Beyond Smart

October 2021If 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 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 here. 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 that 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.