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While I agree with you, I think "busting out the compasses and graph paper" is what science is. We've reached the limits of what we can do in our minds, so now we do mathematics on paper. This allows us to calculate things that we cannot wrap our heads around (try visualizing infinite-dimensional spaces for instance)
One thing I have noticed that less intelligent people do is solving the same problem over and over again. Even culture wars are like this. "X people are discriminated against, and it's totally not their fault, so we need to give special rights to X group to prevent this, as it's only fair to escalate their power/position in society". Even as a teenager I generalized this problem to every related problem which could exist, but somehow society still sees a sense of novelty in "We are X, we are victims, give us power or you're bad and support bad things"
Edit: My point is that, even with pens and stacks of paper, stupid people cannot generalize or reach levels of abstractions which gives them the advantages of space. Space is really powerful though, even more than Time (which is probably why PSPACE and EXPSPACE are bigger than PTIME and EXPTIME respectively. Not that I actually know complexity theory)
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