How to become more intelligent.

[ZenRaiden]

Besides nootropics, is there any other way?

 

[Cognisant]

I can't watch the video right now, but this is my advice:

• Good sleep, at least 8hrs
• Wake up without being awoken by something
• 1hr a day cardio
• Stay hydrated, avoid diuretics like coffee
• No drugs, especially no brain affecting drugs
• No alcohol
• Eat fruit, fish, nuts and meat, avoid processed sugars and keep carbs (rice, wheat, tubers, etc) to a minimum, especially pasta and bread
• Learn something new every day, studying for various certifications is a fantastic use of your time

Take it from me I do none of these things and I'm a total dumbass

 

[ZenRaiden]

Take it from me I do none of these things and I'm a total dumbass

Same.

 

[fluffy]

I know that I often see this and I understand it differently each time. Self control, power balance, emotional integration. These all have some benefits. It is about becoming aware of what to do wherever you are.

People can question what they are doing and realize a new way of doing it. So they no longer need to struggle at some things. It becomes natural to them. As we learned to read but also developed more than a sentence or paragraph, page and book. The comprehensiveness was to begin then see what was easier and were to go next. This is with life to go where it takes us and not make the same mistakes.

The comfort zone is not entirely negative. Struggles do let us grow but too much is a way of going backwards. I learned that with some time that facing my pain gave me the ability to handle more. To see my limitations which I can get closer to but not cross them. Now it is still here but I can relax and approach it where it is needed to be. That is to say I know how to improve than waste energy on repressing the pain unhelpfully. To stop what was a mistake. Allowing pain to unnecessarily exist. Some is good but not going backwards is the goal.

So increase awareness and increase understanding and one becomes more intelligent. Holding to much pain is bad. It needed to be learned from and not exist for its own sake.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Blooms taxonomy

There are criticisms of it, such as obviously being biased words what's at the top of the pyramid.

Obviously you need what's at the bottom to get out what's at the top, so it's kind of contradicting itself on his face.

But, I guess I would just start at looking things in terms of time.

You may be unconsciously be "creating" situations, you could say.

Your environment is dictated by the sum of what you and other people create.

If you could do things faster and be more effective and efficient in less time, it's probably safe to say that in a sense you're expanding your cognition.

You are taking essential information and converting it into whatever you needed to be for work or your personal life.

And by being exceptionally good at that, you ideally free up your time to do whatever you want.

You're doing more with less and less gives you a chance to do more.

The best part is you could just think about it in terms of Little steps.

You're just trying to have a "better" Friday than you had last week, but after having a Friday that's a couple of percentage points better than the last Friday for several weeks or years, you're basically unstoppable.

 

[dr froyd]

think a lot, read a lot of books, try to solve complicated problems, get truthful feedback

the last part is important; many people remain dumb because they have no mechanism for feedback when they are wrong.

 

[Old Things]

I can't watch the video right now, but this is my advice:

• Good sleep, at least 8hrs
• Wake up without being awoken by something
• 1hr a day cardio
• Stay hydrated, avoid diuretics like coffee
• No drugs, especially no brain affecting drugs
• No alcohol
• Eat fruit, fish, nuts and meat, avoid processed sugars and keep carbs (rice, wheat, tubers, etc) to a minimum, especially pasta and bread
• Learn something new every day, studying for various certifications is a fantastic use of your time

Take it from me I do none of these things and I'm a total dumbass

Luke 18:18-27
"A ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked him. “No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: Do not commit adultery; do not murder; do not steal; do not bear false witness; honor your father and mother.”
“I have kept all these from my youth,” he said.
When Jesus heard this, he told him, “You still lack one thing: Sell all you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” After he heard this, he became extremely sad, because he was very rich.
Seeing that he became sad, Jesus said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”
Those who heard this asked, “Then who can be saved?”
He replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”"

In other words, you have kept all the commandments except the impossible ones. There is grace for that.

Spoiler

A little Bible humor.

 

[BurnedOut]

Read statistics. It will turn you from a child to man in a day

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Read statistics. It will turn you from a child to man in a day

Not a bad start

 

[fluffy]

Read statistics. It will turn you from a child to man in a day

Not a bad start

I just read the article on it in Wikipedia

I need more computer skills.

