April, 2025
For the longest time I had been living with the assumption that intelligence is normally distributed but for the longest time reality has not lived up to that expectation. So I find it necessary to make my understanding agree with reality. It turns out that most people are not average smart, instead most people are average dumb. People are average smart relative to other people but they are dumb when measured against the minimum bar of intelligence needed to understand things. We need to start from the beginning. From what intelligence is and how it works and then move to look at why so often it does not work and then try to come up with ways to make it work. Intelligence is better thinking. The higher the intelligence of a person, the better their thinking. Thinking starts with a single thought. This thought may come from the environment or from inside the person’s head. The important thing with most thoughts is that this single thought comes with a sequence of thoughts. If you read about a swan, your mind will go through a flow of thoughts that may include image of a white swan or thoughts about birds. If you think about a deadline you need to meet, it will automatically make you think about the details of the project for that deadline. So the first point to note about your thinking is that your thoughts are always in a state of flow. They automatically keep moving. This is also why it is pleasing to read a novel but irritating to read curriculum books. Because fiction is written in a way that every next scene is directly connected to the ones that came before it while in curriculum books, the next explanations are not directly connected to ones that came before. Sometimes connected thoughts are in entirely different books where you read about atoms (as building blocks) in a physics book but read about how those atoms move in a chemistry book (Charles’s Law). Because thoughts keep flowing, they don’t like when they can’t keep flowing. That is why uncertainty is unnerving for your thoughts. Uncertainty means that there is a point beyond which thoughts don’t know where to flow. Thoughts are like drivers on a highway. They don’t like slowing down and they hate any dead stops. Thoughts will always try to keep flowing. If you offer them a bad route, they will still take it instead of waiting to find a better route. You can notice this when you are trying to solve a puzzle. Your thoughts are anxious to finish the puzzle. The thoughts will often settle on partially correct or completely flawed answer just so they can move on from the problem they were on. [1] Now we can look at the biggest problem that comes with this tendency of thoughts to keep flowing. And it is that people will not spend more time thinking about a thought than they absolutely need to. This means that if they are given a chain of thought (a ready made explanation), they will borrow that chain of thought as is without trying to think of the individual thoughts. This is the reason we have market bubbles. We wrongly talk of bubbles as failures of group thinking but they are actually the result of the norm of group thinking. The norm just results in bad outcomes when some underlying conditions change but people don’t notice because they never paid attention to how the underlying conditions actually mattered. Intelligence arises as the opposition to this natural tendency of thoughts to keep flowing. Inability to overcome this tendency is what makes animals unintelligent. A man that is unable to overcome this tendency in his work seems like a monkey with a hammer. Real intelligence is being able to stop at any point of a thought and think about it. Every thought one stops at and thinks about will result in branches and sub branches. The only problem with branches of thought is that they are often born as pre-concepts. This means that when they first appear, we only have a vague feeling of the concept they might represent without being able to identify what they exactly are. And because they are pre-concepts, they cannot be written down. And because they can’t be written down, it is not possible to come back to them later if you stop thinking about them. An example of this is having an apparently clear thought late at night and you deciding to write it down only to wake up in the morning and find that what you wrote down makes no sense. The only way to retain that thought is to keep thinking about it at night and maybe ruin your sleep and even then you might not be able to get to a point where you can convert it from a pre-concept to a concept. Then how and when do these pre-concepts change into concepts? It is an unreliable process of you routinely spending a lot of time thinking in pre-concepts and some of these pre concepts convert into concepts when they become concrete enough. Because intelligence is based on time spent at a single thought, a measure of intelligence could be how much time someone routinely spends on thinking. If someone spends less than 2 minutes on most of the things that they think about, they have 2-minute intelligence. And most people are like this for most things. And because it is not possible to actually understand most things in under 2 minutes, most people are dumb at most things. Now some of these same people will spend up to 30 minutes thinking about some of the thoughts in their heads and they have 30-minute intelligence in those areas. One of these things where almost everyone seems to have 30-minute intelligence is social