It would help if you clarified why specifically you feel unintelligent. Given your writing style: ability to distill concerns, compare abstract concepts and communicate clearly, I’d wager you are intelligent. Could it be imposter syndrome?
In this vein, the only behavior displayed in the original post that reads as less “intelligent” to me is assuming the [existence * importance] of trainable abstract intelligence.
I notice that people who’ve gotten a lot of the cultural “you’re so smart” feedback tend on the whole to be skeptical of abstract intelligence as an independent trait, perhaps because of the repeated experience of being told one has a trait that doesn’t subjectively feel like it has a specific presence or location.
This gets me wondering if the feeling that one doesn’t “have intelligence” in the way that one “has height” or “has happiness” or even “has verbal fluency” is universal, and the difference in how individuals interpret the absence-of-experience could be fully explainable by social context and feedback.
I feel the original post, despite ostensibly being a plea for help, could be read as a coded satire on the worship of “pure cognitive heft” that seems to permeate rationalist/LessWrong culture. It points out the misery of g-factor absolutism.
It would help if you clarified why specifically you feel unintelligent. Given your writing style: ability to distill concerns, compare abstract concepts and communicate clearly, I’d wager you are intelligent. Could it be imposter syndrome?
In this vein, the only behavior displayed in the original post that reads as less “intelligent” to me is assuming the [existence * importance] of trainable abstract intelligence.
I notice that people who’ve gotten a lot of the cultural “you’re so smart” feedback tend on the whole to be skeptical of abstract intelligence as an independent trait, perhaps because of the repeated experience of being told one has a trait that doesn’t subjectively feel like it has a specific presence or location.
This gets me wondering if the feeling that one doesn’t “have intelligence” in the way that one “has height” or “has happiness” or even “has verbal fluency” is universal, and the difference in how individuals interpret the absence-of-experience could be fully explainable by social context and feedback.
I feel the original post, despite ostensibly being a plea for help, could be read as a coded satire on the worship of “pure cognitive heft” that seems to permeate rationalist/LessWrong culture. It points out the misery of g-factor absolutism.