[HN Gopher] Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed
___________________________________________________________________
Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed
Author : feross
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-03-01 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fs.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (fs.blog)
| JunkDNA wrote:
| In business, many times the lack of any decision (good or bad)
| wastes valuable time. Especially for leaders, unblocking teams to
| move forward has real value beyond whether or not the actual
| decision is optimal. A great many decisions are reversible. If
| your decision is reversible (even at some expense), it may be
| better to just decide and move on. In many cases, you don't have
| perfect information anyway, so trying to make the right decision
| causes you to delay the very experiments necessary to get you to
| an optimum outcome.
| Pietertje wrote:
| I completely agree. I try to position 'not taking a decision'
| as a decision option itself. Often it clarifies how poor that
| choice is or whether you are micro-optimizing alternatives.
|
| And sometimes it is the better decision to postpone the
| decision to a moment later in time you have more information.
| darkerside wrote:
| I like a lot of FS, but this seems particularly incorrect. You
| can slow down your thinking rate, can you not? That being the
| case, it seems trivial to me that you can also speed it up.
|
| Perhaps you can't raise your maximum thinking rate, or you can't
| raise it without introducing errors or reducing criteria, but
| that is different from saying it is fixed.
|
| Of course, what I'm describing is more of a "decisioning rate"
| than a thinking rate, but that's exactly how they describe it in
| the article.
| rcheu wrote:
| Your thinking rate might be fixed (or more likely, decreasing
| with time), but one thing you can do, which is not mentioned
| here, is become more efficient.
|
| This means looking for ways to improve the things you do and
| finding shortcuts so you have to think less. Most commonly, I do
| this by looking back at how I did a task and writing down things
| to help me complete it faster next time. Examples:
|
| - write down the common mistakes I've made in the past and use it
| as a checklist to check before I push code
|
| - create run-books for debugging issues. This is both for
| specific areas and general process things such as "Make sure you
| check all the relevant grafana dashes."
|
| - add questions and answers on StackExchange/Quora when I run
| into problems/questions that take me awhile to resolve.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| How much does it differ between people?
| piercebot wrote:
| I agree with the point about managers and decision-makers setting
| the tone with regard to the "hurry up" culture, but I take
| exception with one line:
|
| > Expecting great things of all your workers
|
| Why is it not OK to expect great things out of everybody on your
| team? Surely people don't want to feel excluded from the "great
| performers" group? Surely people don't want to feel that they're
| not capable of great things?
|
| I'm completely in favor of giving everybody the time and space
| they need to do their best work, but then to _also_ assume that
| some people are incapable of producing great work given the time
| and support they need to achieve it... isn't that the definition
| of an under-performer?
|
| As decision makers, don't we have an obligation to identify the
| people who do great work and empower them? Isn't it our job to
| create the environment in which _everybody_ does great work? Why
| is it not OK to expect that everybody does great work?
| JonathanMerklin wrote:
| The best teams IMO have about a 10/10/80 split between people
| who do great work and know it, people who do great work and
| don't know it, and people who don't do great work (caveat: they
| should do ACCEPTABLE work) but are aware of their limitations.
| There's only so much work that you want your talent to be doing
| and you can try and keep the major touch points to your power
| players, and then you try to silo off the drudgery to the folks
| who are happy to have something hard to fail at. The
| personality type of the good-and-knows-it tends to need to be
| offset by the humble good-but-unsure types. Heaven forbid you
| get even one worker who can crank out productivity like no
| tomorrow and claims to be doing good work because in a vacuum
| everything is functional but they optimize only to close tasks
| and leave the system in total disrepair. It takes literal years
| to clean up some messes, and from experience I tend to prefer
| working with people who adhere to N > quality(output) > 0 over
| those at |quality(output)| > N.
|
| Yes, this mirrors directly that old adage from that German
| general [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-
| Equord#Cl...
| piercebot wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful reply; I'd never heard of
| Hammerstein-Equord before, so that was enlightening.
