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.
> 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.
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.
For the muscle memory example try really paying attention to walking and your going to be less stable.
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.
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?
My brain has compressed/chunked patterns so that I can immediately see what the optimal move or set of candidate moves are instead of having to determine them more computationally.
I'm not sure how that fits into the framework of this article. Something like the number of calculations remains static but total work done per calculation increases.
Much of the debate in this comment thread is a result of these concepts being fuzzily defined in the article itself.
"Think rate is fixed" glosses over activities with compounding returns. Learning!
Better abstractions and heuristics can have an enormous impact on problem solving efficiency.
First-principles thinking is a powerful hammer, but it's expensive. Over-use it and you'll get nothing done. Under-use it, and you'll do nothing original. Knowing where to use it is the trick, and that's _also_ a skill that can be improved over time.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's a shame you've decided to abandon the argument.
That doesn't follow because once you've mastered something you consider less options to reach a conclusion than a novice. One reaches the correct conclusion whit less thinking, not faster thinking.
Following your logic a person taking a shortcut from point A to point B is doing the same amount of driving as somebody not taking the shortcut, they are just driving faster.
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.
As in the old joke:
Q: What's the difference between a novice and an expert?
A: The novice thinks twice before doing something stupid.
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.
I don't remember all of the arguments in favour, but he pointed out reading: We start sounding out individual letters and eventually progress to scanning whole words or sentences or paragraphs.
It's not that our bit rate changes, it's that our "bit" changes.
Yeah, handwavy I know, I am struggling to recall the conversation.
Essentially, though, consider your point another way: We can only process so many concepts/notions per unit time, and initially, in any subject, our concepts/notions are smaller. As our experience grows, they grow, so our throughput increases, even at the same processing speed.
Sort of like widening a highway to handle more volume at the same speed. Sort of.
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.
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).
Don't you think this has a lot more to do with access? I can't imagine there are too many people saying: "I will turn down this high-paying management job because I spent my decision budget at the grocery store"
Access, I believe, is one part of the issue. I'm thinking more of the "my willpower budget is spent on the grocery vs utility bill" leading to other poor choices that make it more difficult to get a promotion that allows for a more care free life (not worrying about bills).
I believe that there are many parts of social and economic feedback loops that make it harder (and continue to make it harder) for people in environments that are willpower draining to move to jobs where the ability to make good decisions is the key value.
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).
A disingenuous argument indeed. Almost as if you took the entire premise of the argument you disagree with and put it inside a "you can argue" block which is then dismissed with no rebuttal.
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.
The first thing I learned from a second human language teacher was that I'd know when I was becoming fluent-ish when I had a dream in Spanish. At least for second-language teachers, internalizing concepts and not thinking about them is a sign of learning progress. It doesn't seem so disingenuous to me, having internalized a lot of things that felt unfamiliar before and having experienced proficiency improvements as unfamiliarity melted away.
I still think that being able to crack an improvised joke based on the situation one is in is a stronger sign of fluency. But it rests on similar assumptions: having internalized the basic structures of the language to the point where you can spend your cognitive resources on execution.
Think about learning to read in.a script you're unfamiliar with (eg Cyrillic if your native language uses Roman script). You need to learn the shape of the letters so you have to keep in mind multiple things just to process one letter.
At some point you're familiar enough with the script that each letter becomes one "chunk" that you can recall and process mentally. This stage is equivalent to sounding out a word by sounding out each letter.
At some point each word becomes a "chunk". Fun fact: they have done tests on reading and if you scramble the letters in text but anchor the first and last letter of each word, most fluent readers can still read the text. [1]
After that groups of words become "chunks" but the barrier here becomes more nebulous.
My point is that the number of chunks your brain can process at a time is relatively fixed (around 5 IIRC).
So I'm not sure that language learning is the counterexample you may believe.
[1]: https://www.treehugger.com/why-your-brain-can-read-jumbled-l...
> 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.
So the number of "chunks" may be fixed, but you are able to absorb and think about the text quicker.
Most learner's are trying to parse the new language into their old, and discount context (understandably with English), and that sudden burst your noticing, is that realisation.
I could go on for quite a while about this, but my main point is: learning a new language is a whole bunch of background processes that most people don't realize.
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.
For that matter, you can certainly write software that has poor upload speed that improves with processing power, regardless of your internet connection.
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.
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.