Notes · Essay
On patience as a method
Why the slowest hypotheses tend to be the right ones. A philosophical aside, written in a notebook on a long train.
There is a particular kind of hypothesis that arrives quickly, feels obvious, and is almost certainly wrong. And there is a different kind — slower, harder to articulate, frequently embarrassing — that keeps returning until you either write it down or spend the rest of your career pretending you never thought it.
I've had three of the second kind. Two of them are in the book. The third is still being worked out in the margins of maps I can't show anyone yet.
The slowness is not incidental. A fast hypothesis is usually a pattern-match: you see something, you connect it to something you already know, and you feel clever. A slow one is different. It's the thing that doesn't fit into any existing pattern, that won't leave you alone, that gradually forces you to build new machinery just to describe it.
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