 

[BurnedOut]

I just read the article on it in Wikipedia

You can use libgen or zlib to get primers for statistics. No shame in that. Learning some bayesian statistics will make you feel like a god when you start realizing just how STUPID everybody is and you are making decisions despite knowing the probabilities.
Case in point, I was reading up on conditional probability and sitting with my friend. We were talking about her boy and I quickly realized that both me and her are extremely biased towards remembering only salient events.

Suppose, take 20 encounters and assume a coin toss - warm/cold. Consider that with a second coin toss - Really interested/sorta interested. The probability of being really interested and warm is lower than being sorta interested and cold OR warm. My sincere advice was to let him take the lead from time to time and then evaluate the probability in a month's span or so to get a better picture. His behavior screams the former but when I evaluate the facts, he has been warm and really interested is lesser than being sorta interested and EITHER warm or cold.

You will realize just how many shitty stereotypes we make on a second-by-second basis based on a few salient memories only. It is funny how easily (but extremely time-consuming) you can deprogram yourself from making such conclusions. It is extremely hard but I have been thinking to sit and actually calculate conditional probabilities for making and sustaining friends at least once a month or after some spicy drama to give myself a reality check.

Another case in point. I had an unspoken fall out with one of my friends. I happened to received some voice messages from them saying how amazing of a friend I was but they were also drunk. Again, the possibility of being sober and telling that to me is much lower than being drunk and telling the same thing. Coin one will represent warm/cold and coin two will represent drunk/not drunk. The posterior probability of her being warm given she is drunk is much higher than her being sober and being warm. You might think that the possibility of being sober and warm is the same as being drunk and warm but being drunk and being warm are not mutually exclusive events because the former causes the latter in many cases.

However you have to remember in mind that this quickly falls apart when your behavior is also drastically different during those observations.

 

[BurnedOut]

Last thing to say that contrary to the beliefs I held about taking decisions about people, we tend to either overvalue the past or overestimate the future. If you use MBTI and use bayesian theorem to deal with people, you will fall apart because it becomes extremely salient according to probability to know exactly where your beliefs stand in comparison to the odds of them being false - that sounds like ISTJs and ESTJs more than anything else, that is, you are delusional in always 'imagining possibilities' because in case of human behavior, these 'possibilities' are rather stupid to come up with when there is plenty of common sense to go around for most things that ALWAYS work such as -
A cheater is likely to cheat again in most cases
It is better to leave someone when they have way too many past relationships with a history of cheating when they show similar signs preceding their cheating

No amount of psychoanalysis or sociology or whatever psychology-related is going to work. History always will. And that sounds damn funny to assert this this so-called bunch of INTPs

 

[fluffy]

A tendency of events is associated with past events. So seeing more of what people have done in the past is a greater predictor of what they will do in the future.

It takes quite an amount of work to change peoples behaviors given emotional and biological tendencies.

 

[dr froyd]

burnedout learned bayes theorem and immediately started applying to personal dramas. Classic

btw there's a whole field in psychology devoted to the shortcomings of the human mind in the domain of probabilistic reasoning; cognitive biases. Bayes theorem shows up in things like base-rate fallacy, but there's many other effects. Come to think of it, knowing cognitive biases is perhaps a good addition to the become-smarter list

 

[ZenRaiden]

cognitive biases

There is a lot that can be done with this.
But ultimately its like MBTI sometimes. You learn whole lot of categories, but you never know how to apply them usefully to everyday life. Not that its not possible, but as you say psychology, does pay attention to cognitive biases.
I would argue tho that many cognitive biases are actually not cognitive so much as emotional to begin with.
Which is something I come to learn lately a whole lot.

 

[BurnedOut]

burnedout learned bayes theorem and immediately started applying to personal dramas. Class

When you have a multitool, everything looks like a screw

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Emotional states override rational thought routinely. We don't really register this unless it is a practice observing ones thoughts regularly with oneself or others.

The animal kingdom is sparse with many creatures that experience cognitive dissonance.

It's clear that the fine tuning of this is done by the neo cortex, and sub cortical regions as well of course.

Not exactly a surprise then that these faculties of the brain are usually the source of of social cultural/economic tensions.

Honestly we should clap at what we have accomplished.

Hopefully the upper class isn't cannibalize itself and then come after the lower class. Fingers crossed.

