In Praise of Slow

I was in a conversation recently about the relative performance of local public health agencies in assembling data to track the COVID-19 epidemic in their areas. These data are of critical importance in assessing the effectiveness of measures taken to slow the rate of infection.

There is large variation across geographies in the accuracy and timeliness of the data provided to the public. The favored hypothesis for the variation was differences across areas in participating in a program to improve the data infrastructure in local areas, funded by the Federal government. The program, if I understand correctly, had been in existence for over 10 years, but not all areas had enrolled in the program. Those participating built a set of processes that improved the quality of data and the timeliness of reporting the statistics from the data. It took a while, several years, but the effects were long-lasting. Those areas not participating in the program are performing less well.

There seem to be more and more examples of the value of careful, consistent work over time yielding benefits. Perhaps the contrasts are sharper now. The “move fast and break things” philosophy breeding “disruption” as the primary source of innovation and improvement is increasingly being questioned.

The human brain and the cultures among humans have not shown the doubling of the velocity of change that Moore’s law asserts for computer chip speed.

I’ve written in the past about the increasing difficulty of acquiring research funding for basic research, as opposed to application research. The proposed creation of a new directorate of Technology at the National Science Foundation is another move potentially in the same direction. But, many technology advancements rest on the findings of basic research that took place years or decades earlier.

For fear of being misunderstood, these assertions about the impact of basic research do not only apply to scientific studies, but also to scholarship and research in the humanities and the social sciences. Much scholarship and research have their effects after a community of peers critique the work and synthesize the developments with other prior work.

With the increased public focus on potential harmful effects of misinformation and disinformation in internet-based communication, we are suspicious of how technologies can be used for evil purposes despite their initial intended uses. Similarly, we have heightened awareness that algorithms affecting systems have all the flaws (and strengths) of the data on which they were built. Slow and careful has renewed appeal.

A list of the unsolved problems of the world suggests that a de-emphasis on “slow” may itself be a cause of those problems. The real heroes of our time are those working on tough problems, who repeatedly fail to achieve desired outcomes, but having subordinated their egos to the problem, persevere onward trying new ideas repeatedly toward success. These are not quick strikes; they seek solutions that may take decades to emerge. Their work is more like “keep moving and understand things” as directing innovation. Think of climate change, wealth inequality, racial/ethnic inequities, and access to health care. Progress on these will not come from fast moves alone.

Universities are easily criticized about their aloofness from the rest of society. They do, however, remain one of the few institutions in modern society that nurtures careful, consistent, deep, study of fundamental phenomena. Further, since universities have the explicit goal of training the next generation of leaders in a society, they have a special obligation of transmitting the skills of slow, careful, resilient approaches to problem solving when such approaches are necessary.