The Last Word On Nothing

Bad things happen quickly; good things take time. This isn’t a perfect pattern, of course, but I think it’s real and worth thinking about. 

A wildfire, explosion, earthquake, pandemic, gunshot, car crash, heart attack—all fast. Cancer typically starts out slow but then gets fast. Climate change seems slow, but the reason it’s so dangerous is that, from a geological, evolutionary, and cultural perspective, it’s fast.

Some good things are fast. A joke, an insight, a rare bird sighting. Someone runs into a burning building and saves a child. 

But most good things are slow, and that’s especially true for science. It took the longitudinal Framingham Heart Study, which started in 1948 and is still going, to identify the biggest risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Long-term datasets like the Keeling Curve, documenting atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from Mauna Loa, Hawai’i, provide some of the best evidence for anthropogenic climate change. (Withdrawing its funding, as the Trump administration threatens to do, is fast.) Drug development is slow. Restoring endangered species is slow. Restoring ecosystems is slow. Designing, building, launching, receiving and analyzing data from, and then sharing images from a space mission to Saturn? Slow.  

Those of us who cover science sometimes gripe about the embargo system and the power of a small number of research journals to determine the news. (The embargo system is an agreement between journals like Science or Nature and credentialed journalists. We get a few days’ notice of what they’re publishing, which gives us a chance to contact outside experts for context and do decent reporting (ideally) before publishing a story when the next edition of the journal comes out.) But what the embargo system, and the scientific publishing system in general, give us is a way to make something slow, fast. To make it “news.” 

It typically takes many years for paleontologists to find a fossil, extract it, date it, determine its taxonomy, document their case that it’s a new species, submit a report to a journal, go through peer review and editing, and finally publish their results. The headline? “Enormous New Pterosaur Discovered,” like it happened yesterday. 

The news has a bias for what’s new, and that’s one reason why good and slow things are under-understood and underappreciated. Smoking-related death rates have declined dramatically, but not so quickly that it counts much as news. Thank you, by the way, to all the researchers, advocates, and journalists who shared the truth about smoking’s dangers despite highly-funded merchants of doubt. That took a long time, longer than it should have. And thanks to everyone who fought to get smoking banned from airplanes, restaurants, office buildings—we should build monuments to you.

It’s not just the news that has a bias for short-term thinking. Venture capitalists and even philanthropies want to launch a shiny new thing, but often pull funding prematurely to go fund the next shiny new thing. Politicians are always looking at quick wins to highlight during their next election campaign. Funding research, education, public health, infrastructure and other long-term investments are better for their constituents but don’t get the appreciation they deserve.

A lot of bad things are happening right now, quickly. It takes forever to set up life-saving clinical trials, but no time at all for sociopaths to stop them. It takes a lot of effort to suppress dangerous diseases like measles, and no time at all for sociopaths to spread lies about them. It takes a lot of time to build up a federal workforce with experience and expertise, and no time at all for sociopaths to fire them. The people who move fast and break things are some of the most dangerous people alive. The rest of us, as much as we can, must try to stop them, to fix things, to move slow and build things.