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Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

#31

Post by tayo42 »

lapcat wrote: post #28
muzani wrote: post #22

One thing I've noticed is that it takes a certain energy threshold to do something. At 30s, first, your internal energy level have dropped. You might also be more senior at work and stuck with higher responsibilities and longer hours, or occupied at home - caretaking parents, young children. Einstein didn't make as many groundbreaking discoveries in his latter years; some attributed this to being tied down with more…

> Einstein didn't make as many groundbreaking discoveries in his latter years; some attributed this to being tied down with more draining work. There's only so much that one person can do in a lifetime. Humans are not infinite wells of creativity. Or let's put it this way: which post-Einstein groundbreaking discoveries do you think he should have made? Why does he personally have to discover everything in physics? Wh…

I am thought Einsteins lack of significant discoveries after relativity was due to kind of bad luck. He happened to get stuck on thinking qm wasn't right? I feel like that happens alot, you could be brilliant just had lived with the wrong circumstances. Maybe he woukd have done more if he was accepting of qm?

Re: Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

#32

Post by akasakahakada »

Read all kinds of university textbooks. First read introductionary layman textbook, if you feel interesting, continue to go deeper, but not too deep.

You don't have to remember everything. Just knowing there exist such ideas or facts is enough. Usually 1000 pages is enough to get a fair proficiency.

You need a ton of factual information across broad domains to be smart.

For free textbooks:

https://openstax.org/subjects/science

Re: Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

#33

Post by keiferski »

Maybe these aren’t super advanced tips, but they’ve worked for me:

- eating certain foods, particularly blueberries. There is a lot of research on their effects. I don’t know if it holds up, but anecdotally I do feel a bit “mentally clearer” after having blueberries daily for about six months.

- Use a spaced repetition system like Anki. Memory is intimately linked to intelligence and there is no better way to improve one’s memory than SRS.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

#34

Post by sockaddr »

keiferski wrote: post #33

Maybe these aren’t super advanced tips, but they’ve worked for me: - eating certain foods, particularly blueberries. There is a lot of research on their effects. I don’t know if it holds up, but anecdotally I do feel a bit “mentally clearer” after having blueberries daily for about six months. - Use a spaced repetition system like Anki. Memory is intimately linked to intelligence and there is no better way to improve…

I’m also on the blueberry+SRS regimen haha, also go outside and walk, normalize your sleep patterns, hydrate, socialize. These are all easy ways to slow the degradation.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

#35

Post by sockaddr »

BigHatLogan wrote: post #4
hindsightbias wrote: post #2

Don’t worry, you get wiser. Instead of chasing the latest IT fad or whatever, you realize it’s mostly something regurgitaded or rebranded and just smirk. Even if it is new, it will be old in a few years. Travel, read books, do things with your hands. The average iphone user is losing IQ points pretty rapidly and they’ll be on meds soon enough to not be any form of competition.

Yeah, I do wonder how much of this is "smartphone-induced" sometimes. I can almost "feel" my brain growing increasingly sluggish by the day...maybe a break is in order.

More on this point, I think it’s important to realize that a lot of technology (like phones) puts you in a “reaction” loop as opposed to your brain’s natural state of “self-entertainment?” for lack of a better term. Thinking is a muscle, you have to work it and looking at memes, tweets, api docs, etc is all fundamentally just reacting to something. Go plan something, design something, anything. But all this comes after sleep. Fix your sleep first if necessary.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

#37

Post by runjake »

Instead of trying to become smarter, I've been focusing on trying to be less stupid.

Gurwinder Bhogal goes over this a bit on episode #602 of the Modern Wisdom podcast at roughly 15:00. https://chriswillx.com/podcast/

Some things in particular:

- Focus more on writing and thinking clearly.

- Try to think more slowly. https://sive.rs/slow

- Avoid posting inane/uninteresting stuff on social media.

- Avoid engaging in debates.

- Avoid ideologies, groupthink, and assumptions.

- Avoid correcting people on the Internet.

- Avoid taking things at face value (eg. news and opinions)

- Avoid "poseuring". I am a strong generalist with a decent knowledge of and passion for a lot of different things. I'm the guy people around me come to for tough technical things. I probably take too much pride in that. When someone asks if I know subject $foo well, and I know a little about $foo, I tend to answer in the affirmative. Most of the time, this works out and through intelligence and luck, I figure it out. Some of the time I am wrong and I look pretty dumb.

- Avoid being unkind to others.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

#38

Post by keiferski »

sockaddr wrote: post #34
keiferski wrote: post #33

Maybe these aren’t super advanced tips, but they’ve worked for me: - eating certain foods, particularly blueberries. There is a lot of research on their effects. I don’t know if it holds up, but anecdotally I do feel a bit “mentally clearer” after having blueberries daily for about six months. - Use a spaced repetition system like Anki. Memory is intimately linked to intelligence and there is no better way to improve…

I’m also on the blueberry+SRS regimen haha, also go outside and walk, normalize your sleep patterns, hydrate, socialize. These are all easy ways to slow the degradation.

Yep, water, sleep, fitness, and being social are all very important too.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

#39

Post by bheadmaster »

As a run-of-the-mill mathematician and programmer, what I've found the most helpful is studying philosophy.

During my teens I went through an existential crisis, and the dread I've felt every day drove me to start reading philosophy books. I found Nietzsche, and while his books were extremely hard to read (took me years to actually go through them), I feel that it's shaped my mind in a universal way, giving me ability to "see through" all the abstractions and arbitrary rules set by various actors in this world, and focus on the fundamentals. Russell and Wittgenstein were the follow-ups, which further developed the sort-of-nihilistic view of Nietzsche into something that made more sense.

I feel it has helped me a lot with both general "smartness" and mathematics, so I'll recommend it too. Read philosophy.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

#40

Post by austin-cheney »

All the research indicates you are as smart as you are born according to measures of intelligence in psychology. You can boost your intelligence up to 10 IQ points with intense practice but that is extremely temporary.

What you can do is instead learn to enhance your personality as such results yield long term benefits (sometimes permanent). For example conscientiousness is negatively correlated with intelligence but boosting your conscientiousness increases your capacity for self-improvement (including increased learning and thus intelligence). Same with lowering your neuroticism. Expanding your openness is directly correlated with increasing both intelligence and happiness.

Perhaps the single most important short term thing that yields long term changes to the mind is to improve yourself physically. Becoming athletic results in short term measurable increases to intelligence.

The single greatest differentiator is becoming more physically durable. When you are less prone to injury, heal faster, and physically tougher you are less risk adverse. Your neuroticism drops to near 0. This alters everything about how you perceive the world including what you do with your time, your interests, and your relationships with other people. It directly affects what and how you learn and the paths you take to accomplish work tasks, even something as boring as writing code.

Unfortunately physical durability is largely fated to good genetics and good diet. The maximum soft tissue healing rate for compound injuries in humans is about 70 hours (it’s also the maximum infectious rate for microbes in humans). Some people have that near invincibility naturally like Wolverine in the comic books (not the movies). Some people have unbreakable bones (soft bones at 1.5-8x higher density). Some people can naturally produce vitamin D in the dark without need for sunlight or risk of depression (gingers).

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