Ask HN: How do you become smarter? An odd question, but something I've never really considered until lately. How does one become smarter? I'm in my early 30s right now. I can feel my brain waning here and there--things that I used to pick up quickly are now taking a long time to settle in. I'm wondering why that is. That seems to concern maintaining one's intelligence. But what if one wanted to improve it? How can I go about doing that? Thank you. |
You don't have to remember everything. Just knowing there exist such ideas or facts is enough. Usually 1000 pages is enough to get a fair proficiency.
You need a ton of factual information across broad domains to be smart.
For free textbooks:
Weight training, get lean etc.
More sleep.
Avoid shitty jobs that take it out of you.
- eating certain foods, particularly blueberries. There is a lot of research on their effects. I don’t know if it holds up, but anecdotally I do feel a bit “mentally clearer” after having blueberries daily for about six months.
- Use a spaced repetition system like Anki. Memory is intimately linked to intelligence and there is no better way to improve one’s memory than SRS.
Also, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223 by Douglas C. Engelbart, October 1962 https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
Habitual brain exercises work too. Crosswords, mental math, etc.
Eating like shit has also really impacted the way I look at the world and gave me a much deeper appreciation for everything good in my life. Nothing like deep burger regret to put into perspective what's important.
Oh yeah and I've become a pick-up artist. Not really intelligence, per se, but I did pay $9000 in seminars and it's been a wild ride of self-discovery. I love being humbled by how great some of my competitors are at it, and it relaxes me knowing that it's something I can improve on yet never really care about being exceptional at.
Finally, I spend a lot of time observing sociopaths. When you actually dig into the lives of the people so many of us look up to, there's a lot of things in their lives that are either undesirable, or not any more figured out than most of us have it. So it helps in a weird way to go to the apex predators of our species who engage without the burden of moral artifacts.
- Phone
- Social media
- Online games
- Sugar
Start doing following things:
- Eat + Sleep + Exercise well
- Get involved in local community, devote time with family and friends
- Read books
- Enjoy life
If you go down this path, use your newfound perspective and mood (as you'll probably feel different) to learn more about your personality and work on improving it, so that you are able to deal better with life, and find out in what things your usual self falls short when dealing with others. The comment from austin-cheney seems very good addressing a similar thing.
About diet, check out this talk from Georgia Ede called 'Nutritional and Metabolic Strategies for Optimizing Mental Health': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkqZW_sBPTg
Not gonna touch on other good habits, as it seems already covered in general, but just going to add a few mindset related things I found that resonate with my experience:
Becoming smarter shouldn't be a goal in itself, as intelligence is already set. Whenever I spent days reading studies, reviews and guidelines trying to search for an edge or better health in general, it was mostly a form a entertainment. I did learn a lot with those deep dives, and I incorporated a lot of these things in my life, but the gains are very marginal over less detailed advice.
At this age your brain is already wired for specialization. Which is probably why learning from textbooks and other structured ways seems easier now than when you were young and exploring, learning by exposure. You can tell the difference especially with language-learning and music.
This is bad if you are just expecting to absorb a topic intuitively, but it doesn't mean you can't conquer and become an expert on it. Or become a quick responder at it. This is where after you have covered some ground, you continue learning using projects and examples.
Life is more complex also than in your early 20s. There's more to do in general, expectations from others and yourself, which sometimes gets in the way of learning, eventually becoming distracting and energy sucking instead of having everything taken care of, or not being bothered by it. You can optimize this by hiring help or finding ways to living a lower maintenance life, keeping a low maint. household.
I find whenever I take steps to simplify my life and time sinks, and take a little time off out of my usual environment, creativity in problem-solving and learning tasks follow.
2. Do less, but better
3. Get healthy
Gurwinder Bhogal goes over this a bit on episode #602 of the Modern Wisdom podcast at roughly 15:00. https://chriswillx.com/podcast/
Some things in particular:
- Focus more on writing and thinking clearly.
- Try to think more slowly. https://sive.rs/slow
- Avoid posting inane/uninteresting stuff on social media.
- Avoid engaging in debates.
- Avoid ideologies, groupthink, and assumptions.
- Avoid correcting people on the Internet.
- Avoid taking things at face value (eg. news and opinions)
- Avoid "poseuring". I am a strong generalist with a decent knowledge of and passion for a lot of different things. I'm the guy people around me come to for tough technical things. I probably take too much pride in that. When someone asks if I know subject $foo well, and I know a little about $foo, I tend to answer in the affirmative. Most of the time, this works out and through intelligence and luck, I figure it out. Some of the time I am wrong and I look pretty dumb.
- Avoid being unkind to others.
> People say that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.
Fascinating trying to think of questions people might ask, how I might respond, and why.
