me longer to understand things and it takes me longer to get to delivery than many of my peers.
However, I have consistently noticed that the quickness comes at the price of a shallow understanding, and the delivery is also often lacking in those who move fast.
For me, I have to really grok the thing I'm focussing on. I have to internalise it somehow and build a mental model. Once I've done that I am actually faster and more productive than the ones who leap on things quicker.
Me too, the hard part is showing that this slower, more methodical process is more valuable than the flashy, quick shallow approach. And it means I might have to chew on a problem for a bit before delivering anything, even a proposal or design much less a product. But for a longer time scale it does pay off.
Fortunately I've had a few good managers and business partners in my career that recognize the value, but it's far from universal and I sometimes have a hard time communicating it myself in the face of the common move fast agile culture that is so prevalent in most of tech.
Yes, I have also had to have many difficult conversations with managers over the years who were worried that I wasn't going to deliver. All I could do was reassure them that this was my process; it will start slowly but will then accelerate dramatically. Once they've seen it work it gets easier of course!
You may have ADHD. I’ve never described myself as dim-witted, because I’ve never viewed it so negatively, but your description fits me exactly. Even down to the spatial awareness thing and biographical details like switching from math to theoretical physics in college.
I eventually got diagnosed as an adult with ADHD, and got treatment. Stimulants help me be significantly more “quick-witted” to use your terms. I would rather describe “being slow” as being in a constant state of distraction, which prevents me from being efficient with the task at hand. Stimulants fix this.
However having grown up scatterbrained, some aspects of it are now architectural in my brain and aren’t changed by slightly modifying the brain chemistry. I now see that as a superpower through, as it gives me a different perspective for seeing problems, and is great for strategic thinking. Stimulants just give me focused control over it and the ability to turn it off and on as the need arises.
I think I wouldn't be so quick to conclude ADHD or suggest stimulants. I have ADHD too, and I know exactly what you're talking about. Those alarms in your head going off. Where everything is an emergency so nothing is. I'm not so sure it is being "scatterbrained" as much as it is over-parallelism.
But the OP's points have more complexity than they think (in my main comment[0] I mention depth being missing). Let's take the quick math one for example. They made the assumption that a calculation was being made. This seems reasonable, but if you're doing a lot of those calculations you'll memorize them. I interestingly have experimental data on this. After my undergrad I had to get an EKG done and the tech asked me to do some basic math questions to get some readings. Problem is, I could answer her questions but she got almost no signal. They were just too easy for me because I was so familiar with them. You don't need to calculate what's in the cache. So we moved to 2 digit multiplications and signal was mixed. Good correlation with being able to leverage previous calculations. So then I had her and my dad pick 3 random numbers and I would multiply those in my head. That did the trick and she said it light up like a Christmas tree (I do this visually, so it really was using more parts of the brain than she was likely used to seeing).
My point is, there's more nuance to this. Your brain isn't just a computation unit, it has various levels of storage with different speeds and capacities, it has different accelerators and processing units that can be leveraged if programmed in the right way. The problem with the OP's assessment is they've measured output speed and assumed this is enough information to calculate FLOPS, but a slower processor can win that race if it just is pulling from cache. A slower processor can win in aggregate if it has more parallelism. The problem is that they're measuring something different than what they think they're measuring, even if it is right up to a first order approximation.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242293
“May have” doesn’t indicate conclusion - you’re the one being quick. That said, the article really does seem to describe the symptoms of inattentive ADHD with a breadth of cues and close precision.
As to the rest of your comment, not to diminish your experience, it’s really difficult to tell what you’re trying to say, and how that has to do with any of the very specific symptoms and experiences mentioned.
This is my first time hearing about inattentive ADHD, but it seems to describe me pretty well. Do you have experience looking into this as an adult? I feel like there’s such a stigma around ADHD diagnoses and people seeking stimulants.
Not OP, but I was diagnosed as an adult. There are brief screening questionaires therapists or general medicine doctors can use as a quick first step. But when I was given one of these tests, I scored a couple points under the threshhold. Later, when a thorough, proper battery of tests was administered by a psychiatrist at a major university medical center, I was found to have significant ADHD impairment. So if you think you may have ADHD, it's worth seeking out a proper evaluation from a psychiatrist. The battery of tests will take multiple hours.
I haven't had a lot of issues getting treatment after my diagnosis, personally. I know some people do have issues, and there are inconveniences like annual drug tests I have to take, but my only regret is not getting diagnosed ten years earlier.
Hey, thanks for the response. I'm in my mid 30s and have considered myself a "space cadet" my entire life. School was absolutely brutal for me, and I'm still amazed at myself for getting through it. Assumed that most of inability to focus was because of mild depression and anxiety, but I'd like to see if something else is going on. Feels like I've been living in a daze for decades.
Guess I'll reach out to a GP first and see what they think. Appreciate you.
Good luck.
Not much to add vs the other comment. Look into ADHD symptoms - inattentive traits that you relate to are all part of that. Upon reflection you might relate to some other symptoms as well. You might want to read about how all of diagnostic criteria are defined in the DSM-5, which is likely similar to what your psychiatrist will rely for diagnosis.
Disregard the stigma, it is mostly confined to people fully ignorant as to what ADHD is, how stimulant medication works, and its well proven safety profile.
My comment is saying "I think it is more likely that OP is comparing apples to oranges. They assume they're interchangeable because they're both roundish fruits, but if you're interested in health benefits then you need to consider additional aspects." It's just longer because I'm specifying aspects and providing an example.
> I had to get an EKG done…
Must have actually been an EEG by the description, right?
Thanks, I looked to confirm and I'm pretty sure you're right. It was over a decade ago and well... I'm not that kind of doctor lol
Given the whole point of the article is that this person's thinking style isn't dysfunctional, in fact seems to be working out just fine for them, why wouldn't we just look at this and say "this is a normal way for a human being to operate" and refuse to pathologize it? Why drug your way to a different thinking style?
Everyone is on their own journey and there are so many reasons a person might think a particular way.
The comment you are responding to is just trying to explain their own situation and say the person who wrote the article might want to investigate a similar experience compared to their own. I read the article as one where someone is exploring and ADHD is would be exploration. I would specify that ADHD inattentive type is the one that it reads most like to me.
I don't see why you'd want to knock someone's choice of treatment for a particular condition. You might not see a need for a particular treatment option, but many folks get relief from anxiety or other things such as RSD while being medicated for ADHD. They can make their own decisions.
> The comment you are responding to is just trying to explain their own situation and say the person who wrote the article might want to investigate a similar experience compared to their own.
I appreciate their perspective. I might want to get checked for ADHD at some point as well, if doing that might improve my quality of life down the road then great, if it turns up nothing, then I'd still be glad to have looked into it.
Because inattentive ADD has done real damage to my life, both personally and professionally. It very nearly destroyed my marriage.
I politely suggest that you check your anti-medication bias at the door. OP is describing a lifetime of feeling s/he is a failure and unable to achieve the goals he would otherwise set for themselves. This is classic ADD symptoms, and the only real therapy with lasting results is medication.
For ADD people such as myself, medication is life-altering in a positive way. I clearly divide my life before and after as different eras: before was a lifetime of failure measured against my own goals (not only external / work requirements), and after a still-ongoing period of self-empowerment and growth.
Yet people such as yourself would attempt to guilt trip and shame us from seeking the only thing which actually helps: modifying our brain chemistry. Why? What reason do you have for shutting down discussion of taking medicine to address a medical condition?
I did struggle my whole life with "attention". Like my attention span in meetings is awful. I record everything so I can listen to later. it's time to look for a doctor.
Question: does stimulants interfere in other areas of life in a bad way (like sexual life etc)?
Depends on the drug and dosage. AFAIK stimulants generally don't have severe or long-lasting impact on those areas.
Both Ritalin and Adderall (as well as variants like Vyvanse) are vasoconstrictors and therefore affect blood flow. This leads to some mild discomfort. "Adderall dick" is a temporary condition comparable to "pool shrinkage"; it doesn't affect everyone, depends on the dose, and neither impacts performance--it still responds to sexual stimulation.
Stimulant usage can mildly increase blood pressure, which over the very long term (years, decades) can lead to ED and other more serious issues. However that is part of why these medications require close supervision by the prescribing doctor, who will add other medications like lisinopril to counteract those effects, if observed.
