If you’re reading through some of the posts in the core sequences and understanding them pretty well then you’re not dumb. Even if it requires lots of thinking and re-reading.
There’s an idea that being smart means that you can understand anything quickly and easily, but that’s not really true (at most, it is sometimes one unreliable sign of intelligence). Being good at something doesn’t mean that it’s always easy for you, it means that you can work to meet the challenges that you face. With intelligence, a big part of that is being able to recognize when you don’t understand something, and to keep thinking it through and investigating it until you’ve figured it out. Which sounds like what you’re doing.
If a new idea comes quickly to someone, a lot of the time that’s because it’s already relatively familiar to them—they have the necessary background knowledge and know about related concepts, so it’s relatively easy for them to add this one new piece of knowledge. (If you’ve gotten to the posts on inferential distance then this will sound familiar to you.) Your educational background means that a lot of the topics being discussed on LW will be less familiar to you than they are to many other people on LW, so of course it’s going to take more work for you to figure them out. The fact that you’re putting in that work and figuring them out is a sign of your ability to learn. It doesn’t mean that you’re dumb.
If you’re reading through some of the posts in the core sequences and understanding them pretty well then you’re not dumb. Even if it requires lots of thinking and re-reading.
There’s an idea that being smart means that you can understand anything quickly and easily, but that’s not really true (at most, it is sometimes one unreliable sign of intelligence). Being good at something doesn’t mean that it’s always easy for you, it means that you can work to meet the challenges that you face. With intelligence, a big part of that is being able to recognize when you don’t understand something, and to keep thinking it through and investigating it until you’ve figured it out. Which sounds like what you’re doing.
If a new idea comes quickly to someone, a lot of the time that’s because it’s already relatively familiar to them—they have the necessary background knowledge and know about related concepts, so it’s relatively easy for them to add this one new piece of knowledge. (If you’ve gotten to the posts on inferential distance then this will sound familiar to you.) Your educational background means that a lot of the topics being discussed on LW will be less familiar to you than they are to many other people on LW, so of course it’s going to take more work for you to figure them out. The fact that you’re putting in that work and figuring them out is a sign of your ability to learn. It doesn’t mean that you’re dumb.