Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Not true. The smart kids will learn even if you hide their books in the attic. The dumb kids won’t learn even if you hide their food in the books.

If you define "smart kids" as "kids who learn even if you hide their books in the attic," and define "dumb kids" as "kids who won't learn even if you hide their food in the books," this is of course true. But then you're just playing with definitions, not making an observation

Nope, I’m just defining smart people as people who can solve problems

Plenty of people who can solve various kinds of problems don't, whether or not there's food hidden in their books

There is a large crowd of unsolved problems accompanied by an even larger crowd of helpless people that beg to differ with you.

Lots of people are or feel helpless for reasons that have very little to do with cognitive ability, particularly the abilities captured by IQ (ability to work through certain kinds of toy problems at high speed)

There's no doubt that it's very helpful in life to have that ability to some exceptional degree, but that's probably not the bottleneck in most lives, given that most real-world problems aren't attached to a short timer and vary widely in complexity

Life is rife with little timers, and in any case removing them doesn’t change the relative results. High scorers today would use the extra time better just like they use the given time now, and end up the high scorers of tomorrow as well.