Also I think kids change everything. Got none of my own but it’s so hard to focus when you have to think for them as they do stupid stuff all the time. Once went to play squash with my 10 year old cousin and he literally lost his shoe, then a towel then a key to his locker. All within an hour. And many people will tell you they were smarter as kids.
There are signs from GPT family progress indicating otherwise.
- becoming aware of and fixing mistakes (https://www.elliottemple.com/essays/life-overreaching-correc...)
- identifying and working with bottlenecks (https://criticalfallibilism.com/most-factors-arent-borderlin...)
- managing your error rate for faster progress (https://fallibleideas.com/gradualism)
- becoming more honest (https://www.elliottemple.com/essays/lying)
- evaluating ideas using binary criteria (e.g., does idea X have important property Y), as opposed to continuous criteria (e.g., how good is idea X on a scale of 1-10) (https://yesornophilosophy.com)
Temple put a lot of thought into what might be called interventions for adults who want to improve their thinking (such as OP). One of those interventions is learning to speedrun a video game (https://curi.us/2198-mario-odyssey-discussion). Temple argues that many of the things you learn as part of speedrunning can help you learn to think better in general.
My own advice would be to not do anything you won't be doing now. There is no "smarter" being. A fish is smarter than you in the ocean but I don't think that's the kind of smart you want. If you want to improve your "global" smartness or understanding, then try to explore other languages.
You can, for example, learn Arabic or Chinese. Learning Spanish is cool but if you only speak English you have been already exposed to a latin language. You can, for another example, learn Rust if you have been programming with Python/TypeScript. If you have been focused on programming for your entire career, another useful thing you can learn is psychology.
Notice all my advice converge to the same idea: learn a new way to communicate.
Is the moderate consumption described, a beer or two after work, directly impacting cognitive functions or is it indirectly impacted by sleep?
Energy management is crucial. It's no longer about time management. When you do have energy, early in the day, that's when you want to want to focus it on self-improvement. Don't try to learn too much late in the day. Allocate plenty of rest periods; many of the smartest people around now don't do anything with their low energy times. It's usually better to sleep early or go for a run instead of forcing yourself to learn more.
There's only so much that one person can do in a lifetime. Humans are not infinite wells of creativity.
Or let's put it this way: which post-Einstein groundbreaking discoveries do you think he should have made? Why does he personally have to discover everything in physics?
Why didn't the Beatles write Stairway to Heaven?
Doing one great thing is hard. Doing several great things is even harder. There's no reproducible method, no routine. You can't just crank out inspiration on an assembly line.
My first instinct was to tell you to read books, or listen to audiobooks, that you don't normally read. They can introduce you to new ideas, and imho that's a great way to start. By reading Heinlein, Ursula K Leguin, Ian M Banks or countless others and then thinking about them, I feel like I developed new frameworks that helped me think differently than before.
As an added bonus, they improved my vocabulary, which helped me with expressing new ideas.
As a second step, discussion about these books often brought even more insights, and here the improved vocabulary came in handy (even more so as I am ESL).
I found that tips like "never be the smartest person in the room" can be useful impulses (pushing you out of your comfort zone and meeting new people in that example), but should be taken with a huge grain of salt. In addition to that, most self improvement books and podcasts seem to be little more than distilled survivorship bias, so I've completely given up on them, but ymmv.
I hope that might point you in one possible direction, but in general I wouldn't worry too much about your brain waning in your thirties, I'm also at that age and have at times felt similarly. I'm pretty sure most of that is just our perception anyway ;)
What you can do is instead learn to enhance your personality as such results yield long term benefits (sometimes permanent). For example conscientiousness is negatively correlated with intelligence but boosting your conscientiousness increases your capacity for self-improvement (including increased learning and thus intelligence). Same with lowering your neuroticism. Expanding your openness is directly correlated with increasing both intelligence and happiness.
Perhaps the single most important short term thing that yields long term changes to the mind is to improve yourself physically. Becoming athletic results in short term measurable increases to intelligence.
The single greatest differentiator is becoming more physically durable. When you are less prone to injury, heal faster, and physically tougher you are less risk adverse. Your neuroticism drops to near 0. This alters everything about how you perceive the world including what you do with your time, your interests, and your relationships with other people. It directly affects what and how you learn and the paths you take to accomplish work tasks, even something as boring as writing code.
Unfortunately physical durability is largely fated to good genetics and good diet. The maximum soft tissue healing rate for compound injuries in humans is about 70 hours (it’s also the maximum infectious rate for microbes in humans). Some people have that near invincibility naturally like Wolverine in the comic books (not the movies). Some people have unbreakable bones (soft bones at 1.5-8x higher density). Some people can naturally produce vitamin D in the dark without need for sunlight or risk of depression (gingers).
Travel, read books, do things with your hands. The average iphone user is losing IQ points pretty rapidly and they’ll be on meds soon enough to not be any form of competition.
