Your issue sounds more social anxiety rather than being a slow thinker. In any case, one way to combat it is to ask clarifying questions.
Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
191–200 of 280 posts
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#192Focus on listening. Pay attention. Don’t zone out.
That is not about being slow. By showing interest and actively participating, your brain should already get pre-warmed with your thoughts.
In a group meeting, imagine that at any time, you should be ready to reply to the question: “what do you think?” This requires actively listening and focus.
If you are zoning out, ask yourself why you are really attending that meeting in the first place.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any chance he might have dyscalculia and/or ADHD? Though I guess he’d might have already been tested.
Why bother? Given the breadth of diagnostic classes these days, there's a good chance you can find a practitioner[0] willing to make a diagnosis. That said, aside from getting funding for treatment or acceptance of accommodations, receiving a label of disordered often does not help, but does add harmful stigmatization. The OP's son seems normal, functioning, and isn't harming anyone. On the other hand, the diagnosing…
Our daughter was diagnosed with dyscalculia, and the diagnosis was very helpful, both for us and for her. She was really struggling with maths and felt like she must just be stupid. The diagnosis helped her to understand that it's just a very concrete thing that she has that affects one aspect of her functioning, and doesn't mean that she's dumb, or lazy, or whatever other story she had ended up telling herself. We are homeschooling her, and it also helped us to understand what was going on for her, and to adapt how we teach her appropriately.
> That said, aside from getting funding for treatment or acceptance of accommodations...
Both of those can also be life-changing, but you make them sound like trivial details. They are not.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#194One thing I learned -- I think it was from The Pragmatic Programmer -- that helps me when I feel forced into making a quick decision is this three-part answer:
1. I don't know, 2. It depends, 3. I'll get back to you.
If people don't accept that, I'll follow with some variation of "Do you want me to guess or do you want me to lie? Either way, I'd be feeding you bullshit, and you deserve better than that. Give me a little bit of time to collect my thoughts."
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
YEah, pre-caching is very much what I do. If you combine it with empathy skills: "What motivates this person", "What are their goals", "what are their interests/specialities" then you can work out a list of stock answers before hand, and alter them to suit the situation later on. You still need to listen, as there is a non trivial risk of your mental model being wrong.
I loathe talking to people who rehearse the conversation ahead of time. They invariably don’t respond to what I actually said but rather change what I said to line up with what they practiced in the mirror. Or they say some version of “I expected you to say foo, to which I would have responded bar”. Cool story, but totally irrelevant. If you don’t have an answer at the time just say so and follow up later. Waiting fo…
I think you loathe talking to people who do it badly.
Doing it well is like playing live jazz. You can practice the song, but if you don't listen to what your bandmates are doing, your awesome rehearsed solo is going to be bad.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
IQ tests being invalid is more politics than science. Among other things, rejecting the existence of cognitive inequality is necessary to justify systemic racism via the continued existence of Asian quotas (Affirmative Action). Since lots of people benefit from this racism, there’s a huge interest in denial. In western countries, when there’s a few billion people in Asia, and you let a tiny amount in gatekeeping them…
> Low IQ is more predictive of success than High IQ. I'm curious what you meant by that. Could you please explain?
A very low IQ has a very clear and predictable effect on life. A very high IQ does not.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. IMO it's used as a tactic to catch people off guard, so the organiser can attend more prepared than anyone else, and get their way But the person who could enforce that all meetings must have an agenda probably also uses the lack of an agenda to their advantage, so the status quo continues
Well most meetings should begin with a call to approve agenda with consideration for adding to it.
That should be an email ahead of time.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#198This is something that's easy to have an opinion on so you're going to get buried. I'll do my best to make a high-signal comment here, but it will be drowned by all the other replies, which also likely touch on these points. First, "slow-thinking" is really just a different way of expressing your thinking and you should begin by leaning into it rather than leaning away. Take time, allow yourself to pause to collect y…
> Finally, do your best to avoid situations where a "quick decision" is needed
I find this easier said than done. I dislike most meetings because I don't think quickly enough to keep up and contribute to the discussion. That often means that others will make decisions that I could have contributed usefully to before I've had the chance to think deliberately about the question.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any chance he might have dyscalculia and/or ADHD? Though I guess he’d might have already been tested.
Why bother? Given the breadth of diagnostic classes these days, there's a good chance you can find a practitioner[0] willing to make a diagnosis. That said, aside from getting funding for treatment or acceptance of accommodations, receiving a label of disordered often does not help, but does add harmful stigmatization. The OP's son seems normal, functioning, and isn't harming anyone. On the other hand, the diagnosing…
> Why bother?
Because knowing about the presence of a condition is better than not. Depending on the severity, untreated ADHD during the years of life where a child begins to establish good study habits, management of the condition, and other tools that work for them, can lead to issue down the road and into adulthood. We have the ability to address conditions like dyscalcula with little interventions to help the student be successful.
Just because something is imperfect doesn’t mean it should disregarded completely if the benefits (academic, social, and career success) outweigh the drawbacks of being untreated. The stigma argument is just FUD and letting that take over decision making for the well-being of a child is a bad path to go down.
There are often, unknown to the parent, invisible scars that the child with a non-neurotypical condition will carry for the of their life after having found out about a condition they’ve had since birth and was not addressed during the most critical time of their life when early treatment could have greatly reduced the harm caused by this disorder.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
IQ tests being invalid is more politics than science. Among other things, rejecting the existence of cognitive inequality is necessary to justify systemic racism via the continued existence of Asian quotas (Affirmative Action). Since lots of people benefit from this racism, there’s a huge interest in denial. In western countries, when there’s a few billion people in Asia, and you let a tiny amount in gatekeeping them…
> Low IQ is more predictive of success than High IQ. I'm curious what you meant by that. Could you please explain?
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