Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.
Stewart Brand • Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
there are very different rhythms of change for different things, like the very long time horizons for transforming infrastructures, developing new drugs or changing the make-up of the armed forces. At the other extreme, there are the very short time horizons of news cycles and software development. In between are the rhythms of schools and
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
The total effect of the pace layers is that they provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing negative feedback throughout the system. It is precisely in the apparent contradictions of pace that civilization finds its surest health.