|
| I think I've lived a charmed life in that, for the past 7
| years, I've worked at a company without a bell curve
| distribution in terms of employees. We're extremely "top
| heavy" in terms of experience and ability, and there has been
| a distinct lack of ego as well. At previous companies I would
| agree with your assessments about types of people, but having
| seen what's possible when you hire only the best people
| through your professional networks who only want to work with
| other talented ego-less individuals, I may be guilty of
| holding myself to unrealistic expectations.
|
| That said, we're becoming a victim of our own success now and
| we need to hire outside of our tapped-out professional
| networks. Perhaps as we achieve a more "normal" distribution,
| the more "normal" advice will start to apply. A good problem
| to have, but still a new problem where there wasn't one
| previously.
| minikites wrote:
| >Why is it not OK to expect that everybody does great work?
|
| Because the ways in which this usually manifests is "hurry up"
| culture. How is "great work" measured and what is the manager's
| responsibility for assigning/distributing work that is
| appropriate to each employee?
| piercebot wrote:
| I'm not sure it's the manager's responsibility to
| compartmentalize and then assign/distribute work to each
| employee. Aren't people happier and more productive when
| they're in charge of their own destiny?
|
| I view the manager's role as one that clearly defines and
| communicates business imperatives and facilitates
| communication about how to get there. If you're telling
| people exactly what to do, how does that enable them to do
| great work? Aren't they just doing what the manager tells
| them to?
| magneticnorth wrote:
| I had thought this was about an actual way to measure "thinking
| rate" and was super interested in what that could be.
| Disappointed to have landed on a click-bait-y article rehashing
| an old point that people make worse decisions under pressure.
| majormajor wrote:
| I don't agree with the article that reducing pressure is the most
| important thing. It's not particularly helpful advice when you do
| find yourself with a time crunch.
|
| Instead, I'd say there's a difference in _quality_ of thinking.
| If ten minutes go by while you 're trying to make a decision, how
| many distinct thoughts have you had? Did you just replay a given
| scenario 8 times over and over in your head? Did you just stress
| about the worst possible scenario the whole time? Or did you
| consider things from different directions and dig into possible
| different outcomes, as well as the input data you have available?
|
| I see it similar to the "do you have ten years of experience, or
| one year of experience ten times?" saying about what you do (or
| don't) learn in a job...
| kleer001 wrote:
| > find yourself with a time crunch
|
| It's also important to ask why that time crunch happened.
| Avoidable mishaps? Random chance? Poor management?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| What is really difficult is to reduce pressure so you can think
| clearly, but maintain a culture of urgency, or perhaps the
| right word is "momentum".
|
| I'm working in a small team on some software that we'll finish
| in a year or two and sell for x dollars. We are self funded so
| every day we spend on the product is another dollar we need to
| earn to recoup our investment. The longer we take, the greater
| the risk we won't ever see a return.
|
| The product needs to be good, but we also need to build it
| fast.
| jonathanaird wrote:
| I hear this a lot and I understand people make mistakes trying to
| rush but this is not accurate for me. I can absolutely will
| myself to think faster. Maybe this comes with experience doing
| some meditation but when I have a difficult problem where the
| solution is not immediately obvious, I can sit in my chair or
| take a walk and focus very intensely on the problem. I get my
| whole mind to just focus on this one thing and I keep my mind
| there without getting distracted or daydreaming. I don't try to
| have any kinds of thought in particular. I just focus on the
| problem. After doing this for a certain amount of time I will
| come up with my conclusion.
|
| I could do this over a longer period of time and create much less
| mental strain but when I'm in a time crunch, it's very useful.
|
| That said if the problem is actually beyond my reach and
| capabilities I won't get much of an answer.
| gridspy wrote:
| Perhaps you are not thinking faster, instead you're doing an
| excellent job at focusing all of your resources on one problem.
|
| It is the sum of all your thought that is (apparently) fixed,
| so moving all that thought to one task will have that single
| task complete faster. It doesn't change how much "thought" you
| could do at once overall though.
