Smart but lazy vs Dumb and worn out

No one wants go in thinking they're stupid(relatively.). With the same exposure to material, if one performs worse than the other with no external disadvantage, we can assume one is more intelligent or at minimum has an innate advantage in a domain. It comes down to how much capacity someone has to process things and there isn't a whole lot anyone can do to modify that. Even working memory training has proven to have limited benefit. Who has greater capacity to deal with novel information and problem-solving? Perhaps even a lesser requirement: who has the minimal capacity for those things at a cutoff level? School is just an example. It can be anything. There are always metrics when there is something real on the line. It would be pretty sweet to live in a world where you can just progress at your own pace without it affecting your mindset one way or another, but unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Intelligence is always relative.

/r/hikikomori Thread Parent