dynamics. Most people are therefore considered to have good enough emotional intelligence to understand the social context of situations they are in with the exception of a few people who never spend this much time thinking about social situations. But other than this area, most people do not spend more than 2 minutes on anything they are thinking about or working on. You can observe this directly. Most things that people think about, they will not be thinking about it after 2 minutes. They will have moved on to something else. Neither will you find them going to back to thinking about it later. With this, we can update our assumption that intelligence is normally distributed because if we are saying that there is a minimum amount of time required to understand something which is much higher than 2 minutes and most people spend less than 2 minutes on things, this means that the graph of intelligence is right skewed and most people lie in the area of unintelligent about most things. [3] The remaining people in the tail of the graph are those who spend a lot of time on most of their thoughts. These are the deep thinkers that can see patterns where others cannot because they spend a lot of time thinking around those potential patterns. One thing to avoid falling for when trying to identify people who have spent a lot of time thinking about things is that there are some people who will seem smart because they will have spent a lot of time not thinking about those things but reading or listening about them. So at every branch they will have a lot of memorised information. But that is all that will be, memory of information around one thought, not more thoughts. This is also where curiosity gets tricky, everyone who is intelligent will be curious but not everyone who is curious will be intelligent. Because learning about things is different from understanding their underlying principles. Memorised learning fails in areas where the most important thing is not a pattern but an anti pattern. If you kept looking at white swans without questioning it, you might come to the conclusion that all swans are white. But just because you have not seen a black swan does not mean a black swan does not exist. This is why the second requisite of intelligence after time spent on thoughts is the level of skepticism a person has. The problem with skepticism is that it is much harder than just spending time thinking about something because when you start to question things, you will need to question things that everyone else around you agrees on and you will end up in a situation where you might be a contrarian in many things. [2] One important point to note is that it is not just total time spent on thinking that is important, but it is actually the uninterrupted blocks of time that are important. You are only as smart as your uninterrupted blocks of time are long. If your uninterrupted block of time for thinking is 1 hour long, you are 1-hour intelligent. If your blocks are less than 5 minutes, you are 5 minute-intelligent. For this reason, mental solitude is extremely important for intelligence. If you don’t have mental solitude built into your routine, you are going to be dumb about the things that you spend your days on. The ideal thing is to be able to block out a period of time immediately an important topic comes to your mind instead of waiting to get free time. Though you can also try to schedule thinking topics for when you are free but this is very hard to do for pre-concepts and is similar to trying to continue a dream over multiple days. [4] For measuring this true intelligence, I cannot think of a standard test because intelligence is contextual. In fact the more extreme the intelligence in one thing, the more likely the person is exceptionally bad at some of the things that we expect from normal people. Like the best writer in the world might be worse at maths than the average person because they spent all of their time thinking about things related to writing. So there can be no standard test to measure intelligence. [5] The only way that seems to work in identifying if someone actually is intelligent is to have a conversation with that person. You try and have a casual conversation and try to find the topics that the person spends a lot time on. Sometimes this is their work but often it is something different than work because most people are not in jobs that they find interesting. When you find a topic the person is interested in and has spent a lot of time thinking about you try to ask probing question for underlying explanations for things they say and see where their understanding bottoms out. You can also question what they say and see if they have already thought about your objection and even if they have not already thought about it, do they skip past it or do they look like they are trying to think about it during the conversation. There will be a lot of people who are capable of thinking deeply about things but in practice they don’t routinely spend time in solitude thinking about any thing. One thing that sometimes indicates shallow thought is high extroversion. Being an extrovert is routinely stepping away from your internal thoughts and instead getting more external triggers that kind of reset where your thoughts are flowing. The problem with external stimuli, which includes social media, is that it will reset every flow of thought to a new starting point. This is also why software developers hate being interrupted when they are working. Because