Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

Instead of trying to become smarter, I've been focusing on trying to be less stupid.

Gurwinder Bhogal goes over this a bit on episode #602 of the Modern Wisdom podcast at roughly 15:00. https://chriswillx.com/podcast/

Some things in particular:

- Focus more on writing and thinking clearly.

- Try to think more slowly. https://sive.rs/slow

- Avoid posting inane/uninteresting stuff on social media.

- Avoid engaging in debates.

- Avoid ideologies, groupthink, and assumptions.

- Avoid correcting people on the Internet.

- Avoid taking things at face value (eg. news and opinions)

- Avoid "poseuring". I am a strong generalist with a decent knowledge of and passion for a lot of different things. I'm the guy people around me come to for tough technical things. I probably take too much pride in that. When someone asks if I know subject $foo well, and I know a little about $foo, I tend to answer in the affirmative. Most of the time, this works out and through intelligence and luck, I figure it out. Some of the time I am wrong and I look pretty dumb.

- Avoid being unkind to others.

The main way is increasing your general level of health. Physically, emotionally and mentally. Reading more doesn’t make you smarter, it just makes you more knowledgeable. Imagine if you had the level of acuity and liveliness you did when you were a child, but the maturity and experience you have now. People say that humans have an intellectual peak in their twenties, well that’s only because most people’s health starts going downhill at that point. Excessive stress, mental overstimulation, emotional problems, etc. You remove these, there’s no doubt you’ll have a clearer and faster mind.

Much of philosopher Elliot Temple’s work is about how to think better. That’s a big topic which includes, among many other things:

- becoming aware of and fixing mistakes (https://www.elliottemple.com/essays/life-overreaching-correc...)

- identifying and working with bottlenecks (https://criticalfallibilism.com/most-factors-arent-borderlin...)

- managing your error rate for faster progress (https://fallibleideas.com/gradualism)

- becoming more honest (https://www.elliottemple.com/essays/lying)

- evaluating ideas using binary criteria (e.g., does idea X have important property Y), as opposed to continuous criteria (e.g., how good is idea X on a scale of 1-10) (https://yesornophilosophy.com)

Temple put a lot of thought into what might be called interventions for adults who want to improve their thinking (such as OP). One of those interventions is learning to speedrun a video game (https://curi.us/2198-mario-odyssey-discussion). Temple argues that many of the things you learn as part of speedrunning can help you learn to think better in general.

I am also in my early 30s and noticed the reverse. I can now understand more complex subjects (like advanced probability or functional programming) that I had trouble conceptualizing when I was younger. I am not sure if it's the age factor or the fact that I have been exposed to other things and the bigger picture is becoming clearer.

My own advice would be to not do anything you won't be doing now. There is no "smarter" being. A fish is smarter than you in the ocean but I don't think that's the kind of smart you want. If you want to improve your "global" smartness or understanding, then try to explore other languages.

You can, for example, learn Arabic or Chinese. Learning Spanish is cool but if you only speak English you have been already exposed to a latin language. You can, for another example, learn Rust if you have been programming with Python/TypeScript. If you have been focused on programming for your entire career, another useful thing you can learn is psychology.

Notice all my advice converge to the same idea: learn a new way to communicate.

Something no one has mentioned yet: stop drinking alcohol to the greatest extent possible. A lot of us in our 30s are into craft beer, good wine, expensive Scotch etc... try abstaining for a full quarter (3 months) and see how you feel after. Even if your consumption was within government health guidelines (<14 drinks per week for men, less for women, and government drinks are small) you will probably be amazed at the difference. I couldn't believe how much having a beer or two after work every day was affecting my sleep and then everything else.

One thing I've noticed is that it takes a certain energy threshold to do something. At 30s, first, your internal energy level have dropped. You might also be more senior at work and stuck with higher responsibilities and longer hours, or occupied at home - caretaking parents, young children. Einstein didn't make as many groundbreaking discoveries in his latter years; some attributed this to being tied down with more draining work.

