[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.

But if you make systematic mistakes in thinking, you will only be making them faster.

But you can get away with more mistakes, if you can loop your test and improve cycle to fix those mistakes.

There was a demo that really brought this home to me. Some robotic fingers dribbling a ping pong ball at blinding speed. Fast cameras, fast actuators, brute force stupid feedback calculations. Stupid can be good enough if you're fast enough.

For more human creative processes, speeding up the design/test/evaluate loop will often beat more genius. Many things aren't to be reasoned out as much tested out.

I have this intuition that higher intelligence "unlocks" some options, and then it depends on the speed how much many points you get from the unlocked options. For example, if you have a ping-pong-playing robot with insane speed, such robot could easily win any ping-pong tournament. But still couldn't conquer the world, for example. His intelligence only unlocks the area of playing ping-pong. If the intelligence is not general, making it faster still doesn't make it general.

For general intelligences, if we ignore the time and resources, the great... (read more)

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[link] Speed is the New Intelligence

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[link] Speed is the New Intelligence

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