In rare but reported cases it can lead to some weird effects, like dissociating orgasms from physical climax -- you can find lots of self-reports on Reddit about these sorts of things. None of these are permanent and go away when the drug leaves your system.
In the vast majority of patients, none of the above happens, and I'm not aware of a single thing that is permanent (other than the effects of high blood pressure over time if you let that go unwatched). This is unlike, for example, SSRIs which have have permanent effects on sexual well-being. I bring this up because some doctors prescribe SSRIs as a first-line, so they don't have to prescribe controlled substances. Don't let them do this to you -- antidepressants can have some insanely bad (and in some cases, permanent) side effects, drastically alter your personality, and are not considered the standard of care for ADHD.
Thank you for the detailed reply! Really appreciate it.
I take SSRI since 2019 because of generalized anxiety disorder, but I'm much better now, my life changed a lot (for the better) and want to stop to take it or change for something else, because I'm already in a low dose but delayed ejaculation is something that I hate, I never had problems with it and the drug takes it to another level.
So I'll check what is a safe combination to perhaps threat both. My attention span really annoys me.
ChatGPT told me about vortioxetine for attention disorder and anxiety, which I'll discuss with the doc.
Thanks again!
Hold on, I'm not saying you should do anything differently than you and your doctor worked out. I have no idea what your situation. I'm reacting to a comment that looked at someone who feels their situation is going just fine and responded by suggesting medication.
I didn't read OP as "feel[ing] their situation is going just fine." That was certainly the tone he was projecting, but the actual content he discussed was a lot of coping strategies for what he sees as his own mental handicap. The purpose of my comment was just to point out, in case he wasn't aware, that it may in fact be a condition that can be medically treated.
To make an absurd comparison, it's as if he wrote a whole blog post about his sailing hobby and how he deals with scurvy on long trips. Maybe there's a lot of innovative tricks he throws in there, along with lowering of expectations -- scheduling the rough legs of the journey to be right after leaving port, before the symptoms set in. The intention of my post was: "have you tried taking vitamin C?"
Stimulants have this effect on ADD people. We don't feel the euphoric highs other people report, nor does it have much in the way of negative side effects. It's a pill I take once a day which gives me control over my life and my well-being. We celebrate neural-diversity and rightly so, but after living many decades of my life as a neuro-atypical person, it is wondrous to be able to just take a pill and be 'normal' for a day, where normal here just means "able to do what I want, when I want to; be aware and present in the moment; and live without regrets."
Sorry for snapping at you earlier, but those of us that choose medication end up having to deal with a lot of this societal judgement crap. Judged by the doctors and pharmacists who treat us as criminals, judged by schools and teachers who think stimulants are overprescribed, and judged by generally everyone when the topic comes up. There's a stigma here and it is a serious issue, so I push back on it when I see it.
> Why drug your way to a different thinking style?
Would you talk this way about statins, PrEP, or ACE inhibitors?
> why wouldn't we just look at this and say "this is a normal way for a human being to operate" and refuse to pathologize it
I don't think it's so much about that... it's more that having a label for a common set of behaviors/symptoms can be a shorthand to explain things more succinctly.
Btw, would you say the same thing about clinical depression? Why/why not?
> Why drug your way to a different thinking style?
Because ADHD (and other things) can be crippling when it comes to actually getting IRL shit that needs doing... done. "We live in a society" is a meme, but there's actually a lot of stuff that can present non-trivial hurdles for neuro-divergent people IRL ... like filing taxes, going to an unemployment office, etc. etc.
(Also, that's not quite what the drugs do if you have ADHD, but I digress)
This is an astute point. I’m a mid-40s mech engineer in the Bay Area. HN is my tribe, by and large. I’ve been bombarded with perspectives that ADHD medication is the answer. (Not officially diagnosed, but I’m confident I meet the criteria and very likely “afflicted.”)
The brain is complex—adapted, or maladapted, for different tasks. My working hypothesis: mine is maladapted to the behaviors currently rewarded in corporate America. And I know I’m not Feynman.
So here I am, stuck in a bi-modal world (or maybe just worldview). This piece hits hard.
I mean, medication is the frontline treatment for ADHD. Research has shown it to be the most effective treatment and to be safe with typically mild side-effects. This is the professional opinion of the medical experts who study this disorder. If anything, it's the oft-expressed skepticism towards ADHD medication that is noteworthy and odd.
Have Americans learnt nothing from the opioid crisis?
I don’t think that’s what the parent is describing it at all, not at the end. It’s a framework for understanding OP’s style of thinking, and connecting it to the research literature - sluggish “cognitive tempo” is the clinical jargon.
Well that's sort of the fun things about psychiatric "disorders", in many of them you can genuinely ask is this difference with the brain actually harmful unto itself or is it harmful because of the way society is set up?
I have struggled with this myself with ADHD where I think my brain is great and it is society that is wrong as many of the ways I do things/see things/operate are subtly shunned by society and the way it works. Everything from the typical 9-5 (my brain works best 11-7), to most white collar careers revolving around stationary work at a desk (I love difficult mental work, but think better when I'm moving around), etc.
I don't think my brain is wrong or performing poorly, I excelled at school but did not learn much from lecture style formats (figured out how to study on my own). But I have gone back and forth with medication because it is very, very difficult to construct my life in a way that plays to my strengths when they are so different than the norm. Medication helps my brain fit into society better, but I don't think it improves my brain function.
Parent post clearly explained the advantages and disadvantages of stimulant use and how they are useful in different situations. Nobody is saying it's dysfunctional. This isn't reddit, you don't need to always be searching for something to be outraged about.
Wow, this got long.
TL;DR: The author, by their own words, is simply coping. ADHD is a disorder, not a "different way of thinking" one chooses to "drug your way" out of. Discovering one has ADHD can be a huge relief. Generally, if you have it, you want to know.
---
I disagree with your reading. The article describes the mechanisms the author has developed to cope with their "thinking style." Whether they merely have a unique thought process, or they are suffering from a common mental disability, their optimistic, solution-oriented attitude is adaptive and healthy.
> I'm not a quick witted person. In fact, I’ve always been worried about my brain’s slow processing time.
> But recently, I've realised that slow processing time is not as much of an issue as I thought it was. And even if I was wrong about that, I still think I’d do better for myself by leaning into it, instead of spending energy trying to fight it.
The author has "always" been worried about this. But he's realized it's "not as much of an issue." It reads to me like the author is working to cope with a long-standing difficulty. And they do not say that they have overcome the difficulty, but only that they've found certain approaches to be superior to others.
If the root cause of this long-standing, much-vexing difficulty might be a well-understood condition with standard methods of treatment that have been helpful to many people, it's reasonable to think the author might appreciate that suggestion.
Also, ADHD is not a "different thinking style" anymore than anxiety, depression, or autism are "different thinking styles." It can feel like that to someone who hasn't been diagnosed yet, and even many people diagnosed with ADHD will downplay the condition as being different--not worse. Furthermore, there are even doctors who will indulge in this wishful rhetoric. This is not unlike those in the Deaf community who assert that deafness isn't a disability[1].
In fact, ADHD is a mental disorder. It does not give one special powers of creativity or insight or anything else in compensation for the lack of executive function and emotional regulation. As Dr. Russel Barkley says[2]:
> Now let's be clear, this is a very serious disorder. This is not some trivial little fly-by-night disorder.
> Also, to emphasize something which I don't think is emphasized enough: ADHD is no gift. There is no evidence in any research on any of hundreds of measures that we have taken that show that ADHD predisposes to anything positive in human life. Now let's be clear, ADHD is but a small set of hundreds of psychological abilities that people will have, and many people may be gifted and talented in various aspects of these other human abilities, but never attribute that giftedness or that success to ADHD itself.
I know you hold no malice in your heart, but your comment has drawn several indignant responses because it expresses an attitude that those with ADHD frequently see, and one that easily shades into an outright stigma towards people with ADHD.
I'm not saying that you were saying this, but many people seem to think that people with ADHD are pathologizing normal difficulties and using it to get their hands on fun drugs.
> You get bored at work. Sure, everyone gets bored.
> You have a hard time starting big projects. I can relate.
> You lose track of time sometimes. Me too!
> You know, it kind of seems like you have all the normal struggles in life we all do, but instead of bucking up and just getting stuff done, you've decided to cry to a doctor so you can get cheap addies.
There is nothing admirable about refusing to acknowledge a mental disorder. ADHD is more or less severe in different people, and it's perfectly valid to make an informed choice to forego any treatment for any condition. But it isn't doing the author or anyone else any favors to "refuse to pathologize it" by ignoring the resemblance to a common disorder.
