Brain upgrading: there is no such thing as intelligence
/By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.
Summary:
What people think of as intelligence is actually accumulated knowledge, skills and innovation ability.
What you can learn is a function of what you know. The more you know the faster you learn! (see explanation below)
What you can do (skills and innovation ability) is a function of what you have done. The more you have done the more you can do!
Your body is limited, your mind is limitless.
IMO your accumulated skills, knowledge and innovation ability (AKA intelligence) should compound exponentially over your life.
No one is born able to walk or talk.
Some people upgrade themselves to invent computer coding (Ada Lovelace), understand the motion of the heavenly bodies (Newton) or build rockets to take humanity to Mars (Musk) - growth mindset
Others believe they are born ‘not good at maths’ - fixed mindset
Jingle: IMO your mind is your ultimate possession. Treat it right and i'll treat you to a good life.
Matthewing your mind… don’t mind if I do!
Reading time: 8 mins
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Details
Growth mindset = your abilities are a product of cultivation
Fixed mindset = you are born good / bad at something.
The Matthew Effect in education and what this tells us about geniuses:
What is the Matthew effect?
Some children come to school having read 20 books, Other students are given a book at the start of school and hold it upside down (ie have read zero book prior to starting school).
Which student do you think gets told they are ‘smart’?
The students with a starting point of 20 books improve at a faster rate than the students who have read none, over the duration of primary school this compounds and the distance in reading between the students grows exponentially larger
IMO what people consider ‘genius’ is explained by the Matthew Effect.
Typically “geniuses” had an early start on a particular ‘skill’ (eg music = Mozart, golf = Tiger Woods, physics = Elon Musk, coding = Bill Gates) that puts a child apart from eg other 4 year olds.
Then this child receives positive feedback that puts in place a positive feedback loop that means they improve further and further compounding exponentially away.
What was a small gap at 4 years old then turns into a bigger and bigger gap to the point where someone has ‘other worldly abilities’ vs normal.
They were not born this way, they compounded this way!
Intelligence = built not born.
Intelligence = accumulated knowledge, skills and innovation ability.
Intelligence = compounds.
The dumbest words in the english language: smart and intelligent?
IMO ‘smart’ has deep fixed mindset connotations.
IMO someone is not smart or dumb.
Dumb = novice = someone is yet to cultivate themeslves.
Smart = expert = has cultivated themselves to have high ability.
Jo Boaler (Stanford Education Professor): The biggest problem with maths education today is that people (teachers / students / parents) think that someone is either good or bad at maths. Ie maths in the west has a deep embedded fixed mindset culture.
We need the culture to shift from asking “How intelligent someone is?” to asking “ how much upgrading one has done to one's brain?”
IMO the traditional meaning of smart / intelligent implies that one cannot upgrade one’s brain.
I.e Intelligence = Ability they were born with
IMO we need to shift the meaning to Intelligence = built not born.
In some respects ‘Intelligence = knowledge, skill and innovation ability you have cultivated’.
As per other blogs I’m trying not to use the words intelligent, smart, dumb, genius! This I like to think is ‘smart’.
Intelligence is a skill itself - AKA there is no such thing as intelligence by the traditional definition.
Intelligence can take on many meaings depending on what lens you take, IMO intelligence is perceived by large in society incorrectly - here is how I think the perception is wrong and where it should shift to
Intelligence ≠ IQ Test
If there was a test for intelligence do you not think people would use it?
If you could have an IQ test see if someone was intelligent, hiring staff would be pretty easy right?
Intelligence ≠ Ability to learn something (theorem) and apply it in the exact circumstance you learned it.
Intelligence = Ability to learn something (theorem) and apply it in a new circumstance.
Intelligence ≠ how fast you can crunch sums.
Slow ≠ slow (slow is a synonym for ‘dumb’... but more than that how fast you can crunch a sum is seen by some as a measure of ‘intelligence’. IMO being slow or fast at problem solving isn’t what is relevant, it’s the quality of the solution, not the time taken that matters. So being ‘slow’ to come up with a solution doesn’t mean you are ‘dumb’. Or… for some fun word play… slow ≠ slow)
Intelligence = can you apply a skill or knowledge in a new circumstance? Not how fast you can apply in an existing trained circumstance.
Intelligence ≠ not the number of theorems from others you have memorised.
Intelligence = the number of new theorems you can create (innovation ability).
Intelligence = the number existing theorems you can adapt to new circumstances (innovation ability).
