I’m a very slow thinker (2016)

I can relate to this. I'm always always envious of people that come up with quick and funny answers. It's a relief to know I'm not the only one.

I feel this way too. Someone once told me about their Google interview and mentioned one of the problems. I spent a fruitless 20 mins flailing around trying for a good solution, then stopped thinking about it. 5 hours later on public transit the entire (and, as it happens, perfect) solution popped, unbidden, into my head.

I always thought that would have been particularly galling if it had been my interview...

I feel similarly. I often find that I run into people who are eager to have a face-to-face debate about something, and who come up with opinions and rationalizations that sometimes end up being dubious. But I feel a strong desire to hear them out and I generally have a hard time piecing together what makes an argument fallacious until I have time to analyze it more deeply, so I generally just take whatever they've said and chew on it a while.

I feel like this helps me come to better conclusions in the long term. Sometimes, I come to agree with what they've said. Sometimes, I find their conclusions flawed. In some cases, I can tell that it's made people who present arguments that ultimately turn out to be fallacious feel justified in those arguments. The fact that I end our conversation by thanking them for giving me something to think about sometimes feels like I'm endorsing their opinion with my inability to come up with an equally quick retort.

I've never really found a solution to this. At various times in my life, I have tried to hone my ability to make equally quick retorts: but I found that I didn't like who I was as a person when I tried to discuss in that way. My conversations with people became needlessly rhetorical and combative, and that I was often failing to hear what they had to say except in the context of how I could weaken it. On top of that, I became an angrier person in general. All of that felt shitty, and like the opposite of truth-seeking.

For me, it's an unsolved problem. I'm mostly at peace with the fact that I need extra time to chew on opinions presented to me in the heat of the moment, but occasionally I feel deep regret for not having said something on the spot.

Nonverbal conversations tend to help me with this personally - even the few moments you get to better put together how you're feeling/what you're thinking, or the ability to re-read what someone has posted, helps significantly. When it's written/typed conversation, you also don't have to deal with the sometimes disarming nature of people's reactions/facial expressions/distractions of the environment around you. I'm often most impressed with people who can do this sort of quick filtering and refinement of what they intend to say with verbal conversation: it's so alien to what I experience when talking with people face-to-face.

Ha. Remembering that one. Is there something about the French language that lends itself more easily to great wit and very usable idioms?

This is the premise of the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. Among other things, he explains System 1 in terms of popular cognitive biases. It's a good read.