zlacker

>>colinc+(OP)
Seems very Taleb's Ugly Surgeon / Berkson's Paradox to me. It's like how software engineers who are at Google are worse if they're better competitive programmers.

e.g. https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/taleb-surgeon/

>>arjie+Ev
Makes sense. My perspective is that fast learners are fast because they absorb information quickly without the overhead of cross-domain synthesis. They have more logical contradictions in their minds which they haven't resolved or aren't even aware of. Their worldview is not coherent as a whole. In some cases, they don't have a worldview; instead they just rely on expert data to inform their decisions... But the experts themselves are often victim to the same kind of domain-specific tunnel vision. Such people often lack creativity in their work because cross-domain pattern synthesis is precisely how you can solve complex problems that haven't been solved before.

>>jongjo+uU
That is a very idealistic perspective. There are certainly fast learners due to the fact they are faster at cross domain synthesis.

>>gmadse+Ae1
This does not match my observations. Also, what I've heard from experts is that 'intelligent' people are more suggestible. The way society measures intelligence is thinking speed; which tends to correlate with learning speed.

Some people learn surface-level information quickly without deep integration; what educational researchers sometimes call "shallow learning." And specialization can create blind spots.

>>jongjo+np1
I'm sure there is an association between personality traits {openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism} with preferences to specialize or learn broadly. That is seperate from the phenomena of nearly all cognitive tasks being correlated with each other positively, e.g. verbal scores are positively correlated with math and musical scores. This is referred to as g-factor in literature.

My overall point being, yes people learn differently, but it is also true that there exists outliers in general intelligence