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Can you make yourself smarter?
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: Can you make yourself smarter?
#22It's interesting to think about what intelligence really means. In some ways, this has been frequently discussed (ie multiple types of intelligence) and in other ways it seems that this has never been discussed (ie what are we actually talking about when we call someone intelligent?) Is intelligence the ability to learn something quickly? Is it the ability to understand something quickly? Is it the ability to solve a particular type of problem quickly?
Depending on what we mean, "Can you make yourself smarter?" has fairly obvious answers.
Start by looking at children. In one regard, we rarely learn faster than when we are kids. Everything is foreign to us, and we are constantly learning, our brains little sponges in a wet world. But clearly, our 25-year old selves could solve far more complex problems than our 6-year old selves. Did we get smarter between 6 and 25?
In the same vein, think about how severely retarded people are described: "He has the mind of a 4 year old." Whether that description is medically accurate or not isn't the point. We certainly think of children as intellectually inferior, even though all of our brains started out that way.
So what changed? Why is a 25 year old "more intelligent" than a 6 year old? Is it the creation of new neural pathways? Is it simply the way they've learned to look at the world or quickly apply answers and processes they already know to fit new problems?
Maybe you can provide more answers? Because it seems to me that the fact that we got to where we are today indicates that you can absolutely make yourself more intelligent, depending on how you define that. But I'm open to objections.
Re: Can you make yourself smarter?
#23This reminds me of an old New York Times article that categorized people into two categories:
1. Those who believe that intelligence is fixed from birth, and
2. Those who believe that intelligence can be improved
The finding was that folks in category (1) tended to be fearful of being wrong, and had trouble succeeding in life whereas the folks in category (2) felt it was OK or good to make mistakes, and tended to be more successful.
EDIT: article is http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06unbox.html
Re: Can you make yourself smarter?
#24This reminds me of an old New York Times article that categorized people into two categories: 1. Those who believe that intelligence is fixed from birth, and 2. Those who believe that intelligence can be improved The finding was that folks in category (1) tended to be fearful of being wrong, and had trouble succeeding in life whereas the folks in category (2) felt it was OK or good to make mistakes, and tended to be…
[dweck mindset] will find the work of the researcher most associated with that result.
Re: Can you make yourself smarter?
#25Wow, the timing here seems auspicious. Lately I've been thinking about the limitations that being human puts on a programmer. We work very hard (and should) to reduce cognitive load on ourselves through good development tools that act as crutches for memory---REPL's and good debuggers allow us to try something and see what happens, as opposed to simulating a multivariate operation in our heads. Intellisense and easil…
Your comment reminds me of the Charles Petzold essay on getting away from the IDE, which is summarized fairly nicely in this Coding Horror post: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/10/the-cognitive-style...
Personally, I think that attaining the state of flow is what makes programming enjoyable, and I haven't experienced it in many years. There are just too many APIs, too much poor documentation, too many bugs, and too many languages I have to switch between for me to ever get into the 'zone'.
Re: Can you make yourself smarter?
#26Superficially, the answer to this question is, obviously, yes. We reason spatially and with mental simulation, but we also reason by applying the linguistic conventions learned from our culture (e.g., "if this statement were false, then ..."). What most people seem to fail to realize is just how different people are from each other cognitively, and how many different ways there are of getting to a particular conclusi…
Source?
Re: Can you make yourself smarter?
#27It's interesting to think about what intelligence really means. In some ways, this has been frequently discussed (ie multiple types of intelligence) and in other ways it seems that this has never been discussed (ie what are we actually talking about when we call someone intelligent?) Is intelligence the ability to learn something quickly? Is it the ability to understand something quickly? Is it the ability to solve a…
Yes, you certainly did get smarter between 6 and 25. Children's brains are still developing until late puberty. All sorts of cognitive tasks show development, including short term memory, working memory, etc... It's absolutely not just factual learning taht is happening.
Re: Can you make yourself smarter?
#28Wow, the timing here seems auspicious. Lately I've been thinking about the limitations that being human puts on a programmer. We work very hard (and should) to reduce cognitive load on ourselves through good development tools that act as crutches for memory---REPL's and good debuggers allow us to try something and see what happens, as opposed to simulating a multivariate operation in our heads. Intellisense and easil…
How are you using Anki with emacs? Or are you using Anki to learn Emacs?
Re: Can you make yourself smarter?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this book http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0141035501/ the author says that solving simple math equations (addition,subtraction ,division) fast is much more stimulating than doing complex math.
And the argument and evidence he provides is what?
Seems very true in my opinion. I've always excelled at math, essentially have a bachelors in mathematics, etc etc. My weakness has always been getting the details of the "basic" math correct.
Higher math is about logic, abstractions and applying them to solve problems. Basic math is about holding bits of information in your head and manipulating them accurately. I absolutely believe that basic math taxes your working memory system more than advanced math does.
Re: Can you make yourself smarter?
#30While I can't read the article. My answer to this question was always along the lines of "Oh I'm sure you can, but the problem is that thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, dumb people won't feel that they need to put in the effort to get smarter. " So the smart get smarter and the dumb get dumber; so to speak.
Actually, there was a weird recent re-analysis of Jaeggi 2011 using the Big Five psychology data they recorded for the subjects at the time, where the Conscientiousness (rough synonym for hardworking and self-disciplined) benefitted least in terms of far transfer/IQ while their scores improved the most: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912...