Slow thinking HN members, what are some strategies you've use to overcome and compensate for the lack of quick thinking.
E.g. I found I'm great at analysis or putting together elaborate argument but if I'm in a situation where I need to make a quick decision or get in actual argument I lose all of that capacity and usually drop to the level of IQ 85 if I/m to be judged by the outcomes. Nevertheless a slow thinker does have that potential there he's jut not able to tap into it if he falls into my category. In martial arts, rehearsing overcomes a lot of that - what has worked in real life for you?
I'll do my best to make a high-signal comment here, but it will be drowned by all the other replies, which also likely touch on these points.
First, "slow-thinking" is really just a different way of expressing your thinking and you should begin by leaning into it rather than leaning away. Take time, allow yourself to pause to collect your thoughts. People often interpret quietness (not filler) as intelligence and maturity (because usually it is). Alternatively not answering is also valid.
Second, as a person who is generally regarded as quick-witted and sharp, most of that sharpness comes from either having a few pre-known responses to ideas or anxiously revising situations in my head ahead of time. This is, generally, a bad thing because it means I have made decisions on how I will respond to things without all of the information (as some will come over during conversation). Methodically thinking things through, fresh, is probably the only realistic way to be open minded.
Finally, do your best to avoid situations where a "quick decision" is needed; this is good advice even for "quick thinkers". Fast decisions are often poor ones - the counterpoint to that is dragging something out over many weeks or across many meetings - but putting yourself in a situation where the unknowns become knowns or the scope of the landscape and weight of the decision can be properly assessed is important. What's better is that you will likely be able to have a better paper trail for this.
One absolutely final piece of advice: Avoid using the word "slow", use "deliberate" instead.
If you have to make a 'quick decision', one of the pieces of advice I've heard is to try to make the smallest possible good decision that will move the ball forward. Often getting started is enough to provide more information needed to make a better long term decision, but making the best possible, smallest decision will rarely get you into trouble.
The tradeoff of this kind of incremental planning and execution is that it becomes more reactive and myopic. You can end up stuck at a local maxima or worse, just executing a random walk.
I think a large part of becoming "quick" in an effective way is to improve your triage skills. This is a meta-decision process where you quickly estimate the time-dependent risks and priorities.
It's like gradient descent for humans
From experience, it doesn't work, especially in a group setting. People usually end up trying to guess what you want to say, or add on to what they said, or move on, or something. But they very rarely just wait patiently for me to think things through.
I'd challenge that. I think that being both quick and sharp comes from having an accurate mental model of what kind of information is important for the decision. When new information comes in, you don't discount it, but you have an intuitive feel for how much it should affect your priors.
For example, say that your team works on a minor page of a major tech product, say something that only gets 0.1% of traffic. Your TL reports back that a change they made to an ads widget on the page drops conversions by 20%. The change was done in service of a visual design consistency effort across the company. Normally a drop in conversions by 20% would be an immediate no-go, but knowing that the page only gets 0.1% of traffic, you can run the math and figure this is a 0.02% decrease in revenue, almost imperceptible.
Now imagine that the news was that 3 other key products in the company are dropping the visual consistency effort. The right move here is probably to cancel the project, because if you go ahead with it but others don't, you actually make the consistency worse. You can't know that without knowing the context and reasoning behind the initial decision. Normally, when an unrelated product cancels a project, it doesn't matter to you.
This sounds very admirable to me
Major problems then arise if I have already started to answer the question to avoid an awkward pause, and realize several words in I don't like the answer. Finding a way out of the words you have started then feels like texting while driving along the road with 100 km/h.
I have been in several interview situations in my life (including two on national radio), and the ones that went well were usually the ones where I either knew the questions beforehand, or in which I was asked questions I had already thought of and memorized an interesting answer.
I suffer from it myself and i'm definitely better at answering by email than in an oral discussion when i'm overwhelmed by thoughts and can't focus on one.
If it were intentional, I could see it being admirable. But I do wish I could think a bit more on the spot in some situations.
