Hack-value pairs
I have a page in my Roam Research titled “EIQ”. At its head is an orientating idea: a quote from computing greybeard Alan Kay that states, “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” Below this statement is a transposed Kanban mutant—four collapsible sections titled “done”, “doing”, “to do” and “possibles”—which I use to maintain an awareness of projects, initiatives, involvements, events and activities above a certain scale. In tandem with other processes and artefacts, EIQ has helped me adjust my filters, navigate commitments, forgot sufficiently, and make decisions.
My recurring contact with EIQ seems to have yielded a detectable spike in my ability to orientate in the moment, and also made me a little better at steering my overall trajectory—or at least more persuasive in my self-delusion. So recently I’ve been wondering what other possible IQ buffs exist. How else can I complete the following statement, beyond Kay’s adage?
“insert hack is worth insert value IQ points.”
Before I propose some hack-value pairs, though, let me state that the candidates below are—or at least should be—hacks not habits and should provide boosts to intelligence not wisdom.
Hacks not habits: a good night’s sleep will make most people smarter—counterpoints: Guzey’s kool-aid warnings—but consistent sleep hygiene is a habit. And habits are hard. Hacks, in comparison, are easy; they’re accessible cheap tricks that require no fundamental alterations to the infrastructure of one’s life or living.
Intelligence not wisdom: similarly to the difference between hacks versus habits, a hack makes one smarter, not wiser. A good frame for the distinction is Dungeons and Dragons 5E ability scores: a character with high INT plays very different from one with high WIS, and the hacks below act as INT boosts.
With the qualifiers out of the way I can now reveal my list of potential IQ hacks and their speculative effect. Some have been given the kiss of generalisation and collapsed to a single item in cases where initial ideation yielded dupes (e.g. “deliberate imposition of constraints”). In these cases I’ll list an impact range. The list itself is ordered by bio-centricity, from those that directly hack the meatstack through those that leverage human culture and conviviality and to those which are technologically-enabled augmentations or extensions. Here be the list:
Consuming caffeine, +10 IQ (+/- 5 depending on sensitivity)
Switching thought to an analogue, tactile or embodied modality, +20 IQ
Napping, +20 IQ
Sitting still and doing nothing, +10 IQ
Taking a walk, +10 IQ (+5 if sunny)
Exercising intensely, +15 IQ
Taking a pill and placebo-ing oneself, +15 IQ
ELI5ing to self or rubber ducking, +5 IQ
Refactoring attentional scope or unseeing, +60 IQ
Maximising attentional scope, +40 IQ (yes, I halved Kay’s estimate to meet reality)
Minimising attentional scope, +20 IQ
Deliberately imposing or eliminating constraints, +5-15 IQ
Delegating to epistemic peers, -25 to +25 IQ
Shit-posting opinionated wrong takes on socials, -30 to +30 IQ
LLM prompting, +/- 30 IQ (dep. on prompt and problem domain)
This is not an extensive and all-encompassing list at all—and I’d love to see others evolve it—but it does strike me that a lot of the proposed hack-value pairs are orientated around perception, contextuality and resetting or adjusting modes of attention. That could be my own belief-consistent information processing in what the manifestation of intelligence actually is, or it could be a clue that IQ really is tied up with continuosuly red-teaming one’s reality representations.
I was also struck by another theme amongst the proposed hacks. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that “…the actual boundaries of human equilibrium are very narrow, and it is not really necessary to use a rack or hot coals to drive the average human being out of his mind.” It seems that buffing IQ is like torture; the simple approach is best.