Edit: I've had one to many

 

[fractalwalrus]

cognitive biases

There is a lot that can be done with this.
But ultimately its like MBTI sometimes. You learn whole lot of categories, but you never know how to apply them usefully to everyday life. Not that its not possible, but as you say psychology, does pay attention to cognitive biases.
I would argue tho that many cognitive biases are actually not cognitive so much as emotional to begin with.
Which is something I come to learn lately a whole lot.

Yes, it would appear that we are poorly wired for pure rational thought. Emotion and autonomic behavior accounts for the vast majority of the why behind how we act. Reason is a vessel for how to attain that which the emotion drives toward. Even with reason, most of the individuals who lean more towards MBTI thinking over feeling tend to be bogged down with cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Undoing these last 2 things would probably aid in increasing intelligence if one defines intelligence to be "prefect reasoning abilities." Even with that definition, its tough. There are situations where heuristics work just as well as careful thought, and sometimes even better (which is why this was likely selected for). If you spend hours pondering the perfect solution where someone else came up with a less than perfect solution in a fraction of the time, who can be said to be more intelligent?

 

[fractalwalrus]

burnedout learned bayes theorem and immediately started applying to personal dramas. Classic

btw there's a whole field in psychology devoted to the shortcomings of the human mind in the domain of probabilistic reasoning; cognitive biases. Bayes theorem shows up in things like base-rate fallacy, but there's many other effects. Come to think of it, knowing cognitive biases is perhaps a good addition to the become-smarter list

I agree that if one wants to sharpen their reasoning skills, then they need to address cognitive biases and logical fallacies. However, sometimes heuristics "just works," in a fraction of the time.

 

[BurnedOut]

Exactly my point. I have not seen 'thinking' types really being thoughtful or doing anything remotely rationally apart from dismissing emotions of themselves and everybody else

 

[BurnedOut]

However, sometimes heuristics "just works," in a fraction of the time.

They do tend to work for most parts until we anchor ourselves to false/salient memories and then start making judgements. Heuristics usually work with good inputs but fuck up instantly when you feed garbage to it. Without heuristics, we would have never had any progress in chess engines where heuristics tend to work so much more efficiently with good data

 

[fractalwalrus]

However, sometimes heuristics "just works," in a fraction of the time.

They do tend to work for most parts until we anchor ourselves to false/salient memories and then start making judgements. Heuristics usually work with good inputs but fuck up instantly when you feed garbage to it. Without heuristics, we would have never had any progress in chess engines where heuristics tend to work so much more efficiently with good data

Indeed. Take the hypothetical scenario of a logician inserted into a warzone. (ignore for a sec how they would have got there in the first place), Would quick reflexes be able to serve them more than careful pondering of outcomes?

 

[sushi]

read more, enough said

 

[birdsnestfern]

Be more conscious of the nature of reality. Science is reductionist and it deals with matter. But there is much more to life than that, experience, psychokinesis, intent, non dual reality, everything is everywhere at once. Open up to the holographic universe.




Neo is an anagram of ONE. One consciousness. When you become aware that you ARE the same as the one singularity, that your intent and your energy shapes reality and pushes things around, you experience peace.


What is consciousness? How does it work? Why and how do we think? Recently, physicist Stuart Hameroff of the Center for Consciousness Research at the University of Arizona put forward a revolutionary theory that is so convincing and beautiful that it really seems to solve the “mystery of the millennia.”
A so-called quantum collapse occurs in the brain – an incredibly complex phenomenon – and as a result, a thought is born. But then the brain turns out to be a kind of analog of the Universe. Or – a quantum computer created by nature, which is able to mentally connect with any point in the universe and with any civilization, even on the outskirts of the Galaxy.
Science and philosophy stormed the problem of consciousness from two sides. Science was looking for a material carrier of thought, for example, a neuron. It turned out that when the brain dies, consciousness also disappears.

Philosophy separated “thought” from the brain, and represented it either as an ether filled with knowledge (Vladimir Vernadsky and his noosphere), or as an “aura” around a person’s head. But experiments with psychics did not give a clear result: sometimes mediums showed amazing effects, but often they could not do anything, and many also turned out to be magicians.
And all this time, strangely, quantum mechanics remained on the sidelines. It is strange – after all, it is it that operates with “consciousness” from the very beginning. Let’s take a closer look at this.

