Intellectual energy
One of the big variations I see between people is the amount of energy they habitually put into thinking, and I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere.
General advice about improving health and lowering intellectual friction would seem to help increase the ability to think, and ideas like “take five minutes to consider the problem” adds impetus, but I’m not sure what the general difference is between me and most people, or Yvain and me.
Intellectual drive isn’t an unalloyed good—cranks have high drive combined with low self-editinig, and some types of depression include a compulsion to think about topics that cause misery and/or inertia. Part (all?) of the value of meditation is getting some time off from thinking. Still, increasing intellectual drive would probably be a good thing for a lot of people.
Has anyone found that rationality training or anything else increases the default desire to think?
The single biggest influence on this I can isolate is social. When my brain expects thought to be rewarded by social status it’s happy to pour calories into thought. When I feel like I’m stupid, or that no one will listen, thinking becomes tremendously difficult. I’m convinced this is the major difference separating intellectuals from normal people—intellectuals are people who were socially rewarded for thinking. School does a great job of punishing people for thinking, unless they’re near the top of their class. Normal people drop the habit for the same reason I dropped team sports. Not to say it’s necessarily illogical—comparative advantage and all that..
Yes.
The thing that really brought this to my attention was a close high-school friend of mine who, in high school, was “one of the dumb kids”… that is, not learning-disabled, but not on the honors/college-bound track. When we graduated he was reluctant to come visit me in college, because I’d gone to MIT and “he wouldn’t have anything in common with all those smart kids.” Etc.
The thing was, it was clear to me that he was every bit as smart as I was, and in fact when he did come visit he was astonished to discover that he fit in with my college friends quite well… he’d thought I was some kind of fluke. He’s since gone on to a successful career as an industry analyst. Every once in a while I tease him about being “one of the dumb kids” and he acknowledges that no, he was just wrong about that.
I wish I understood better how the transition happened, because I suspect that a lot of equally capable people don’t manage that transition… and, as you say, drop the habit.
I was rewarded for being smart when I was a kid, which may not be the same thing as thinking.
I’ve known people who liked thinking and grew up in anti-intellectual environments—they were very happy to get out.
I think you’ve got a partial truth there.
As a kid, at some age I realized that when people tell me “you are smart”, it means that I said something they agree with. They certainly didn’t reward a clever argument again their ideas. (Another source of praise was when I won some mathematical competition, because that was socially neutral; a pure signal of skills, evaluated by some external expert.)
I’ve actually had people call me smart for arguing against them quite often. It’s a kind of defense mechanism - ‘you’re only winning the argument because you’re smart, not because you’re right’.
I’m pretty sure I’d often end up losing arguments with very smart and debate-happy socialists, libertarians, postmodernists, neoreactionaries, anarchoprimitivists or jesuits if I got into them, but I don’t think that means I should end up agreeing with the world-views of all of them.
Very true.
Although I think that has more to do with time investment than raw intelligence. Still I think it’s often overlooked that in a world where you know people are a) biased b)dishonest and c) generally more intelligent than you, doing your own thinking becomes a pretty poor strategy.
I’ve had this happen too and what’s funny is that my apparent “smartness” was simply due to a familiarity with strong counter arguments to their position, and nothing to do with intelligence.
It probably meant “you said something smart that they agreed with.”
It’s quite common to get that kind of a compliment even if you say something relatively stupid they agree with.
I think your substituting your evaluation of smart for theirs. They thought it was smart, even if you didn’t.
Under such interpretation, yes, it’s likely it was often something they considered smart and I considered merely… socially expected of me to say.
I had the same experience, but ‘being smart’ is an inherent feature of you, not a product of your work put in, so I felt insecure about possibly doing dumb things and damaging the perception of me as smart (which probably contributed to my adult issues with asking for help and fear of failure).
There’s a reward for doing easy thinking tasks, or for attempting ones known to be so difficult that success is not expected. However there’s no reward for trying anything that’s just far enough beyond your ability to be a good learning experience.
Sure there is: the satisfaction of pulling it off.
