December 18, 2025
Fast vs Slow: Comment Cage Match
Slowness Is a Virtue
Slow and Steady vs Fast and Furious: Internet picks sides
TLDR: Jakob says slow, mapless research beats quick wins, challenging IQ-as-speed thinking. Commenters clash: some defend speed as “remove delays,” others demand funding for long bets and reject moralizing slowness. It matters because it shapes how breakthroughs, teams, and money prioritize depth over deadlines.
Jakob Schwichtenberg’s Slowness is a Virtue argues that true research is wandering without a map—slow hunches, not fast checklists—and that our love of speed (and IQ-as-speed tests) misses the people who choose bold, messy problems. He name-drops Einstein, Andrew Wiles, and even porcelain’s accidental discovery. But the real fireworks are in the comments.
One camp cheers the nuance: as qouteall puts it, there’s real slowness (grinding without obvious results) vs garden‑variety procrastination. Another camp screams “try doing that in sprints.” n4r9 vents about teams forced to break everything into tasks under two days, which works for a cookie‑cutter website, not for exploring new routes through complex systems. Some want solutions: keiferski asks how to redesign institutions to fund long, uncertain bets—maybe “be less than hyper‑rational” when backing hunches.
And then the plot twist: commenters link this to James Somers’ “Working quickly is more important than it seems”. jasode insists Somers wasn’t endorsing sloppy speed; it’s about removing delays so good work ships faster. Meanwhile, noodlebird bristles at the vibe of “slowness” as moral high ground, asking who decided IQ puzzle‑solvers aren’t legit. Jokes fly: team Slow and Curious vs Fast and Serious, “slow‑cooked breakthroughs” vs “sprint spaghetti.” The crowd is split—and very loud.
Key Points
- •The article argues that academic incentives favor fast, well-defined questions suitable for short funding and publication cycles.
- •It distinguishes development (plan-driven execution) from research (goal pursuit without a clear map, guided by intuition).
- •The author asserts that speed can be an anti-signal for genuine research novelty, making slowness a virtue in exploration.
- •Historical cases—Böttger’s porcelain discovery, Wiles’s work on Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Einstein’s general relativity—underscore long timelines.
- •The article critiques IQ and academic tests for measuring speed on well-defined problems while neglecting problem selection and open-ended exploration.