During my teens I went through an existential crisis, and the dread I've felt every day drove me to start reading philosophy books. I found Nietzsche, and while his books were extremely hard to read (took me years to actually go through them), I feel that it's shaped my mind in a universal way, giving me ability to "see through" all the abstractions and arbitrary rules set by various actors in this world, and focus on the fundamentals. Russell and Wittgenstein were the follow-ups, which further developed the sort-of-nihilistic view of Nietzsche into something that made more sense.
I feel it has helped me a lot with both general "smartness" and mathematics, so I'll recommend it too. Read philosophy.
I wouldn't call him a philosopher, because philosophy to me must have a timeless element that is necessarily detached from any specific time or society, and Jordan is first of all a clinical psychologist, which makes his experience inherently tied to the current society through his practice with patients.
That being said, we are living in the current day, I think his lectures and books are very helpful for anyone struggling with the meaninglessness of modern life.
I also personally dislike his usage of Christian mythology and ethics in presenting the "how-to" of life. It might be useful as a narrative tool, but Christianity in itself is extremely toxic life-denying philosophy.
Take your time, months or years if you need to. Learn different things at the some time. Mix it all up in there and let it brew while you sleep.
Incrementally increasing risk appetite as a mental exercise
Ensuring "skin in the game" (when there's something to lose, I tend to be more "awake")
Focus on personal conduct (rather than merely absorbing "information"; right practice makes me better, not just the knowledge of what to practice)
Becoming accountable, pledging results, and putting 100% efforts
Also, for inspiration, pick some "extreme" fields to study: mountaineering, Olympic level training, etc
“One more new thing” is relative. You aren’t starting from the same position this time as the last, or the first.
That’s a good thing.
This internet stranger suspects what you’re calling intelligence is maybe something else. Rest? Motivation?
Don’t forget that your brain isn’t in a vat. (Probably. Maybe. No promises, not getting all philosophical here.) Take care of the whole organism.
TBH, I do not consider myself smart but inquisitive. I always try to create mental models based on the simplest explanations of a concept that is otherwise hard to understand. Taking care of my mental health is another thing I do proactively as I suffer from clinical depression. Will all that being said, I go through small obsessions every month or so and that pushes me to know everything about a certain topic and then summarize it at the end in my head. Being smart isn't always a natural characteristic, and it is definitely something you can work on.
I don't know how to become smarter, but I definitely know how to become dumber:
- Sleep less
- Joints problems coming from few physical activity due to COVID WFH + I hate exercises
- Suddenly had hay fever after so many years
- Pressure from work + kid
- Financial pressure from owning some property (essentially, when you have a 30-yr debt, saving for a few years of spending does not feel safe at all)
I figure you can at least avoid some of these by making the right decisions.
In you 30s you're not a child, your biology tells you - now pick the target, we can't afford to be smart everywhere anymore.
So either you get very smart at something specific by focusing on it (or few specific areas if you have enough capacity) or not smart at all.
Another alternative is to keep soothing yourself with those silly "improve your diet, read books and stop drinking" kind of advice you find all over the internet.
Asking as someone perpetually soothing myself with advice about diet, alcohol, spirituality, etc.
Because it's an empty, abstract and leading to nothing goal. Our mind needs to know "why exactly" to find its "hows". It's just how it works.
Yeah, that was pretty long winded and may not even have been entirely what you were asking, but I hope it's still useful to you.
Edit: whenever you come across something you don’t understand/know - learn more about it. It’s a journey not a destination.
Personally I've learnt several foreign languages to the point where I can read classic novels in one of them. Different cultures and idioms help me see things in a different light.
I have also dabbled with woodworking, gardening / hydroponics, electronics / embedded systems. Read more widely in the fields of chemistry, biology and linguistics. Also read biographies of notable people.
Do I feel smarter? Not really. The more I learn and discover the more I realize all the things that I know nothing about.
I did notice I can articulate ideas better and think clearer, but I also noticed the bad parts of my personality traits such as anxiety and obsessiveness increased and I had to develop new mechanisms to keep them in check.
This just proves to me that the old adage of ignorance being a bliss may actually be true.
If you want to criticize someone's philosophy, you need better arguments then ad-hominem.
Hmmm, you lost me there. Are you talking about the politics and practices of current American evangelical right wing Christians? I'd agree with you there.
But in light of how Peterson digests Christianity I'd say it's the exact opposite of your claim. "Pick up your damn cross." and "Clean your room." as exemplars of such.
Furthermore, Christianity offers hope and redemption through faith in Jesus Christ, rather than promoting guilt. Sin refers to actions or thoughts that go against God's will, which can harm individuals and society. However, forgiveness and transformation are possible through faith in Jesus Christ.
Romans 3:23-24
> Christianity offers hope and redemption
Hope and redemption is only necessary if you think all humans are guilty by being alive and therefore hopeless.