| Kranar wrote:
| Then this article becomes trivial. Imagine we discussed
| running, no one would argue that your running speed is fixed,
| most people agree that one can vary the speed at which they
| run even though it is perfectly well understood that there is
| a maximum speed they can do so and a minimum speed. And just
| like running, the maximum speed that I can run is not a
| single well defined value. It depends on whether I am running
| a marathon or a sprint.
|
| Similarly with thinking, I can vary the speed at which I'm
| thinking depending on whether I am playing bullet chess,
| speed chess or standard chess. Certainly when playing bullet
| chess, just like running a sprint, I am operating at my peak
| speed, but that speed is not sustainable for long periods of
| time and it's inefficient in terms of energy use, so I get
| burned out if I have to engage it for a long time.
|
| If I'm running a marathon or thinking about a problem that
| requires deep and intense focus, I stop operating at my peak
| speed and instead operate at a long term sustainable speed.
|
| This is the kind of variation that this article misses when
| it says that our thinking is fixed. It's anything but fixed,
| it's a fairly complex and poorly understood trade-off.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| > Deferring non-critical tasks doesn't save any time overall, it
| just pushes work forwards--to the point where those tasks do
| become critical. Then something else gets deferred.
|
| Spoken like someone who never procrastinated! More than half the
| time these tasks end up disappearing because not only were they
| "non-critical" but also they weren't necessary.
| neonological wrote:
| tldr: if you're doing something quickly you're more prone to make
| mistakes.
|
| Did this article present any new information that everyone
| doesn't already know? Or is the article just re framing the word
| "thinking" with "rate of change."
|
| Many analogies and quotations don't serve to to present new
| information. The catharsis of relating something to an unrelated
| concept makes it feel like new information was presented but in
| reality you learned nothing new.
|
| Additionally the author makes a claim and instead of using
| evidence to validate the claim he uses analogies.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Thanks, I didn't realize it was broken
| sombremesa wrote:
| Anecdata, but I really don't think thinking rate is fixed. An
| easy example is learning a new language - at the beginning you
| will have a lot of trouble expressing yourself as you grasp for
| vocabulary and struggle with grammar, but over time these tasks
| become second nature and you'll be able to think and express
| yourself much faster.
|
| You can argue that your thinking rate hasn't changed, you've just
| internalized some concepts and no longer have to actively think
| about them, but that seems like a disingenuous argument. You
| could certainly repeat this process for other disciplines and
| indeed 'think faster' for all intents and purposes.
|
| Of course, this is a clickbait article and I'm wasting my time
| even responding to this, but I had a visceral reaction to this
| that I felt I shouldn't ignore.
| fredgrott wrote:
| be careful of the assumption.
|
| Humans when they are born can understand 10,000 word sounds in
| multiple languages but as newborns approach the age of 3 their
| brains delete the un-sued neurons in the language area of the
| brain...it's why it's harder to learn languages as we age.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > You can argue that your thinking rate hasn't changed, you've
| just internalized some concepts and no longer have to actively
| think about them, but that seems like a disingenuous argument.
|
| I think this is an important distinction actually.
|
| For instance let's take the example of choosing a tool for a
| particular job. Over time you teach yourself that tool X is
| best for a particular type of task, so any time you are faced
| with that type of task you automatically pull put tool X,
| without thinking about it. On the surface it looks like you're
| thinking and deciding very quickly but really you're just
| taking a shortcut.
|
| Eventually you are faced with a task that looks on the surface
| like the type of task you use tool X for, so you start working.
| After a while it turns out that it would be best to use tool Y.
| Now you've wasted a bunch of time using the wrong tool because
| you used a shortcut to avoid thinking, instead of taking the
| time to think.
|
| It's a dumb example but I think it illustrates the difference
| between "thinking faster" and shortcutting your thinking to
| reach a conclusion faster.
| com2kid wrote:
| > Eventually you are faced with a task that looks on the
| surface like the type of task you use tool X for, so you
| start working. After a while it turns out that it would be
| best to use tool Y. Now you've wasted a bunch of time using
| the wrong tool because you used a shortcut to avoid thinking,
| instead of taking the time to think.
