Slow Processing
We are a culture obsessed with speed and productivity. I first recognized this bias and its consequences as an engineer working at a startup, but this extends beyond the tech industry. Today, news events are dissected and reported on instantly. We share headlines and soundbites in real-time and respond rapidly with tweets and comments. Yet despite the abundance of information and the speed with which we are able to access it, thoughtful discourse has largely broken down. Complex and nuanced topics are filtered into simplistic binary categories and a depth of understanding is noticeably absent. One gets the sense that in the information age, we have somehow become less informed.
Two major culprits have been identified as contributing to this growing problem; the misaligned incentives of a profit-starved, ad-driven media and the rise of social media platforms that exploit our cognitive biases and reinforce reductionist, tribalist thinking. However, I believe these are merely symptoms of a deeper, more systemic problem; our demand for immediacy. We demand immediate answers. Immediate results. While the lightning speed at which information flows is wonderful, we mistakenly believe that true understanding can be delivered just as fast. Perhaps we should look to nature — with its millions of years of accumulated evolutionary wisdom — to teach us something about this.
In The Hidden Life of Trees, author Peter Wohlleben offers fresh insight into the daily functioning of trees and shows just how social, dynamic, complex and truly alive they really are. It is suspected that trees feel pain and don’t just sit still and accept abuse from natural predators, but actively respond to threats. A caterpillar eating a leaf on a branch, for example, will trigger a distress call from the leaf to the rest of the tree in the form of an electrical signal. But unlike animals where electrical signals travel to the nervous system in mere milliseconds, this electric pulse is sent at an incredibly slow rate of just a third of an inch per minute. This seems an odd choice from an evolutionary perspective, but what is an apparent weakness also comes with an advantage. As Peter Wohlleben observes,
Trees live their lives in the slow lane, even when they are in danger. But this slow tempo doesn’t mean that a tree is not on top of what is happening in different parts of its structure. If the roots find themselves in trouble, this information is broadcast throughout the tree, which can trigger the leaves to release scent compounds. And not just any old scent compounds, but compounds that are specifically formulated for the task at hand.
What is remarkable about trees is their ability to respond to specific threats with specific responses. They can take in information about the predator by processing its saliva and then produce scent compounds to attract certain beneficial predators, those that can remove the threat without harming the tree. For example, elms and pines attract parasitic wasps that lay their eggs inside the leaf-eating caterpillars, which then eat them from the inside as the larvae develop. What the tree lacks in speed, it makes up for with an effective, if not overly harsh, response.
The same kind of strategic thinking can be found throughout much of the plant kingdom. In his book, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants, plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso highlights the discovery of something known as myrmecophily by botanist Federico Delpino in 1886, a property shared by over three thousand plant species. These plants secrete nectars outside their flowers, for example on the branches or buds. At first, this was considered strange and wasteful. The purpose of nectars on the flower itself was well understood as a reward for pollinators. But by producing it elsewhere, it was discovered that the plant offers some of its vital sugars to attract insects in exchange for their aid as a defense against other predators. Ants, for example, happen to be very effective protectors, gathering in large masses and viciously attacking other animals and even competing plants that dare to disrupt their daily dessert. This is just one of many examples in Stefano’s book that shows how unique plants are in their approach to problem solving, devising ingenious long-term strategies to deal with a hostile environment. Of course, these strategies take a great deal of time to implement and patience to see any rewards. But this makes sense because unlike animals that can react to threats in real-time, plants simply don’t have that luxury. As Stefano observes,
…speed is an incidental factor in a plant’s life. What is really important for plants is not so much responding quickly but responding well, so as to solve the problem. At first it might seem rash or even unreasonable to argue that plants find better solutions than animals. Yet if you study the question carefully, you will find that animals respond to the most diverse stresses using the same solution every time, a kind of knee-jerk reaction to all emergencies. This reaction has a name: movement. Whatever the problem, animals resolve it by moving…But escape is not a solution; at most it is a way of sidestepping a problem. Animals therefore do not solve problems, they simply avoid them more efficiently.
Plants — by virtue of being rooted to the ground — have evolved a very different approach to survival. What they lack in their ability to move through space, they make up for with their effective use of time, prioritizing deliberate, strategic action over frantic activity. And it is here we can begin to see a kind of natural law, a universal tradeoff between speed and precision of response which can also be found throughout the human system.
The human immune system has two subsystems that work in tandem, a fast and broadly effective innate system and a slower, more focused adaptive system¹. The innate system can act very fast when threats (bacterial or viral) enter the body, activating skin and mucous membranes to prevent germs from spreading into the body as well as mobilizing immune system cells to attack anything that looks foreign. The common symptoms of a runny nose, inflammation, and fever are the result of an active innate system working hard to flush out the threat. However, this is a nonspecific response. The body is raising the alarm bells and frantically activating different systems. If the innate system is unsuccessful in eliminating the pathogen, then after about 4 to 7 days the adaptive system kicks in. The adaptive system is busy working in the background to process and analyze the pathogen. Once it forms a clear picture of the threat, it develops immune cells specifically designed to attack it, much like the elm developing a particular scent compound to attack the caterpillar. It also stores that information in memory so that it can be more efficient in attacking the same pathogen again in the future. The cleverness of vaccination is in its ability to trigger the adaptive system, such that the body can remember the threat and be better prepared in the future.