they are somewhere very deep in the flow of a thought about the program they started an hour ago and if they are interrupted they can lose their chain of thought and will have to start from scratch again. [6] And then on the other extreme you will find some people who spend hours every day thinking in depth about a lot of things. These people usually have a backlog of ideas that they want to think about and will fetch a topic from that backlog. But these people are not that common. For the longest time, I only knew one person who did so. It was also odd having to explain how I spent my time if someone insisted on knowing. For instance, I remember having to avoid saying that I spent entire days thinking about things when people asked me what I did over the weekend. Fortunately I have since found a lot of more people like this. And every time I find a person like this they have some kind of obsession where they channel this. And every time I think to my self that the person will do exceptional work in their obsession and they do end up doing ridiculously well in a few years if they have not already done so. [7] --- [1] The neuroscientific explanation for this tendency for thoughts to want to keep flowing is that when neurons fire, they are connected to more neurons that fire in turn. [2] Now what is left to do at this point is to either disagree with everyone or keep to yourself and find areas where you think everyone is wrong and try to capitalise on in. The thing to do when you have found something like this is not to try to convince everyone else but to benefit from it and if you do really want to convince others, your success at that thing will do a better job at convincing others than your arguments ever will. [3] I had been having a lot of trouble trying to make sense of why people are dumb in so many places. Like for a few months since I started working in the open market for software development, I’d been able to ship in 2 weeks what teams of 5+ engineers were taking over 2 months to ship and they were still doing a worse job. I thought the issue was communication overhead or something else. But it turns out the answer was very simple. People just have not spent enough time thinking about anything to be good at it. [4] You may also want to adjust your company to allow thinking deeply about things. If your friends talk about celebrities and sports, that’s what is going to take most of the space in your head. If you can share third level thoughts with someone, they will return with some additional thoughts on that level or even a level lower which would help your thinking. When average intelligence people think about things together, the average intelligence of the thinking goes down. But when high intelligence people think about things together, the intelligence of the thinking goes up. [5]The fundamental problem with IQ tests is that they are trying to assess people’s ability to see specific types of patterns. And those that perform well are the ones who have spent enough time with those types of patterns. One set of patterns in this test is the shape rotation pattern. This is something a carpenter would perform exceptionally on because he rotates shapes in his mind routinely. But the same carpenter will fail at the maths word problems in the test because he is not used to thinking about word problems. Similarly someone with a social science degree will be able to perform very well on the word problems but will fail at the pattern rotation part. One person may do well because they know that they need to convert problems into algebraic equations while another may fail because they don’t know this small piece of information. So IQ tests are a measure of some things that some people are good or bad at often by pure chance. That is why there are a lot of high IQ people who don’t do much better in life than the average IQ person. It is also why we end up having to create new categories of intelligence like “street smart” and “wise” because IQ does not seem to be working in e general sense. Then another major problem with IQ tests is that they are relative. They are not trying to score individuals against some absolute bar for intelligence but only with respect to each other. Which is problematic because it is possible for collective intelligence to fall over time without us being able to tell if individuals have gotten dumber or smarter. [6] Software is one of these fields where you routinely think about things that are extremely large in scope. Comparing the number of lines of code they have to go through, it is equivalent to writing a new book every 2 weeks. Anyone who has tried writing even a short article knows how much space it takes in your head while you’re doing it. [7] There is one limit to the deep thinking intelligence. You cannot be the best carpenter in the world by just thinking about it. You have to actually work. Because a lot of areas require real life information to improve. But as you work in these areas, you need to block out some time to do deep thinking about the work you are doing or you will end up as someone who can only do what he has done and has learned nothing beyond it. Unfortunately that is how most people work. People spend less time thinking about what they are working on than I spend on thinking about what the best kitchen lighter would be. There are some habitual skeptical deep thinkers who actually do spend a lot of time thinking about things. And there are more intelligent than most others.