Thank you for explaining this in a way in which a visual learner like me can understand. Please make more comic style posts in the future!
From my experience with working with groups I've found a few things to work, all of them revolve around incentivizing or promoting positive feedback loops. This includes: bribery/payment (while most people think of this as being with money, since I work with 10-17 year olds it's usually candy or pizza), lowering the bar so that small bits of progress are celebrated greatly, making the actual task less boring (turning on some music, working with friendly people, making it look pretty), humor, taking breaks to promote sanity, having a comfortable working environment etc.
I personally find just writing quite a challenge when trying to convey an idea to someone else, not everyone has the same learning style so I try as much as possible to use multiple mediums when explaining. For example: drawing pictures or saying something out loud including sound affects or gesticulating. So, while I agree with your point, I think that additional forms of explaining are equally as invaluable
I quite agree with Paperclip Minimizer, you succumbed to the typical mind fallacy even as you talk about the typical mind fallacy, how ironic.
Just be careful, because it's better to make an abacus than to make a calculator. What do I mean by that? Well, an abacus helps you get the answer to your question but it also teaches you how to get that answer: take the abacus away, you can still do math, because now you know how. This is not so with a calculator.
So, make something that teaches proper thinking, not blatantly corrects thinking.
Imagine it this way: you've made your Thinkerly and then an evil overlord hacks into it so that 'good thinking' is now defined as being a non critical, manipulatable lump of jelly. Do the people who have previously used Thinkerly start questioning the program and use what Thinkerly has previously taught them to be skeptical of the program? Or, do they not notice at all because they just know to click the button to make everything better, or in this case smarter?
I would say that we already do, in some respects. For example nap pods at Google or the ever common situation of sucking up to all of the needs of a genius, CEO, or prodigy. However I think the real problem is making these services available to more than just the geniuses at big companies with lots of money. Like the way that a neighborhood gym has a weight room, we need mental treadmills in communities too.
I personally do not find this dynamic confusing at all. Seeing as this is not obvious to other people I'll try to explain how I understand it to work (and because I like the idea of cats and pineapples I'll stick to those):
1. You need to start with cats, and the right cats: Two people who have each other's undivided attention makes for a much better conversation than starting in a group. And obviously these two cats need to have something both of them have common knowledge about in order to have a conversation.
2. Soon you'll start to form a pineapple: The conversation of two cats usually works by each cat adding information the other doesn't know and find interesting. You're sooner or later bound to find some other people walking by at your party who also want to add in on the conversation. The amount of these people determines the "size" of your pineapple aka group.
3. The choice: Now, you could start pushing other people away when they want to turn your pair of cats into a pineapple, and that may be a reasonable thing to do if people in your pineapple are just pretending to know things or aren't interested. However, if this is not the case it is a plus to be in a pineapple.
In general this dynamic from cats to pineapples is what creates things like special interest groups and in general how communities form. The internet is simply making step 2 easier than ever.
The typical mind fallacy sounds like the best fit so far. Thanks to both Unnamed and shminux for mentioning it.
I really like this, however the term 'hard selecting' or 'selecting harder' is confusing to me. Do you think you could rephrase it to me, so I could understand it better?