Yup, but this always made school so fucking boring for me. Get it the 5 first minutes the teacher explains, spend 55 other minutes wandering in your mind about other stuff while the teacher proceeds to drill it into your peers memory repeating it ad-nauseaum until they sing it like fucking gospel.
That's the education I experienced at least, maybe someone else had better luck, but once you've to slowdown to the slowest of 30, and you're the fastest, things get pretty slow.
This messed me up so bad when I finally hit material I needed to work at even a little. Years and years and years of getting things instantly, with no effort whatsoever. Lecturing about the same thing again for the fifth day in a row, but I had it the first day? Cool, I'll draw cartoons and still answer any questions you ask me. Hand me a test? No problem. A-grade work in 5 minutes, read my book for the remainder of the hour. My stupid kid brain (this was... age 13 or so? Maybe 14?) was sure something horrible had happened to me over the Summer and I was now an idiot, when that stopped being how things worked. I wouldn't be surprised if I could have been diagnosed with actual depression, from then through my early 20s, mostly due to that and the follow-on effects.
I've since learned this is a super-common experience for gifted kids and one of the things really good gifted programs focus early on mitigating. I gather kids smarter than I was may still experience something similar, but not until they burn out hard and very suddenly, around Sophomore or Junior year of a challenging degree program.
If you had the choice understand the concept 10 times slower but in the end would come up with twice the amount of connections, would you consider it as something valuable?
Yes I see how it would make life easier, but is that really a meaningful goal?
And how do we know that the reasons behind that it makes life easier isn't just a bias society has towards its own traits? - E.g life is easier for right handed people aswell.
> If you had the choice understand the concept 10 times slower but in the end would come up with twice the amount of connections, would you consider it as something valuable?
But then they aren't just thinking slower, they are doing more processing. It isn't just "slow vs fast', it is "more processing vs less processing". Similarly if two people eat hamburgers as fast, but one of them eat twice as many hamburgers and therefore takes twice the time, it doesn't make him a "slow eater" it just means he eats a lot per meal.
I think the extent to which this actually occurs is overstated in discussions of intelligence because it makes people feel better, but maybe I'm just an asshole.
> Why do you think thinking fast is more important than thinking slowly?
I would say _that_ should be the definition of intelligence (as in, how 'smart' one is). If it takes someone a day to understand something, and it takes someone else 5 minutes to do the same, it's not just a matter of time spent. It completely shapes _how_ one thinks and how deep you can go in any given subject. There's only so much brainpower we can expend before getting tired and 'restarting' tasks is not easy.
Let's say if you are listening to a discussion with a topic you aren't very familiar with, but your peers are extremely familiar with. You'll see that the way the conversation flows is very different. They will rapid fire, exchange incomplete sentences (because the other person has inferred the rest) and overall have a much more rich and complex conversation. You'll be thinking about the next chess move, they will be thinking 10 steps ahead.
Then you'll say: "that's a bad example, this is about knowledge, not intelligence, they are doing it faster because they know more about the subject". Yes. I'll argue that a meaningful 'intelligence' delta doesn't really exist among healthy humans. It's all about how many patterns you have been exposed to. When we try to measure intelligence, we end up measuring knowledge, every single time.
Take the Mensa tests. Someone who went to good schools and did mentally challenging things will have most likely encountered similar questions before. Not exactly the same questions, but adapting something you have seen before to a new situation is much easier than doing this for the first time.
