Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

One thing society needs to get right is not screwing over slow thinkers from day 1. A slow thinker can sometimes generate amazing projects over remarkably short timelines, but deliver "meh" performances on standardized tests that use time pressure to fit scores to a bell curve

I think a lot of people just assume that human populations somehow fit a bell curve neatly over various traits, but many of these tests are *designed* to clean up the curve by tweaking test items until beta populations fall along the right line

This might mean adding redundant "easy" questions to push more low-scorers up to the middle or using time pressure to push slower readers/thinkers down to the middle, depending on how the curve looks on initial tests. Or vice versa.

The problem isn't that high-scorers are bad at the thing that's being tested for, it's that there may be some or many folks scoring in the middle who are equally good or better. When you tweak items to produce a desired curve, you muddy the waters re: what the test actually tests

If top scorers *are* really good *and* really fast, isn't that fine? Well, no. In the real world, cognitively-demanding work isn't a speed run. If top scorers get the best opportunities, people w/ traits preferable to speed (creativity, conscientiousness, etc.) may get pushed out

I do sometimes wonder though if these kinds of structural obstacles aren't actually essential to instilling resilience in slow thinkers - one of the most valuable traits they can bring to challenging work projects. Would they still have this if they didn't struggle early on?

Resilience is really valuable, as is the creativity required to make your way through a world that wrote you off early. But if you're developing these things because the world allocates the best opportunities poorly, it's still a suboptimal world