[link] Speed is the New Intelligence

Gunnar_Zarncke

The article really is about speeding up government, but the key point is speed as a component of smart:

A smart friend told me recently that speed is the new intelligence, at least for some types of technology jobs. If you are hiring an interface designer, for example, the one that can generate and test several designs gets you further than the “genius” who takes months to produce the first design to test. When you can easily test alternatives, the ability to quickly generate new things to test is a substitute for intelligence.

This shifts the focus from the ability to grasp and think through very complex topics (includes good working memory and memory recall in general) to the ability new topics quickly (includes quick learning and unlearning, creativity).

Smart people in the technology world no long believe they can think their way to success. Now the smart folks try whatever plan looks promising, test it, tweak it, and reiterate. In that environment, speed matters more than intelligence because no one has the psychic ability to pick a winner in advance. All you can do is try things that make sense and see what happens. Obviously this is easier to do when your product is software based.

This also changes the type of grit needed. The grit to push through a long topic versus the grit try lots of new things and to learn from failures.

From Scott Adams Blog

The article really is about speeding up government, but the key point is speed as a component of smart:

A smart friend told me recently that speed is the new intelligence, at least for some types of technology jobs. If you are hiring an interface designer, for example, the one that can generate and test several designs gets you further than the “genius” who takes months to produce the first design to test. When you can easily test alternatives, the ability to quickly generate new things to test is a substitute for intelligence.

Smart people in the technology world no long believe they can think their way to success. Now the smart folks try whatever plan looks promising, test it, tweak it, and reiterate. In that environment, speed matters more than intelligence because no one has the psychic ability to pick a winner in advance. All you can do is try things that make sense and see what happens. Obviously this is easier to do when your product is software based.

This also changes the type of grit needed. The grit to push through a long topic versus the grit try lots of new things and to learn from failures.

There's problems you can solve quickly, and problems that you can solve at all. You want to find someone who can solve problems at a certain difficulty as fast as possible. If they can't solve it, work on making it so they can. If they can, work on making it so they do what they already can do, but faster.

This is particularly clear with computers. You can write better algorithms that solve more problems and get better answers, at the cost of running slower. If a program can't solve your problem, it's worthless. If it can solve your problem, making it more sophisticated will make things worse. For example, you can't stick formatting into a .txt file, but if you have no need for formatting, Notepad runs faster, takes less space, and is more reliable than Word.

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[link] Speed is the New Intelligence

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[link] Speed is the New Intelligence

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