The other part of the puzzle you are missing is that getting diagnosed with ADHD was a hugely positive, life-changing event for many of us who were not diagnosed until adulthood.
To live with undiagnosed ADHD is to live with a condition that makes others see you--and you see yourself--as chronically late and unreliable, unfocused and slow, and disorganized. You are, by all appearances, lazy, irresponsible, and careless: a bad, virtueless person. And over and over again, you fail to reach the eminently achievable goals you set for yourself.
It's an immense relief to discover your life-long shortcomings are not those of a morally defective soul, but of a medically defective brain. And this relief is entirely apart from the hope that medication or another treatment might help.
So perhaps you can now understand why those who have experienced this unburdening are eager to pay it forward. It's not like being diagnosed with cancer. We've always known the struggle. Now we know the enemy with whom we struggle.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/deaf/comments/134tw70/do_you_identi...
2. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9w6YL5__Z8
Edit: Added a TL;DR, removed an unnecessary quote, and made a couple slight wording changes.
Thank you for this long and insightful post. You put into words the frustration that I felt at Patrick's comment (which I apologized for elsewhere), and communicated it far better.
Heh, I'm glad someone read the thing. After reading your later replies to Patrick, I felt my comments were essentially redundant, so it's nice to hear you appreciate them. I doubt Patrick will scale my wall of text, and I don't blame him, but that's what you get when you rile up a hyperfocusing ADHDer.
Someone with many parallel trains of thought is not necessarily inflicted with ADHD. It's natural for some human brains to race a mile a minute while others to plod along slowly and methodically. I've known very smart people on both sides of the spectrum and it's a pretty wide spectrum.
> You may have ADHD
Don't think this is related to ADHD, I have very serious ADHD but I have no issue keeping up in conversations I am interested in.
ADHD is about where you can put your energy / attention, not if you are fast or slow when you focus on something. If you are very fast when you are interested then you aren't a slow thinker, if you struggle keeping up when you aren't interested due to lack of focus then the issue isn't being a slow thinker its the lack of focus.
My experience as well. I was able to mask my ADHD with my high IQ, but I always felt like everyone else got a memo that I had missed, even when I was able to perform at a high level for short amounts of time.
Been diagnosed last year at age 42 and started taking medication. I think both quicker and faster because I don't get side-tracked and lost constantly. I can participate and even lead complicated discussions now when previously I would drift off because of something someone said that reminded me of something that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
If someone feels mentally sluggish it's worth looking into getting checked out.
> I’ve had one interview where I had to do multiplications really quickly, whilst shouting my name, and doing such-and-such random thing every five minutes.
I think the whole “I would stand up and walk out of that interview” trope is a little overused but … I would stand up and walk out of that interview. Was that a real situation?
I’ve never actually done this. But I’ve fantasized about preparing several interview questions for the company I’m interviewing at. They forget that interviews are a two way street.
If I like them (and the process was bearable), I would ask nothing. If I’m mildly annoyed, something “simple” yet patronizing like fizbuzz. If I’m REALLY annoyed then something wildly specific and pedantic.
Interviewer: “do you have any questions for me?”
Why yes, a chicken, fox and sack of flour need to cross a doubly linked list, how would you flip the list inside out from the middle while counting the number of pingpongballs that can fit into 747 VW Beatles.
Never ask nothing if you like them. Always have some keen-sounding questions to ask.
When it comes to hiring decisions if there are tied candidates but only one position it can often come down to candidates A was quiet and didn't ask any questions and seems disinterested, but candidate B had loads of questions to ask at the end and seemed really interested and keen and wanted to know x, y, and z.
Who do you think gets hired in those scenarios.
But yeah it is sometimes tempting to turn the tables :). So far no one has done it to me, but not sure what my response would be. "Haha nice joke! Ok we're outta time thanks for coming!" I guess!
I think asking some intelligent questions about the business or the work is a MUCH bigger advantage than just a tiebreaker.
It demonstrates a LOT about how well you will work out at the company, how interested you are in it, how much of a self-starter you are.
Plus, asking intelligent questions about team dynamics, or how a company prefers to do X workflow, also show that you understand the importance of those things. If I am evaluating a candidate, those types of questions would show additional areas of skill and knowledge that person possesses that may not have already come out through the rest of the interview.
If you already hate them asking no questions is fine - you already know you wouldn't accept the job if offered so you should just say that and ask how quick the interview can end (sometimes they have quotas to fill and since you already have blocked off the time it costs you almost nothing to stay and can be a polite way to help someone else thus doing a good deed).
If you are inclined to like them enough to accept a job you need to ask questions! You need to be sure your inclination is correct. The worst case is you accept a job and realize after a month it is a bad job - all your other leads have gone cold and unemployment won't like you quitting now (check your local rules for if you can collect and if so what, but beware that you may have to keep working while looking for a job which is hard)
Of course there are different situations. If you are signing a 1 month contract you sill are watching your other leads anyway in that month. (or they are paying you enough to take 3-6 months off looking for the next contract)
Oh for sure. Ask questions, just not annoying whiteboard questions. Also I hate this “ask us anything” part of the interview. It’s so performative.
It should be rephrased as “the jeopardy round” since it’s still about the candidate, but phrased backwards. And it’s not a time for REAL questions, it’s a time to show you’re smart and attentive but not TOO smart, you want the interviewer to feel good about themselves so they can feel good about you.
> what my response would be
I don’t ask candidates to do anything I wouldn’t put up with. It would be unusual but I would be game (if they were serious). Fundamentally that’s what my fantasy is about: a world where interviewer and interviewee have mutual respect for each other.
In the recent past I’ve asked candidates to walk me through code they’ve written. I’m super happy to reciprocate for 15 min and I think the candidate (if they’re working with me directly) would get a lot out of it.
I'm sorry, is that 747 different VW Beetles, or one VW Beetle that's scaled up to be 747-sized? If it's scaled up, is it so they have the same length, or area? Neither is relevant (just tell me the area to fill with balls), but I'd like to know, anyway.
"I...I don't know that!" [Interviewer is violently ejected out of the window]
It’s a trick question. The number is a distraction. If they don’t ask the model year of the VW Beatle they’re clearly not detail oriented and can’t be trusted. /s
Sure, interviews go both ways, but there’s a major difference in what each side wants from the other. The company wants someone who can deliver software and architecture, which requires substantial vetting. The main thing the employee wants (in most cases) is money, which is far easier to determine the value of (I’d consider “what’s the position pay?” a perfectly reasonable question when interviewing someone).
The employee also wants to understand working conditions like company culture, overtime expectations, etc.theres lots of fuzzier questions you can and should ask in interviews because interviewers will almost never intentionally reveal this information if asked directly.
The pay question is valid, but not appropriate for a technical interview. If someone asked me I wouldn’t even know the answer. That would be a question for the recruiter or possible engineering manager.
I think it’s 100% okay to ask about pay in an interview but not okay if it’s the only thing you ask about.
For me: I care about the day-to-day of who I’m working with and what that dynamic is like (in addition to money and benefits).
The only pay question I can answer is how realistic getting the promised bonus is. I've worked in places where there was a bonus plan that could pay nice, but in practice we got $200 one year, nothing the next, and then it ended. I've worked in places where on a bad year the bonus was $15000 (after taxes and 401k deduction) and it went up in good years. I can't tell you what your pay will be, I know your grade so I could look up the range but I don't remember it (even for my grade I don't remember)
What you really should be asking is what the company is like to work for. Is there set/expected working hours (can you accept those hours). How often are there lunches that in practice are mandatory? Do people really play ping-pong or are the tables just for show / after work. Is there a dress code? How much notice is required for vacations. Will they tell you that you can't take vacation at times, and if so when. What do they expect you to do that isn't in your job description (that is as a programmer are you also expected to talk to customers). What is the dress code. Anything else that might affect your ability to work there.
There are also questions they are not legally allowed to ask (family status, disability not relevant to the job...). However you might want to reveal that you are/have one of those things so they they will pass you over now (they can always find an excuse once they know they won't hire you) if they care instead of latter. Hopefully this never comes up (or if it does they turn out not to care and so hire you anyway) but depending on your situation you might decide it is better to reveal it now rather than dealing with them finding out later. This is food for thought, not something I think is needed.
Presumably - in a rational interview process - base compensation would be disclosed prior to the technical.
