Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

There are “cognitive skills” that contribute to “intelligence”. So then the question is: are those skills a certain kind of knowledge that can be learned?

AFAICT some can be, and many probably cannot be *yet,* and others possibly can't be unless you alter the brain. But it's early days and hard to know. Can aphantasiacs learn to create mental imagery? Not yet, maybe in the future (many have visual dreams!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia 

It seems to me that the current emphasis on cognitive speed probably confuses the issue. Are there any items on an IQ test that a typical person with an average score would *never* be able to solve even if they really wanted to and could spend days or weeks or months trying?

"emphasis on cognitive speed probably confuses the issue" This bugs me because we know via protocol analysis that different people use their minds differently and that this is fractal. Speed and IQ are path contingent and fluid all the way down.

I don't understand much of the vocabulary you use in your replies or on your blog, which is why I probably won't respond to you very much

What is the hardest, most salient, most confusing, most annoying, or most off-putting thing?

If you don't grasp the meaning of several terms or phrases in a sentence, either because they're totally unfamiliar or because they have no apparent meaning in context, it's hard to isolate any one of them as particularly troublesome