Energy management is crucial. It's no longer about time management. When you do have energy, early in the day, that's when you want to want to focus it on self-improvement. Don't try to learn too much late in the day. Allocate plenty of rest periods; many of the smartest people around now don't do anything with their low energy times. It's usually better to sleep early or go for a run instead of forcing yourself to learn more.

I feel like there are too many definitions of "smart" for me to give a useful answer, and people are too different anyway so what worked for me might not work for you, but I'll just write down what helped me. You could probably start by asking yourself what you really want to achieve, and why, and it might help you more than anything I am writing here.

My first instinct was to tell you to read books, or listen to audiobooks, that you don't normally read. They can introduce you to new ideas, and imho that's a great way to start. By reading Heinlein, Ursula K Leguin, Ian M Banks or countless others and then thinking about them, I feel like I developed new frameworks that helped me think differently than before.

As an added bonus, they improved my vocabulary, which helped me with expressing new ideas.

As a second step, discussion about these books often brought even more insights, and here the improved vocabulary came in handy (even more so as I am ESL).

I found that tips like "never be the smartest person in the room" can be useful impulses (pushing you out of your comfort zone and meeting new people in that example), but should be taken with a huge grain of salt. In addition to that, most self improvement books and podcasts seem to be little more than distilled survivorship bias, so I've completely given up on them, but ymmv.

I hope that might point you in one possible direction, but in general I wouldn't worry too much about your brain waning in your thirties, I'm also at that age and have at times felt similarly. I'm pretty sure most of that is just our perception anyway ;)

Sleep well. Sleep is critical for structural learning (insight, generalization, etc.). Your hippocampus is theorized to randomly walk through memories to build these structural connections in your cortex during slow wave sleep.

All the research indicates you are as smart as you are born according to measures of intelligence in psychology. You can boost your intelligence up to 10 IQ points with intense practice but that is extremely temporary.

What you can do is instead learn to enhance your personality as such results yield long term benefits (sometimes permanent). For example conscientiousness is negatively correlated with intelligence but boosting your conscientiousness increases your capacity for self-improvement (including increased learning and thus intelligence). Same with lowering your neuroticism. Expanding your openness is directly correlated with increasing both intelligence and happiness.

Perhaps the single most important short term thing that yields long term changes to the mind is to improve yourself physically. Becoming athletic results in short term measurable increases to intelligence.

The single greatest differentiator is becoming more physically durable. When you are less prone to injury, heal faster, and physically tougher you are less risk adverse. Your neuroticism drops to near 0. This alters everything about how you perceive the world including what you do with your time, your interests, and your relationships with other people. It directly affects what and how you learn and the paths you take to accomplish work tasks, even something as boring as writing code.

Unfortunately physical durability is largely fated to good genetics and good diet. The maximum soft tissue healing rate for compound injuries in humans is about 70 hours (it’s also the maximum infectious rate for microbes in humans). Some people have that near invincibility naturally like Wolverine in the comic books (not the movies). Some people have unbreakable bones (soft bones at 1.5-8x higher density). Some people can naturally produce vitamin D in the dark without need for sunlight or risk of depression (gingers).

Don’t worry, you get wiser. Instead of chasing the latest IT fad or whatever, you realize it’s mostly something regurgitaded or rebranded and just smirk. Even if it is new, it will be old in a few years.

Travel, read books, do things with your hands. The average iphone user is losing IQ points pretty rapidly and they’ll be on meds soon enough to not be any form of competition.

As a run-of-the-mill mathematician and programmer, what I've found the most helpful is studying philosophy.

During my teens I went through an existential crisis, and the dread I've felt every day drove me to start reading philosophy books. I found Nietzsche, and while his books were extremely hard to read (took me years to actually go through them), I feel that it's shaped my mind in a universal way, giving me ability to "see through" all the abstractions and arbitrary rules set by various actors in this world, and focus on the fundamentals. Russell and Wittgenstein were the follow-ups, which further developed the sort-of-nihilistic view of Nietzsche into something that made more sense.

