Breadth

Thinking about thinking about thinking.

Remember when I talked about the three modes of thinking we can each use?

You can be fast, deep, or wide with your thinking, but it’s very costly to try to do more than one at a time.

In the comments section, Daniel Nest and I concluded that there are easy AI examples of this in the real world, and that deep research really should be called wide research. If you want deeper thinking, you want a reasoning model to spend a minute or two on the question you’re asking.

Finally, there’s fast thinking. Sometimes you just want to know where most eels go to make whoopee, or how old James Clerk Maxwell was when he died, or what a metronome is; you definitely don’t want deep or wide thinking. Having the mental eye of Sauron turned toward something trivial is such a vast waste of resources as to be silly, but it’s also going to take a long time.

Another way to describe the wide form of thinking might be broad. Broad is a word I’ve heard all my life, having grown up at the confluence of the Broad and Bush rivers. Broadly speaking, the word broad is most often used as a metaphor for a wider range of topics or ideas, as opposed to the way it was traditionally used in Old English: an open, extended space.

I’m not going to broaden this piece today, but instead will just share that broad thinking is my favorite type of thinking, though it’s useless without the occasional deep dive or fast sprint. What mode do you find yourself using the most, and why?