The typical high achiever in technical fields is the beneficiary of a better than average capacity for working memory, which is the critical bottleneck for learning complex rule-driven material in a short period of time, such as in school. But this capacity has little if any bearing on one's ability to reflect on a diffuse and unstructured corpus of information accumulated over extended periods of time, nor in cultivating the habit of remaining in suspended judgment necessarily to fairly evaluate its value.
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