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I've found that creating a shared document or flowchart can work wonders if key team members engage and build upon it. And once everyone has said their share you can then have a meeting to discuss how to progress. I've found this method to work well as you can take your time to reply to suggestions and comments and research them better. It also removes and element of emotionality from the decision making: everyone can see the suggestions and counter points, but the conversation is often less defensive and more considered as people have time to second guess themselves. So by the time you hold the meeting the benefits and drawbacks of the contending options in meeting your goals are clearer.
Sometimes the meeting or call is about an emerging urgent situation. Even then, the decision is probably not needed this minute. Not before there is what input there is to find. That first meeting might then be more about figuring out what input or data might be available.
That's not that cause for me. I just grasp things quickly.
> Avoid using the word "slow", use "deliberate" instead.
That sounds inclusive but isn't what Kahneman meant. Slow thinking is when you leave it to your subconscious, so the only deliberate thing would be to give it time and put your conscious mind elsewhere. So in that way the two terms wouldn't be interchangeable in a 'Thinking fast and slow' sense.
In response to OP, to me the exercise that helped me the most is to put myself into situations where a quick decision is needed but in case of a mistake the consequences are not that bad, just like in drama theatre you get better at improvisation by not having a script to follow.
More that anything else I agree with a) taking the time, and b) keeping an option to avoid the answer altogether.
I don't know if I qualify as a "slow" or "fast" thinker - I actually think that no one qualifies as either and it all depends on your experience in the topic at hand - but I have my share of situations where I cannot get my thoughts together. With --age-- experience I taught myself to feel comfortable with taking my time (reasonable amount, though) or just saying "let me think of it and come back to you later" (if I feel the pause can become unreasonably long). Most people I am surrounded with understand and accept it well.
1. How can I tell if this information is true ie what else would need to be true if this is correct?
2. If this is true, what are the implications of this new data ie what has changed in our plans?
3. Given these implications, what do I need to do different?
I find that questions around these help me (and the rest of the audience) better understand the issue very quickly and help me get up to speed quickly.
But, externally, no one's gonna see this shit so it's just something one has to get comfortable knowing about themselves but not other people. We often advise people a "lowest common denominator" type of logic because philosophically, it's impossible to know what the actual fuck.
the way to get fast is to do some caching, if you already explored the domain and stored the answers for it you can just remember the information.
the problem is when the caching is done wrong. you explored only a subset but thought you explored everything.
the other kind of fast thinking is when you go bullshiter route and act like an LLM you fast interpolate between known data-points without system2 validation and give plausible looking answers with full confidence, you'd be amazed by how many people get fooled by this.
There are problems that legitimately must be sat with for months if not years.
Furiously responding to potential ways to solve a problem might just use a lot of energy.
I find this easier said than done. I dislike most meetings because I don't think quickly enough to keep up and contribute to the discussion. That often means that others will make decisions that I could have contributed usefully to before I've had the chance to think deliberately about the question.
And when it's come out how I want it to, it's understandable to the third parties. Deliberate equates to clear and intelligible.
That's a great way to hear god laugh. Jokes aside - if the quick decision can be "walked back" or is not detrimental if you decide wrong then it doesn't matter and you should probably decide quickly to get through the "maze of life"
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My son is/was quite bright - reading at 3, reading the Economist and understanding 20% of it at 5, teaching himself calculus at 7. He got terrible grades in school maths, and his teachers thought he was lazy because he so obviously understood the material.
With some cognitive testing at age 6, he was placed "somewhere over 2nd stdev" (they just stop after a bit) for most cognitive subjects... but when taking response time tests he would drop to 2nd percentile. Second percentile! You could ask him to to find the root of a simple quadratic, and he would think about it and get the answer, then ask him to name the first five even numbers, and he would take about the same amount of time. His processing speed was (and is) just slow. In school, many marks went towards "flash tests" and speed competitions in math. He couldn't get through the first half of the tests, he'd run out of time. He's in third year honours maths at uni now, favourite topic is abstract algebra. They give him more time on tests.
My point is that this is real for some people, it's not just practice or technique or rehearsing.
