by godelski | 2025-09-14 22:09:59+00:00
> “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”

That actually reminds me something I head from Corridor Crew. Wren was referencing Brandon Laatsch (timestamped link to clip [0])

| "Shower thoughts only work, when you put in the work." You have to actually spend time trying to brainstorm something, trying to think of something, and at the end of it you'll've made no progress and be discouraged. But then randomly, later, in the shower, doing something completely unrelated, the idea hits.

It's weird, but I think it works. My best guess is that (part of this can be explained that) by spending time thinking about the solution space, your brain will then subconsciously start to generalize. Which would mean this is, to some extent, a trainable skill. I'm sure Churchill was also a master of moving conversations to topics or subtopics where he could more quickly make off-the-cuff remarks. But I think even the "slowest" person will recognize that they are much quicker in certain categories. Slowness might not mean they lack having thought about those topics, but might just mean they've thought less about quip remarks in that domain (or even quip remarks in general).

I think we would be naive to assume quick responses are a good measure of one's intelligence[1]. I know this is common, but I think it is missing the same thing that quick responses also tend to miss: depth. You can be fast and deep, but more often people are fast and wrong[2]. More complex the topic the easier it is to be unaware of how wrong.

[0] https://youtu.be/9FL7IZavt1I?t=93

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242293

[2] https://0x0.st/KcAU.png

[Edit] I wanted to add that I found this method highly effective during my PhD. It requires a balance of churning the wheels and walking away. Progress is invisible until the finish line is in sight, so you need to spend time pushing even if it looks like you are getting nowhere. But at the same time, you need to walk away. If you keep pushing you'll never have that time for those random thoughts. There's a laundry list of famous physicist[3] who used to "only work" for a few hours a day and then do things like go on long walks or play tennis. I think that fits into this model. It seems to be a critical aspect for any creative work. Honestly, I would find that the most common mistake I would make is sitting at my desk for too long. It results in a narrowing of focus. There's a lot of times we want that narrowing, but there's also plenty of times we want to think more broadly. I think this is very true for programming in general. I can sympathize with managers who look at people doing these things and interpret them as being unproductive. But I think the reality is that productivity is just a really hard thing to measure when you're not a machine stamping out well defined widgets. I think this ends up with us just making fewer "widgets" and of lower quality. I mean it isn't like you can measure quality by anything as simple as the number of lines of code or number of Jira tickets knocked off. Hell, if you are too narrow your solutions are probably creating more tickets than you're knocking off! But that's completely invisible, only measurable post hoc, and even then quite difficult to measure (if not impossible).

We often talk about current "titans" and all of them boast their long hours and "dedication." People like Elon suggesting 120hrs or the growing 996 paradigm. But I'm unconvinced this really checks out. If anything, it appears much more common that Nobel scientists worked fewer hours, not more. We're all not working on Nobel level work, but it does beg the question of what the most effective strategy actually is. Certainly we can't conclude longer hours at the desk yields better output. We can't counterfactually conclude that Dirac would have been even greater had he spent 16 hrs a day working rather than a handful. "More hours" just seems to be a naive oversimplification, highly related to these "shower thoughts"

[3] Dirac is a famous example, who colleagues would also jokingly use the unit "Dirac" in reference to "one word per hour". Notoriously "slow" thinker, but a surefire candidate for one of the smartest humans to ever exist. Poincare famously worked 10am till noon then 5pm till 7pm. Darwin followed a similar model.