Intelligence is Fucking Stupid

Andy Lester

I hate the concept of intelligence. I hate even more the way we use that word.  

At first glance, it’s pretty unassuming. You’ve probably used it plenty of times and thought nothing of it, whether you were talking about the smart person in your course or someone who you find particularly inspiring. 

But as students, the word “intelligence” can be hugely detrimental to us, our confidence, and our learning. To understand why, we first have to ask…  

What is Intelligence? 

Intelligence is only really brought up when we talk about doing hard things. Let’s narrow this down to mental tasks specifically, such as problem solving, remembering stuff, or being able to create stuff. Seems like a good start. But somehow, you’re not considered intelligent for remembering to wash your dirty plate after dinner (though your flatmates might still call you stupid if you don’t). Despite the fact that this is solving a problem and involves remembering something, it doesn’t quite pass as an intelligent feat. I believe this is because tasks such as this are something most people can do without much difficulty.  

So, we need to have a quick chat on difficulty. 

If you want to know how difficult a task is, ideally you want some objective measurement of the difficulty that applies to anyone attempting it. The problem is, that’s just not possible. We can feel something is difficult to ourselves relative to the amount of effort we exert in completing that task, but that’s our subjective experience only. 

Because difficulty is an experience rather than some God-given value assigned to every task in existence, everyone is going to have a different experience and feel a different amount of difficulty, meaning no task can have a fixed, universal difficulty.

Instead, we compare our subjective experience to as many other peoples’ experiences as possible and use that to judge approximately how difficult a task is.  

Imagine you just did a pull up and it was the most gruelling, excruciating five minutes of your life. After putting in all that effort, you’re very proud of yourself (as you should be!). But you don’t know how difficult a pull-up is, only how difficult it was for you. You know your subjective experience. 

If one day, you walk past a playground and see someone effortlessly doing mad pull-ups, looking like a juiced-up jack-in-the-box, then this adds a new dimension: capability. 

It’s clearly not taking as much effort for this stranger to do a pull-up as it did for you. A pull-up is a much easier experience for them. And suddenly, you stop thinking that pull-ups are hard. Instead, you think that you’re bad at pull-ups, and this person is good at doing pull-ups. You now think they’re more capable than you. 

I think of capability like a ratio between how much effort someone puts into a task, and their output for that given task. I find this effort to output ratio a really helpful idea, and we’ll come back to it soon. 

But capability for mental tasks isn’t a one-for-one definition of intelligence. The sentence “I’m capable of doing algebra, I’m not capable of doing calculus,” is different from “I’m smart enough to do algebra, I’m not smart enough to do calculus.” 

Capability is particular to a given task, and can change with practice, learning, and training. Intelligence, meanwhile, is thought of as some inherent trait in each and every one of us and applies to every mental task we complete in every aspect of our lives. You’re smart or you’re not. Simple as. 

But in practice, because the difficulty of any mental task is inherently comparative, intelligence is also inherently comparative.  

So, what’s the big problem? 

What I mean by this is that intelligence doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The same way we don’t have a basis for how hard a pull-up is until we see other people do it—which then defines how capable you are at that task—we can’t know how “intelligent” we are until other people do the same thing and we can assess how much effort they put in. 

And we can’t compare apples and oranges. Different disciplines often require vastly different skills: doing maths isn’t objectively harder than writing essays and believing anything along those lines is pointless (coming from someone majoring in physics and theatre, I back this 100%). 

We will have the best judge of “intelligence” for people who do similar mental tasks to us: people in our courses, our jobs, clubs, and so on. The similarity of mental tasks we must complete through assignments and tests offer many opportunities to compare ourselves to our peers. Unfortunately, this makes it very easy for us to form ideas about how intelligent other people in our courses are. And the people who we are most likely to perceive as intelligent are usually going to be the people who do better than us. Not surprising, but important to note.   

Rather than attributing a person’s success to their efforts first, we often find ourselves attributing it to their natural intelligence more than anything else. 

On top of that, intelligence is often thought of as an unchangeable quality of a person. You can’t get more intelligent. 

This leads to my biggest gripe with intelligence. When we take this for fact and believe that you can only do better than you are now by being more intelligent (which, for some reason, we also believe can’t happen) we believe we’re fated to do either the same or worse than we are now, forever! How good! 

This doesn’t have to be the case. 

I work for a tutoring company, and so I see this often materialises in an internalised belief students hold that “I’m not a maths person,” or “I’m not an English person.” These beliefs are entirely self-inflicted blows. If you approach a subject already thinking “I’m bad at this, and I’ll always be bad at this,” it’s not surprising that you hold yourself back.

This marks the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Students with a fixed mindset often find it harder to motivate themselves to start and complete necessary work, as they don’t believe it will yield any results regardless of how helpful any given chunk of learning may truly be.  

But the upside of your mindset being entirely self-inflicted is that it’s also in your control. You can choose not to believe it.  

By doing so and instead believing that your effort is what will give you the results you want, suddenly everything you do is no longer defined by some roll of the dice that determined how intelligent you’re destined to be. You take your life back into your own hands.  

What we need to do as individuals is to shift what we believe causes academic progress and broader learning from intelligence towards effort. As it stands, if you believe intelligence matters, then progress primarily sits under an external locus of control, rather than an internal one. Similar to a fixed and growth mindset, a locus of control says how much we believe we can change the outcome of our lives and surroundings. An external locus means you’d believe outside factors control your life more than your choices and efforts, and an internal locus of control is the opposite. 

Remember that imaginary pull-up that you did? 

It was hell. But you did it. Firstly, congrats on your imaginary accomplishment. Do you think that that effort would be meaningful? From the perspective of a person wanting to improve, wanting to get fitter, wanting to do something, I think that effort is something you should always be proud of. Regardless of how difficult it was for anyone else, the act of putting in that effort showed that you can do hard things. 

This is what I want. I want you, reading this article now, to know that when you put in effort, you make progress. That progress doesn’t look the same every time and certainly doesn’t look the same for everyone. But it’s progress. 

Even if you look at every other person who’s ever done a pull-up, or ever done an essay on To Kill a Mockingbird or Fallen Angels, and take all the notes on how they do it, the only way you’re going to actually improve is by going for that pull-up, writing that essay, and making that effort.  

As students, everything that we do should be focused on improving ourselves and our knowledge. We will not benefit from constantly comparing ourselves to the people around us, so why keep using a word that has its entire basis in petty comparison?  

And no buts. 

Now, there are some alternatives for how people measure intelligence.  

For example, the effort-to-output ratio mentioned earlier. This is what some people believe really defines intelligence, but as it has to be considered for a given skill. I earlier called this a capability, but proficiency is also a good word for it. 

In terms of learning a given skill, I should make you aware that memory is something we can also train! In fact, there are actually memory tournaments, where people who dedicate their lives to remembering compete to see how many random numbers or sequences of images they can recall. The human species is really fascinating, huh? 

But they all use a set of techniques to help them remember these unconnected bits of information, not just their ‘natural ability.’ 

For problem solving or similar displays of already held knowledge, I raise the counter argument that applying learnt knowledge is something we also have to learn how to do and is subject to the same arguments as above.  

Believing another person’s success to be entirely because of their natural talent or intelligence does nothing for you. Actually, it does worse than nothing: it denies the impact of any of their efforts to get to where they are now. It helps no one and only stops you from checking out a winning strategy. 

If you completely delete the word intelligence from your life here on out, and disregard it in your learning, you’ll be better able to focus on your own learning and make the changes you want to see in yourself. 

Intelligence is fucking stupid, but you’re not.