Quantum mechanics appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. Unlike the theory of relativity, which was created by one person, Albert Einstein, this is a collective creation. Despite its “weirdness”, it instantly and forever became the basis of physics, because it incredibly accurately explains what is happening around us.
Quantum mechanics says that normally matter and energy are in an indefinite state. So, light is both a wave and a set of particles (photons). But as soon as the observer (human) intervenes, matter is “determined”: light, for example, becomes either a wave or a particle, depending on what is “expected” of it.
This is the collapse of the wave function (the term is unfortunate, but everyone is used to it). Radical researchers say that the world does not exist at all until we look at it. Others claim that the whole world is filled with consciousness and is an “observer”: both wood and stone have consciousness.
Despite the obvious oddity, the collapse of the wave function is easy to see in experience, which is even shown in advanced physics classrooms in high schools. So there is no doubt.

But what is it about consciousness that it changes the universe? Why is the observer so important? The physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose of Oxford, a member of the Royal Society of London, was the first to suspect that consciousness has a quantum nature.

Hameroff has been working with Penrose for 30 years and wants to understand exactly how it works. The fact is that the quantum theory of consciousness is a bit … unscientific, and allows telepathy, mind reading, communication with the ancient oak and the spirits of ancestors, that is, everything that mystics indulge in.
And this is somehow not good, because there is no sense in mystics. If you postulate such incredible things, you need to scientifically explain it. And here’s what he did.
Penrose realized that every particle of the universe is just a curvature in Einstein’s space-time. When such a curvature or “bubble” bursts, quantum collapse occurs and consciousness emerges.
But in his model, consciousness was born as if spontaneously and could not give rise to meaning and memory. The universe was clearly “thinking”, but like a schoolboy who looks out the window at the lesson: first about one thing, then about another.
Hameroff suggested that brain neurons organize these bubbles of space-time so that their pops form something like music. This music contains thought, memory, information. The philosopher Pythagoras in the 6th century BC said almost the same thing. How did he know? Let’s leave this question.
Hameroff’s hypothesis was greeted with skepticism: the quantum computers that exist today operate at ultra-low temperatures in a sterile environment; Can quantum transitions take place inside a warm and humid brain? Now Hameroff was able to resolve all doubts. And here’s what he gets.
Light itself is consciousness. It used to be thought that a conscious observer “forces” matter to make a decision. Now it is clear that the opposite is true: the quantum transition, on the contrary, generates consciousness.
“Ancient traditions characterized consciousness as light. Religious figures were often depicted with glowing “halos” or auras. Hindu deities – with luminous blue skin. In many cultures, those who have “awakened to the truth” are “enlightened ones,” writes Hameroff in his latest article.

Hameroff presented a complete breakdown of how this works at the level of photons, atoms, molecules and neurons, what chemical reactions and substances are involved in the “creation” of consciousness.

The most important conclusion follows from his theory: consciousness preceded life.
“Conventional science and philosophy suggests that consciousness emerged at some point in evolution, perhaps as recently as the advent of the brain and nervous system. But Eastern spiritual traditions, panpsychism, and Roger Penrose’s theory of objective reduction suggest that consciousness preceded life,” writes Hameroff.
And these traditions turned out to be right (again, how did the ancients know? ). Hameroff describes in detail the early universe, filled with the light of the Big Bang – the universe was then a megamind. But then the substance became cloudy, and a period of unconsciousness set in. When it ended, complex molecules began to appear. With their help, the Universe began to “think” more clearly and precisely.
Thus, the entire universe is conscious because consciousness follows directly from quantum mechanics and relativity. Man is “more conscious” than stone only because the neurons of the brain are a more convenient environment for quantum transition than the crystalline structure of stone or wood fibers, but man is definitely not the only, and certainly not the first thinking being.
Just by thinking something, we turn on (not “we”, it turns itself on) a quantum transition that connects us to any point in the Universe and to any complex mind that exists anywhere.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Thus, the entire universe is conscious because consciousness follows directly from quantum mechanics and relativity. Man is “more conscious” than stone only because the neurons of the brain are a more convenient environment for quantum transition than the crystalline structure of stone or wood fibers, but man is definitely not the only, and certainly not the first thinking being.
Just by thinking something, we turn on (not “we”, it turns itself on) a quantum transition that connects us to any point in the Universe and to any complex mind that exists anywhere.

Fascinating, long have suspected the possibility, but did not know there are scientist who would claim this.