Additionally, you also want a fair number of problems in any given test to reduce the variance in the grades, and you want the student to be able to finish a significant number exercises that can truly cover the breadth of the content to learn, hopefully with more than one approach as well. If a student takes 2h to solve a problem there is no way they will be able to complete enough of a problem set.
Of course, there are outliers. But personally, especially given my shorter attention span, the ability to do math correctly and quickly was absolutely crucial, and I wouldn't have been able to pass otherwise.
Because accommodating every kid's needs is expensive, and society is not willing to pay for it.
An individual who has "mastered the material" can answer quickly irrespective of their smarts: they learnt both the fundamental concepts and the derivatives in preparation for the test, and can commence answering the question immediately from the derivatives.
An individual who has not "mastered the material", but is smart, can start with the fundamentals, work out the derivatives, then commence answering the question: but only given enough time.
So tests which include a time element are, or should be, knowledge tests, and not an intelligence, or 'ability to answer the question', test.
E.g. https://neurosciencenews.com/iq-decision-speed-23377/ "Researchers discovered that people with higher IQs are quicker when solving simple tasks but slower when dealing with complex problems."
I’ve learned to accept it and manage expectations with people.
One thing I discovered about myself was for many things I have a “gut feel” that I trust unquestioningly. I might not be able to explain why something is wrong/right, but I know it is. Given a bit of time, I can explain it sufficiently and convincingly.
I’ve never had the gift of quick answers with explanations. I’m okay with that.
[0]: http://www.psychologysalon.com/2012/01/overpathologization-d...
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Many years ago my family was trying to see Letterman in NYC. I wasn’t old enough, and we knew that going in. The night before, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I was going over what I thought I might need to know. When was my fake birthday, why don’t I have an ID, etc. On the day, I was asked these questions by security and gave a quick and natural answer. Afterword my dad commented that I was really quick and good at thinking on my feet, but the truth was that I prepared.
One skill I learned during grad school was spending lots of time going over conversations or presentations or even upcoming meetings in your head. This "warms up" your cache, and helps you play out possible Q&A, so that you have more opinions ready.
And another skill I learned was actually learning to control the meeting to a certain extent. I'd come in with something like a limited "choose your own adventure" conversation tree in my head, and then I'd try to present choices or questions to those I was meeting or talking with, so that I could at least have a fallback.
And finally with experience comes wit. The 10th time you enter a situation you're much more likely to have something to say than the 1st time. And eventually, you'll start to recognize similarities in conversations.
But yeah, lack of quick wit makes social and work situations more challenging. It's just hard to make myself have strong opinions on the spot usually.
I did debating in school and a lot of the prep was like this too — once you have your position sketched out, you put on your 'opposition hat' and start to critique your own position for holes.
Also, where in the HN guidelines it says — Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. — when you're prepping, you tend to do just the opposite: assume that someone _is_ going to attempt to respond to a weaker version that's easier to criticize.
It can help you have a rebuttal on the ready if needed but regardless it also helps you to distill/reframe ideas in a way that's clearer from the outset (which is a good thing in & of itself, even if you don't have someone taking a counter position)
If you combine it with empathy skills: "What motivates this person", "What are their goals", "what are their interests/specialities" then you can work out a list of stock answers before hand, and alter them to suit the situation later on.
You still need to listen, as there is a non trivial risk of your mental model being wrong.
If you don’t have an answer at the time just say so and follow up later. Waiting for your turn to talk is disrespectful and painful to watch.
Nothing against failing as both outcomes are good learning scenario, though I think, def favor preparing for the most interesting failure is probably the best outcome.
But the person who could enforce that all meetings must have an agenda probably also uses the lack of an agenda to their advantage, so the status quo continues
* I write everything down on calendars, to do lists, planners etc. * I have a smart speaker in every room so I can capture pieces of information as soon as I know about them. * I use many different kinds of timers to remind me of tasks, or to switch tasks from one to another. * I use checklists to help complete daily processes.
The best thing you can do is acknowledge your weaknesses, reflect on situations where you struggle and find specific techniques or processes that improve the outcome for you. It won't happen overnight. Good luck!
This correlates with ADHD.
