On Being Slow

I have eaten up Newport’s idea since, well, start of college. It started with Thomas Frank Youtube channel who recommended one of the computer scientist’s book, How to Win at College. Long story short, eight years later, I didn’t win that kind of “win” at college. I survived, at least. People don’t just absorb advice and apply. I have to learned it myself. But, yeah. Thank God.

But that don’t make shy away at following Newport’s blog. In a subtle way, it inspired me to also write. Not in his sophisticated way of thinking. Just write about whatever that’s overcrowding my mind.

Well, why? Maybe his systematic and computational thinking-kind-of analysis about certain topics are kind-of clicked. And above all, his practical and pragmatic approach at executing life plan is the most resonant with me.

Including slow productivity.

I feel I want to throw up my own words when talking about productivity — blame the internet trends that made it so shallow. But it’s important, maybe the most important after constantly aware of our own intention and end goal (status: universally accepted) and having a clear epistemological standing (status: debatable, it’s just my flavour of living).

Because being productive entails accomplishment. Being accomplished should be on something useful. Feeling being useful usually makes you happy. Everyone wants to be happy. Thus, everyone should know their own best way to be a productive human being.

And I am who I am. I’m mostly a knowledge worker. My value lies on producing knowledge. That might surface as a product, but it starts with churning stuffs in my brain, communicating and exchanging information and understanding with the others— not in my physical muscles (unless you count finger muscles).

Somewhere in mid-2024, followed with one of most productive semester in my life.

Newport’s slow productivity isn’t rocket science. It’s simple. Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality. That’s it (which is a kind of disappointment that his idea is not sophisticated enough haha — but he argues these points well). For knowledge workers with relatively high autonomy like me, it’s a framework that actually makes sense. No more pretending that shallow work counts as real productivity. Sorry, endless Zoom meetings.

On the other hand, I build AI systems for a living. And here’s where today’s world gets interesting. Trying to match the speed of machines is a losing game. I’ve tried :/. My human brain strongly objects to processing information at the speed of GPT-4.

This whole situation reminds me of that one time I tried to speed-read through a complex technical concept in one of the independent courses I take online. Of course, it didn’t end well. Epistemic security — fancy words for making sure we actually understand what we think we understand — doesn’t play nice with rushing. You can’t just ctrl+F your way through deep comprehension.

Working with AI has taught me something funny about human cognition. Our tools get exponentially faster, but our brains stubbornly maintain their ancient processing speed (though very efficient, relatively speaking). Some things just can’t be rushed.

I would like to say that in this AI-accelerated world, our human-paced thinking isn’t a bug — it’s a feature. Contemplative robustness doesn’t come from matching machine speed. It comes from embracing our maddeningly slow, wonderfully thorough human way of understanding things. Sometimes that means spending an entire day, entire week, even entire year on a single concept, turning it over and over until it clicks.

Just like how I once cried over my slowness in understanding before a multivariable calculus exam — which somehow now feels like a piece of cake when learning deep learning stuffs. (warning: it’s a link to a PDF file)

And I think that’s perfectly fine.

(…now that you have left college! ← this is an important caveat we won’t explore now)

In the long run, people doesn’t care how long it took you to read a book. How long it cost your time to write that article or chapter. Just like people rarely asked how many change of seasons it took Aristotle to develop his ideas or how much effort Ibn Sina had to put in trying to wrap his head around the Greek philosopher’s thinking before resorting to commentary books first. And just like the students appreciate the pain of our early scholars in producing knowledge before social media disruption, before the internet came, and especially before the printing era. What matter is that it sticks through millennia.