Thinking that Sarah is stupid is not the simplest explanation.
Couple of reasons:
1) Sarah got into university
2) Sarah finished university
3) Sarah pass approximately 32 course at university
4) Sarah maintained a high enough average to be select to work in the corporation she is in now.
5) Sarah was chosen as the expert in her field
There is only two things that point to Sarah being stupid:
1) Copying others' work and thinking that a simple change of font is sufficient enough to mask it.
2) What your mother said.
As you would have noted, evidence for Sarah being smart can't simply be explained away. It would require a few professors and classmate helping her out. It would require someone botching the interview and the selection of an expert. This isn't the simplest explanation.
If we assume Sarah is smart, why did she make such a glaring mistake and why does your mom said what she said? A possible reason why Sarah did what she did was because she didn't want to do it again. I assume the effort that Sarah placed into copying and the conversation with Michelle was not more than 30mins.
People who do a good job are normally rewarded with more of the same work. So, instead of 30mins of work, Sarah might have ended up putting 300hours of work into something that will most certainly not yield a high payoff for her. So, in this case it might be best if she pretended that she is stupid, which would basically fast track her career by months if she was to working on stuff with high payoff instead.
But, you could tell Sarah's boss about her incompetence. No you wouldn't; the easiest thing is to ask for another expert. Even if you did, she can simply say she was going to write legal a letter that it might be in the best interest of the company to purchase the copyrights of these paper, instead of having a highly qualified person wasting time and money on something that might essentially be fruitless.
Sometimes it might not be in your best interest to appearing competent all the time. Appearing competent all the time is akin to a greedy algorithm which might not be the optimal solution to achieving your end goal.
In terms of the author's mom, maybe she is right but it doesn't apply here.
In summary, the simplest explanation is that Sarah is smart, but for whatever reason she chose to appear incompetent in this scenario; I have outline such a scenario above. If Sarah is stupid it would require, more than likely, over a dozen people willfully assisting Sarah's incompetence, but if she is smart it just requires her to play dumb for 30mins.
This is not to prove comprehensively that Sarah is smart but really to show that other simpler explanations exist. If I was Michelle, a lot of alarms will be going off in my mind, and I would not simply dismiss it as she is stupid.
In my experience labelling someone as smart, just because he/she finished college and got a job, is a mistake or a bad assumption. I have plenty of ex-classmates who ware A students trough high school and college, but they fail miserably at anything that requires thinking, common sense, or coming to conclusions on your own. They ware just good at learning things from books, remembering them word by word but not understanding a thing they just "learned".
Same experience here. I know a lot of people that are not even good at learning word by word but somehow manage to go through university
I can add my experience for jobs too: most of the times people get jobs because employers do not bother to verify if they are good or not. This has sadly happened in half the companies I've been. Where I'm working now there are a couple of persons working as developers that don't know how to program and don't even have a background in programming or computer science just because the two non technical founders did not bother to have some technical guy at the interviews to verify the candidates.
Same here. I knew people who memorized their way through their mid-term and final exams, but couldn't explain any of what they'd memorized.
That applied to some of the professors also -- one even put a question on a mid-term for biochemistry asking for the rate of a reaction at equilibrium (no joke). When questioned about this, the TA proctoring the test simply didn't understand what was wrong with the question.
My chemistry is extremely rusty, but I thought that even if the reaction was at equilibrium, there is still a rate of reaction--it's just that the forward and backward reaction rates are the same, so there's no net change.
(anyone with a better knowledge of chemistry please correct me if I'm wrong)
The rate of the reaction would be the net, which is by definition 0 at equilibrium, as you described. So the answer SHOULD have been 0, but to be a question worth putting on a mid-term for biochemistry, the question should have specified starting concentrations of the various components (reagents and products) in the solution.
More to the point though, the person who wrote the exam didn't understand why the equilibrium part mattered...
Good alternative explanation. I did plead ignorance sometime when was asked about some issues that I know well to avoid doing the work. People say, "so you work in IT. I have this problem at my home computer..."
Thinking that Sarah is stupid is not the simplest explanation.
Couple of reasons:
1) Sarah got into university
2) Sarah finished university
3) Sarah pass approximately 32 course at university
4) Sarah maintained a high enough average to be select to work in the corporation she is in now.
5) Sarah was chosen as the expert in her field
There is only two things that point to Sarah being stupid:
1) Copying others' work and thinking that a simple change of font is sufficient enough to mask it.
2) What your mother said.
As you would have noted, evidence for Sarah being smart can't simply be explained away. It would require a few professors and classmate helping her out. It would require someone botching the interview and the selection of an expert. This isn't the simplest explanation.
If we assume Sarah is smart, why did she make such a glaring mistake and why does your mom said what she said? A possible reason why Sarah did what she did was because she didn't want to do it again. I assume the effort that Sarah placed into copying and the conversation with Michelle was not more than 30mins.
People who do a good job are normally rewarded with more of the same work. So, instead of 30mins of work, Sarah might have ended up putting 300hours of work into something that will most certainly not yield a high payoff for her. So, in this case it might be best if she pretended that she is stupid, which would basically fast track her career by months if she was to working on stuff with high payoff instead.
But, you could tell Sarah's boss about her incompetence. No you wouldn't; the easiest thing is to ask for another expert. Even if you did, she can simply say she was going to write legal a letter that it might be in the best interest of the company to purchase the copyrights of these paper, instead of having a highly qualified person wasting time and money on something that might essentially be fruitless.
Sometimes it might not be in your best interest to appearing competent all the time. Appearing competent all the time is akin to a greedy algorithm which might not be the optimal solution to achieving your end goal.
In terms of the author's mom, maybe she is right but it doesn't apply here.
In summary, the simplest explanation is that Sarah is smart, but for whatever reason she chose to appear incompetent in this scenario; I have outline such a scenario above. If Sarah is stupid it would require, more than likely, over a dozen people willfully assisting Sarah's incompetence, but if she is smart it just requires her to play dumb for 30mins.
This is not to prove comprehensively that Sarah is smart but really to show that other simpler explanations exist. If I was Michelle, a lot of alarms will be going off in my mind, and I would not simply dismiss it as she is stupid.