Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?

Businesspeople, governments, and politicians aren’t looking to solve problems; they’re looking to win arguments. And the way you win an argument is by pretending that what should be an open-ended question with many possible right answers isn’t one. Make it enjoyable, have free booze on the train, put Wi-Fi on the train, have a ball pit on the train for kids—these are the Disney answers. Those are multiple and involve what you might call human judgment. You can’t win an argument with those.

What you do is pretend this is a high school math problem with a single right answer, you solve for the right answer using high school math, and then nobody can argue with you because apparently you haven’t made a decision. You’ve simply followed the data.

This is a massive problem in decision-making. We try to close down the solution space of any problem in order to arrive at a single right answer that is difficult to argue with.

Shout out to my buddy Chris who shared this with me. This whole article is so great, one that was difficult to pull only a single quote from.

I do like the author’s conclusion as well, which talks about the notion of “slow AI.” Maybe not every problem needs to be solved instantaneously.