Intelligence = the number of existing theorems you can combine together in novel ways (innovation ability).
IMO the value of knowledge and skills is what new things you can do with them. Not that you can apply them in the exact circumstance you were taught them in (ie rote learning, AKA procedural understanding, AKA memorising someone else’s if/then statement).
How could a test with one right answer ever test if you can apply that knowledge in all circumstances?
How can one question on a concept every test if you can apply that concept in more than that specific question?
Procedural understanding = can apply in the exact circumstances you have seen in the past.
Conceptual understanding = can apply in new circumstances in the future you have never seen before.
Essentially I think intelligence is your ability to draw on all your knowledge to synthesize new solutions to new new scenarios that you come across
If you are unable to synthesize new solutions then you have no hope but to be reliant on the if/else statements of others
Example
This is the difference between a doctor giving a diagnosis of a known disease based on known inputs (symptoms) and a post-doctorate finding a breakthrough in a viable coronavirus vaccine
Alright, this is getting off track. Haha! Sounds like me!
How much you can learn is a function of how much you know? Ie does everything compound?
Example: reading an article - qualitative explanation
Let’s say that ‘Person 1’ likes sport and ‘Person 2’ doesn’t like sport.
Both ‘Person 1’ and ‘Person 2’ read an article on sport.
In the same time with the same article:
More facts: Person 1 will find more facts than Person 2 (eg 5 vs 3) as they know what to look for because of prior sports knowledge.
Each fact is more valuable: each fact will mean more to Person 1 than Person 2 as the value of facts is based on how many other facts you can join each fact onto. Eg fact value: “fact 1 joined onto 3 other facts” > “fact 1 joined onto 1 other fact”
Each fact is remembered longer: the more valuable a fact the longer you remember.
So effectively knowledge compounds. The more you know the more you learn from each incremental unit of learning. AKA the Matthew Effect.
IMO the same compounding effect applies for acquiring skills and innovation ability.
Using physical tools as an analogy to explain skills
Quote: “If all you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.”
Imagine you are trying to build a house and all you have is your hands, some sticks and mud.
Now imagine you have all the modern day tools and can go to a hardware store.
It’s not fair, the person with tools and access to a hardware will be able to build a skyscraper. The former a sand castle.
This is very similar to comparing two people in a workplace, one who has is adept in many skills and the other who is a novice
You are both humans, but one of you has systematically accumulated skills, and the other one hasn’t.
One is not born better than the other, one has built themselves to have capabilities greater than the other.
Let’s say knowledge = ingredients, skills = tools (like a knife, oven, etc) and innovation ability = recipes.
You can see the innovation others have done by looking at the recipes they have created.
Then you start to do small innovation by simply changing one step of their recipe.
Then you do medium innovation by joining together 2 recipes in a novel way.
Then you do large innovation by starting to make your own tools, join together 3+ recipes for 80% of the solution and make up some new steps to get to 100%.
IMO anyone can innovate just like anyone can learn to talk.
In life you want to try systematically accumulate as many tools (skills) as you can and keep them stocked in your shed (prior knowledge), as well as seek for out many different supply lines to hardware you need (knowledge) so you can spend your time building the Burj Khalifa (breaking new ground innovation) and not pottering around with sand castles (repeating if/then statements)
So yes, to me done well upgrades have increasing value per unit of time, ie compound exponentially over time.
1 hour of upgrades 10 years ago = 1 unit of improvement.
1 hour of upgrades now = 10 units of improvement.
IMO the best people have cultivated their minds to be 100x+ more capable than ‘average’.
I think someone like Elon is 1,000,000x as innovative as the ‘average’ person.
But I also think that everyone could be as innovative as Elon.
To do what Elon does you have to do what Elon does. IMO he’s be at hardcore upgrades for 4 decades.
It might seem like a lot of work, and it is a lot of work…
...I’d just change one word however…
It’s a lot of fun / reward / meaning / energising / positive sum-ness!
IMO your mind is your ultimate possession. Want to have fun / reward / meaning / energising / positive sum-ness? IMO spend time consciously upgrading your brain!
If you only take away one thing:
IMO you are not born good or bad at anything.
IMO intelligence = how much cultivating you have done to that point.
IMO intelligence can compound exponentially. This means that you might have 10x the capabilities you had 10 years ago… so all else equal you might add 10x the value to the world… and as such should be paid 10x as much?
The best things in life are selfless and selfish!