How to Be Smart. How to Improve Your Intelligence.

on a very fundamental level many people
feel that confidence is intelligence and that the way to be more intelligent is to dissimulate confidence to feign confidence habits of mind are easily misperceived as innate character traits what you may perceive as self-confidence in me is a process of constant worrying but productive worrying being smart involves worrying it involves worrying all the time it requires that you're constantly paying attention not to things you already know and understand but to the limits of your understanding necessarily and by definition the things that you are just barely confident with things you are curious about things that you haven't mastered yet things you don't yet feel confident speaking the title of this video might seem like parody or self-parody but the truth is when you look around the internet you see a lot of people who are asking themselves this question and who are looking for answers to questions very much like this one but they tend to phrase it in such a way as to avoid admitting blatantly that they feel dumb that they feel lost that they feel hopeless or that they feel that others have an advantage in life that they haven't quite sorted out for themselves and the truth is all of us have felt that way unless you're an amnesiac unless you can't remember your childhood due to years of alcoholism or something all of us have gone through sometimes years and sometimes decades of feeling that way and that is the subject of this video but what i see on the internet is people yearning for advice simply and bluntly as to how they can be more intelligent or how they can live their lives more intelligently and what they end up with is this sort of self-help motivational advice it's really antithetical to their purposes there's another youtuber who was speaking really passionately about this apothogen he'd managed to get from a self-help manual that told him oh uh you know your problem isn't that you need to be highly motivated to go out and accomplish great things you just have to get out there and start accomplishing great things in order to feel highly motivated now whether or not this is good or bad advice what is the ideological function for the reader for the believer in reading this and getting excited about it on a very fundamental level many people feel that confidence is intelligence and that the way to be more intelligent is to dissimulate confidence to feign confidence and this is in fact stupidity and it is the road to remaining ignorant to inculcating and defending your stupidity it's true that for example in a movie we associate a certain kind of confidence with an intelligent actor or an actor playing the role of a brilliant scientist confidence looking from the outside in is how we perceive someone who already knows what they're doing but that's not what intelligence is that's not the way to become smart that's not the way to learn or gain that same competence that might lead you to feel confident in one scenario or another being smart involves worrying it involves worrying all the time it requires that you're constantly paying attention not to things you already know and understand but to the limits of your understanding necessarily and by definition the things that you are just barely confident things you are curious about things that you haven't mastered yet things you don't yet feel confident speaking on i saw another youtuber who's quite notorious for being stupid just today sargon of akkad if you agree with him politically fine if you hate him and despise him politically fine but he's stupid like if you agree with him that has nothing to do with whether he is intelligent or stupid there was this wonderful demonstration of both why and how he's stupid and of what stupidity really means in practice where he he had this sort of uh spontaneous unscripted stream of consciousness political rant and at first he's ranting about things he's been reading on twitter lately specifically things written by socialists and left-wing people whom he's criticizing and of course in that he knows what he's talking about because he's actually read these things on twitter's response and then he moves on to criticizing a few other youtubers and these other youtubers are actually people he knows personally and he's watched their videos so you know in a sense he knows what he's conversing he's confident he's exuding this you know boisterous confidence that his audience responds to and they like about it and then you know he took a next step and he started talking about what happened in the french revolution like circa 1789 to 1794. he hasn't even read the wikipedia article on the french revolution he doesn't know what he's talking about at all but he maintains this momentum this confidence he's not even aware that he's taking a step from something he can and should be confident or at least relax speaking about into another province where he should worry he should be worried now being worried doesn't mean you have to act worried you can say to someone in a completely self-confident way i don't know you can say to someone a self-confident way i wish i knew more about that you know i'd like to take the time and do something i don't know there's nothing wrong there's nothing more there's nothing weak about that you can seem strong and self-confident while saying to someone this is the limit of my knowledge this is what i've read this is what i know this is what i don't know all right intelligent people are those