I’m fully aware that social science can be understood as the summation of correlations, trends, and proxies. In this respect, almost every stereotype has some fundamental truth to it (although this is self evident as I knew this even before I was familiarized with the social sciences.) But some trends and the causes behind them aren’t fully obvious to me. One of the most prominent might be the ostensible stereotype of intelligence and information technology. For relative outliers, like those that far surpass my own prowess and understand programming in depth, I understand this stereotype. But for the average layman with quick typing ability and command of basic computer functions, I do not understand it. At my school, it seems that most people cannot equal my own typing speed. Assuming a normal distribution, I’m not surprised- I’ve passed 100 WPM on brief ten second trials. On longer sixty second trials, I regularly hit the 98th percentile. This is in spite of the fact that those that care to measure their typing proficiency are above average for the general population, if only slightly, and statistically speaking there will be some hackers/cheaters the tilt the distribution to the right. This is mediated a bit considering that my generation/cohort is also more adept with computers than the general population.
Still, many peers seem to be impressed with my typing speed, along with my general speed and prowess with browsing the web. Personally, I know there are many STEM inclined individuals that have better command of basic functions, but I guess I hold up pretty well. My point is really that these functions are rudimentary at best. I’m not some programming wiz that’s synthesizing Java and C++ to rapidly sift through search results. And I don’t know why some of what I do is so difficult for people of otherwise average intelligence.
Brutal 