I feel it has helped me a lot with both general "smartness" and mathematics, so I'll recommend it too. Read philosophy.

Try to learn something difficult. Something that you really struggle with and find mentally exhausting. Preferably something useful but it’s not a waste of time to try learn something that you may never use. For example, if you are not naturally talented at math try to fundamentally understand general relativity. Or learn a musical instrument if you are not musical. This may not work for everyone but it works for me. It has reversed the arrow of time for my brain for sure.

Take your time, months or years if you need to. Learn different things at the some time. Mix it all up in there and let it brew while you sleep.

Continuously taking on more challenges; if you don't push the boundary of your capabilities, one stagnates.

Incrementally increasing risk appetite as a mental exercise

Ensuring "skin in the game" (when there's something to lose, I tend to be more "awake")

Focus on personal conduct (rather than merely absorbing "information"; right practice makes me better, not just the knowledge of what to practice)

Becoming accountable, pledging results, and putting 100% efforts

Also, for inspiration, pick some "extreme" fields to study: mountaineering, Olympic level training, etc

> I’m in my early 30s right now. I can feel my brain waning here and there--things that I used to pick up quickly are now taking a long time to settle in. I'm wondering why that is.

“One more new thing” is relative. You aren’t starting from the same position this time as the last, or the first.

That’s a good thing.

This internet stranger suspects what you’re calling intelligence is maybe something else. Rest? Motivation?

Don’t forget that your brain isn’t in a vat. (Probably. Maybe. No promises, not getting all philosophical here.) Take care of the whole organism.

I have been getting a lot of feedback from my colleagues for the past 2 years or so that I am one of the smartest people that they know of. My mother doesn't like me highlighting the fact that I am smart in front of other people especially our extended family (she thinks they will be jealous and wish ill of me) and pushes me to do better by working harder and keeping my head down.

TBH, I do not consider myself smart but inquisitive. I always try to create mental models based on the simplest explanations of a concept that is otherwise hard to understand. Taking care of my mental health is another thing I do proactively as I suffer from clinical depression. Will all that being said, I go through small obsessions every month or so and that pushes me to know everything about a certain topic and then summarize it at the end in my head. Being smart isn't always a natural characteristic, and it is definitely something you can work on.

Context: Just reached 40 + a few months

I don't know how to become smarter, but I definitely know how to become dumber:

- Sleep less

- Joints problems coming from few physical activity due to COVID WFH + I hate exercises

- Suddenly had hay fever after so many years

- Pressure from work + kid

- Financial pressure from owning some property (essentially, when you have a 30-yr debt, saving for a few years of spending does not feel safe at all)

I figure you can at least avoid some of these by making the right decisions.

As I get older (54) I figured out a couple of things, the first is obvious and especially true in our industry and that is you must constantly be learning. Personally I devote one hour a day during the work week to study a given topic that relates to my job -I do this on company time, since it relates to my job. It's amazing what a difference it's made in my career. The second thing is to constantly challenge your self to learn/do new things, in particular things that don't come natural to you -basically you are forcing the brain to do stuff it doesn't like and making it adapt. It's just like working out except for the brain, constantly testing ans trying the system over and over to stimulate growth.

Read heavy books and scientific papers, bang your head against a (metaphorical) wall a lot. Follow intellectual trails and be willing to get seriously lost.

Our brain only gets smarter by pursuing a goal. And "get smarter" is the worst goal to have.

In you 30s you're not a child, your biology tells you - now pick the target, we can't afford to be smart everywhere anymore.

So either you get very smart at something specific by focusing on it (or few specific areas if you have enough capacity) or not smart at all.

Another alternative is to keep soothing yourself with those silly "improve your diet, read books and stop drinking" kind of advice you find all over the internet.

