Playing on Hard
Intelligence Is a Denominator

I grew up in an environment where “being the most intelligent” was the most important thing but the way to prove that was in mostly verbal skills of ~bullshitting~ demagoguery. The environment was full of qualifications of being stupid for not knowing something or being stupid for having different opinions - that sort of thing. Everybody was stupid, children especially.

Once I realized, much later, in my late 20s, early 30s, that “being the most intelligent” in that sense was holding me back, not allowing me to easily admit mistakes which in turn meant that some mistakes took way too long to be corrected, I started working hard on caring less about “being the most intelligent”. But I will admit that to this day I have a very pleasant physical reaction for being called out for my intelligence.

Once my wife and I started our family, we never talked to our kids about “being smart” or “being stupid”. Never ever. Kids would pick it up at school but we would work on guiding the conversations toward effort and ethics and not built-in capacity for resolving problems. But recently, the two older ones, how in their teens, have started telling me that “I must be a genius” or that “all their friends think I’m a genius” and that “I should measure my IQ”. Beyond the pleasant reaction that I don’t know how to eliminate, this concerns me, and I wanted to share here how I think about intelligence:

Intelligence is a denominator and not a multiplier.

I believe that in our culture we treat “being smart” as somehow valuable in itself. My claim is that it is not: it is only valuable in order to achieve something and that something is the numerator. If I achieve X with IQ of 100 and you achieve that same X with IQ of 200, then, I claim, you really ought to have achieved more with all that raw power that you were packing. I realize that achievements are not perfectly tied to intelligence but that is the whole point: it’s humanity’s most critical tool but not the only tool. And furthermore, being a tool that more or less stays the same, that cannot be developed through practice, I think we ought to be focusing on other traits that we can train, that we can develop and that can help our individual flourishing. Things like:

  • Figuring out when to persist and when to quit
  • Learning vicariously from others, good or bad
  • Analyzing, always analyzing, failures and successes so that we can play the “next hand” better

I realize that all of the above also depend on intelligence but they, unlike intelligence, these can be learned and practiced and improved.


Last modified on 2025-01-30