Thread by @TaylorPearsonMe

Occasionally, there is a saying that hits you in just the right way and just the right moment and you keep coming back to it over and over.

One of those for me is: Slow is Smooth. Smooth is Fast.

taylorpearson.me/interestingtim…

The saying is widely attributed to the Navy Seals though many other military figures have made similar observations.

One of Augustus Caesar's favorite sayings was "Festina Lente" (Hasten slowly)

When you are dealing with lethal weapons, there is a very skewed distribution in outcomes: You are either dead or not dead.

Being dead is infinitely worse than being not dead.

So, you really, really want to do everything you can do to stay not dead.

If it takes 1 second to get off a shot at someone and you miss, you are in trouble.

It is infinitely better to move slower and take 1.5 seconds to make sure you hit them. The half-second you saved being faster but missing is worth nothing.

One part of the meaning of "slow is smooth. smooth is fast." is about practicing slowly so that the correct motor patterns are ingrained.

If you’ve never played golf before and you go out there and try to go full Bryson DeChambeau, you’re going to have a bad time.

Tacit knowledge—as opposed to explicit knowledge—is knowledge that is difficult to express or verbalize. It’s something like intuition that one develops over a lot of experience in a specific domain.

Moving slowly at first helps to ingrain this.

taylorpearson.me/fingerspitzeng…

However, even experts seem to still follow the "Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast" mantra.

Why is it this?

I think it comes back to my hobbyhorse topics of ergodicity and fat tails.

For systems that are characterized by fat tails (AKA black swans), over-optimizing for efficiency in the short run has two major problems.

https://twitter.com/TaylorPearsonMe/status/1182409505595953157

First, it actually leads to less efficiency in the long run because of the build-up of hidden risk.

https://twitter.com/TaylorPearsonMe/status/1339961145587888128

The way that hidden risk normally shows up is by making a tradeoff to get more efficiency in the short term at the cost of robustness and efficiency in the long run, what I’ve called the Robustness-Efficiency Trade-Off (RETO).

Here's a simple example: You pack your work calendar to 95% full.

A work emergency comes up. You deal with it in a sort of half-ass way that won’t prevent it from happening again.

Even that takes so much time that you have to reschedule the rest of the week, now you’ve added another task (rescheduling) to your already overflowing calendar.

Contrast this with when you are operating at 70% capacity.

An unexpected issue comes up.

You have plenty of time to deal with it and so you fully address the root cause so it doesn’t happen again.

That's it.

However, the other fat tail is equally important: the company or individual running at max capacity also has no ability to seize new opportunities.

The governator was actually very good at this.

A lot of good opportunities have a very short half-life and very high upside (a la @andrewchen's Law of Shitty Click Throughs).

andrewchen.com/the-law-of-shi…

Amos Tversky, the late collaborator of Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, once said:

“the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

This micro-inefficiency of spending more time dealing with a problem creates a macro-efficiency: fewer problems in the long run.

Counterintuitively, operating at ~70-80% often means outcompeting another company or individual operating at 90-99% capacity.

Festina Lente!