Don’t Confuse Quick Reasoning with Intelligence

It can take many years and lots of experience to realize something schooling will never tell you:

Rapid mental calculation and reasoning is a strong sign of limited mental capacity.

Rapid mental calculation and reasoning comes from a lack of possibility. When the space of possible outcomes is severely restricted the answer is almost immediate.

Those who lack generative imagination, strong counterfactual thinking, prospection and fluency in running multiple mental simulations are handicapped in running possibilities. This makes their answers to calculation and reasoning rapid, given their was nowhere else to look.

Those who naturally create multiple scenarios take a good amount of time to eventually land on the only disappointingly simplistic answer to a contrived question.

Don’t confuse quick reasoning with intelligence.