March, 2025
People are dumb by choice. IQ is the ability to see patterns but your ability to see patterns improves based on how much time you spend looking at similar patterns. If you spend hours and hours over months learning to do IQ tests, your IQ test results will improve. Obviouly this exercise wont improve your actual IQ. IQ tests fail because of this. Not only can you improve your IQ test scores without improving your IQ, you can have higher score just by having spent your time in the right domains. If you spent a lot of time in maths, you will do better in IQ test. If you spent a lot of time thinking about physical manipulations you will do better on the IQ test. This second part can be double checked by giving shape manipulation part of the IQ test to carpenters and then comparing the score with other skilled laborers that dont work with shapes. The average of carpenters will be higher than non-shape workers. The reason that the default IQ is different for people has a lot to do with the things people have spent time on. Autistic people do better in engineering not because they are born to be good at engineering but because their brain does not have the capacity to focus on other aspects of life and is only left with focusing on what is objective. Their inability to notice emotional context is something that has left their brain free from the things everyone else spends 90% of their time on. What happens with this 90% is that they will spend time on whatever comes next. If they pick a hobby like tinkering with hardware, their brain will spend 90% of its time thinking about hardware. The more time they think about hardware, the more patterns related to hardware they are likely to see. Older people become noticably more smart about life in general and less smart about new things because they start spending more time on their kids and families as opposed to younger kids who have all the time in the world to spend on the new things that they are interested in. Coming back to the example of autistic people, everyone is technically autistic in a lot of areas. Most people are autistic about medicine because they dont spend a lot of time thinking about it. Those learning construction are autistic about cloth making. But we dont see them as such because we dont consider cloth making as something everyone should learn. We only see people as autistic when they don't understand emotions and social context. But the catch with this is you can actually teach autistic people this but they will need to spend much more of their brain's routine time on it then and this would come at the cost of spending time on the things they were good at. So while we try to make kids get at least average good at most things in life, we should keep in mind that they will not be exceptional at any one thing in life. Of course there are downsides to spending too much time on one type of thing. Quality of life in other areas might fall and you might not be able to function as most other people do. For example, a friend once talked about how her parents insisted that she get married before she was allowed to take the foreign scholarship she was being offered. It was a very long discussion where I was trying to figure out where the actual problem was. Did she not want to get married then? No, that was not it. Was there something wrong with the guy they were suggesting? No, he seemed ideal on paper. Was she worried that the guy would not be supportive of her taking that scholarship? No, she was not worried about that. Then she started mentioning very specific attributes that she wanted in a guy and I did the obvious thing of counselling her that coming with such specific combinations was unrealistic because you can't just make up a human to meet those kinds of details. In the end, I marked that conversation down as something my sisters do when they just want to rant about something without wanting anything from me. The first time this conversation got a different interpretation was when my siblings were jokingly telling me that I should do career counselling professionally because I can break down someone else's problems for them into objective decisions very well and I mentioned horrbly failing at doing so a few times. I've since gotten better. Now I know that this specific conversation can mean at least two things. Though I'm not sure I would perform very well with a different script. Now coming back to being dumb by choice, being dumb is likely directly related to lack of agency in thinking about certain things. A backend engineer who does not know how to fundamentally calculate the resource consumption for a simple poll is someone who has not spent a lot of time thinking about polling or resource consumption or both. Now the question comes, why and when does this happen and how to avoid it. It often happens when the work the person is doing they have no interest in. If a person is building software and they are not the type of person who spends their free time thinking about software, they are not going to spend enough time trying to see patterns. Now why do they need to spend time to see patterns? should the patterns not be obvious as they work? yes, some patterns will be obvious but those will be ones in first level thinking that you automatically run into. But there are a lot of patterns that are not directly connected to the routine work. Some of them may be things that you only see if you step back and try to think of a system as a whole. Some of them may be things that you only see if you try imagining them in different configurations that don't even exist. Similarly deep thinking is also related to the time spent on things. It is only slightly different in that it depends on not only one level away from direct results but then another level away where you think about the effects of the effects and