Don't underestimate the drive for people to lie or greatly exaggerate their achievements over the internet.
I personally find the post not entirely believable. E.g.,
- First she says "I had learned nothing beyond sixth grade math: no algebra, ...". Then she says "I had been lucky enough to be introduced to ... some algebra ..."
- "You see, I had no formal education". Oh wait, that still leaves out the possibility of thousands of hours of khan-academy, and youtube and what not, for math, physics, programming, during high-school, summers, evenings, freshman college, sophomore college, etc, etc. (Yeah no.).
- She was ignorant in math and physics in June 2012, took a QFT class around Dec 2012, and had an eye opening experience. It's good poetry but not clear what she meant by that. (could be as simple as sitting in a QFT class without credits, and being able to follow some of the discussion)
- She was taking QFT in Dec 2012, and yet she graduates with BA in physics as last as May of 2014 (from her profile page). So very likely QFT was a giant namedrop, and if you ignore that, spending 2 years on undergrad math and physics coursework, when you've already taken logic and set theory, leading up to a bachelor's degree is pretty routine for most students.
- She worked on the ATLAS project. But. Doing data analysis and "helping design electronics". That sounds like a computer nerd who liked to dabble into physics just for the sake of picking a major for the degree (not that hard).
Each of us has the unfortunate case of being a population sample size of n=1. I think each of us, on some deep level , have met and recognized our own learning rates- and not only the linear rate, but derivative- and I agree with you that this rate of change is deeply linked to fluid intelligence
