The measure of human intelligence used to be easier: Give someone a task and measure the results. These days tasks that can be easy for some can be nearly impossible for others. The reasons for this are simple enough, a person has been educated by school, peer interaction, environmental stimuli, and their own interests in enough of a similar measure to be calculable by tests that are administered throughout the life span of any given individual.
IQ VS EQ Testing
Standardized classical IQ testing
The typical IQ test takes many factors of education into account and can give a reasonable estimate of how much retention a person has for their past studies, and how much problem solving skill they possess at a given moment. However this doesn’t really take into account how much variation there is based on the mood of the test taker. If a person felt the testing was silly or simply didn’t wish to take the test it would be a dramatically different result than if someone had spent days or longer mentally preparing for the test and felt confidence in their ability to do well.
EQ Testing
The standardized EQ test from VeryWell.
EQ testing measures emotional intelligence in a similar way but again if one is having a lousy day they may or may not do as well as they might on a different day. These two tests are quite different but they reflect an underlying truth about intellect and mood. They are immeasurably interrelated.
How Then Does One Become Smarter?
A broad range of topics exist that bear study, but which ones actually increase intelligence? The sciences are largely preoccupied with mainstream science and become indifferent to an array of topics that might hold a person’s interests. Complex Mathematics can be learned where there is an interest but quickly isolates the student from any room from creative thinking as math is a sort of zero sum game once you evolve past calculus. Social Sciences are mostly BS, based on studying easily faked polls. This generally leads people to start challenging universally accepted truths about everything from potty training to racism.
The Fundamental Ingredient For Intellect
Interest in a subject is the primary ingredient. One must have a serious interest to study and to question what is knowable about any topic. Just agreeing with a popular opinion is the brain becoming lazy, and blindly disagreeing is equally lazy. The only way to increase “understanding” is to walk with both sides of an issue until you can reasonably acknowledge that in most cases both are probably true enough, to require further evaluation. Is the ultimate truth of a subject knowable? It only matters if you have the interest required to pursue it.
How does this make me smarter?
We can take every single environmental factor in your situation from; early childhood diet, to peer pressure this very day, and eliminate them entirely from considerations when estimating your intelligence. This is provided you are well versed or studied in at least some subjects.
A great example of this might be music, if you are Arizona’s own Mozart on a Casio Keyboard it didn’t matter where you were born, what you ate, or who your friends were, because you have attained a mastery of something. Once that is accomplished you have all of the required skills to master anything else. You compose yourself towards the interest in the next subject and use the same kind of thinking to get closer and closer to mastering that subject, and then another, and then another, and that is the very definition of becoming smarter.
Does Education Help Or Hinder This Process?
The idea that taking 10,000 people as a group and teaching them to add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. It has always had the flaws it currently has, but has always been a necessity for the majority of people as a stop gap between them approaching any given subject material, and mastering any or all of it.
However once that is accomplished it becomes largely unwarranted, and all to often is nowadays a breeding ground for social sciences and other political pollution that makes people combative against the common sense that keeps knowledge on track and growing.
It seems like the best way to get smarter is to avoid joining the thinking of large groups with agendas that have stopped learning to lean on an ideology, no matter what that ideology is. Intelligence has nothing to do with social justice, and it isn’t a matter of political correctness. One must be able to look beyond those things to master a subject. It may become popular to disregard math as a racist idea, but then you won’t know how many apples you have. That is largely how society is de-evolving currently, if only as a silly example.
Best wishes, and for the core who seek genuinely, stay interested.
