"In intellectual work, it’s much easier to get twice as fast than twice as good." radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/yod
Interesting to consider when this is an effective strategy. In many design tasks, simply being able to generate (& discard) more alts will produce better results. But…
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… this is probably only true when the problem can be solved with something like pre-existing approaches. Inventing wholly new representations needs 2x-good > 2x-fast.
In most software tasks (but often not the interesting ones), 2x-fast is usually higher-leverage than 2x-good.
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Reminds me also of experiences learning piano. For years, was trying to move as fast as possible onto harder repertoire. Then had a great teacher who made me slow way down, play stuff from years ago, focus on musicality. 2x good was much more rewarding than 2x fast.
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Also: when is it easier to get twice as good than twice as fast? One obvious answer is when you're approaching some physical time-and-motion limit. Probably also true early on. My intuition is that "fast" is more sigmoidal than "good", so good often grows faster early/late.
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One of my favorite places to work in a 2x fast mindset is email. Except long-form correspondence (which is its own thing), I have email idiosyncratically throttled down to 30m 2-3x/week. I make it a game: set a timer; plow through as much as I can; close the app; let stuff sit.
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In my head this is very tied to the "ruggedness" and dimensionality of some fitness landscape where fast is better IF you can either do gradient descent on a smoothish landscape OR the space is low-enough dimensionality that you can intuit a ~global max
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK_model)
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Ooh, this resonates!
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