> The main thing the employee wants (in most cases) is money, which is far easier to determine the value of
Money isn't important if you never see it. If the employer can't solve leetcode on the spot, how are you to believe they will be able to figure out how to make payment?
They studied math, so it was probably for a quantitative finance job where I've seen (quite a few!) other people talk about similar interviews. Stuff like computing standard deviation confidence intervals or deciding which of two strategies are higher expected value with only mental math and a few seconds of thought.
This makes me skeptical of his claim that he is actually slow. I think it's like he felt like he couldn't keep up or imposter syndrome, but this is true of the vast majority of people. Most people find those interviews hard. That is the point...they are supposed to be challenging.
I have to imagine thats an interview for a role where quick maths and approximations are standard part of the role... otherwise wth
I think it's more like coming up with heuristics to approximate an answer quicky, even if the answer is wrong . With option trading, being able to intuit what the option should be priced at.
Option trading was my first thought too. I went on a tour of the CBOE years ago with some former pit traders and they setup a mock scenario as if we were in the pits during an active trading day, to teach us how all that worked. I was thoroughly impressed by the ability these guys had to do all this math in their head, and maintain the bottom line of a complex position, all while surrounded by chaos.
It wasn’t mid-question, but I once left an interview loop after the worst 1hr session of my life. The interviewer put some React question in front of me then said “okay I’m going to go work now.” ???? I was already there and it was an easy question so I just did it, but after that I emailed the recruiter to say “no thanks” and moved on with my day. Still felt pretty good!
Maybe he interviewed to be an astronaut? These kinds of psychological tests are done in niche areas, but it is really unusual.
This absolutely resonates with me.
I have always felt that my verbal recall skills and the size of my lexicon do not correspond strongly to the quality of my ideas.
Which is unfortunate because I believe most people over-index on these attributes. folks with extremely high wit and low/average critical thinking, I.e Russel Brand types are extremely persuasive due to their ability to be so _accurate_. But accuracy doesn't matter if you're not shooting at the right target. We confuse accuracy with truthfulness. It is some sort of cognitive fallacy our brains short circuit to.
The best folks in our position can do is find work that allows our results to speak for us. And yes, write. Find the time to write. Strategically position yourself such that the battleground is async written text.
That’s tough in an age where nobody really reads anymore
someone's reading this comment right now but they probably don't really understand what the point of it is
I have thought of myself as a slow thinker but have shifted to the view that it's more about myself putting a higher value on the thoughts that inherently take time to reach.
Other, "quicker" people are satisfied with superficial ideas and sometimes don't even care about factual correctness. But when I finally form my opinion, it is always very considered. When quick people are questioned it's often evident that depth is lacking.
So I am slow only because I do alot more processing, simply put.
True depth of thought is often achieved through exposing your ideas to others. It’s scary and uncomfortable, but ultimately you might spend months refining an argument that the first other person to look at will find a flaw in. We don’t see our own blind spots (by definition).
If you spend months in isolation, true, but if it is a matter of answering something on the spot vs the next day that is not a problem.
But the main point of my comment was that the situations in which I have felt slow, I have later realized that is only because some other people confidently state the first thought that comes to their mind. They are quick to answer but not any quicker to the final conclusion (which may be days away).
And depending on maturity and team dynamics, that may or may not be bad thing. A couple of people confidently spitballing some bullshit between them can reach a solution quite nicely if there is no prestige involved and a shared understanding that "oops, this was wrong, try again" is an expected part of the process.
I am a slow thinker but learnt a trick early on from an American girl I met in a bar: she said that a lot of Americans think and are perceived as quick thinkers but often it's not the case: they just don't stop talking. And if you keep talking, about whatever (no one listens anyway), indeed you get ahead. I met that girl when I was 19, now i'm 50 and still it works well in social settings. People like me at parties as just blabber on wherever you put me. But when you ask me a question about math or software, I am quiet for too long, which makes me better at those than many I think as I see many of my colleages just blabber on about those things too and, while seemingly quick, they are often very wrong and shouldve kept their mouth shut.
As an American I see this a lot (talking to fill the spaces), and it’s really irritating. I have family members who do it, and it’s really hard to have meaningful conversations with them. My relationship with them suffers, too. One of them chastised me once for not sharing information about myself, my reply was “every time I start to you change the subject” … that was met with stunned silence. It got marginally better after but reverted to the mean fairly quickly.
Listening is a great skill to have.
I fully agree, but some people are attracted to this space filling 'switched on' (it's not, I am thinking about something completely different and just generating random output with the speech center of my brain) peolple; it's some kind of a hack to be 'liked' and 'thought off as being a fast thinker'. I never use it with friends or colleagues. But it works very well in interviews, parties, social gatherings, VCs etc.
I sometimes have to yell "shut up" when this gets too much for me. I can't get a word in because they are filling space (sometimes complaining that I don't talk enough).
I write about doing high-risk, impactful and neglected science. Particularly in physics, biophysics and biosecurity. Ex-Cambridge Maths. Ex-Goldman. Currently at hedge fund but no finance content here.
Judging by this person's bio, I am sure he is not actually slow, at least not as defined by IQ. You don't land those jobs and credentials by being slow. Getting a quant job for example requires being able to think fast on one's feet to answer interview questions.
I think it's more like his working memory speed is not up to his satisfaction or subjectively he feels slow, but relative to everyone else or general population, he is not actually slow, much in the same way a runway model may feel fat due to body dysmorphia, but is not actually fat.
My first real struggle with slow processing time was when I started to play competitive volleyball in high school.
the vast majority of people who try a sport will suck at it, and many are still bad even with practice, hence why so few become pro. it has nothing to do with mental slowness.
It's like when Einstein felt he was bad at physics or math. No, he was brilliant at it, but he thought he was not good enough to solve the problem he wanted to solve, which had also vexed everyone else too.
I think the author nearly touches on something when he uses the phrase "slow, patient thinkers" towards the end. He's actually a patient thinker. Sometimes that feels like being slow, because you're not jumping at a constant stream of ideas. But there are problems that patient thinkers will take their time to solve, whilst "quick" thinkers will simply give up or move onto something else.
Yeah this article kind of feels like an NBA benchwarmer complaining how unathletic they are, despite being more athletic than 99.99% of the population.
I went through an autism assessment about a year ago. Part of that was getting an IQ test. I scored well in Verbal Comprehension and Perceptual Reasoning, but struggled more in Processing Speed. This was accounted for by giving two scores, the Full Scale IQ, and the General Ability Index (GAI). The GAI deemphasizes the processing speed, as raw speed to an answer usually isn't that important these days. I was told the having a larger gap between these numbers is one indication that autism might be in the picture.
I feel like I have a lot to say about this because I've actually been at both ends of the spectrum at different points of my life.
Going into college I was an extremely quick witted person, but I was also at the beginning of a depressive episode. Over the course of 10 years (and 8 years of therapy), I developed into the slow thinker that I am now. The reality is: I actually think my quick wittiness was only possible because I was overlooking a ton of mistakes. I was an incredibly certain person, but I didn't have the foundation necessary to be as sure of myself as I was. Going to therapy made me more cautious about thinking I knew how others thought and felt, and I realized that, by being so quick, I was dominating other people and failing to actually gain any real input or information from them.
The best way to describe it is biologically IMO. It's the difference between a precocial and altricial species: A precocial species matures quickly because it has strong instincts. It's born knowing what to do and how to do it, but because it's ruled by its instincts it can't be creative. It responds to each stimulus the same way each time. An altricial species is born with less knowledge. It has to spend time learning, but because it learns, it can pick and choose its response to different stimuli, and so it exhibits greater creativity.
Maybe I've gone too slow and I feel like I'm starting to pick up speed again these days, but I'll never think less of a slow person. Maturation is not necessarily a good thing. IMO the longer you can go without maturing, the better.
>Maturation is not necessarily a good thing. IMO the longer you can go without maturing, the better.
I'm sorry, how does this sentence connects with anything else you've said?
If you’re running a team, you owe it to yourself to start looking for these people. Some of the absolute best engineers I’ve ever worked with are of this sort - they get absolutely swamped in group discussions, but when you get them alone and lower the tempo so they can get done processing, they’re often two or three iterations past the group. Don’t let the showy people throw you off - the people who think before talking are worth their weight in gold.
Paradoxically, these are the ones selected against in "modern" tech interviews.
