There are two kinds of slowness. One is trying hard while getting no visible result. Another is procrastination. The article refers to the first

I enjoyed this. At my own workplace it's a challenge to fit my team's work into the wider sprint-based methodology where every project must be refined, estimated, and broken down into items with <2 days effort. That makes a certain amount of sense if, say, you're building a standard web portal. It makes less sense if, say, you're adapting modern hierarchical routing algorithms to take vehicle dimension restrictions into account. It's difficult to express just how nebulous this kind of work can be. Managers like to say "Maybe you don't know how long it will take now, but you can research and prototype for a couple of days and have a better idea". The problem is that research work generally takes the following form:

* Come up with 5 possible approaches (2 days)

* Create benchmark framework & suite (1 day)

* Try out approach A, but realise that it cannot work for subtle technical reasons (2 days)

* Try out approach B (2 days)

* Fail to make approach B performant enough (3 day)

...

You just keep trying directions, refining, following hunches, coming up with new things to try etc... until you (seemingly randomly) land on something that works. This is fundamentally un-estimatable. And yet if you're not doing this sort of work, you will rarely come up with truly novel feats of engineering.

Good post, but I wish he had delved more into how modern institutions could be revamped to allow for slow, long term thinking.

I think there is an assumption that institutions inherently are short term optimized, but I don’t know if that’s actually true, or merely a more recent phenomenon.

My guess is that you’d need to deliberately be “less than hyper rational” when doling out funding, because otherwise you end up following the metrics mentioned in the post. In other words, you might need to give out income randomly to everyone that meets certain criteria, rather than optimizing for the absolute best choice. The nature of inflation and increasing costs of living also becomes a problem, as whatever mechanism you’re using to fund “long term” work needs to be increasing every year.

The timing of this article and the submission seems to coincide (and possibly a reaction) to the other story on HN frontpage: Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) (jsomers.net)

To clarify, some are misunderstanding James Somers to be advocating sloppy low quality work, as if he's recommending speed>quality. He's saying something else: remove latencies and delays to shorten feedback loops. Faster feedback cycles leads to more repetitions which leads to higher quality.

"slowness being a virtue" is not the opposite of Somer's recommendation about "working quickly".

like the idea of the article. however, it gave me bad vibes. this “virtues” only use is to have moral high ground over other “virtues” instead of deconstructing intelligence as a whole.

why is it bad that the person with the highest IQ does puzzle columns? are all people with IQ supposed to be doing groundbreaking research? can you only do groundbreaking research if you’re intelligent?

i think the real virtue here is not “slowness” but rather persistence. what do you think?

Slop

Having a website that’s legible with DarkReader is a virtue this article sadly does not espouse.

The classic military maxim… slow is smooth and smooth is fast.