Sadly, one cannot eat satisfaction.
In that case I precommit to give social status and share food with to people who write clever things and post them on the internet.
“Will write clever things for food” :-D
Specifics?
I became one of the dumb kids as soon as I arrived in college and several years after graduating I’m still not sure how to recover an enjoyment of thinking. Or, for that matter, an ability to think for more than a couple of minutes in a row without some kind of panicky freakout. Some of my friends have suggested video games, but I’ve been putting those off for various reasons that might not be valid.
Do you have any ideas about what happened?
I’ll tentatively suggest treating for anxiety.
I went to a very a difficult school and suddenly found that the single good quality I knew I had (being smart) I didn’t really have at all. Every attempt to think hard became a reminder that I am a failure in this regard (and therefore have no demonstrable value as a human being etc. etc.). The existence of due dates forced me to think hard pretty often anyway until I graduated, but since then it just doesn’t happen. Apparently this effect is pretty common for alums of [college], but usually it wears off after a year or so and it’s lasted longer than that for me.
So yes, clearly an anxiety problem, and the video game suggestion would be a sort of exposure treatment. Can’t afford to pay a third party to fix my brain (when I tried that in college I spent a month totally failing to communicate what my problem even was until they told me to stop coming, so involving another human is likely to be very time-inefficient), but there are workbooks and such that are said to be useful.
Thank you for posting about this. It takes both courage and respect for truth.
I’ve made a huge amount of progress shutting down self-hatred. Unfortunately, I haven’t kept a diary, so this is from memory, and I’m not completely sure which of the many things I’ve tried were crucial. I also do have therapy (only once a month—the style is influenced by Somatic Experiencing). I think it helps, but it isn’t the main thing.
This is going to be a core dump. I recommend that if you start feeling swamped, pull back from it.
Here’s what I’ve written in the past.
I strongly recommend Transforming Negative Self-Talk by Steven Andreas—it’s an NLP-based approach of modifying the speed, volume, pitch, direction, etc. of the attacking voice. I found it did a lo quiet mine, and one of my friends found it helpful. The book says that these methods don’t work for everyone, so if you try it, please view it as an experiment. It is absolutely the most obviously effective self-help book I’ve used.
I’ve seen some talk about the need for compassion and courage to get out of self-hatred, but I find these abstractions are too grand and frightening. Fortunately, getting in on small facts and grinding can be very useful.
Two mottoes: “I will not do my enemies’ work for them.” “I will not beat myself up for symptoms of depression.”
I’ve found that fits of self-hatred are not under direct conscious control, but they can be examined and this helps. Partly, it’s that the process of examination is very different from being caught up in self-hatred.
Even if you can’t prevent self-hatred, experiment with self-care afterwards. You’ve just had a rough time, and you won’t be struck by lightning if you take a moment to come back to the ordinary world and let yourself feel steadier.
It’s done me some good to look at self-hatred as a passion. I still don’t know what’s going on, but just acknowledging that high-energy inventive hatred is a strong drive helped somehow.
It also helped to realize that part of my mind must be terrified of something to be working so hard to constrain me, even though I haven’t figured out what it’s afraid of.
It helps (in a slow grind sort of way) to keep coming back to whether what the voice is saying is true—the universe is remarkably tolerant of people who don’t meet random ideal standards.
Compassion and Self-Hate—a good book on the subject, with focus on men’s issues. I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t)-- another good book with focus on women’s issues.
Would you like to join my Minecraft server?
No, really. As far as games involving problem-solving go, Minecraft with a large set of tech-mods is pretty high up there, and adding the social element helps motivation. I’m not sure what the best fraction of time to spend on games is, but it’s almost certainly >0.
This very nearly spiralled out of control at the start of my PhD. Doesn’t sound as extreme as you so my advice probably won’t be of much help. Collecting small victories helped.
My experience in grad school (materials engineering) was very different. Within the sphere of people who attended my Ph.D. program, academic success seemed very poorly correlated with intelligence. Maybe a difference in the school’s or department’s culture.
