What are the inputs and outputs of intelligence?
Ok, this question is a weird one, but Iāve been marinating on it for a few days now. What are the inputs and outputs of intelligence? If I were to quantify the things that an āintelligentā person were doing, or the rate at which someone was gaining intelligence, what would they be?
Some obvious answers came to mind; math, science, some sort of academic pursuits. However, I wanted to boil it down to the essence of those pursuits and what they entail, and that helped me to come up with a very simple set of inputs and outputs.
Word Input - How much do you read? This is where we get new ideas and perspectives that challenge our world view and force us to think outside of our bubble.
Word Output - How often do you write? When we write our thoughts down, we solidify connections between our mind and reality, and force ourselves to clear up the fog of purely mental ideation. This practice helps create more clear, focused thought, which contributes directly back to our ability to learn new information.
Challenge Input - How often are you challenging your brain, and learning new information? These āchallenge inputsā are the broadest bucket, and encompass any activity that we donāt yet know, but are learning. This is math, programming, puzzles, hobbies, and anything else that forces you to spend dedicated time studying and storing new information in your brain.
Challenge Output - How often are you practicing the challenge inputs? If your challenge input is math, this is solving problems. If itās programming, this is working on a side project that helps you learn a new technique. Itās not enough to have challenge inputs, you have to put those inputs into practice to turn them into skills, which I think is tangientially related to this pursuit of āintelligenceā.