It depends on what you mean by "intelligence." Are you looking for an IQ? Trying to learn new skills faster? Learn new facts faster? Think faster? Have better recall for what you've learned? Be able to synthesize new things from information you already know? Being "smart" is complicated, and it can mean a lot of things, but here's what I would say is the most general advice from my own life: 1. If you're looking to improve IQ, the most important thing is practice. IQ is mostly based on reasoning and logic, so things like logic games or puzzles, or trying to look at a problem you're having from a different way from usual are good ways to work on it. 2. If you want to learn new skills faster, it's best to find one skill that can be "used" to help with a number of other skills. Anything related to hand-eye coordination can be picked up faster if that's already a skill that you have. 3. Learning new facts is... tricky, but ironically the best thing you can do to learn them faster is to slow down. Your mind can only hold up a max of seven new pieces of information at once, but that's assuming you have a very good short term memory and strong ability to convert short term to long term. For most people, it's more like 3 or 4. Slowing down how fast you encounter new information can improve your ability to recall it later. 4. Thinking speed, unfortunately, isn't really something you can change, at least not in my experience. Then again, I apparently think fairly quickly as is, so I may not be the best person to ask on that front. 5. Synthesizing information also mostly comes down to practice, but it also requires a level of thinking beneath the surface level (though if you're asking this kind of question, you're probably familiar with that) and analyzing each new piece of information to actively look for connections to what you already know.

Yeah, that was pretty long winded and may not even have been entirely what you were asking, but I hope it's still useful to you.

Vitamin B (all types), particularly if you drink caffeine which is a vit B agonist, exercise and get plenty of sleep.

Without getting into the weeds of trying to define intelligence: just go into more detail/deeper of what you already know. That’s all the education system really does anyway after a certain point.

Edit: whenever you come across something you don’t understand/know - learn more about it. It’s a journey not a destination.

it’s amazing how much younger and sharper exercise, proper diet, and good sleep can make you feel. or at least, that’s been my experience. i was astonished when i realized it wasn’t as much “getting old” as it was ”shit habits” that i was feeling.

I guess there are lots of different interpretations of what it takes to be "smarter".

Personally I've learnt several foreign languages to the point where I can read classic novels in one of them. Different cultures and idioms help me see things in a different light.

I have also dabbled with woodworking, gardening / hydroponics, electronics / embedded systems. Read more widely in the fields of chemistry, biology and linguistics. Also read biographies of notable people.

Do I feel smarter? Not really. The more I learn and discover the more I realize all the things that I know nothing about.

I stopped drinking, maintain a good sleep hygiene, excersise more, eat better and read regularly about 18 books/year.

I did notice I can articulate ideas better and think clearer, but I also noticed the bad parts of my personality traits such as anxiety and obsessiveness increased and I had to develop new mechanisms to keep them in check.

This just proves to me that the old adage of ignorance being a bliss may actually be true.

Read all kinds of university textbooks. First read introductionary layman textbook, if you feel interesting, continue to go deeper, but not too deep.

You don't have to remember everything. Just knowing there exist such ideas or facts is enough. Usually 1000 pages is enough to get a fair proficiency.

You need a ton of factual information across broad domains to be smart.

For free textbooks:

https://openstax.org/subjects/science

Work on stuff that motivates and resonates with you, that gets you hooked in. I was pretty dumb at a the Object Oriented Microsoft nonsense from the 2000s for example, and flunked the interviews of companies that wanted a thoughtworks style of thinking and coding everything. I am definitely dumb at that stuff, because I find it tedious.

Weight training, get lean etc.

More sleep.

Avoid shitty jobs that take it out of you.

Maybe these aren’t super advanced tips, but they’ve worked for me:

- eating certain foods, particularly blueberries. There is a lot of research on their effects. I don’t know if it holds up, but anecdotally I do feel a bit “mentally clearer” after having blueberries daily for about six months.