Yeah, I think too many people go into interviews trying to see if the candidate matches their ideal, as opposed to trying to figure out who and what the candidate is. My best hires have all been people with skills and approaches I didn’t know I didn’t have until I got to talk with them.
I can relate 100%. It affects how I perform in coding interviews, and I also need to work around it in my job.
I also have ADHD and a lot of this matches Dr Russell A Barkley's description of ADHD, particularly when he describes it as a performance and executive function disorder - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzBixSjmbc8eFl6UX5_wW.... ADHD includes much more but this "slow thinking" seems to be a prominent feature.
Lots of undiagnosed autistic people in the comments describing autistic masking and burnout.
Autistic burnout is the name for the unexplainable energy drain when you have to interact with people, because while social interactions are usually as effortless and as easy as lifting a finger for neurotypical people, they can feel like lifting a 100lbs stone for you, because you have to constantly remember how to act and at the same time focus on the moment to not miss a social cue, etc. This is called masking and it drains your energy.
Now watch people under this comment claiming they are not autistic, because how they are able to perfectly socialize, because they have learned to keep eye contact by putting a reminder on a post-it note on their desk for a year in the middle school.
Before discovering I'm autistic I was totally dumbfounded: why I was tired as if I ran a marathon after a meetup with friends for just a few hours? Now I know.
What you are describing in paragraph 2 is not specific to autistic people, although it is common. Introverts in particular can also become drained from social activity. There is some overlap.
Masking also is not necessarily the source (or sole source) of social exhaustion and instead the exhaustion may come due to greater sensory sensitivity and/or cognitive processing requirements, which are common in autism. Furthermore; masking has other purposes such as avoiding bullying, social exclusion, and other forms of negative outcomes; the intent and effort varies by the thing being masked and the person.
YMMV; it's a spectrum.
I believe I'm a slow thinker too and it's always bothered me that in a work context there's an inherent advantage for fast thinkers due to the idea that the optimal way to solve problems is to "just jump on a call/huddle" or hash it out in a meeting. Coupled with the fact that many people never write anything down for asynchronous consumption it can be easy to become a bystander whilst decisions are made.
I feel the exact same. Quick calls and huddles give me anxiety. I can’t think of good ideas until I’ve had solo time to process the problem. Now I’ve resorted to sending my unsolicited ideas hours after one of these calls occurred and to my surprise they’re appreciated by the team so far. Setting a boundary and being vocal about needing heads down time to contribute most effectively could be worth trying.
I take to heart how my stomach reacts whenever I have to jump on a quick call. But you have to do it anyway, and the feeling of having survived those calls is, no doubt, rewarding.
I find it becomes less rewarding over time. Easy to resent the wastefulness of it.
I think of myself as a slow thinker and feel the same as many other comments on this post but I always but this down to being a visual mind and having to draw/picture everything to think it. So in my experience slow thinking is topic dependant; maths, conversations, even code are slow because I have to draw it in my head and it takes time. But give me a spatial/visual problem, like coming up with a plan for garden landscaping, organising room layouts or will this object fit in this space and it takes like 1 micro-second. it's weird.
This is exactly how I'd put it, and also why I absolutely hate context switches. When you're asking me to switch context, for example to a different project, then I have to bring in the project structure, the modules the moving pieces, the problem we're trying to solve, everything before I can remember enough to answer your question.
Totally agree. It takes a while to "load" the project but then once it's loaded moving around a large codebase is a breeze but as soon at the code changes broaden and I slow right down cos I have to rebuild the map with the new additions. only way i can describe it: it's like loading google/apple maps and instead of it showing a low detail view with only the big roads displayed i'm loading the entire super details map, it takes a while but once it's loaded there's 0 lag.
also it's actually reassuring knowing someone else is similar, no-one in my life seems to work the same.
I feel like a simpler explanation is that the author is roughly average in most traits, and comparing themselves to others who are above average in certain traits.
I doubt it's about thinking speed. At times I've thought I was fundamentally deficient in some way, only to realize later that I was catastrophising about a poor performance in something and generalizing that across my entire life.
There is also a lot of variation in our abilities, mostly due to practice. When I've holed myself up in my room working for weeks I lose the ability to socialize in general, let alone make witty comebacks. But once I'm in a social environment for a while I can banter with anybody.
Practice helps of course, but arguing against differences in thinking speed is like arguing against differences in intelligence, or even running speed.
JoelOnSoftware had a great piece back in the day where he mentioned that while he consciously knew what a short sale on an option was, in practice he had to stop and think about how to calculate it, while his financial friends just knew the answer immediately. He drew a comparison to pointers in C, where if you're going to be a C programmer, then pointers should just be intuitively obvious to you and not something you need to think about.
IAW, there are no pure fast or slow thinkers, a lot of this is just how well have you internalized the background material. Having quick repartee in conversation has absolutely no relationship to immediately seeing what the loop variable should be in a programming problem. FizzBuzz isn't quickly solved by decent devs because they think faster, it's quickly solved because it's a trivial problem that doesn't require serious thinking for experienced devs.
When I'm programming for finance or medical, I often have to tell the PM "let's stop here and let me think about this for a day". Because it's not my field, it takes me a while to get my head around it. OTOH, there's very often algorithm conversations where I have to wait for others to catch up.
I'm not sure it is quite that simple. The other day someone asked me about the project I've been working on. The thing I touch nearly every single day and know in intimate detail...
It still took me what felt like a good minute or more of thinking to remember anything about it and more than that to recall specific details of interest. It would take me even longer to think about something that I don't have at the tip of my tongue, so to speak, but I find there is no such thing as an immediate answer for me. That doesn't seem to be true of all others.
I think you're hitting on the fact that there are multiple variables that contribute to "quickness." Having digested a lot of background material is definitely part of it and ties to the higher up posts about e.g. Churchill. Also a way intelligence can correspond to it, in the sense that more intelligent people have often digested more topics. But there also seem to be people who are less distractable, more tuned in to what is going on, and more able to tie current happenings to their body of knowledge and make a joke or whatever.
I resonate highly with this. Especially when brainstorming ideas with my manager. He's very quick with suggestions, and I am always saying ehhh I don't know let me think about it. I have realized that him giving me ideas quickly to iterate on is beneficial because I am always able to refine it. I still do think it is a deficiency in some sense as I would have loved to be one of those guys who could just grok stuff instantly and contribute quicker
The author uses the following examples to describe slow thinking:
> In a mathematics context, it would be doing mental math to figure out things like the split of a restaurant bill.
> In a social context, it would be coming up with witty responses in conversation.
> In a recall context, it would be quickly remembering facts.
> In a sports context, it would be like a badminton player�s quick ability to hit the shuttle in a gap.
> In a job interview context, it would be solving small scale coding problems and quickly designing algorithm
But they are all in fact completely different kinds of thinking, and an individual may be fast or slow depending on the kind. As an example, I have no trouble with 1), 3) and 4), but am abysmally slow with 2) and 5). Am I a fast thinker or a slow one? I also know why 2) and 5) are slow, because they are human interactions and I spend extra time thinking about whether what I wanted to say may offend the other person. That's not necessarily slow thinking persay, but more so overthinking, resulting in a delayed or absent response.
The thing that resonated the most with me was the idea that slow processors need to focus on strategic thinking. I am a 60 year old and now retired software developer. I keep myself busy by actively continuing to code every day. I definitely have experienced a slowing of thinking in the last ten years. I have read that this could be because I have more information to sift and sort but being honest with myself, the machinery is not as well tuned as it once was.
I am fine with all this. I love coding and I doubt I will ever stop doing it for pleasure. I have had to become more methodical and intentional with my time on the laptop but reflecting on this piece, being more strategic would be a wise thing for me to contemplate on.
I consider myself to be a slow-thinker too. I have several above-average people as friends. New stuff (usually some mathematical topic) that takes me a whole day to internalize the basics, I can tell to them in 15 minutes and they will be able to understand it and to immediately connect it with other topics they know. I have not attended a special school for mathematically gifted like some of them. In school and during my first year at the university, I used to think that I am just intelligent enough to have an idea how true intellegent one could be...
I was always bad at solving equations with more than 3 unknowns, since this includes enough steps to have a significant probability that I forget a sign or mix something up - even though the algorithm itself was completely clear to me.
Today I acceppted myself much more: I think my real advantages are that I am a) interested in a lot of things and b) I am enduring in reading about a topic. Even if I need to read explanations of 5 different authors to grasp something, I do so. And I care much less today than ealier. However, I still like to be faster at times.