The animal mind is no different from what we see elsewhere in nature and biology. For example, the speed-accuracy tradeoff in neuroscience is a well-known behavioral phenomenon, having been studied for over a century. Cognitive neuroscientist Richard P. Heitz provided an overview of the research in a paper published in 2014². From the abstract:
There are few behavioral effects as ubiquitous as the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT). From insects to rodents to primates, the tendency for decision speed to covary with decision accuracy seems an inescapable property of choice behavior.
As the author points out in the introduction, this may all sound rather obvious and “pedestrian”. After all, we know that when we drive too fast on the road, we reduce our ability to carefully navigate the terrain and increase our chances of getting into an accident. Or if we chop too quickly with a knife, we increase the probability of cutting ourselves. We seem to understand this at a gut level, but it seems so only when it comes to visible and immediate movement through space. This is not a concept we easily intuit about the invisible processes of our own conscious and reflective minds.
Precision with respect to movement is analogous to clarity and depth with respect to thought and the same tradeoff with processing speed can be found. Author David Epstein highlights this by challenging some of our long-held intuitions about learning and education in his book Range. Citing the work of Lindsey Richland, he identifies one major problem with education in the United States; teachers and parents not allowing students enough time to grapple with difficult problems and through their constant feedback and hint-giving, transforming conceptual problems into procedural ones. While this has a short-term payoff, it comes at a long-term cost. As he observes:
When younger students bring home problems that force them to make connections, Richland told me ‘parents like, Lemme show you, there’s a faster, easier way’. If the teacher didn’t already turn the work into using-procedures practice, well-meaning parents will. They aren’t comfortable with bewildered kids, and they want understanding to come quickly and easily. But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem.
Cognitive psychologist Nate Kornell points out that part of the reason that US students don’t do as well on international measures of knowledge is because they are doing too well in class. The trick is to make learning hard, not easy. Training that forces learners to generate answers without hints has been shown to produce better test results. In addition, “spacing” or distributed practice — the simple introduction of time between training and testing — provides better long-term results as students are unable to simply cram for an exam and are forced to sit with what they’ve learned for some time. The desire to see immediate and visible progress is in fact counterproductive:
Progress should just not happen too quickly…As with excessive hint-giving, it will, as a group of psychologists put it, ‘produce misleadingly high levels of immediate mastery that will not survive the passage of substantial periods of time.’ For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run.
David concludes in a chapter of the book titled Learning, Fast and Slow, “Learning deeply means learning slowly.”
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel prize in economics for his revolutionary work on decision making and behavioral economics, much of which challenged the prevailing paradigm of rational agents in economic theory. It turns out (surprise, surprise) humans are not entirely rational (i.e. internally consistent) when it comes to judgment and decision making. Kahneman shows that the human mind has two modes of thinking: a fast-processing, intuitive system I, and a slow-processing, intensive system II. The system I is very useful for navigating the world in our daily lives. We probably wouldn’t be able to function without it. But it also gets us into a lot of trouble, especially when forming political opinions or making ethical judgments. One example of this that is pertinent to journalism is the availability bias. Public perceptions of risks shaped by the media are often at odds with underlying realities. For example, studies showed that tornadoes were judged by the public as more deadly than asthma, although the latter causes 20 times more deaths. Or that death by lightning was judged less likely than death by botulism even though it is 52 times more frequent. Kahneman discusses this in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow:
The lesson is clear: estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage itself is biased towards novelty and poignancy. The media do not just shape what the public is interested in, but also are shaped by it. Editors cannot ignore the public’s demands that certain topics and viewpoints receive extensive coverage. Unusual events (such as botulism) attract disproportionate attention and are consequently perceived as less unusual than they really are. The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.
A tragic consequence of this thinking was the notable rise in car-related accidents post 9/11 as people — frightened by the intense media coverage of terrorism — shifted their behavior away from flying, which is and continues to be safer than driving³.
Much like our bodily addiction to sugar or drugs, the uncontrolled mind is hooked on premature conclusions. Kahneman discusses an experiment that analyzed the reaction of people to one-sided evidence provided for different legal issues. The conclusion is sobering:
The participants were fully aware of the setup, and those who heard only one side could easily have generated the argument for the other side. Nevertheless, the presentation of one-sided evidence had a very pronounced effect on judgments. Furthermore, participants who saw one-sided evidence were more confident in their judgments than those who saw both sides…It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.
This kind of thinking is a product of our system I, which is a short circuit that jumps to conclusions quickly in order to arrive at a sense of completeness that fits the narratives we’ve already developed. Much like the parents and teachers uncomfortable with the kids that struggle in school, so too are all of us deeply uncomfortable with feelings of uncertainty and doubt. This creates an incentive to seek a consistent picture rather than to develop a deeper understanding. As Kahneman observes,
Contrary to the rules of philosophers of science, who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them, people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold. The confirmatory bias of System I favors uncritical acceptance of suggestions and exaggeration of the likelihood of extreme and improbable events.
