I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about intelligence: what it is, how to define it, how to measure it, where it comes from, can it be increased, etc. Although I’ve by no means made a final decision, here are some of my feelings about it:
- Nature vs. Nurture: While I think you’re definitely born with some innate level of intelligence, I don’t think you’re completely limited to that level. You can choose to become more intelligent. How to do this should become clear from the rest of this post.
- How to define/measure intelligence: More and more I feel that the two defining features of intelligence are as follows:
- Your willingness to seriously consider new ideas. By and large, I’ve found that the people I would consider “intelligent” are those that are willing, even eager, to learn new ideas, and to genuinely make an effort to try to understand them, even if they disagree with them. There are several ways in which we try to filter out new ideas, and I think some of those are very detrimental to intelligence. For example, refusing to consider alternatives in a given situation is a sign of closemindedness leading to low-intelligence. Just because you feel that there are only x possibilities, you shouldn’t be unwilling to listen to the (x+1)th possibility, where “listen” btw means more than just hear it. It means understand the possibility and weigh its strengths and weaknesses critically without making a prior judgement. Obviously you will have some pre-bias to look at it in a certain way, and that’s OK!, but you shouldn’t be completely unwilling to change your opinion. Note that this applies not just to particular situations or ideas, but in general; whether it be with regards to science, art, music, etc. Another thing to watch out for is rejecting some idea on the basis of some small detail. While the devil is indeed in the details, he’s not in all of the details. Just because there might be inaccuracies or falsities in an argument doesn’t make the entire argument false. Learn to recognize which elements of an argument are crucial to the argument and which are incidental. Incidental details can be wrong in an overall correct argument.
- A somewhat related measure is how adept you are at adapting your knowledge to solve your problems. This includes many different things, such as knowing how to find information that you don’t know, thinking about problems from a variety of angles, looking for alternative methods of getting to the same result, etc. This goes back to the idea of accepting new ideas in that an intelligent person will try to collect as much information as possible, so that they have a bigger databank of knowledge to draw upon when they have to solve problems. This frequently reminds me of those people who say “Why do I need to learn this?,” because it’s a fundamental mistake in the way they’re looking at things. The question is not “why do I need to learn this?” but “how can I use this in the future?” And the answer to that question, very often, is “I don’t know.” But the right thing to do is not to say “since I don’t know how I’ll be able to use this, I’m just not going to learn it.” The right thing to do is say “I don’t know how I’ll be able to use this, but I’m going to learn it so that one day maybe it will come of use.”
Based on these two things, you may already be raising some objections. The first is that there are many things that you do not learn or accept because they’re “obviously wrong.” And this is where it can get tricky. Because yes, many things are obviously wrong. This is what Maddox calls your “Bullshit detector.” Someone says “white people are dumber than asians” and your bullshit detector immediately goes off because you know that this is probably not true. Or it might be based on the person saying it: if you know someone who habitually says dumb/false things, you just start ignoring what they say. While these are usually the correct things to do, you should be careful not to just apply a blanket rule, because sometimes your detector will fail. A seemingly dumb argument will contain elements of truth, ones you had not considered. Your “dumb” friend might make a remark that has the inner beauty of genius to it. And the other thing to look out for is your assumptions. As I saw on some poster, “the things that trip us up are not things we weren’t sure about; it’s things we were sure about that weren’t so.” Always looks carefully at the premise of an argument, at the basic axioms from which you reason about something. If those are false, no matter how well constructed the rest of the argument is, it doesn’t really matter.
- Finally, although people are obviously better at some things than others, I think intelligence is something which applies to everything. Someone who I would consider intelligent is not great at everything, but they at least have the capability to be decent at it. An intelligent reader can be a good musician; a talented artist can be a good judge of character. Very rarely is a person “intelligent” about some things and “dumb” about others.
So in case you’re still wondering how you can be more “intelligent,” it’s simple. The next time someone tells you something new, listen. And try to understand. Really.
Tags: intelligence
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