While I think I am a decent programmer/SWE, I do not like pair programming. My path of coding is not linear and most of the stuff I type will be erased until I am confident about my solution.
And getting enough sleep is also a big issue.
I'm going to propose an alternative explanation. This distinction doesn't exist, or at least not the way it seems.
The "fast thinkers" aren't thinking. They're just doing. Everyone is not only capable of this, but probably behave this way several times a day on certain tasks without realizing it or how it seems to others.
This is beyond mere practice towards a narrow goal. Certain topics just click better due to seemingly unrelated, yet deeply integrated life experiences.
It's not something to worry about since, as the article states, it doesn't affect outcomes much. If anything, "fast thinking" creates blind spots.
I find myself bimodal, when comparing my "speed" to others in social situations.
If there's something that's novel to me, I feel like I'm slower than the average bear. Not massively slower, but with a desire to take the material aside and spend some time alone with it.
But if it's my home ground, if I've been living inside it, I find few people can keep up with me.
At least part of it is that social interaction takes a bit more processing power. I know I get a bit autistic and info dumpy when I know the ground, and that relieves the social pressure (though I know it costs me points too).
The conversation here has been really interesting since it shows we all have subtly different abilities and issues around slow processing.
I am a senior/staff software engineer with 20 years of experience and who would be considered a top performer. Quick wittedness is something I rely on but technical thinking is always slow. White board interviews are nearly impossible. So finding work is ROUGH.
I wouldn't call my self the class clown, but I am often the first one to crack a joke and people look to me for lighthearted fun. I often hope this will save me in interviews as I rely on my past work and personality are my strong traits. All of the jobs I got through this, or from a personal referral. Never through a technical interview.
My way of coping with this has always been to work more hours then everyone else. It helps that I am also more passionate about what I am working on then those around me. I work on open source in my free time, while my co-workers have barely heard of Linux. If it were not for my love of the craft, I be miserable in this industry.
I first noticed this all when I was a kid and started taking more advanced classes. I’d have to take copious notes and deeply review them after class to make sure I knew what was going on. While my friends would listen once and ace the tests. I was also always behind on reading speed since I had to read things 2 or 3 times before the words really registered in my brain.
As a side note, I recently worked with a real version of the oh-so mythical 10x programmer. And he was a college intern! Running loops around the rest of us at our startup. He was doing the work of several of us older programmers. I think most of it was do to his 0-friction processing of information. Read, assimilate, code. Interesting to watch. They do exist.
Dr. Amen has identified at least seven types of ADHD. I have three of them. I’m a slow thinker, but despite being detail-oriented, am not well-organized, make mistakes, am erratic, fairly unpredictable (if anyone needs me as an entropy source for a TRNG?), procrastinate, am on the autism spectrum, have OCD tendencies, have paranoia (also had hallucinations as side-effect of stimulants), am uncoordinated, have treatment-resistant depression, etc.
So, these “you are X, therefore Y” don’t work for me. A lot of people don’t fall into buckets well.
I find myself in both the spaced-out "slow thinker" and witty "fast thinker" camps depending on the situation I'm in and the people I'm with. I think it's less about mental predisposition like the article says and more about how comfortable I am.
When I'm with old friends, processing time feels snappy because I'm less burdened by anxiety and general mental defense mechanisms. When I'm underprepared for a job interview or with a new group of people, the latent anxiety and subconscious doubt uncontrollably slows down the quick processing part of my brain.
My first college girlfriend made me realize that I wasn't a fast thinker. In person our conversations didn't seem problematic to me, but on the phone she would respond too quickly to what I was saying. I wouldn't be able to get into listening mode in time to pick up on the beginning of her replies.
I suppose that different people just have different strengths and mine isn't quick repartee. Another unusual thing I've noticed is my inability to do my best thinking while music is playing. While working briefly at a company to help out some friends I was forced to hear music throughout my time working on location; it was terrible (for me). In school I always did my work in quiet settings.
I was a math major in college and music interfered with my math work more than other subjects. My theory is that math and music both rely on similar mental resources.
I think it can be an error labeling people as "fast" or "slow". I had similar self doubts to the OP during my PhD, where so many people around me would say they "got" a concept and I was just feeling behind. But a few years in, while desperately trying to "catch up" I realized a good portion of the time I was just misinterpreting. Even those tasks aren't as well defined as the OP suggests.
There's another dimension that often is not acknowledged: depth. People have different thresholds at where they're comfortable talking about a topic or saying they "understand". I also don't think there's a strong correlation with the person's intelligence, if anything, a slight bias towards "slower" people being smarter.
You'd never judge how fast someone can run without stating the distance. Your 100m sprint time isn't going to tell us much about your 400m time nor your marathon time, and vise versa.We all think fast and slow at times (intended), and we're all 4 people in the above list on different topics. I think we should just make sure we're judging people at the right race. The trouble is despite standing in front of you, talking face to face, you don't know if in that time they've run a few meters or a few kilometers. I think we'd all do better if we worried a little less about speed. If your destination is nowhere, you get there in the same time regardless of your speed.
>“Your 100m sprint time isn't going to tell us much about your 400m time”
…
Statistically it should actually tell us a lot about your 400m sprint time.
Fair, the analogy has flaws. But did this make my point any less clear?
I’ve been thinking about that in the context of hiring. Some companies require a cognitive test, which is often some kind of Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices. Unfortunately, most companies giving these tests do it with a time limit, thus measuring a speed function, and neglecting other dimensions. Some people think fast, others think deep. We need both.
In college I interviewed at a commodity trader and they made us play a group trading game, I bombed because I wanted to make sure every trade I made was profitable/certain, people who made it to the next round moved quick even if they made somewhat questionable trades. That's when I realised I was not meant to be a commodity trader where decisions need to be made in matter of minutes. It was just so different from the business case interviews I was also doing at the same time where you build a thesis and stress test it and look for areas you missed
I'm also a slow thinker, but I'm doing well on these types of tests, because they are very contained and small, plus I have partly learned to sort of relax my brain and let it work more intuitively.
For me at least, the slow thinking comes in part from being overly reflected. Thought can pull me into a seemingly phased out state where I drill down into it or try to find related connections. I also have trouble to go from thought and abstraction to language, because it's always hard to find the right expression that _really_ fits.
So the larger and more disconnected the possible space is that one could explore, the slower I naturally get before expressing myself.
But these matrices and puzzles are very contained and observable in their entirety. Even though solving these isn't my main forte, they also don't necessarily trigger my slowness to the same degree as other tasks.
If someone uses them in a job interview, they would likely make me a bit nervous, because it feels bad to be stuck or unsure when you're solving a puzzle and that can be draining and distracting for long enough to matter if the test is timed.
But I think if they are used with care, the minimum required score is considerate and they are not the only test, then they might be fine or even useful.
This is a beautiful reflection on your thinking. Thanks for sharing.
I like to think I’m pretty quick at generally getting things done in the context of work, and in my anecdotal experience I can see how it doesn’t actually benefit me all that much.
If I use that capability to work faster/harder/better I still can’t get around the fact that there’s nowhere to be promoted to in my company.
Or there’s the fact that I don’t actually want to be too high of a performer and set high expectations for myself and be saddled with more work.
I also haven’t lucked out with working at the right company at the right time to get promotions. Usually, companies growing fast with a lot of opportunities to make visible impacts allow people to climb the ladder.
I have a family member that did this and now that they’re above the indicator contributor level they report that their job is significantly easier than it used to be, it just has higher stakes and more meetings.
So thinking faster doesn’t magically turn me into a VP or something like that, and thinking fast isn’t even needed for that role.
I am a slow thinker if I need to do some calculations that require a precise answer. For me, it's a memory thing. To be fast you need to memorize patterns, algorithms and data, whether you do it consciously or not. You also need to have a good working memory.
I have a terrible long term memory and about an average working memory.
As a work around, when I don't have to come out with precise answers I got quite good at making aproximations.
As another work around, my brain tries to use data that it can recall with ease such as very fresh data, instead of trying to remember things that might take some time to remember or not remember at all.
While I enjoy debating and long talks about tech, science, culture, history, art etc, I tend to concentrate on stuff I can deduct or think on the moment such as ideas instead of trying to remember stuff.
As a consequence, I tend to suck at job interviews when I am asked to recite things from memory. So before interviews I kind of have to review most asked questions.