|
| I'd caution that for many tasks, using a close enough tool
| can be good enough, and an experienced user of a "close
| enough" tool may very well get results rapidly.
|
| Regular Expressions are a great example of this. I've done
| stuff with regular expressions that a proper parser or tool
| modifying ASTs would be "correct" for[1], and if I learned to
| use those specialized tools I'd be better off, for that one
| particular task. But the fact is regular expressions serve to
| sub-optimally solve a lot of different problems. I'd make the
| argument that the total time I've spent learning regex's and
| then solving a lot of problems with them at 80% speed has
| been a more efficient use of time than if I'd learned a bunch
| of one off "ideal" tools.
|
| [1] I have a ~bad~ habit of generating large repetitive
| chunks of code using regexs.
| sombremesa wrote:
| The reason this is a disingenuous argument is because it
| endeavors to restrict the definition of 'thinking' strictly
| to cognition - or further still, to cognition in the absence
| of recognition, which is actually quite absurd if you think
| about it. However, by definition thought has no such
| restriction - recognition and spontaneous ideas should hold
| as much weight, and can in fact speed up the process of
| cognition itself [0].
|
| > The difference between "thinking faster" and shortcutting
| your thinking to reach a conclusion faster.
|
| I don't see any difference between these two things - perhaps
| you can elaborate. In my opinion if you can shortcut your
| thinking to reach the same conclusion faster, you are in fact
| thinking faster for all intents and purposes.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zm9sTfWnQ0
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I think a definition of thinking close to how the article
| is using the term is more like:
|
| Thinking is a process of considering options and reaching a
| conclusion.
|
| Using that definition, or something like it, then I think
| it's pretty evident that decision making shortcutting is an
| absence of thinking.
| sombremesa wrote:
| > Thinking is a process of considering options and
| reaching a conclusion.
|
| Okay, let's take this definition of thinking as our
| basis. Presumably, a chess grand master is able to do
| this faster than a novice.
|
| However, by your own argument, you're also calling this
| an absence of thinking. So, which is it?
| karmakaze wrote:
| A chess grandmaster knows better than to consider every
| option to the same depth. Pruning is choosing what not to
| think about. I wouldn't expect grandmasters improve by
| increasing their positions evaluated/second throughout
| their career.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Doing less thinking to reach a conclusion quickly isn't
| the same thing as thinking faster.
|
| It's a meaningful distinction because there are physical
| and mental costs (calories and stress) to trying to
| "think faster" that don't accrue the same when making
| decisions based on learnings.
| sombremesa wrote:
| You've abandoned "thinking is a process of considering
| options and reaching a conclusion" now.
|
| > making decisions based on learnings
|
| This is the ONLY type of thinking there is. Ergo, you can
| 'think faster' for any given discipline with practice.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > You've abandoned "thinking is a process of considering
| options and reaching a conclusion" now
|
| This is a big claim to make without any explanation of
| why you think that.
|
| I'm forced to conclude you're not discussing in good
| faith. Bye.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| Think of it like simple decisions. X=>Y
|
| You start with some of them: A=>B, C=>D, B=>C, E=>F, B=>G.
| You now get A, and need to decide which tool is better: D
| or F. You start the reasoning: A=>B=>G&C=>D. After 4
| reasonings you arrive at the solution: D. If you need to do
| this reasoning several times, you 'learn' A=>D. Now, when
| you need to make the same reasoning, you do A=>B&D. You get
| the same output but twice as fast. You 'learned'. Muscle
| memory is also a very good example of this.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > Of course, this is a clickbait article and I'm wasting my
| time even responding to this, but I had a visceral reaction to
| this that I felt I shouldn't ignore.
|
| Hey me too! I'm _phenomenally_ more creative and productive
| when "in the field" doing experiments, than when I'm at home /
| at work trying to predict problems and come up with novel
| solutions. I'm definitely thinking faster and better when
| equipment is on the line and stakes are higher.
|
| I really do believe I am more _engaged_ in a problem when it's
| urgent, expensive, and imminent, rather than very far away.
| Engagement produces better results for me.
