Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

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.

> I’m in my early 30s right now. I can feel my brain waning here and there--things that I used to pick up quickly are now taking a long time to settle in. I'm wondering why that is.

“One more new thing” is relative. You aren’t starting from the same position this time as the last, or the first.

That’s a good thing.

This internet stranger suspects what you’re calling intelligence is maybe something else. Rest? Motivation?

Don’t forget that your brain isn’t in a vat. (Probably. Maybe. No promises, not getting all philosophical here.) Take care of the whole organism.

I feel like there are too many definitions of "smart" for me to give a useful answer, and people are too different anyway so what worked for me might not work for you, but I'll just write down what helped me. You could probably start by asking yourself what you really want to achieve, and why, and it might help you more than anything I am writing here.

My first instinct was to tell you to read books, or listen to audiobooks, that you don't normally read. They can introduce you to new ideas, and imho that's a great way to start. By reading Heinlein, Ursula K Leguin, Ian M Banks or countless others and then thinking about them, I feel like I developed new frameworks that helped me think differently than before.

As an added bonus, they improved my vocabulary, which helped me with expressing new ideas.

As a second step, discussion about these books often brought even more insights, and here the improved vocabulary came in handy (even more so as I am ESL).

I found that tips like "never be the smartest person in the room" can be useful impulses (pushing you out of your comfort zone and meeting new people in that example), but should be taken with a huge grain of salt. In addition to that, most self improvement books and podcasts seem to be little more than distilled survivorship bias, so I've completely given up on them, but ymmv.

I hope that might point you in one possible direction, but in general I wouldn't worry too much about your brain waning in your thirties, I'm also at that age and have at times felt similarly. I'm pretty sure most of that is just our perception anyway ;)

You may be onto something here--I definitely have slipped in taking care of the whole organism. My sluggishness might be a symptom of that.