I'm a decently fast thinker but a relatively slow learner. I'm good at synthesizing information. It's because I tend to naturally doubt/resist new information and I need to see some proof or utility value before I can fully absorb it. Once I've absorbed information, I can recall it years in the future and can synthesize it with different related information.
I'm grateful for my slow learning because if I had just absorbed everything I was ever told on the first go, I would probably be crazy right now because of how many contradictions I've encountered in the information I've been presented with and how often I've had to re-evaluate my worldview...
You don't want to learn stuff based on what you learned first; what information you retain and decide to build upon should be about what best fits into your existing (hopefully gradually improving) world model.
I think it's great to play to one's strengths, but it's also true that what people perceive as "quick thinking" is often the result of very large amounts of practice. More specifically, people I know who are good at the types of skills described at the beginning of the article (mental math, witty responses, remembering facts, playing badminton to a high level) probably have a knack for them, but there are also types of underlying skills that aren't obvious to someone who hasn't spent a lot of time practicing the activity in question. I'll take two skills that I'm familiar with as cases in point: mental math and tennis (adjacent to badminton).
For mental math, there are all sorts of tricks that allow one to transform the problem into one with fewer values to hold in memory (for instance [1]). There are also lots of different patterns that allow shortcuts in calculation. The more of these one knows (kind of like facts in a trivia contest), the simpler many sorts of mental math problems become. And the more one has practiced, the faster one is at applying them. This is not to say that there aren't people who are exceptionally gifted, but it's also possible to be perceived as "quick-witted" by actually doing a lot of slow thinking ahead of time.
With tennis, sometimes it seems like players have exceptional reaction times (At the highest level, they certainly do!), but one learns over time to move to different areas of the court preemptively based on what the opponent is likely to do. This often shortens the distance one has to run by a step or two, which makes a pretty big difference in reaching difficult balls. Also, time spent practicing with better players who hit harder gradually changes one's perception of ball speed and one's ability to follow the ball all the way to the racket. It's like one's eyes get better, somehow. None of these perceptual changes or positioning habits happen overnight, but with enough stacked skills practiced over time, a person's reaction time appears to get faster even if their absolute reaction time hasn't improved.
Of course there are people with a higher skill ceiling than others, but I also think people write themselves off as being hopeless at something, choose not to practice, and then conclude that they are unsuited to the skill without having better understood what the road to "good" actually looks like.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachtenberg_system
Chess Master at Any Age talks about this on page 55: https://archive.org/details/Chess_Master_at_Any_Age/page/n65...
Thats interesting. I was just thinking about how I am pretty good at Blitz chess, but absolutely abysmal at normal chess, in relation to the OP.
I fit into this category so much and have noticed that it has certain properties. For example, in areas of expertise it took me longer to master, but now that I'm an expert I'm comparatively faster than other experts in the same field.
My only explanation for this is that being 'slow' left me something of an social outsider, and this gave me more time to immerse myself in the things I cared about, and so I went deeper. This applies to a lot of different things.
That said, this slowness has caused me so much agony over the years! But now, like the author, I lean into it and have found many advantages through it.
I've often associated quick thinking with lack of thinking. It's intuitive and prehaps emotional. In some cases folks I've seen who were 'quick witted' completely lacked a filter and it didn't help them at all.
I'd rather go with "‘processing time’ not mattering in any meaningful way".
I dont think slow thinking affects the tasks in the example the same way. I have fairly good reflexes e.g. I am able to return pretty fast shots in ping pong, am able to catch things that slip my grip before they hit the ground etc.
But I am not particularly fast in mental maths.
Depending on how relaxed or engaged I am, I can have a witty reply or no comeback at all. Sometimes I have a reply but it is too sharp for the situation so I hold it back.
I think these engage different classes of thinking.
Its a little unclear in the bulleted list but in the volley ball example it becomes evident the author isn't talking about reflexes.
"Where do I pass the ball to if it comes to me? What is the current formation? Should I try to receive the ball, or will my team-mate go for it?"
There he's describing quick on-the-fly strategic choices eg. what is the best move to make in the next half second? So he can hit the ball but he can't do the quick thinking to know if he should.
I wonder how one can slow down as a fast thinker. In school I used to be very fast with algebra and physics. But the hardest part was to get the numbers right. Just because my brain was too fast to think it through properly. Now when I'm writing code I still sometimes miss this "calculation parts" - some edge cases, maybe syntax, getting the general idea correctly. I did learn to deal with it somehow, but still I wonder how other people deal with it.
I’ll admit that taking a pause and planning isn’t one of my best strengths - I focus too much on experimenting and iteration. I’d love to have OP as a coworker - complementary problem-solving styles.
> The funny part is that now, I come across as 'quicker'. But that's no accident - I'm just reciting things that I've worked on for a long time, slowly, behind the scenes!
Winston Churchill said something to this effect. His quick witted responses were often pre computed in idle time and he would pattern match the situations to see which one fits where/when.
Are you slow, or are you prudent, more risk-averse?
Cause it mayn't be that you're slow, it could just be that you don't want to make a mistake.
I wonder how much of this is due to our own braking circuit. I guess: me in a confident situation will beat my stressed self every single day. The gap is so large.
Preach on, slow thinker here as well. When it comes to social situations our options are avoid them and look anti-social, or embrace them and appear dim.
You can just call yourself a reasoning model now
We're faster when motivated. If you're young and don't like competition and a team sports is imposed on you, you don't even know that you're supposed to be more motivated than you are, to save your team and crush the other one. Motivation and training are hugely correlated to speed IMHO.
Now take your time. Most of the important thoughts in life are ones you can take your time with. It’s all good as long as you get there eventually.
In fact we might all be slow thinkers. Wisdom might mean thinking slowly and carefully, with acknowledgment of as many external factors as possible.
Heck that might be what life is about, getting to the highest possible point of wisdom even if it takes a long time.
In my experience, barring actual disability, those who think "slowly" are often just deeper thinkers.
The ability to think very quickly isn't necessarily better, often it's just the ability to care so little about the consequences that you pick a lane quickly and go with it.
And I say this as someone who is a quick thinker and have trouble focusing for extended time...
I find that small variations in lifestyle also have a massive impact in perceived sharpness. Sleep, exercise, booze etc.
Maybe it's time to rethink what standardized tests measure.
As AI takes over deep analysis, the most valuable skill might not be how well you think, but how quickly you can process information.
In the future, will we be tested on 'thoughts per second' instead of pure knowledge?
Nice read. As another commentator mentioned, this is a great real-world application of Kahneman's 'Thinking, Fast and Slow.' The author's examples illustrates how leaning into System 2 thinking can be a powerful strength, not a weakness.
Note though, that the book has been criticized for low reliability. ("Replication crisis", https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow)
I read the book and many ideas felt like "yes, that sounds reasonable and feels good" but that is a danger of the book. The very seductions it describes applies also to its readers.
Dunning Kruger effect - debunked. Etc.
Interesting. Thanks
Being a slow thinker is simply a negative. That's fine.
However, you can try to be more conscientious. By many, if not most, measures conscientiousness is more important than raw horse power.
The book Thinking, Fast and Slow addresses this topic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
Does it? Some of the words are the same but I think they refer to different things. The author of the article is talking about processing speed for tasks that belong in Kahneman's slow system 2, not about some personal preference/aptitude for slow over fast the way Kahneman means it.
The author is saying in many situations he is applying type 2 thinking when he should be applying type 1. His volleyball experience for example.
The book discusses this. Albeit for most people the problem is the reverse. They are applying type 1 thinking to situations that require type 2.
Not exclusively: playing volleyball is surely a ‘thinking fast’ situation, for instance.
Is there actually such a thing as a "slow thinker"? I find it hard to believe that slow thinking skills doesn't heavily correlate with fast thinking skills, is there any evidence of this?
Note you have to rule out stress, since stress is not related to this. Performing badly under pressure just means you are not stress resistant, it doesn't mean you are a slow thinker, you can still think quickly when you are calm.
So to me it seems like labeling yourself as a "slow thinker" is just putting unnecessary limits on yourself. "I am not good at that, I am a slow thinker" is defeatist.
I think I'm a slow thinker. And that's because I have ADHD and a number of learning disabilities including dyslexia and dyscalculia, and also short term memory problems. It takes me twice as long to do things as normal people. I'm smart, but if the game is "do this thing quickly and accurately" then my results will make me seem very dumb. I did manage to get a Ph.D. but only because it's the kind of thing that doesn't require you to be fast and accurate, but slow and deliberate. I can do that very well. But then people see the Ph.D. and think that means I'm a fast thinker, and they are often very disappointed I am not.
