So, as a contrast, I claim I also have the ability I’m describing, and I was unusually good at math as a kid (increasingly more so as I got older) and just very smart overall but that was about it. I was in a gifted program in elementary school and a different gifted program in middle school; they did a good job developing my ability to think but I didn’t really use it on anything except math and schoolwork. The thing that unlocked me was my first CFAR workshop, which is when it first occurred to me that I could enjoy using the parts of my brain I’d developed to think about math to think about anything at all.
Thanks for writing this up!
So, as a contrast, I claim I also have the ability I’m describing, and I was unusually good at math as a kid (increasingly more so as I got older) and just very smart overall but that was about it. I was in a gifted program in elementary school and a different gifted program in middle school; they did a good job developing my ability to think but I didn’t really use it on anything except math and schoolwork. The thing that unlocked me was my first CFAR workshop, which is when it first occurred to me that I could enjoy using the parts of my brain I’d developed to think about math to think about anything at all.