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Growing up, I was often insecure re how ‘smart’ I was, compared to others. It makes sense to aspire for the top of the dominance hierarchy, especially when intelligence is so widely celebrated.

However this overfitting on heuristic measures of intelligence is not only suboptimal, but detrimental to individual development. Focusing on those who appear ‘smartest’, inherently abandons your curiosity regarding what everyone else is smart about. It is difficult to have a wide array of intellectual curiosities when you idolise the ‘intellectual achievements’ of those at the top.

There are interesting considerations on what ideas/attitudes people have that contribute to them being ‘smart’. When positioned within public discourse, these contributions tend not be weighed according to their intrinsic value. It is rare that ideas are taken at face value, instead they are more frequently assessed within the context of the discussion.

It is seen that these discussions do not weigh the sides of opposing ideas equally. Instead, they lean towards contributions with heavier weightings. That is, that which sounds more eloquent/convincing, is more socially acceptable, and has more empirical evidence.

The implications of this unequal weighting can be explored within the compromise between celebrating old conventional ideas and exploring new contrarian understandings. To appear dominant within various conversations, you can get away with an education of conventional truths. To explore contrarian ideas, you are intentionally moving through unknown territory, with less established arguments.

Imagine the choice between being smart and proposing new ideas that change societal perception. Most would choose the latter. It is impact of the ideas that carries significance.

The immediate candidates for ‘who was smartest person’, tend to follow this pattern of those with ideas which have had a great impact on others: Galileo, Newton, Bohr, Einstein. It tends to be that these individuals have their intellect assessed on the merit of how transformational their ideas were within their environments.

To consider how to become ‘smart’, like these individuals, it is useful to consider critical thinking from a bayesian perspective. Within such a framework, it becomes your imperative to recognise your own biases and assumptions. To develop your thinking, you must give serious consideration to emerging ideas that may contradict your mental models and internalised beliefs. If nothing else, you must maintain weak priors and update systematically.

With age, I increasingly value how contrarian people are. It’s thought provoking to find outlier thinking. But debate and confrontation, do not tend to bring the best out of these people. The reason being that it is much harder to argue for that which is unorthodox. Even if it is the unorthodox nature of what is being said, that is what makes it interesting.