Practice, practice, practice. No, wait, hold your rotten fruit, I’m serious.
It’s a bit hard to articulate, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the interaction between two human abilities: the ability to do whatever you want, and the ability to get better at something by doing it over and over. The second one sounds like the hard one, but really the first one is—most people never realize that they really do have full agency over their own lives. They’re too used to ruling out possibilities according to someone else’s heuristics, and never stop to examine those heuristics. If you haven’t yet fully internalized the fact that you really can do whatever you want, I’m not sure what words would inspire that, but think about it.
As for the practice bit, again, people have this artificial division between “people who can do x” and “me.” But all it really takes to be able to do most things is to try to do it a lot, ideally in a structured sort of way. The catch is that you have to be willing to do something you’re really bad at for a while—as Go players say, lose your first 100 games as fast as you can. Or play 100 twangy horrible chords before you play a pretty one. Or screw up 100 math problems before the concept makes sense. But if you decide you’d like to have a certain skill, and have a good attitude about the necessary period of sucking at it, there’s nothing stopping you from acquiring the skill.
The synthesis of those two ideas is quite liberating. As it applies to your case, you can learn as much as you like about whatever you like, including ways of reasoning and discrete facts and abstract concepts. There are also exercises that’ll improve your brain’s capacity to learn, understand, and remember. (I don’t know a lot about that, but there are other people here that do.) And you can have as much of all of this as you want, limited only by how much time you can find for it. In short, yes. You have all the power you need to be as intelligent as you aspire to be; you just have to choose to use it.
On a side note, you should know you’re not alone on the low-level-of-formal-education front. I’m a high school dropout and just started college a couple of months ago, in my 20s. A lot of the technical stuff on LW goes over my head—but, per the above, that’s mostly because I haven’t chosen to dedicate time to learning it yet. :) It’s lower priority than schoolwork and other projects of mine, and knowing that makes me feel totally fine about not understanding.
(ETA: Okay, so this is my 2:30am level of eloquence. If it still seems like a good idea in the morning, I’ll think about drafting an essay explaining the point in more depth, since, as I said, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.)
But if you decide you’d like to have a certain skill, and have a good attitude about the necessary period of sucking at it, there’s nothing stopping you from acquiring the skill.
Not only this, but if you find a skill intimidatingly impressive, you’re probably overestimating how difficult it is.
Indeed. It’s more useful to know what the curve of difficulty is like. A guitar teacher friend once warned me that, unlike the piano (on which it’s easy to make a pretty sound at all and hard to make a complicated one), on the guitar it’s hard to make a nice noise at all but once you can do that it gets much easier. Knowing that, or at least having been told that, has done a lot to keep me from being frustrated while learning the guitar. “It’s okay … it’s supposed to still be difficult and sound weird. I’m still new at this.”
As for the practice bit, again, people have this artificial division between “people who can do x” and “me.” But all it really takes to be able to do most things is to try to do it a lot, ideally in a structured sort of way.
I often don’t think in terms of intelligence or talent. Until you start getting to the limits of human performance, there are simply skills that some people have learned and that others haven’t. It’s not that I can’t draw, it’s that I haven’t learned how to draw. There also seem to be meta-skills that make a difference: for example, the skill of translating “word problems” into mathematical equations. When trying to help classmates with high school physics, this was often their stumbling block.
Well put. There’s a page in the Usual Error about this—basically, that almost every “can’t” can be expressed more precisely as “haven’t chosen to spend time learning to,” or “haven’t prioritized.” And making a point of acknowledging those explicitly to yourself is empowering. When you actively reword statements like that, you’re reminding yourself of your own agency instead of denying it.
Practice, practice, practice. No, wait, hold your rotten fruit, I’m serious.
It’s a bit hard to articulate, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the interaction between two human abilities: the ability to do whatever you want, and the ability to get better at something by doing it over and over. The second one sounds like the hard one, but really the first one is—most people never realize that they really do have full agency over their own lives. They’re too used to ruling out possibilities according to someone else’s heuristics, and never stop to examine those heuristics. If you haven’t yet fully internalized the fact that you really can do whatever you want, I’m not sure what words would inspire that, but think about it.
As for the practice bit, again, people have this artificial division between “people who can do x” and “me.” But all it really takes to be able to do most things is to try to do it a lot, ideally in a structured sort of way. The catch is that you have to be willing to do something you’re really bad at for a while—as Go players say, lose your first 100 games as fast as you can. Or play 100 twangy horrible chords before you play a pretty one. Or screw up 100 math problems before the concept makes sense. But if you decide you’d like to have a certain skill, and have a good attitude about the necessary period of sucking at it, there’s nothing stopping you from acquiring the skill.
The synthesis of those two ideas is quite liberating. As it applies to your case, you can learn as much as you like about whatever you like, including ways of reasoning and discrete facts and abstract concepts. There are also exercises that’ll improve your brain’s capacity to learn, understand, and remember. (I don’t know a lot about that, but there are other people here that do.) And you can have as much of all of this as you want, limited only by how much time you can find for it. In short, yes. You have all the power you need to be as intelligent as you aspire to be; you just have to choose to use it.
On a side note, you should know you’re not alone on the low-level-of-formal-education front. I’m a high school dropout and just started college a couple of months ago, in my 20s. A lot of the technical stuff on LW goes over my head—but, per the above, that’s mostly because I haven’t chosen to dedicate time to learning it yet. :) It’s lower priority than schoolwork and other projects of mine, and knowing that makes me feel totally fine about not understanding.
(ETA: Okay, so this is my 2:30am level of eloquence. If it still seems like a good idea in the morning, I’ll think about drafting an essay explaining the point in more depth, since, as I said, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.)
Not only this, but if you find a skill intimidatingly impressive, you’re probably overestimating how difficult it is.
Indeed. It’s more useful to know what the curve of difficulty is like. A guitar teacher friend once warned me that, unlike the piano (on which it’s easy to make a pretty sound at all and hard to make a complicated one), on the guitar it’s hard to make a nice noise at all but once you can do that it gets much easier. Knowing that, or at least having been told that, has done a lot to keep me from being frustrated while learning the guitar. “It’s okay … it’s supposed to still be difficult and sound weird. I’m still new at this.”
I often don’t think in terms of intelligence or talent. Until you start getting to the limits of human performance, there are simply skills that some people have learned and that others haven’t. It’s not that I can’t draw, it’s that I haven’t learned how to draw. There also seem to be meta-skills that make a difference: for example, the skill of translating “word problems” into mathematical equations. When trying to help classmates with high school physics, this was often their stumbling block.
Well put. There’s a page in the Usual Error about this—basically, that almost every “can’t” can be expressed more precisely as “haven’t chosen to spend time learning to,” or “haven’t prioritized.” And making a point of acknowledging those explicitly to yourself is empowering. When you actively reword statements like that, you’re reminding yourself of your own agency instead of denying it.