In Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?, advertising executive Rory Sutherland challenges our knee-jerk assumption that faster is always better. He asks us to consider what might happen if we approached problem-solving and decision-making with a more open-ended, human-centered perspective.

He offers a thought experiment: what if the brief to design a new train connection was given to Disney instead of railway engineers? The latter immediately focuses on speed, time, distance and capacity. With Disney, the goal wouldn’t be to shave minutes off the journey. They may ask a different question: “How do we make the train journey so enjoyable that people feel stupid going by car?”

Such open-ended briefs are very rare because “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.” The result? Our fixation on measurable outcomes often leads us to overlook the nuances of human experience: comfort, joy, even a bit of whimsy.

Sutherland illustrates his point with Uber’s app design. The app doesn’t make your taxi arrive faster; it merely reassures you they’re coming, easing the anxiety of uncertainty. “Too often, we optimize for the numerical thing, time and speed. We’re not optimizing for the emotional state, which is disquiet or anxiety.” This subtle but powerful reframe suggests that what we often desire isn’t speed, but certainty – a different kind of efficiency, one that doesn’t come with quantifiable metrics.

Sutherland’s most timely example is our rush to automate everything with AI, such as essay writing: most essays we write over our lifetime have essentially no intrinsic value, but the effort and process of writing them does. If we hand over so many processes to AI, what human experiences and profound insights are we leaving behind?

“Instinctively, people love to codify things, and make them numerical, and turn them into optimization problems with a single right answer.” This simplifies decision-making but strips it of nuance, creating models where human psychology becomes the first casualty.

Metrics-driven decision-making gives us a world where social acceleration leaves us perpetually unsatisfied, and where train journeys feel sterile and never quite fast enough. Sutherland calls on us to ask better questions, embrace ambiguity, and resist the urge to reduce everything to a single metric. By doing so, we might rediscover the richness of human experience that often lies in the spaces between measurable outcomes.

from 311 / The fallacy of faster