who are constantly aware of these fences if you like at the limits of their knowledge and who are always worried about them they're people who are aware of when they take that step from their own area of competence to incompetence and this doesn't mean they're people who are afraid to take that step right on the contrary i think if you're an intelligent person you worry about the limits of your knowledge productively you worry about what it is you don't know you get curious about what it is you don't know and then you have investigated to some extent and then you know it right you can't research absolutely everything under the sun right but in this way you start living your life intelligently and thus therefore you become a smart person with time with effort all right habits of mind are easily misperceived as innate character traits nothing you're seeing about me right now wasn't it i i fashioned myself into the man that i now am there was a time when i spent my youth sitting on the carpet playing sega master system playing video games i watched the same terrible tv shows everyone else in my generation watched i had a terrible formal education i grew up with all the same disadvantages as pretty much everyone else in my society and how did i warm my way out of that i was dissatisfied i was rapacious i wanted more right and when i look back at my life i only wish that i had wanted more sooner and earlier and that i hadn't accepted compromises and excuses right i accepted at a very young age that i would never read aristotle why i could make a separate video reflecting on that that there were some things that were unknowable or too hard for me to read it's not true of course i could have read aristotle you know i would have helped if i had parents who encouraged me or something you know would have helped if you have a tutor or at something right i accepted an early age that i could never learn latin and i could never learn greek i went on later in life to learn languages that are much much more difficult than latin and creek and i'm learning much more difficult language now uh i wouldn't call this discouragement i wouldn't even say that it was that i felt stupid it's that i thought these things were impossible and unknowable and untouchable for me other things weren't so what a lot of you don't know this but when i was a young young man i was very interested in theoretical physics i read books about you know research into how gravity works and how dark matter works and the formation of star systems i did that and i was thinking about making that my career and i decided against it for various reasons you know just that didn't seem intimidating to me to read about physics but some things seemed impossible to me and i didn't i didn't question them i didn't i didn't get motivated in the way that i'm motivated now just to mention i mean research we're doing right now in this apartment includes the history of central asia places like tajikistan and uzbekistan is it easier or more difficult to learn the history of athens or to learn the history of tajikistan and uzbekistan this is not the most difficult research and this is you know casually at all times i'm expanding my knowledge of the world and i'm challenging my own ignorance i'm aware of the limits of my knowledge some of that some of these things i'm aware of for years before i can get around for years and years and years i had already done research on the french revolution and i had never done research on the english civil war it could be called the english revolution that came before it and i knew there was an important dynamic relationship between them i knew i had to get around it sooner or later and a couple years ago with my with my girlfriend i did that research so what am i describing here what you may perceive as self-confidence in me is a process of constant worrying but productive worrying not worrying for the sake of worrying but worrying so that i'm aware of the limits of my knowledge so that i'm aware of my own ignorance and so that i'm challenging my own ignorance but i would never do what sargon of akkad did in striding over that boundary for your you're commenting on twitter you're commenting on youtube and then you're company of the french revolution and you don't you're not oh hey i'm now talking about something i haven't read something i i don't really know for myself this business of confusing confidence for intelligence i think also is at the root of what people reach out for and what they end up grasping onto in self-help books just think of this you know marvelous grand useless piece of wisdom that the other youtuber got so inspired by you know oh it's you don't need to be motivated to accomplish great things you need to get out and start accomplishing things so that you can you can feel one of it why do people seek out these kinds of catchphrases and what is their real function it's a very strange sort of reassurance it's reassuring you that there's nothing here you need to worry about that there isn't something you don't know that's going to make you incapable of achieving your objectives and aims and real wisdom involves precisely that gnawing doubt being with you at all times not to live your life despite doubt but to live your life with doubt informed by doubt let doubt sharpen your senses at all times let your awareness of the limits of your own experience and expertise you know wet your appetite for learning and don't cling on to these catch phrases that are in the parlance of our times thought terminating cliches