You're welcome to make substantive points thoughtfully, of course, whatever you're for or against.
Would highly recommend a watch https://youtube.com/watch?v=FkKPsLxgpuY
But it still has merit as another psychological test battery you can do to determine areas in which you may struggle to process information.
My working memory sucks [compared to the standard for my age range and demographic]. I've had access to stuff like RBANS (Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status), through psychologist friends working in memory clinics. IQ tests correlate that finding, and are much more readily available (ie. free and not locked behind institutional firewalls).
Sure, the most thorough IQ tests are paywalled, but as a concept it's readily available online, though tests will yield you huge variation in scores.
We can choose not to treat IQ as a tool to compare ourselves to other people, but rather as a tool to identify our own strengths and weaknesses within different areas of the test. Ignore the single score at end of test, think on what felt hard, and performance in the score breakdown.
I would love to see more (better designed, statically rigorous) neuropsychological assessments become open and free to access. It would definitely have helped me growing up as an unknown AuDHD kid, to understand I really wasn't "a bright kid just making excuses for things I don't want to do".
Reading comprehension tests test end-to-end ability to process that test and those questions in this circumstance. What comes next? tests test your ability to understand and solve a particular set of puzzles: they're a decent proxy for pattern-recognition skills if you share cultural context with the test author and can handle the administrative overhead of that style of examination. And so on. It's nonsense to give yourself some overall score at the end (though this can make sense for populations), but that doesn't mean the tests are worthless.
I tend to think internally, and while I usually have a clear vision in my head of how a system works, if I try to translate that mental model on-the-fly into an explanation for others, it typically comes out as an incoherent jumble of loosely related phrases.
To that extent, I much prefer written communication. It gives me time to convert the thoughts in my head into English, and I typically iterate on what I’ve written down quite a few times until I’m satisfied with it (including Hacker News comments for example).
The one exception to being a “slow thinker” is if the discussion involves a topic I know very well and someone says something that is incorrect or inconsistent. While I can’t necessarily articulate my own ideas immediately on the spot, I do seem to be able to quickly identify and explain flaws in deductive reasoning or come up with examples that highlight inconsistencies.
I’m not sure I necessarily like that my brain defaults to looking for flaws in arguments rather than reasons to support them, but my own internal process of generating ideas consists of a cycle of proposing an idea to myself followed by immediately trying to find ways to shoot it down (such that whatever ideas survive this mental gauntlet are decent ones I guess). But I think this approach had the unfortunate side effect of optimizing the “quick thinking” part of my brain into that of an inconsistency-detector rather than a rapid brainstorming mechanism.
Just a thank you for describing what is my own self perception. I thought I was a broken weirdo. Well, maybe I still am, but at least I'm not alone!
May be due to how reasoning is a social activity humans evolved to save time and cognitive load via division of labor.
1. An individual's reasoning workload is reduced by forming a bias. The gaps left by this bias can be filled with others' reasoning. For example if Gail focuses on why a business idea is good and Bob focuses on why that same idea is bad, they reduced the total amount of reasoning required by 50%. 2. If strong reasons are always prepared for everything, effort is wasted when others are easy to convince. So people start with minimal effort, producing weak reasons (why the business idea is good or bad). Gail and Bob keep responding to each other's reasons with stronger reasons only until necessary. After reaching consensus further reasoning is not required.
Source: https://youtu.be/_ArVh3Cj9rw?t=969
In software engineering, I've found that this is very common. And if I look at what successful senior engineers have in common, it's that they've mastered a way to present complex technical information in a way that's easily understood. It's a super power.
When asked a question, I can give a great answer 10 minutes; an hour; a day later. It's not a full day of active thinking, but time is needed to "stew" in my mind for a while. So I give my best answer in the moment (which might be "I don't know"). Then I follow up with my awesome answer whenever it comes.
Slow thinking makes conversation more difficult. Anything beyond 1:1 conversation usually means the conversation flies faster than I can think. I'm OK with that and just enjoy listening to the conversation and occasionally contributing. On rare occasion this makes other people uncomfortable. However I have generally surrounded myself with people who accept my quiet nature.
