A thought on my slowness in all things intellectual

[hmpf]

I wonder...

Could it be that I'm a 'relatively stupid' person who's learned to think like an 'intelligent' person through early, frequent, sustained exposure to 'intelligent' people and their mental products? And that this accounts for my slowness in thinking and writing? I seem to be able to come up with a similar level of 'quality of thought' as regular 'intelligent' people do, but it seems to take me considerably longer to do so. Could this be because it simply takes me a huge extra effort to be clever and erudite and deep and whatnot?

Putting lots of stuff in quotation marks here because I'm groping to express something I don't have quite the right words for. 'Intelligence' in the above sense, for instance, would be something rather more fluid and vague than the common sense idea of 'intelligence'.

Comments

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

To be a little less vague, I've had many real-time conversations with you about "deep" and "meta" type stuff and I've never found you to be slow.

So if you're dumb and slow about stuff, then I must be too, and at least that means I'm in good company.

With regards to actually writing things down and expressing things, people do that differently. I tend to write VAST tracts of stuff until...until eventually, usually two-thirds of the way through the essay, I finally realise what it is I'm trying to say, and manage to write it concisely. And then either I get rid of the first two-thirds or I let it stand and hope whoever's reading it finds it interesting in retrospect. So...I free-associate and just keep writing (notice that I'm doing that now?) until I hit on what it is I want to say. If I just think about it then I...don't manage to get there. You've probably noticed the same thing in my speaking tendencies? ;)

Kev, on the other hand, with sit quietly thinking about his next sentence for...minutes at a time, sometimes, if it's important enough and he thinks the sentence needs to be just right. It can be irritating when I'm trying to have a really important conversation with him, but I don't think it's a sign of low intelligence, just...cautiousness, maybe?

People are different.

Speed might have something to do with some sorts of intelligence, but I think you're equating that with the wrong sort here. Also, quality does not equal quantity, or I'd be singing the praises of Anne McCaffrey. And trust me, I'm not.

And most importantly - like I said - in real-time actual conversations, this is not something you seem to struggle with. I'd have noticed.