October 2021If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would saythat he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you amore sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first.Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. Butthat wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special abouthim was that he had important new ideas. Being very smart was anecessary precondition for having those ideas, but the two are notidentical.It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that intelligenceand its consequences are not identical, but it isn't. There's a biggap between them. Anyone who's spent time around universities andresearch labs knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely smartpeople 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. Imagineyou had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothingnew, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surelyyou'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 smartstill feels like the thing that matters, even though I knowintellectually that it isn't. I spent so many years thinking itwas. The circumstances of childhood are a perfect storm for fosteringthis illusion. Intelligence is much easier to measure than the valueof new ideas, and you're constantly being judged by it. Whereaseven the kids who will ultimately discover new things aren't usuallydiscovering them yet. For kids that way inclined, intelligence isthe only game in town.There are more subtle reasons too, which persist long into adulthood.Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes the basis ofthe dominance hierarchy.[1]Plus having new ideas is such a newthing historically, and even now done by so few people, that societyhasn't yet assimilated the fact that this is the actual destination,and intelligence merely a means to an end.[2]Why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new? Viewedfrom 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 onlyingredient 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 mostlyinborn. The evidence for this seems fairly convincing, especiallyconsidering that most of us don't want it to be true, and theevidence thus has to face a stiff headwind. But I'm not goingto get into that question here, because it's the other ingredientsin new ideas that I care about, and it's clear that many of themcan be cultivated.That means the truth is excitingly different from the story I gotas a kid. If intelligence is what matters, and also mostly inborn,the natural consequence is a sort of Brave New World fatalism. Thebest 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 leastbe 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 severalingredients in what does, and many of those aren't inborn, thingsget more interesting. You have a lot more control, but the problemof how to arrange your life becomes that much more complicated.So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas? The factthat I can even ask this question proves the point I raised earlier— that society hasn't assimilated the fact that it's this and notintelligence that matters. Otherwise we'd all know the answersto such a fundamental question.[3]I'm not going to try to provide a complete catalogue of the otheringredients here. This is the first time I've posedthe question to myself this way, and I think it may take a whileto 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 isindependent-mindedness. I wouldn't want to claim that this isdistinct from intelligence — I'd be reluctant to call someone smartwho wasn't independent-minded — but though largely inborn, thisquality 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 projectsandfor overcoming the obstacles you face with early work— and thesecan all be learned. Some of them can be learned by societies. Andthere are also collections of techniques for generating specific typesof new ideas, like startup ideas and essay topics.And of course there are a lot of fairly mundane ingredients indiscovering new ideas, like working hard, getting enough sleep, avoiding certainkinds of stress, having the right colleagues, and finding tricksfor working on what you want even when it's not what you're supposedto be working on. Anything that prevents people from doing greatwork has an inverse that helps them to. And this class of ingredientsis not as boring as it might seem at first. For example, having newideas is generally associated with youth. But perhaps it's not youthper se that yields new ideas, but specific things that come withyouth, like good health and lack of responsibilities. Investigatingthis might lead to strategies that will help people of any age tohave better ideas.One of the most surprising ingredients in having new ideas is writingability. There's a class of new ideas that are best discovered bywriting essays and books. And that "by" is deliberate: you don'tthink of the ideas first, and then merely write them down. Thereis a kind of thinking that one does by writing, and if you're clumsyat writing, or don't enjoy doing it, that will get in your way ifyou try to do this kind of thinking.[4]I predict the gap between intelligence and new ideas will turn outto be an interesting place. If we think of this gap merely as a measureof unrealized potential, it becomes a sort of wasteland that we try tohurry through with our eyes averted. But if we flip the question,and start inquiring into the other ingredients in new ideas thatit implies must exist, we can mine this gap for discoveries aboutdiscovery.Notes[1]What wins in conversation depends on who with. It ranges frommere aggressiveness at the bottom, through quick-wittedness in themiddle, to something closer to actual intelligence at the top,though probably always with some component of quick-wittedness.[2]Just as intelligence isn't the only ingredient in having newideas, having new ideas isn't the only thing intelligence is usefulfor. It's also useful, for example, in diagnosing problems and figuringout how to fix them. Both overlap with having new ideas, but bothhave an end that doesn't.Those ways of using intelligence are much more common than havingnew ideas. And in such cases intelligence is even harder to distinguishfrom its consequences.[3]Some would attribute the difference between intelligence andhaving new ideas to "creativity," but this doesn't seem a veryuseful term. As well as being pretty vague, it's shifted half a framesideways from what we care about: it's neither separable fromintelligence, nor responsible for all the difference betweenintelligence and having new ideas.[4]Curiously enough, this essay is an example. It started outas an essay about writing ability. But when I came to the distinctionbetween intelligence and having new ideas, that seemed so much moreimportant that I turned the original essay inside out, making thatthe topic and my original topic one of the points in it. As in manyother fields, that level of reworking is easier to contemplate onceyou've had a lot of practice.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston,Robert Morris, Michael Nielsen, and Lisa Randall for reading draftsof this.
