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Beyond Smart
October 2021
If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most
would say that he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to
give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably
think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the
same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about
Einstein. What was special about him was that he had important
new ideas. Being very smart was a necessary precondition for
having those ideas, but the two are not identical.
It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that
intelligence and its consequences are not identical, but it
isn't. There's a big gap between them. Anyone who's spent time
around universities and research labs knows how big. There are
a lot of genuinely smart people who don't achieve very much.
I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be
desired. Perhaps you did too. But I bet it's not what you
really want. Imagine you had a choice between being really
smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but
discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter. I
would. The choice makes me uncomfortable, but when you see the
two options laid out explicitly like that, it's obvious which
is better.
The reason the choice makes me uncomfortable is that being
smart still feels like the thing that matters, even though I
know intellectually that it isn't. I spent so many years
thinking it was. The circumstances of childhood are a perfect
storm for fostering this illusion. Intelligence is much easier
to measure than the value of new ideas, and you're constantly
being judged by it. Whereas even the kids who will ultimately
discover new things aren't usually discovering them yet. For
kids that way inclined, intelligence is the only game in town.
There are more subtle reasons too, which persist long into
adulthood. Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes
the basis of the dominance hierarchy. [1] Plus having new
ideas is such a new thing historically, and even now done by
so few people, that society hasn't yet assimilated the fact
that this is the actual destination, and intelligence merely a
means to an end. [2]
Why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new?
Viewed from that direction, the question seems a rather
depressing one. But there's another way to look at it that's
not just more optimistic, but more interesting as well.
Clearly intelligence is not the only ingredient in having new
ideas. What are the other ingredients? Are they things we
could cultivate?
Because the trouble with intelligence, they say, is that it's
mostly inborn. The evidence for this seems fairly convincing,
especially considering that most of us don't want it to be
true, and the evidence thus has to face a pretty stiff
headwind. But I'm not going to get into that question here,
because it's the other ingredients in new ideas that I care
about, and it's clear that many of them can be cultivated.
That means the truth is excitingly different from the story I
got as a kid. If intelligence is what matters, and also mostly
inborn, the natural consequence is a sort of Brave New World
fatalism. The best you can do is figure out what sort of work
you have an "aptitude" for, so that whatever intelligence you
were born with will at least be put to the best use, and then
work as hard as you can at it. Whereas if intelligence isn't
what matters, but only one of several ingredients in what
does, and many of those aren't inborn, things get more
interesting. You have a lot more control, but the problem of
how to arrange your life becomes that much more complicated.
So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas? The
fact that I can even ask this question proves the point I
raised earlier — that society hasn't assimilated the fact that
it's this and not intelligence that matters. Otherwise we'd
all know the answers to such a fundamental question. [3]
I'm not going to try to provide a complete catalogue of the
other ingredients besides intelligence. This is the first time
I've posed the question to myself this way, and I think it may
take a while to answer. But I wrote recently about one of the
most important: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.
And this can definitely be cultivated.
Another quality you need in order to discover new ideas is
independent-mindedness. I wouldn't want to claim that this is
distinct from intelligence — I'd be reluctant to call someone
smart who wasn't independent-minded — but though largely
inborn, this quality seems to be something that can be
cultivated to some extent.
There are general techniques for having new ideas — for
example, for working on your own projects and for overcoming
the obstacles you face with early work — and these can all be
learned. Some of them can be learned by societies. And there
are also collections of techniques for generating specific
types of new ideas, like startup ideas and essay topics.
And of course there are a lot of fairly mundane ingredients in
discovering new ideas, like working hard, getting enough
sleep, avoiding certain kinds of stress, having the right
colleagues, and finding tricks for working on what you want
even when it's not what you're supposed to be working on.
Anything that prevents people from doing great work has an
inverse that helps them to. And this class of ingredients is
not as boring as it might seem at first. For example, having
new ideas is generally associated with youth. But perhaps it's
not youth per se that yields new ideas, but specific things
that come with youth, like good health and lack of
responsibilities. Investigating this might lead to strategies
that will help people of any age to have better ideas.
One of the most surprising ingredients in having new ideas is
writing ability. There's a class of new ideas that are best
discovered by writing essays and books. And that "by" is
deliberate: you don't think of the ideas first, and then
merely write them down. There is a kind of thinking that one
does by writing, and if you're clumsy at writing, or don't
enjoy doing it, that will get in your way if you try to do
this kind of thinking. [4]
I predict the gap between intelligence and new ideas will turn
out to be an interesting place. If we think of this gap merely
as a measure of unrealized potential, it becomes a sort of
wasteland we try to hurry through with our eyes averted. But
if we flip the question, and start inquiring into the other
ingredients in new ideas that it implies must exist, we can
mine this gap for discoveries about discovery.
Notes
[1] What wins in conversation depends on who with. It ranges
from mere aggressiveness at the bottom, through
quick-wittedness in the middle, to something closer to actual
intelligence at the top, though probably always with some
component of quick-wittedness.
[2] Just as intelligence isn't the only ingredient in having
new ideas, having new ideas isn't the only thing intelligence
is useful for. It's also useful, for example, in diagnosing
problems and figuring out how to fix them. Both overlap with
having new ideas, but both have an end that doesn't.
Those ways of using intelligence are much more common than
having new ideas. And in such cases intelligence is even
harder to distinguish from its consequences.
[3] Some would attribute the difference between intelligence
and having new ideas to "creativity," but this doesn't seem a
very useful term. As well as being pretty vague, it's shifted
half a frame sideways from what we care about: it's neither
separable from intelligence, nor responsible for all the
difference between intelligence and having new ideas.
[4] Curiously enough, this essay is an example. It started out
as an essay about writing ability. But when I came to the
distinction between intelligence and having new ideas, that
seemed so much more important that I turned the original essay
inside out, making that the topic and my original topic one of
the points in it. As in many other fields, that level of
reworking is easier to contemplate once you've had a lot of
practice.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica
Livingston, Robert Morris, Michael Nielsen, and Lisa Randall
for reading drafts of this.
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