[link] Speed is the New Intelligence

Imagine casting a "speed ×100" spell on a dumb person. Would that make them a smart person? No.

On the other hand, if we would cast a "speed ×2" spell on a smart person, it would appear to make them smarter. They would be able to solve difficult problems in half the time, right?

So... there seems to be some connection, but also a difference. Speed can make you more productive, and productivity is a signal of intelligence. But if you make systematic mistakes in thinking, you will only be making them faster.

Smart people in the technology world no long believe they can think their way to success.

Because they already are thinking. If you are already thinking at near 100% of your capacity, telling you "think more" is not going to help. The right advice in that situation could be "instead of thinking without experimenting, try thinking and experimenting". But one should give that advice only to people who are already thinking.

Is this new, or just a professional blogger weaving a few familiar concepts together into an essay that sounds new? "Quick witted" is an expression that goes back at least six centuries (esp. definition 20), and "quick/slow on the uptake" at least two. The correlation between the speed of neural signals and IQ has been known for a while. In fact, a quick grasp of new concepts is pretty much a defining characteristic of intelligence (as the latter word is generally used). And how often have we heard the standard startup wisdom of "fail early and often", "move fast and break things", etc.? There's even a whole program development methodology called "Agile".

If anything, Adams is being a bit slow on the uptake here.

previous discussion http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr4/link_speed_superintelligence/

typo in the title - Intelligence

The interface design example is classic Rationalism Verses Empiricism. The empiricist consults nature, iterating and testing until they have something that observably works. Speed of work, not depth of thought, is what matters. The classical rationalist doesn't bother, because they have so much faith in their models and deductive aparatus(in other words, a very very good imagination, mental or virtual) that they believe they can tell whether something will work just by looking hard at concepts while occupying the simulated mindsets of imaginary users. While I recognize that understanding user needs and perceptions from a distance is hard, I opine that the rationalist approach, on the right set of shoulders, is extremely valuable in interface design, there are local maxima you can't get past with A/B testing and user interviews.

You need to be thoughtful as all hell to do something new without ruining it in ten different ways. IMO Infinite scrolling is a good example. The design community has collectively decided that the idea is fundamentally broken for all sorts of reasons because none of them seem to be thoughtful enough to sit down and answer to each of the criticisms and see that every single one of them can be patched, instead of just looking at what has been done and making generalizations from how they did.

You cannot create truly new things without depth of thought, without a focused, accurate enough imagination to find the flaws before building one too many failed attempts and giving up.

[1] citation pending. I'll probably push out my black swan infinite scroll implementation at some point in the first or second quarter.

Now the smart folks try whatever plan looks promising, test it, tweak it, and reiterate.

A little nitpick, but I think that would be much better as "iterate".