Measuring Intelligence: The Most Considered Question and Brute Force Thinking

Defining Intelligence

Firstly, intelligence does not need to be measured. We can survive just fine without having to quantify each other’s intelligence.

But if you wanted to, there is not currently a great way to do so. What I think of first, when considering a measuring of intelligence, is the IQ score. However, most people don’t know what the IQ test is, or how to properly take it, or what it means to score high or low. I don’t even know all of those things. If it was more commonly understood, the IQ test might be a great way to measure intelligence, but in its absence I’m offering a potential alternative.

Intelligence, or how smart someone is, is something I’ve thought as being the capacity one has for learning new information.

You’ve probably heard of the term book smart, likely in the context of people who know a lot of facts. Book smart, in my experience, seems to have a negative context. Book smart people have knowledge from books, rather than from real world experience, and real world experience should be prioritized. However, I think book smart has more to do with memory, which I will get to in a moment.

Intelligence should be thought of less as how much you know, and more as how much you are capable of knowing things. For instance, I don’t remember what I learned in 7th grade math, but I have the ability to learn it right now if I chose to. So, my intelligence is how capable I am of learning something, rather than the things I currently know.

The Three Components to Intelligence

With this definition of intelligence, I propose three components that contribute to measuring it in an individual, and I will relate it to a household computer. There is motherboard quality, processing power, and storage capacity.

The motherboard quality determines how complex of a computation the computer is able to make. (I don’t actually know if that is true with computers but imagine it is).

The processing power determines how quickly the computer can compute.

The storage capacity determines how much data the computer can hold before it is full.

Another way to think about them is complexity of thoughts, speed of thinking, and memory.

Everyone has a different combination of these three things. High motherboard quality results in the ability to consider complex ideas, or dense material. High processing power results in the ability to think very quickly. High storage capacity results in the ability to hold a lot of thoughts in your brain at one time.

Someone with all three would appear very intelligent. They would be able to think through many scenarios very quickly, remember more relevant information from the past, and understand complex ideas with a large amount of variable. These people are very good at chess. In chess you need to understand the complex idea of how the pieces fit together, thinking through many different scenarios very quickly, and remember the possible outcomes of different combinations of moves.

Someone with a high score in any one of the three categories would still appear fairly intelligent. Being able to consider very complex ideas, even very slowly and one at a time, is a sign of intelligence. Being able to come to conclusions very quickly is another sign of intelligence. Being able to remember small details from the past is also a sign of intelligence.

Personally, I believe I have high motherboard quality, but pretty average processing power and storage capacity.

A side note on processing power. An amazing quality that people who have high processing power possess, is what I call brute force thinking. The ability to think through many scenarios very quickly. This is the ability that computers rely on the most.

Measuring Intelligence

Now, if you wanted to measure your own intelligence, you could probably come up with a score out of 10 for each category. I realize that the title of this essay is measuring intelligence, but I am not actually offering a way to do that for all three categories. And by measure I mean compared to other people. I’m sure there are memory tests and speed tests that you could take, to see where you stand wit those two categories.

I am however offering a potential way to measure one category, the motherboard quality. Again, this is only theoretical, as I don’t think we need to do this or even should. But if we wanted to, I think this would be a good way to do it.

The Most Considered Question

In the daily internal monologue of our brains, many questions arise. “What should I eat?” “Where are my keys?” “What should I do today?” All sorts of questions. Some of them are simple, some of them complex.

The simplest of all questions are questions with yes or no answers. The complexity of a question relates to how many smaller questions you must ask in order to get a yes or no question. How many steps it takes to get there. We can call these sub-questions.

Simple questions contain few sub-questions. “Should I go swimming?” is a simple question. It has a yes or no answer. “What should I eat?” likely has a very small number of sub-questions. “Should I eat pasta?” Yes or no. “Should I eat salad?” Yes or no. It’s hard to find a question with no sub-questions, but the amount of sub-questions can increase dramatically.

Complex questions contain a very high amount of sub-questions. “What is the meaning of life?” is a complex question because it branches off into many sub-questions, each with their own sub-questions.

To consider a question means to attempt to formulate an answer. You do not need to reach an answer in order to have considered a question, but to hear a question or think it does not mean you have necessarily considered it. I imagine it should be easy to tell if you have considered a question or not.

Now, imagine everyone in the world wrote down every question they considered, simple or complex, for an entire week. There would be a lot of repeated questions. There would be some very complex questions, and a lot of simple questions. There would be a most complex question of the week, and there would be a most simple question of the week, for each individual.

Now imagine you compiled all of these questions, and for each person identified which question they considered the most times. This would be a good indication of what they spent most of their time thinking about. And, if you were to compare this most considered question to the most considered questions of other people, you might notice common trends.

I would imagine that the types of question being considered by intelligent people would fall into a similar tier of complexity. Or rather, the complexity of your most considered question would indicate how high your motherboard quality is.

So, if you were able to make a ranking system for the complexity of a question, you could begin to identify which rank people fall under, and identify your intelligence compared to them.

Other Variables

It should be noted that there are a lot of factors at play, when considering a person’s most considered question. Things like life stage, location, socio-economic status. And perhaps this plays into an unfortunate reality about intelligence. High intelligence must be paired with a favorable environment in order to result in influence. If influence is your goal, as it is with many highly intelligent people, you must exist in a favorable environment. An environment where you can afford to spend time considering complex questions. Sometimes, being highly intelligent can help a person make their environment more favorable, but this is not always the case.

The other unfortunate reality about this is that the result is a culture influenced by people with favorable environments. You see this in how many white people, and especially white males, exist in the places where you would look for highly intelligent individuals. Certainly, there is not a disproportionate amount of highly intelligent white men in our population. But there is a disproportionate amount of white men among those who exist in favorable environments.

I believe that this is beginning to change, but the fact that it has been a reality for so long means that it has certainly had an impact.

Conclusion

Everyone, I’m sure, would like to be smart. I mean that in two ways. Everyone probably thinks they are smart, and everyone probably would like to be even smarter than they are.

I’m sure a lot of people have more capacity to learn, or more intelligence, than they realize. After all, the brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised, and some just need a better workout regimen.

But not every brain is quite the same. With this essay I’m proposing an easier way to think about the components of intelligence, with the goal of helping you identify where your strengths and weakness are. Once you do that, you can better play to your strengths, the components you score higher in, and give yourself more grace in the areas you are weaker in, the components you might score lower in.

Learning should be a source of joy. Intelligence is a wonderful gift. Considering complex questions is a great way to take full advantage of this brain that you’ve been born with. And, it can often lead to making your environment more favorable, whatever that means for you, be it mental, physical, or financial health.

But don’t let thoughts about intelligence influence how you behave around other people. One of the best, most complex thoughts that I’ve encountered is simply “how should we treat one another?”