The demand for immediate answers may be an evolutionary impulse, a requirement for survival in the wild in order to quickly spot a predator, but is not a system well-adapted to the world in which we currently live, which requires more time spent in uncertainty — and therefore more time spent listening, reading, and processing — as we deal with an increasingly complex reality composed of large and sophisticated systems.
The misunderstandings and misconceptions that accompany tribalism and polarization may well be a natural consequence of a society that simply moves too fast and that hasn’t been designed to control for speed. Journalists that report too quickly and don’t take the time to do deep, thorough research. Citizens that read or watch too frequently and don’t take the time to read critically and seek different viewpoints. Little time is given to challenge, explore, understand or process any particular issue or event. Most of us form surprisingly strong opinions on enormously complex issues, not having read any academic literature or studied much history or philosophy or science or even analyzed the underlying data from primary sources. Sadly, this is also a rare quality in journalism and not necessarily the fault of the journalist, but rather of a system that disincentivizes depth in favor of speed. Instead, news and politics in our fast-paced culture is necessarily reduced to a kind of entertainment. Important and complex topics are either ignored or reduced to sensational headlines. Politicians to sound bites and quips, debate-stage theatrics rather than policy substance. The most shared piece of information is the witty one-liner, the funny tweet, the 30-second video. Rolf Dobelli, author of the bestseller The Art of Thinking Clearly — and soon to-be-released Stop Reading The News — summarized the problem with this quite well in a Guardian essay:
News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect. The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand.
This is partly an education problem in that we haven’t been taught to understand the inner workings of our own minds. Of course, many of us are starting to recognize how our own minds can lead us astray and how easy it is to deceive ourselves. But, broadly speaking, the incentives to develop slow, thoughtful, rational minds are simply not there in our fast-paced culture. After all, the primary unstated goal of education is to make us employable, earn an income and not fall behind as the world continues to blindly sprint ahead. Academic success is more about resume building for careers than it is about true learning. This is evidenced by an education system that does not value conceptual understanding or philosophy so much as it aims to produce winners of a memory marathon, often within narrow specializations. This, in spite of the fact that there is no longer any need to cram and store information in our heads that is readily available with a few taps on our phones.
The logical conclusion then, based on popular attitudes today, is to blame our ills on capitalism. After all, at the root of all these problems seem to be economic incentives that run counter to our own long-term interests. But this might be a premature conclusion. We tend to confuse the problems of consumerism (excessive consumption of trivial goods and services) with capitalism (market-driven means of exchanging value). One input factor in our capitalist system that deserves more attention is the monetary system. In the current monetary setup, GDP growth is not considered a beneficial byproduct of economic activity, but a necessary requirement for the continual functioning of society. The key lever that monetarists and government officials seek to control is the velocity of money circulating in the system. The goal is to have money exchange hands between consumers and producers as rapidly as possible and saved as little as possible in order to continuously grow the economy. This creates perverse incentives that affect everything money touches, which invariably shapes culture.
I’m certainly not advocating for some reductionist notion that speed is bad or that technology is evil. I’m a software engineer, and I fully recognize the benefits of speed. After all, I’m able to reach a relatively large audience because of the efficiency of our internet architecture. But I’m also a systems thinker and all systems require a delicate balance of inputs for optimal functioning. Perhaps it is because we are a culture that has not outgrown its imperialist ambitions, but space and time themselves have become territories to conquer, instead of tools we can employ, dials we can turn and modulate in order to improve our lives. Rather than learn from the tree, we have decided to emulate the fly, frantically buzzing around the globe and within our heads. The result is a society that has become remarkably polarized and governments that have devolved to a state of constant gridlock, all while enormous problems brew in the background — rising healthcare costs, a changing climate, wealth inequality, burdensome national debt, etc. Sensational narratives are given significantly more weight than scientific realities and compromise pragmatic opportunities for collective progress. It appears no political party or belief system is immune to the tidal wave of speed that has swept everything in its wake over the last few decades, a real tragedy of the commons.
Thankfully, I’m not alone in recognizing this problem. Already movements and counterforces have emerged that are attempting to combat a fast society. For example, we are beginning to recognize the role that time plays in human digestion and healthspan, with a growing number of research studies confirming the long-term benefits of fasting. There has also been a resurgence in the ancient practice of meditation, an acknowledgment of the power of time and space for improving mental health. There’s even technological innovation. Bitcoin was designed as a grassroots attempt to replace an archaic and counterproductive monetary system, with the concept of time preference being a core component of its underlying economic philosophy⁴ and which also happens to be reflected in its slow, conservative software development process. The beauty of the internet is that while it may have exacerbated the problem, it also contains a necessary self-correcting mechanism by allowing the dissemination of these important, yet still fringe ideas to spread. We have a chance to create a better future, but only if we remain focused on the root cause and not the symptoms.
[1]: The innate and adaptive immune systems. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279396/
[2]: The speed-accuracy tradeoff: history, physiology, methodology, and behavior. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2014.00150/full
[3]: Driving deaths and injuries post 9–11. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3233376/
[4]: I recommend reading The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous to learn about Bitcoin’s economic philosophy