The ideas stupid people come up with are statistically more likely to be wrong, so if we rewarded them unconditionally for having original ideas, we’d end up incentivizing the production of wrong ideas. It may actually be a good thing that “having original ideas” is a specialization of labor largely restricted to the intellectual upper class.
I accept the premise that “the ideas stupid people come up with are statistically more likely to be wrong,” but I would add two caveats. First, “within the domains in which those more intelligent people have relevant knowledge and draw on that knowledge,” and second, “Even then, for any difficult problem the majority of original ideas will be wrong even from more intelligent people.”
I would propose that the intelligent people might be more useful in sorting right ideas from wrong ones, than in trying to generate all the ideas themselves.
Right—comparative advantage and all that. The problem then though, is that we end up with a large population of the mentally obese, growing increasingly distrustful of the intellectual elite who are supposed to do the thinking for them, because they represent a different youth tribe. We probably want to be encouraging intellectual effort for it’s own sake in the way we try to encourage sports—even if you’re not an athlete, you should take pride in running every day before work or whatever.
I expect a lot of individual variation with regard to this. In particular, I don’t think I do thinking for social rewards—I chase thoughts and ideas because it’s interesting and “interesting” for me is an entirely terminal value tied to curiosity and exploration.
I used to think that about myself, which is of course weak evidence about you. How do you choose what to think about, amongst all the possibilites?
Partially it’s driven by my needs and partially it’s pretty random. I’m an infovore so there’s a stream of information that’s running though my head and some chunks of that look subjectively interesting enough to chase.
I don’t think I’m socially driven because a noticeable part of my ruminations never see the light of day—not even discussed with other people, never mind published/posted.
If you wish to study this, here are two words that link what you are talking about to the literature:
“Need for Cognition
“Typical Intellectual Engagement”
Thanks.
I think you should differentiate between intellectual drive and productive drive. Yvain happens to have both.
Intellectual productiveness takes a lot more effort than intellectual consumerism. Surrounding yourself with people who happen to appreciate your intellectual products rewards both intellectual and productive drive. You have to exceed a certain threshold of production before you will get sufficient motivation from those social rewards, though.
I think regularly talking to people who value deep thought about things and/or looking up studies and googling early on etc. is a good way to get yourself to commit more to thinking deeply and doing your research. My most common motivation for finding some research is to confirm or deny a point in an argument
This reminds me of Lykken’s First Law:
David Lykken proposes in this editorial (gated) that psychologists should take up the study of mental energy. In particular he makes the falsifiable claim:
I haven’t been able to find any study done on this though. Please share references if you find any.
Check out Ishaan’s links.
No. Not for adults.
I think the “desire to think” comes pretty much with the meat hardware, or is at least a product of early childhood and cultural influences. My mind feels like a freeway, full of a constant stream of thoughts competing for my attention...and I know several people who self-report being aware of almost no real introspection or abstract thought. (They are almost all “happier” people than me, by the way.)
I do think rationality training can help those with a high intellectual drive get more traction in actually using that drive to produce something meaningful. Part of the reason I like LW is it feels a little like steroids for my brain—it helps me focus and organize my thoughts a bit. After reading some of the stuff smart people write on here, “regular life” feels like it is moving in slow motion intellectually and I can make good progress.
Intellectual OCD. Untidy ideas bother you, and you need to clean them up.
That’s one thing. Another thing is exploration: chasing thoughts into interesting intellectual landscapes.
I think thats part of what motivates ‘someones wrong on the internet’ syndrome, when you see something obviously and provably wrong the need to fix it is almost visceral.
Creating something new out of the ether is much harder though.
That’s a good point. Intellectual OCD isn’t that creative. In fact, it can be a hindrance, as newly created ideas tend not to be too tidy.
You nailed it.
How do I do that? Be specific.
How do you give yourself OCD? Hmmm, I had always considered it a bug, and not a feature.
Encourage your annoyance with bad ideas?
Ha.
Sorry. I meant I think I suffer from the intellectual OCD as you’ve described it. How would you suggest I rid myself of it?