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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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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.

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).

So, these “you are X, therefore Y” don’t work for me. A lot of people don’t fall into buckets well.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

Are you familiar with System 1 and System 2?

https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The problem therefore seems to be more accurately described as having the same insights as others, but they arrive later, i.e. "delayed" insights.

Delayed processing could be an effect of delayed context switching, i.e. monotropism [0]. Monotropism can be an indicator of mild autism.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropism

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.

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 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.

However, you can try to be more conscientious. By many, if not most, measures conscientiousness is more important than raw horse power.

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?

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.

Cause it mayn't be that you're slow, it could just be that you don't want to make a mistake.