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October 2021  
  
If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he
was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-
sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would
have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about
Einstein. What was special about him was that he had important new ideas.
Being very smart was a necessary precondition for having those ideas, but the
two are not identical.  
  
It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that intelligence and
its consequences are not identical, but it isn't. There's a big gap between
them. Anyone who's spent time around universities and research labs knows how
big. There are a lot of genuinely smart people who don't achieve very much.  
  
I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be desired. Perhaps
you did too. But I bet it's not what you really want. Imagine you had a choice
between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart
but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter. I would. The
choice makes me uncomfortable, but when you see the two options laid out
explicitly like that, it's obvious which is better.  
  
The reason the choice makes me uncomfortable is that being smart still feels
like the thing that matters, even though I know intellectually that it isn't.
I spent so many years thinking it was. The circumstances of childhood are a
perfect storm for fostering this illusion. Intelligence is much easier to
measure than the value of new ideas, and you're constantly being judged by it.
Whereas even the kids who will ultimately discover new things aren't usually
discovering them yet. For kids that way inclined, intelligence is the only
game in town.  
  
There are more subtle reasons too, which persist long into adulthood.
Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes the basis of the dominance
hierarchy.  Plus having new ideas is such a new thing historically, and
even now done by so few people, that society hasn't yet assimilated the fact
that this is the actual destination, and intelligence merely a means to an
end.   
  
Why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new? Viewed from that
direction, the question seems a rather depressing one. But there's another way
to look at it that's not just more optimistic, but more interesting as well.
Clearly intelligence is not the only ingredient in having new ideas. What are
the other ingredients? Are they things we could cultivate?  
  
Because the trouble with intelligence, they say, is that it's mostly inborn.
The evidence for this seems fairly convincing, especially considering that
most of us don't want it to be true, and the evidence thus has to face a stiff
headwind. But I'm not going to get into that question here, because it's the
other ingredients in new ideas that I care about, and it's clear that many of
them can be cultivated.  
  
That means the truth is excitingly different from the story I got as a kid. If
intelligence is what matters, and also mostly inborn, the natural consequence
is a sort of _Brave New World_ fatalism. The best you can do is figure out
what sort of work you have an "aptitude" for, so that whatever intelligence
you were born with will at least be put to the best use, and then work as hard
as you can at it. Whereas if intelligence isn't what matters, but only one of
several ingredients in what does, and many of those aren't inborn, things get
more interesting. You have a lot more control, but the problem of how to
arrange your life becomes that much more complicated.  
  
So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas? The fact that I can
even ask this question proves the point I raised earlier — that society hasn't
assimilated the fact that it's this and not intelligence that matters.
Otherwise we'd all know the answers to such a fundamental question.   
  
I'm not going to try to provide a complete catalogue of the other ingredients
here. This is the first time I've posed the question to myself this way, and I
think it may take a while to answer. But I wrote recently about one of the
most important: an obsessive _interest_ in a particular topic. And this can
definitely be cultivated.  
  
Another quality you need in order to discover new ideas is _independent-
mindedness_. I wouldn't want to claim that this is distinct from intelligence
— I'd be reluctant to call someone smart who wasn't independent-minded — but
though largely inborn, this quality seems to be something that can be
cultivated to some extent.  
  
There are general techniques for having new ideas — for example, for working
on your own _projects_ and for overcoming the obstacles you face with _early_
work — and these can all be learned. Some of them can be learned by societies.
And there are also collections of techniques for generating specific types of
new ideas, like startup ideas and essay topics.  
  
And of course there are a lot of fairly mundane ingredients in discovering new
ideas, like _working hard_, getting enough sleep, avoiding certain kinds of
stress, having the right colleagues, and finding tricks for working on what
you want even when it's not what you're supposed to be working on. Anything
that prevents people from doing great work has an inverse that helps them to.
And this class of ingredients is not as boring as it might seem at first. For
example, having new ideas is generally associated with youth. But perhaps it's
not youth per se that yields new ideas, but specific things that come with
youth, like good health and lack of responsibilities. Investigating this might
lead to strategies that will help people of any age to have better ideas.  
  
One of the most surprising ingredients in having new ideas is writing ability.
There's a class of new ideas that are best discovered by writing essays and
books. And that "by" is deliberate: you don't think of the ideas first, and
then merely write them down. There is a kind of thinking that one does by
writing, and if you're clumsy at writing, or don't enjoy doing it, that will
get in your way if you try to do this kind of thinking.   
  
I predict the gap between intelligence and new ideas will turn out to be an
interesting place. If we think of this gap merely as a measure of unrealized
potential, it becomes a sort of wasteland that we try to hurry through with
our eyes averted. But if we flip the question, and start inquiring into the
other ingredients in new ideas that it implies must exist, we can mine this
gap for discoveries about discovery.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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