[cm2012]

It makes life easier. E.G.

- 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.

[agustif]

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.

[handrous]

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.

[psysharp]

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.

[Jensson]

> 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.

[psysharp]

Absolutely.

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?

[Jensson]

But that is a different question.

[cm2012]

We agree in part, I don't think its morally better to think faster. Just that it makes life easier/makes it easier to achieve life outcomes you want.

[whimsicalism]

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.