|
| Maybe that's because I'm not thinking faster, but I'm thinking
| with a higher duty cycle on _this one problem_, but that's not
| a meaningful, operable insight. Like everything on fs that
| somehow makes HN.
| pbronez wrote:
| I think the key is to recognize what situations help you be
| productive, then engineer more of those situations into your
| life. You don't need to squeeze your brain harder, you need
| to be in the field more.
| skohan wrote:
| I tend to be a proponent of the resource model of cognition.
| E.g. you have a limited budget of willpower in a given day, and
| when you run out of it, it becomes much harder to resist that
| piece of chocolate cake in the fridge.
|
| By the same token, I would find it plausible to believe you
| have a certain budget of decisions to be made, or problems to
| be solved in a given period of time before quality goes down.
|
| I think it's likely this is also something like a muscle that
| can be trained over time.
| contravariant wrote:
| Well thought demonstrably takes effort, a _ridiculous_ amount
| of your bodies resources is spent on thinking, however it 's
| hard to pin this down in a certain 'rate'.
|
| You could probably show that calories and certain other
| resources get exhausted by concentrated thought, however in
| my experience this has little to do with speed of thought and
| everything to do with depth (the only times I truly felt
| mentally exhausted was when I was trying to dig up deeply
| buried fragments of memory to solve a maths problem).
| shagie wrote:
| This is known as decision fatigue -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue
|
| It leads to things like "people who tend to have to make
| important decisions have fewer clothing sets" (
| https://www.businessinsider.com/successful-people-like-
| barac... )
|
| I would contend that this is part of the reason why it is
| difficult for people who have to make decisions about "should
| I pay the rent, groceries, or utilities" to be able to join
| the white collar jobs - as those are about making decisions.
| If your will power budget is exhausted on food choices
| (because you don't have much money), its harder to make good
| white collar job decisions.
|
| I would furthermore contend that the above is an excellent
| argument for UBI (though this gets deeper down into
| politics).
| alexfromapex wrote:
| The brain memoizes learned concepts just like computers often
| using a LFU-like algorithm at least my brain seems to
| teraflop wrote:
| As Alan Kay put it: "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ
| points."
| glial wrote:
| I think your instinct is both correct and missing something. At
| some level, 'thinking' involves transmitting information about
| the world. Suppose you had a poor model of a new task - the
| code used to encode information would necessarily be
| inefficient, since you don't know the probability distribution
| of anything related to the task. Once you do the task for a
| while, you get a better sense of the probability distribution
| of stimuli, and (in theory at least) could develop a more
| efficient code. Adaptive Huffman coding does exactly this -
| builds codes on the fly that gradually get more efficient. It's
| possible that the brain does something qualitatively similar.
| If so, it would 'look like' information transmission is
| happening faster.
|
| From this perspective, 'information transmission rate' could
| actually be constant during learning, when defined as a
| reduction in subjective uncertainty over time. But because you
| start with a poor task model, your initial uncertainty is
| higher when starting learning, due to unfamiliarity with the
| task, so to an outside observer it _looks_ like information
| transmission is slower. As your task model improves, your prior
| for each message matches the environmental statistics better,
| and information transmission speeds up -- again, just from the
| perspective of the observer, as your subjective uncertainty now
| starts low and just goes lower.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| In that story, isn't the cognition time the same with a bottle
| neck at the audio output? That would be like saying your
| computer's CPU is slower because your internet upload speed is
| low.
| sombremesa wrote:
| You must be running better software than me, last I checked
| my tongue cannot be actuated independent of my CPU.
|
| For that matter, you can certainly write software that has
| poor upload speed that improves with processing power,
| regardless of your internet connection.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| We all use slightly different forks from the same software.
|
| I must be running my grandmother's fork, as she taught us:
| "Turn your tongue seven times before speaking. This way
| you'll have time to think if you ought to say the things
| you want to say.".
|
| I think first and then I produce a whole sentence or
| paragraph. My text or speech is not improvised word for
| word as I progress. There is a small delay when I convert
| my French thoughts into English, but that's it.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I'm not a pro at this but this blog post is not very convincing
| to me. I have read evidence that people perform often perform
| cognitive tasks better under light stress, and that stands to
| reason. It would be a poor brain that did worse at thinking the
| more you need to do it.