- Use a spaced repetition system like Anki. Memory is intimately linked to intelligence and there is no better way to improve one’s memory than SRS.

Learn (self-)hypnosis. You have lots of brains, so to speak, you just have to organize them coherently.

Also, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223 by Douglas C. Engelbart, October 1962 https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

Don't focus on learning anything new. Learn to focus on connecting everything you know already. Neuroplasticity is a female dog.

Meeting and learning from others is a great way to start. Being curious and asking the right questions.

Follow instructions from Hacker News. That is definitely how one might adjust their intelligence.

Improve your health, like many others have said.

Habitual brain exercises work too. Crosswords, mental math, etc.

I've found regurgitating cliches and mirroring others to be really helpful. Really helps knowing I'd be fine and fit in if everything around me cratered.

Eating like shit has also really impacted the way I look at the world and gave me a much deeper appreciation for everything good in my life. Nothing like deep burger regret to put into perspective what's important.

Oh yeah and I've become a pick-up artist. Not really intelligence, per se, but I did pay $9000 in seminars and it's been a wild ride of self-discovery. I love being humbled by how great some of my competitors are at it, and it relaxes me knowing that it's something I can improve on yet never really care about being exceptional at.

Finally, I spend a lot of time observing sociopaths. When you actually dig into the lives of the people so many of us look up to, there's a lot of things in their lives that are either undesirable, or not any more figured out than most of us have it. So it helps in a weird way to go to the apex predators of our species who engage without the burden of moral artifacts.

I'd challenge you to become wiser, not necessarily more intelligent.

Stop using following things:

- Phone

- Social media

- Online games

- Sugar

Start doing following things:

- Eat + Sleep + Exercise well

- Get involved in local community, devote time with family and friends

- Read books

- Enjoy life

Standard dose sertraline has a cognitive effect in non-depressed people, as besides being a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, it also has a slight dopaminergic effect (irrelevant for therapeutic purposes it seems, but still noted in case reports) I've had friends that don't use stimulant medication, reporting positive effects in both mood and cognition with a short low dose trial (25mg/d)

If you go down this path, use your newfound perspective and mood (as you'll probably feel different) to learn more about your personality and work on improving it, so that you are able to deal better with life, and find out in what things your usual self falls short when dealing with others. The comment from austin-cheney seems very good addressing a similar thing.

About diet, check out this talk from Georgia Ede called 'Nutritional and Metabolic Strategies for Optimizing Mental Health': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkqZW_sBPTg

Not gonna touch on other good habits, as it seems already covered in general, but just going to add a few mindset related things I found that resonate with my experience:

Becoming smarter shouldn't be a goal in itself, as intelligence is already set. Whenever I spent days reading studies, reviews and guidelines trying to search for an edge or better health in general, it was mostly a form a entertainment. I did learn a lot with those deep dives, and I incorporated a lot of these things in my life, but the gains are very marginal over less detailed advice.

At this age your brain is already wired for specialization. Which is probably why learning from textbooks and other structured ways seems easier now than when you were young and exploring, learning by exposure. You can tell the difference especially with language-learning and music.

This is bad if you are just expecting to absorb a topic intuitively, but it doesn't mean you can't conquer and become an expert on it. Or become a quick responder at it. This is where after you have covered some ground, you continue learning using projects and examples.

Life is more complex also than in your early 20s. There's more to do in general, expectations from others and yourself, which sometimes gets in the way of learning, eventually becoming distracting and energy sucking instead of having everything taken care of, or not being bothered by it. You can optimize this by hiring help or finding ways to living a lower maintenance life, keeping a low maint. household.

I find whenever I take steps to simplify my life and time sinks, and take a little time off out of my usual environment, creativity in problem-solving and learning tasks follow.

Set time aside for active reflection and meditate.

1. Find leverage

2. Do less, but better

3. Get healthy