then again the effects of those effects and then also try to think about the results of these combinations. The only problem with this is that these levels exist as preconcepts, things that cannot even be defined with words because they are too vague at that point. Most of them you probably cant even identify as concepts so you wont be able to write them down and if you cant write them down you run into a very basic problem that everytime you start thinking about them you have to start from scratch. You cant start again from where you left off becuase the end was not a concept but a combination of vague concepts and their effects. This means that the only way to think in depth is through uninterruped chains of thought. You can only have uninterrupted chains of thoughts if you have time in solitude and the depth of your thoughts are then limited by the longest uninterruped duration of thinking that you can have. This essay is an example of this phenomenon where I am writing the longest article I have written in a while because I eliminated all of my interruptions including linkedin which even though did not have notifications enabled was an interruption that was triggered by my brain's tendency to want to open the app and post something. I did not have any other social media apps installed on my phone anyways. You can see an example of this very clearly with the context window sizes and how well it performs. Larger context windows are a requisite for better AI though a larger context window does not always mean better understanding. Basically the longer the AI can think about something, the longer its chain of understanding and the better the thinking. The equivalent of the context window for humans is the uninterruped periods of time we spend thinking. If the longest period of uninterrrupted time is less than 30 minutes, the thoughts will only be 30 minutes smart. You might think that you can just start blocking out 2 hours every weekend to have better thinking. But that is not how it works. Not every 2 hours that you spend thinking will result in something useful. It is like rolling dice. You might get a 6 but more often you wont get a 6. To reliably get a 6, you need to spend 2 hours multiple times every week. And even then your thinking will only be 2 hours smart. If you want to be 4 hours smart, you will need to spend 4 hours multiple times a week in uninterrupted solitude. To get solitude you need to be in an uninterruped environment. There cannot be multi tasking. You cannot take breaks. Even getting up to drink water can be a break in your thoughts unless you can do so in an automated mode which is tricky itself. I once brushed my teeth with facewash because I was trying to continue thinking about something and did not notice that the tube in its normal position was not toothpaste until I was done brushing and tried rinsing and the water did not have any foam. Only then did I notice that it was not toothpase and the taste was very bad. Now there is one caveat in solitude allowing the longest chains of thought. Which is that you can keep thinking about vague concepts in vague ways without ever actually turning them into something concrete. And this is where a lot of people get stuck at. After you have spent sufficient time in your thoughts you actually want to try writing your vague thoughts by converting them into words. You are basically trying to think in "type" where instead of interrupting your thoughts to write, you think in writing by just starting to write down your thoughts. Try not to interrupt yourself while writing to edit or find the right words. For the first draft, you should just start writing down your thoughts as they come to you without stopping. If you are not used to doing this and start this now, your first writings are always going to be about thing that are happening to you and your feelings about them because those are the things most of your time is spent thinking about. But as you start spending more and more time thinking about things, your thoughts will start focusing more on intereting things and your writing will also become about more interesting topics. This is why most people who are dumb are dumb by choice. The dumbest thing to do is to stay in things that you don't want to think about. If you are a backend engineer who does not like to think about backend in your free time, you should move into something else because you are never going to be really good at it. You will only be as good as is required of you at your job and even that is not guaranteed because you will find shortucts to thinking about things by memorizing answers from others. Of course there are also people who don't like to think about anything. They just want to make enough money to pay for their interests and they are happy with that and that is fine. To these people I recommend deferring to other people that spend a lot of time thinking in long uninterrupted blocks of time. This is not about calling someone better. It's about delegating to specialists. Like you delegate plumbing to a plumber instead of doing it yourself. You should delegate and not be irrationally stuck at imagining yourself being better at something you don't spend time on. Or you should adjust your life around to make time for uninterrrupted chains of thought. But dont act dumb by arguing with people on things you have not spent time on thinking. It is obvious in things like medicine where you know the doctor knows more than you and you should not argue with him on how to do an operation. Before arguing with someone's contrarian view try to indirectly gauge how much time they have spent on thinking about something and if they have spent more time than you thinking about it, try to find out the underlying reasons for their opinions instead of making the obvious counter arguments that they already know.