Being bored out of my mind in grade school and unable to read anything else during that time just led to a lot of day dreaming and not “productive” or directed thinking. What do people bored out their minds at work/life think about?
Host: What's the most complex thing you do in your kitchen?
David Mitchel: thinks for a fraction of a second Worry about death.
- Someone is explaining a concept.
- We get it in a few seconds, can come up connections, next steps, implications, etc.
- Other people need to have it explained longer, or miss the main point, or don't see how it connects to other pertinent things.
You can see how that would make life easier, and make you more effective at a variety of real time tasks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then the question becomes: when is something fully processed - and to which degree is a person inclined to explore the depths of a concept?
What is the limit that decides when depth is no longer valuable?
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.