|
| I don't think the claim that the thinking rate is fixed is well-
| sourced in this blog, but there is various good advice that you
| can take to at least avoid wasting cycles you have spent. One
| idea is to try to write down decisions and the reasons for them,
| and get sign-offs, to prevent relitigating things with yourself
| or others. I'm sure there are a thousand other ideas that are a
| little more productive than trying to "reduce the pressure you're
| under" (as if that's something most of us have control over).
| pico wrote:
| I read Slack about the time it was written, and this theme has
| stuck with me through the years. I start feeling it whenever I'm
| trying to go faster than I know that I can go. Both the stress
| and this "law" remind me to pick the high priority thing
| (requires some wisdom) and the rest will have to wait.
|
| So the minor thing the article leaves out is that DeMarco cites
| this as Lister's Law: People under time pressure do not think
| faster. I couldn't find a nice primary source for that. Here's
| the best I found:
|
| https://medium.com/@jasonrigden/the-eponymous-laws-of-comput...
|
| It's nice from time to time to turn your mind out to pasture and
| lazily reflect on just whatever. Those times can be surprisingly
| productive and refreshing.
|
| But for me at least, if I'm trying to drive my brain through
| productive knowledge work, whether that's designing an api or
| algorithm or implementation, there is a top speed. And unless I'm
| kidding myself, I can work at that top speed as a choice of will.
| And no amount of pressure can make my mind put the pieces
| together faster. Now pressure to a point will keep me from
| letting things like HN distract me. Beyond that point, additional
| pressure will eventually hurt my ability to concentrate, and
| might even cause me to bail. Just being transparent here.
|
| Edit: BTW, DeMarco's book was written mostly from the perspective
| of managers and the pressure they place on others as they
| organize the workplace.
| bobbydreamer wrote:
| Fantastic...... I agree. The wrong decisions I had made was due
| to pressure in that short duration and if I had taken more time
| atleast 10mins more, I wouldn't have made that.
|
| Disclosure : decisions were related to stock purchase and
| sell.....
| nxc18 wrote:
| I tend to think trying to speed up thought in general is a fool's
| errand.
|
| However, as others have noted, there are clear exceptions, and
| training a pathway does indeed speed up thinking on that pathway.
|
| I'll highlight another example of thinking speed
| changing:podcasts. Given that I have to listen and comprehend
| most words, and listened-to words use the same pipeline as
| thought words (I can't listen and think words at the same time;
| at best I can context switch quickly) I think it's reasonable to
| say that listening (with comprehension) is thinking.
|
| When I first started listening to podcasts, I started at 1.25x.
| Then 1.5x. Then 2x. Now I'm at 2-2.5x on everything. I'm
| disappointed when things like YouTube don't let me push past 2x
| (a silly limitation you should fix if any YouTube engineers are
| reading).
|
| It seems I did train myself to do general-purpose symbolic
| thinking at 2x. Recall is pretty good, too. I tend to go on walks
| while I listen, so I get a natural IRL memory palace effect.
|
| Which begs the question: is thinking rate fixed? Probably not
| actually. I think people tend to underestimate what is possible
| until they see/experience someone doing it; a self-imposed
| tyranny of low expectations.
| yura wrote:
| There are browser extensions that allow you to play YouTube
| videos (and others) past 2x speed. Very useful.
| jakub_g wrote:
| Open devtools console, no need for extensions:
|
| document.querySelectorAll('video').forEach(v =>
| v.playbackRate = 2.5)
| marmaduke wrote:
| When the boss asks for something done faster, I like to reply,
| "sure, I can do that with a higher error rate."
| kleer001 wrote:
| reminds me of the ancient slogan "Think"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_%28IBM%29
|
| Though, (tongue-in-cheek) points off for not mentioning g factor
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
|
| Also, mirrors my own experience in terms of my own productivity
| and how it takes a severe nose dive after hours.