Also slow thinking comes with its advantages. Embrace those. Despite being a slow thinker, my client repeatedly tells me that I deliver high-quality output really fast. He's always asking how I come up with these amazing ideas.
---
Derek Sivers says he's "a very slow thinker:"
> When someone wants to interview me for their show, I ask them to send me some questions a week in advance...
> People say that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.
> When you’re less impulsive and more deliberate like this, it can be a little inconvenient for other people, but that’s OK. Someone asks you a question. You don’t need to answer. You can say, “I don’t know,” and take your time to answer after thinking. Things happen...
HN discussion:
- https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/35039358
- https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/17694306
This is a very good point that's worth, uh, pointing out.
Being able to quickly reply is not necessarily a good thing. I've caught this in myself - making some witty response to a situation and then immediately realizing, "I haven't examined that opinion in years. I don't like it or believe it anymore. I wish I hadn't said that."
But without vocalizing that introspection, it may just appear that I'm witty and, depending on the listener, a bit of an asshole. Actually I'm less of an asshole than I used to be, but sometimes you're getting old data which hasn't been cleaned up yet.
"The first thought that goes through your mind is what you have been conditioned to think, what you think next defines who you are."
People fill voids and awkward situations by saying stuff, even if that stuff is wrong.
It's OK to be quiet. It's also OK to say 'Let me think about that'.
Lose some arguments.
And unless the situation you are in that requires a quick decision is life or death, it probably doesn't need one.
I tell people "I don't make decisions on the spot," or "I need to consider it, I'll respond by end of day," etc.
Great advice. Nothing shows confidence more than asking a question and then waiting for answer. Let the awkward silence sit.
And when you do speak, keep answers short and to the point. It also conveys confidence.
Anytime I see/hear someone rambling in email/on meeting, I know they are not confident in what they are saying.
Well then you are dismissing people unfairly. You won't hear a peep out of me if I don't know the answer. On the other hand, if I have mountains of data that proves my point, or if the problem is nuanced, you'll hear all of it.
I'm working on getting better at distilling that data into short, actionable points for people like VPs (because I'm now at the level where these people read what I write).
But if you were to assume that I'm not confident, based on my inability to boil it down, you'd be drawing the wrong conclusion. You should listen to me because I'm nearly always right, and when I'm wrong, I'm usually the first to identify that fact and provide a solution.
Also I am autistic, which certainly impacts my communication.
I'd argue its far better to say something like, "Good question. I need to think about that for a minute" rather than just sit there saying nothing at all after being asked something. I know a few engineers who do that and while their answer is normally fine, the awkward silence makes me and others question their social skills. Not their intelligence.
I know other engineers who do the same thing but say, "Let me think about that for a minute" and I've never heard of anyone questioning their ability to think quickly or social skills.
What you are suggesting is not wrong, its just a bit.. rude? awkward? Why impose that feeling on others when a clarifying sentence can prevent it?
The best impromptu speakers, who can carry debates and thrive on off the cuff arguments, in my experience were full of shit. When I critically look at what they said, it usually boiled down to: (a) if you're not with us, then you are against us (b) you just need to believe, work harder, and stop complaining.
In high school I got really into drama and improv, to succeed at improv AT ALL I had to effectively have to be in an altered mental state. When I am being quick witted my brain is literally functioning differently, there is no truth, no data, no thoughtfulness, it's stream of conscious ejected straight from my brain.
Mentally it's not unlike skiing a steep slope but the single internal directive isn't "oh shit, stay up" but "oh shit, entertain", it's not even an active thought per se, just an internal bent.
Fortunately my inner dialog and thought life isn't racist, evil or cruel, as no filter is no filter.
Before I learned that I had the capacity for this mental modality, I didn't even know it existed, I finally made the break through during "improv training" sessions and the "flight" response that caused me to stutter and choke just spontaneously disappeared, I'm not sure if everyone has the capacity.
I usually engage in slow thinking, in highly social situations where I'm "On", it still feels like flying down a ski slope, fun, very mentally "on" and damn scary.