Intelligence is... · 6:50am Nov 29th, 2021
An ability to learn important things from anyone. Let’s investigate!
When I first realized that I was too dumb to accomplish my goals, I decided to write out everything I thought I understood. On the first night, I probably wrote about 10 pages of crap, and I committed to adding more things to the document every night until I felt it was reasonably complete.
I hit a stumbling block very quickly: the document was obviously incomplete, but when I sat down to write, I couldn’t think of more things to add. I decided to get familiar with a note-taking app. Every day, I would jot down ideas as they came to mind, then every night, I would flesh out those ideas into my document.
Over the next couple weeks, I ended up writing about 60 pages of crap on how things change over time, how my intuition lets me navigate various concepts, how I made sense of mathematics, motifs I found attractive, how things piece together, and about a dozen other such topics. As I wrote more, I ran into a very different problem. The more I wrote, the more ideas I got for writing even more. There were two things going on.
- The more I expanded the borders of my knowledge-I-knew-I-knew, the more light it shed on knowledge-I-didn’t-know-I-knew.
- Making my knowledge explicit made it easier to find connections between concepts, and those connections let me multiply every discovery. It was increasingly the case that learning one new thing led to a cascading effect where many mental models would change as a result.
It’s those two things that I want to highlight. As a direct consequence, I have two claims. First, the broader your knowledge base, the easier it is for you to uncover insights. Second, the more interconnected your knowledge base, the easier it is for you to convert one insight into other insights.
People think differently. The more intelligent you are, the broader and more interconnected your knowledge base, the easier it is for you to learn from other people. It reminds me of that famous quote from Emerson.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.
I used to treat that quote as a dictate thinking that it was a behavior worth putting effort into, not a skill I needed to build up. I’m not sure if Emerson is quoted out of context, or if he didn’t realize that he would be misunderstood, or if he just didn’t realize what a smarty pants he was.
The ability to learn important things from other people is not something that came naturally to me no matter how much I wanted to pretend. I don’t believe it comes naturally to anyone. It takes a ton of work to first understand yourself well enough. How much can you learn from others when you can’t frame their thoughts well enough to recognize the insights that led to their construction? How much can you do with their insights when they don’t have implications for the things you most badly want to understand? Not enough, and not enough.
Anyway. Just a random thought and a bit of nostalgia. Thanks for reading.
Good blog!
I read tons of Emmerson back in the day; I was still 'finding' myself.
His essay on self-reliance helped me immensely at the time.
A part I wanted to touch on is things you know that you didn't know you knew. That's a case of active and passive memory. Like CPU and RAM, the first runs at the forefront with active resources, while the latter is in the background, maybe useful for the future, with passive resource use.
Things are committed to passive memory because something about it seemed important to you. Either greatly or minimally. Even little, useless things, are committed. For the same reason it was stored, if that reason is actively met again, it serves as a symbol and key to retrieve that information.
Agreed. The broader of things you know and understand, the better you can reknow what you know, and quickly/better understand that which is currently foreign and unknown. However, the process of knowledge is much like a skill. After not riding my motorcycle for a winter, I always come back to it fearful. You approach it with the same fear and skill as a newbie.
However, if you can brave that fear, and practice on the bike for a bit, one returns to their previous skill quickly. Things flood back into you. How much to lean, ideal positioning, how to deal with cars in a certain pattern—etc. But you have to be back in the process of riding a bike for that world to fade back in around you.
Knowledge is easy to acquire, hard to understand, and scary to apply.
Intelligence is more than how quickly you can process a thing. Things you can easily grasp and do come from a natural inclination, aptitude, and attitude. Learning within those fields, though sometimes difficult, is an enjoyable challenge. It's outside those fields where intelligence takes a different meaning. How well can you learn? How well can you change things about yourself to learn? To forgo something you truly believe because it hampers the current process?
I never saw intelligence as acquired knowledge. It's more so how one acquires, processes, and applies knowledge. I suppose I mean to say how well can they adapt to the new process. It's nice when previous intelligence enables the next process to be easy. But when you must drop all that you know to do something new, however, is where things get interesting.
Sorry if this is a bit bland and all over the place. I don't really have the mind or time to clean it up as I should.
I'll follow up on this comment after I've had a couple of days—and lengthy showers—to think it through.
As always.
Thank you for giving me something to think about, Sen.
~ Yr. Thinking Pal, B
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Intelligence is absolutely more than speed of processing. Similar to how fanfic output is just one metric about you, I see speed of processing as just one metric for intelligence. A lot of the core components of intelligence— ones that seem to affect every metric— seem to be less measurable things, like motivation, judgement, grounding, and an ability to connect many concepts.
I like how you phrased this. Thinking about when surroundings might literally "fade into view," I ended up thinking of my eyes adjusting to a dark room. ("There seems to be a common underlying factor between how people develop run-away fears of the dark and how the stars only come out at night. It feels vaguely like there’s some conservation of perception involved so that when our six senses have less to report, we naturally amplify whatever remains, and somehow the process can evoke fear or beauty.") Your mind and eyes orchestrate to change how they see as the room literally fades into view, and it takes time to build up enough spatial awareness to move around fluidly. If the dark room is a familiar one, it takes less time, you know what to expect, and you can get comfortable much more quickly. If it's your first time in that room, you don't know what monsters might be hiding there.
The process of learning, taken through to completion, is inherently about bringing in newer, potentially deeper truths to confront your systems of thought. Deeper truths can easily break more shallow beliefs and everything built on them, and it's often unclear whether you'll ever be able to rebuild what was broken. Can you keep your friends when you can no longer get on the same page? Can you feel important knowing that everything you'll ever know will occupy a random, negligible fraction of both the physical and mental worlds? Can you remain confident knowing that you'll never be able to comprehend things that are very important to your life? Can you fight the temptation to dehumanize people when you can increasingly model them as machines? How many times are you willing to flip the coin and gamble on questions like these?
Anyway. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You seem to spark a lot of interesting analogies with your comments.