| labrador wrote:
| I have bipolar disorder and my thinking rate is certainly not
| fixed. I literally can't think about problems I don't care about,
| while I can cut eliminate hours of thinking and cut right to the
| solution when thinking about something I really care about. The
| question of how one can increase their thinking rate seems
| strange to me.
| DC1350 wrote:
| I don't think this is true. I personally think of it as "going
| sicko mode", and it's the difference between writing as fast as I
| can for 2 hours straight during an exam, and putting in half as
| much effort during an entire work day. I can think way harder
| under pressure. One of the most influential things anyone ever
| said to me was pointing out how much slower I am during normal
| work than a high pressure situation. I could write 1000 words in
| the time between waking up and getting out of bed if I could go
| sicko mode at will.
| Diederich wrote:
| To add to the other excellent comments here: I've been getting
| paid to think for most of 30 years now, and I'm absolutely
| certain that my rate of thinking has decreased over time.
| Related: the number of different things I can keep in my head at
| a time has also declined.
|
| It's _possible_ that my somewhat slower rate of thinking is
| partly or mostly offset by more effective thinking, based on
| decades of experience, but I 'm definitely not sure that's the
| case.
|
| My professional experience is an advantage, but it's also a
| disadvantage at times. 20-25 years ago, I knew quite a bit about
| how virtual memory performed on the same program running under
| HPUX 9 and AIX 4. Woot? (Yes I understand that such 'ancient'
| knowledge and experience probably produces mental pathways that
| helpfully apply to more modern considerations. Probably.)
| (Spoiler: virtual memory performance on HPUX 9 and 10 (at least)
| was abysmal.)
|
| To the main point of the article: it's complicated, but, agreeing
| with various sibling comments, I'm pretty certain that the right
| kinds of pressure/stress, in the right conditions, at the right
| times, etc etc, will effectively speed up the rate of thought.
| That agrees with my experience.
|
| Normal disclaimer applies: human brains are radically and often
| absurdly different, and one person's experience will, on average,
| shed very little if any light on another person's experiences.
| Kranar wrote:
| It seems to me what you're saying is that your ability to think
| like a sprint has degraded but that your ability to think like
| a marathon has improved. Both of those are measures of speed
| and can be boiled down to a rate, even though they have very
| different characteristics.
|
| Both of those can also be quite valuable in different
| circumstances and completely useless in others. Just a matter
| of finding the right environment that can make the best use of
| your thought process at your given stage of experience.
| narag wrote:
| For some time I believed that my rate of thinking had
| decreased. But that changed for the better. Exercise, healthy
| food and sleeping schedule, friendly job environment and it
| turned back to my thirties perfomance, even higher.
|
| My two cents: beware of burn out.
| nostromo wrote:
| Also take into account your eating habits.
|
| Eat lots of healthy fats and your brain will sing. If you eat
| a bunch of carbs and little fat, you'll likely experience
| brain fog.
| Diederich wrote:
| Yup, this is important stuff. In my case, my diet has been
| steadily improving, on average, throughout my adult life.
| My wife and I are now doing roughly 20/4 intermittent
| fasting most days of the week, and that food is quite
| healthy.
| marmaduke wrote:
| I don't have the citations off hand, but
|
| > my rate of thinking has decreased over time
|
| from my neuro 2xx or 3xx courses, this is how it works:
| crudely, the young brain works faster because it takes into
| account less information, fewer contingencies, while the older
| brain does the opposite.
| Nition wrote:
| I can't find it now, but someone else on Hacker News a while
| ago posted a study that backed you up. Age above ~20 made
| people worse at basically every type of cognition test except
| for general knowledge.
|
| Edit: Found it.
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797614567339
|
| Posted originally in this comment by checkyoursudo:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356216
| jakub_g wrote:
| Semi related: There was some study about chess ability of
| best players that showed up lately. Apparently 35 y.o. is
| when best players max out their skill. Then it's flat for a
| while and starts going down in 40s/50s.
| Nition wrote:
| Implying that's the optimal balance between thinking
| ability and time to learn I suppose.
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