So you're right, I do self limit by labeling myself as a slow thinker, but I think it's for the best because otherwise people overestimate me and end up disappointed.
Yeah, it sounds like this label might fit on you, but I'd still be interested in seeing any studies about it.
I do feel that most people who label themselves as "slow thinker" aren't actually having the kind of issues you describe though, similarly how most people say they have "bad memory" even though most people have typical memory.
This rings of fast-thinker ableism.
Then where is the evidence? I can't find any, mostly find studies about reaction time differences and so on but that isn't what we are talking about.
You are not a slow thinker. You are a deliberate thinker. "Slow" suggests laziness; while "deliberate" implies careful consideration.
Lazy is someone who could be fast but does not want to. Slow is more like, "this is my top speed, can't go faster". Right?
You may be an ent? It takes a long time to say anything. And so we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.
I think there are two main reasons you tend to be a slow thinker: 1. You're not focused enough. (you pay too much attention to what people think about what you're going to do, instead of focusing on the question itself.) 2. You haven't practiced enough. (This is the first time you've encountered this kind of problem.)
i think it just doesn’t matter much.
answering a question in 30 seconds vs. 5 minutes of thought is a very salient distinction in school and in some job interviews. it can impress people. so it feels painful to be slow.
all else equal you’d rather be quick. but it’s only a very small advantage for doing most real work.
I've personally found that the time taken to think through a discussion is akin to an inverse guassian curve:
- on the left tail are people who know little-to-nothing about (or have little experience with) the given topic and neeed a chunk of time
- then as knowledge and experience increases, less time is needed, eventually peaking out at what appears to be instance understanding + ability to communcate effectively about it
- but then something interesting happens when they get even more experience + knowledge: they now know about all the edge cases, things that go wrong, etc. and once again take more time to think through the topic
I've also found that most everyone is the same in this regard. Every once in a while (like any normal distribution) there's an outlier on one side of the spectrum or the other, but for the most part, everyone is the same.
Where people tend to differ is in their coping skills in such situations. Early in my career I had to learn to ask people to explain their thinking. Later it was me slowing down and realizing there's likely more to it than I think (and for those behind me).
Now it's me telling those at the peak of the curve to slow down, because while they may be right, and -maybe- they've thought it through, that's probably not the case.
TL;DR to anyone who thinks they are a slow thinker - you probably aren't (like imposter syndrome), and just need to learn to slow the room down. Doing so will help you, others behind you, and those in front of you.
Tiger: I want to eat you. Me: Hmm... why would you want to eat me, sir?
Well, at least the author is thinking, and that's great...
I'm also a slow thinker and can relate with the author.
But something stands out to me here: The article doesn't mention making music, drawing or similar.
I started drawing a bit this year with a book that focuses on how it feels to draw and how to think about drawing and it has been quite fun and enlightening. It is hard to describe, because it's a unique experience.
The big lesson here for me is that you can switch thinking or rather brain state modes deliberately as long as you know how they feel. It's almost like switching on your intuition and stop getting bothered by your thoughts.
This intuitive mode is much quicker and more automatic. My theory is that slow thinkers have a harder time to get into that state or generally switching back and forth. That's fine in of itself, everyone has different strengths. But it's also not completely out of reach and it can be enriching to practice that way.
Besides being a slow thinker, I am a bad thinker. Now what ?
I've noticed this too and it's always bothered me. It isn't true in everything (I love the split decision making when roller skating in a crowded rink), but when it comes to something like learning new mathematics, my wife is so much faster that I feel like I'm in some kind of slow motion bubble. My processing power just isn't there. The bio-CPU is out of date so to speak. I eventually get there, but in a completely different way after putting together sufficient metaphor and then examples. She just...gets it. Then again, I'm much better than her in other ways (I've never met a stranger). I think brains are just weird.
the less I practice, the slower I get. That's probably a bit like a muscle.
Everyone is socially awkward until some alcohol.
I've been thinking about something related lately.
I've been going through algorithms problems and although I've been a very successful engineer, I feel terrible when solving algorithms problems.
I had a realization, which is that there are two ways to learn:
1. trying to figure out solutions a priori
2. learning from tutorials online or cormen, rivest, stein, etc.
The two approaches are very difficult for me to reconcile. I'm the type of person that always prefers to do (1). That said, a lot of algorithms probably either
1. took a lot of careful studying to figure out
2. were solved by someone who is really brilliant
3. some combination of (1) and (2)
I think we need to remember that in all likelihood, many "solved" problems in technical fields -- which individuals are expected to be able to solve, at least in programming interviews -- probably were solved in the past by taking a lot of careful time by reasonably smart (but not necessarily genius individuals -- though I am sure there are exceptions).
I would much prefer to be able to do (1) for every algorithms problem, but the fact of it is, I think it is near impossible (probably even for very brilliant individuals, maybe folks like Ramanujan excepted -- and even then, he had exposure to building blocks in textbooks).
Calculus is a special case of this, for example. It doubtless took Newton and Leibniz a lot of very careful studying to discover calculus in addition to them being very bright individuals.
Solving a rubik's cube is another example. I suspect (though am not sure) that the the number of individuals who have solved a rubik's cube a priori is extremely tiny. Maybe on the order of dozens (out of hundreds of thousands if not millions?) in the world ever.
I don't think that these issues are clearly articulated enough and it really is a shame.
It's also a tragedy, I think, that we live in a world where:
1. individuals working in technical fields are often expected to be able to know how to do a lot of very hard things that likely took humanity a very very long time to discover
2. there is a tremendous amount of pressure in many contexts to know how to do very hard things in many cases without very much support in learning
For individuals that don't care too much about figuring things out a priori, I think this can be a very very challenging world.
I think one of the ways out is to appreciate the above -- and to carefully, slowly, thoughtfully attempt to reconcile when to try to understand things a priori versus when to try to learn things from principles others have discovered.
The first individuals who were doing things like sorting algorithms, dynamic programming, etc. likely took months if not years to be able to solve problems that are now considered (relatively) trivial and in only a few lines of code.
I think a good, related example to your point is the “2 watched literals” algorithm used in SAT solvers. It uses lazy evaluation to significantly improve the speed of the SAT solver. I implemented an SAT solver a couple of years ago just for learning and when it came to refactoring my code to implement the 2 watched literal I had what felt like a moment of recognition of the cumulative time and effort of many people working in this field of research that it must have taken to arrive at this design. It’s just such an elegant implementation that to me seems it can only have come from deeply understanding the theory and implementation of SAT solvers.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
You could put effort into, first, considering what to think. Which does not necessarily involve thinking. And maybe your're quicker at that.
> those with a slower processing time somehow compensating with other qualities.
Does not list those other qualities.
Reality is that some people are better and some are worse. No need to make half assed excuses about that.
> Does not list those other qualities.
Well, here’s a good one: some people could hugely benefit from slowing down and doing some good old thinking before posting a comment that makes them look like a complete ass.
[dead]
My observation is that people mostly think at the same speed but some are happy thinking less before they draw conclusions. This often comes across as a skill or being smarter (to be fair it's a legit skill whether you agree with the results it delivers). I find a lot of business and management consulting is like this, people happily jump to the closest pattern whether or not it fits in order to avoid thinking and appear clever, and there's very little appetite to actually think deeply about something because whatever you do will need to be run by other people who don't want to think...
I agree. And when this tendency fuses with overconfidence and obstinacy, it becomes the root of much of the world's problems.
> Over time, I’ve noticed that my friends, split between the ‘quick-witted people’, and the ‘non quick-witted people’ seem to have similar levels of achievement. This is really a comment about distributions. If you select a skill, like math or career or whatever, and look at distribution quick-witted people vs the slow-witted people, then it appears that those distributions actually overlap.
Are you familiar with System 1 and System 2?
https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...
Not sure why this got downvoted but I too remembered System 1 & 2 thinking.
It's pretty normal for my comments to get downvoted on HN.
Likely your name attracts downvotes, most HN comments doesn't get any votes at all but likely you attract an extra downvote here and there due to your name.
The sort of people who would downvote me for being some furry really ought to ask themselves, "Why do I reflexively dislike a community that is mostly queer?"
Of course, I suspect most of them already know the answer.