This blog post discusses a study using a construct called “clerical intelligence”; I wonder if low clerical intelligence is the sort of thing that would cause someone to be good at math “conceptually” but keep making frustrating mistakes in practice.
Ooh! I think ‘clerical intelligence’ is the thing that my husband and I have taken to calling ‘attention to detail’ amongst ourselves. It’s also been at least occasionally studied under that name – when applying for an admin job, they gave me a test of ‘attention to detail’ that consisted of several hundred timed questions comparing a block of six numbers to another block, having to answer whether they were the same or not, with around 5-10 seconds to spend per question. I don’t think I’m outright bad at this, but it’s not effortless for me. (Luckily, I had math teachers who gave points for the work getting to the solution, not just the solution, so I could get 7⁄8 points on a complicated problem even if I substituted a + for a—somewhere and got the wrong answer).
My husband tends to use ‘attentional to detail’ to some degree also to mean what Paul Graham would call ‘taste’ or what Jonah would call ‘aesthetic discernment’. I think the causal relationship is probably that in order to develop ‘taste’–intuitions for what’s good that correspond to what’s generally agreed to be good – you need to be paying close attention to its details for a few years. Thus I have ‘taste’ for music, writing, and to some degree math, but not for fashion, since I never looked at what people were wearing.
Ooh! I think ‘clerical intelligence’ is the thing that my husband and I have taken to calling ‘attention to detail’ amongst ourselves. It’s also been at least occasionally studied under that name – when applying for an admin job, they gave me a test of ‘attention to detail’ that consisted of several hundred timed questions comparing a block of six numbers to another block, having to answer whether they were the same or not, with around 5-10 seconds to spend per question. I don’t think I’m outright bad at this, but it’s not effortless for me. (Luckily, I had math teachers who gave points for the work getting to the solution, not just the solution, so I could get 7⁄8 points on a complicated problem even if I substituted a + for a—somewhere and got the wrong answer).
My husband tends to use ‘attentional to detail’ to some degree also to mean what Paul Graham would call ‘taste’ or what Jonah would call ‘aesthetic discernment’. I think the causal relationship is probably that in order to develop ‘taste’–intuitions for what’s good that correspond to what’s generally agreed to be good – you need to be paying close attention to its details for a few years. Thus I have ‘taste’ for music, writing, and to some degree math, but not for fashion, since I never looked at what people were wearing.