Intellectual horsepower- is it born or can it be improved?

Nope, horsepower is innate. You can work around it by structuring your thought, using systems etc. but can't really improve it. It also declines with age/lifestyle.

I half agree half disagree. There is an innate component but areas of intellect that enable you to excel or do smart things can be improved such as the ability to memorise facts, spot patterns and solve problems by breaking them down logically. I think these things can be learnt and improve but it will take some time and it'll be harder.

I think everything can be improved within reason but if you are not born a natural "genius" you will never become one. But you definitely can improve all cognitive functions. It all comes down to hard work, discipline and commitment.

Think about when you have prepared non-stop for interviews and how sharp and focused your brain has become and then afterwards you relax and it reverts back. I think if you spent time over a prolonged period maybe months maybe years it could have a permanent effect.

Ultimately I would say don't focus on others, focus on yourself your goals, strengths and weaknesses. Self improve, reflect adapt and start again.

Scientists have a limited understanding of intelligence and no one has come to a conclusion about it, so it's difficult to speak on. However, I'll reiterate what others said before and state that mental performance can certainly be improved upon.

A large portion of your brain's functionality can be heightened but some activities will still come easier to different people. Most of the natural intellectual horsepower people have is applied to learning capabilities and activities that require talent. Everything else seems to be fair game.

You can work hard and look smart. If you put in 100hrs vs 50hrs of preparation, it will show. But as far as "grinding" as someone above said, probably more difficult when you are faced with challenges that need more immediate attention. That's why opportunity matters, though. If you have $xxx,xxx to spend on education, you're more prepared, not necessarily always the smartest in the room.

Also want to clarify that having mediocre intellectual horsepower is not a career killer or anything. I know plenty of people with average smarts who make a killing through hard work, creativity, social skills, or good dollops of common sense and structured thinking. Likewise, I know some scary genius level people who achieve only mediocre success as they are stuck in their own head, lack certain social skills or some other flaw in other areas of cognition. Really a complex question, harder to answer without an agreed upon definition as well.

Like many pointed out here, it's something you're born with but you don't need to be particularly smart to make money. Being hard working can get you to $1M+ a year fairly easily.

I have a ton of friends in real estate that started with like $30,000 - $50,000 and net out $400k+ a year now and they aren't smart at all. They're willing to get their hands dirty and do things nobody else will though --- which is far more important and admirable IMO. No ego. :)

Although I have essentially zero experience in finance, I have found that regular meditation practice has helped my brain process thoughts more clearly. Even Ray Dalio practices meditation and look at where he is now. The only way he accomplished what he did was by incorporating the right ingredients into his life. Even though I’m uncertain about having the ability of an innate horsepower of intelligence, developing the brain and maintaining it properly will only help in the grand scheme of things. It’s like maintaining a car. If you change the oil when it needs to be changed, the car will run fine. If you mistreat it, then it’ll be as if someone farting in a toilet and flushing. Utterly inefficient. Meditation is like ejaculating on Oprah Winfrey’s cholesterol driven titties. It’s yummy.

"Poor Charlie's Almanack" and "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life". My IQ prob hasn't increased but the quality of my thought processes has improved, although regrettably nowhere near to Warren and Charlie's level....

Jordan Peterson notes that it's very easy--through nuture--to hurt someone's IQ but very, very difficult--though possible--to marginally improve it through nurture. I think he's speaking more about early childhood development.

I think Intellectual HP/IQ has a lot to do with our parenting. Developing ones curiosity from an early age stems into higher intelligence, critical thinking, problem-solving etc. With that being said, genetics also plays a significant role

I feel like all conversations on intelligence should probably be prefaced with an agreement that our understanding of it so far is limited and very ill-defined compared to the idea of what we're trying to communicate via "intelligence." With that said, I'll assume we're talking about ability to do academics.

I think that ability in particular is probably innate but is not entirely deterministic of quality of output or even quality of insight (the ultimate purpose of our intelligence anyways), from which many unknown and known factors are involved. For example, it's probably hard to compare intelligence between people of different academic professions -- after all, what exactly is fueling their ability to do work? Who knows. Some subjects seem so impossibly comparable yet we have a notion of "intelligence" from everyone based on work output. And I think this is the crux of the long running joke made about how biologists are "dumber" than chemists, who are "dumber" than physicists, and they're all ruled over by mathematicians (xkcd made a comic about this before).

Yet even from within a subject it's still hard to compare intelligence and what it really means. Take mathematicians for example; let's do a (admittedly shallow) comparison between Alexander Grothendieck (legendary 20th century mathematician if not possibly one of the greatest in current history) and Terry Tao (very, very famous mathematician who was born around the time the era where the 20th century pantheon of mathematicians began to retire in productivity).

From what I understand of their lives, Tao was very quickly identified as a prodigy among prodigies. In fact, Tao is known to have encountered Paul Erdos as a young child where Erdos was amazed by his abilities at math -- to which he would later write a recommendation for Tao for his attendance in Princeton's PhD program. Tao is the most recent legendary prodigy in math and his rapport quickly built up before his age hit the double digits and with good reason -- he was able to perform exactly as his fame suggested in math. And possibly one thing that greatly aided him in his growth was his very early exposure and training in math (probably because people quickly discovered his talent).

Now, take Grothendieck as another example. To put his life in a "condensed" summary: basically, his parents were anarchists post-WWI and breakout of WWII. He had to flee countries many, many times because of this, and in fact lived most of his life stateless, no particular citizenry to any one country. During his time growing up, he was placed in many internment camp on the grounds of being a potentially dangerous individual (anarchy basically). In fact, Grothendieck was even able to escape one internment camp (Camp de Rieucros) with the intent of assassinating Hitler. Details follow after but he was eventually permitted to live in some remote village in France where he would often hide during Nazi raids. Post-early adulthood: Grothendieck begins his first stint at higher academics at University of Montpellier, where he did poorly in many of his subjects for three years. His time in higher academics later spans to a few other schools where he eventually ends up writing his dissertation at University of Nancy on functional analysis, where he continued to remain unknown within the world of math. It wasn't until he began his early tapping into algebraic geometry (which he would later lay out its theoretical groundwork and quintessentially be its founder) during his time at the IHES that his rise to fame quickly escalated. By the time he unquestionably stood at the top of algebraic geometry, it was clear he had made his mark on both math and history so suddenly and with absolutely no foresight from anyone.

So why was this so remarkable? Because Grothendieck was a living genius by all accounts of his work quality yet there was absolutely no way for personal opinions of him or academic measurements to have identified his talents. In fact, if one were to look at his academic profile during his time in grade school (where he was constantly put into internment camps) and undergrad, it is clear as day that he was nothing special. One could even argue that he was below-average even by today's standards. And it is clear that he never once received any additional help in developing his abilities at math (likely due to his lower class as a result of having to run away all the time).

In the context of the WSO community, one could even say that many, many target and non-target students would have made him look incredibly bad based on academic and extracurricular achievements at the undergrad level alone or even be able to compete with him academically. Perhaps even in early graduate level too. But it is unquestionable that Grothendieck's raw "intelligence" is an entire league of its own, which none of us could even begin to imagine. And his mark on civilization's development is unquestionably greater than any of ours.

From what I understand, Tao has not yet had as much of an impact on math as Grothendieck, unless Tao has managed to utterly revolutionize a field or outright spawn a new one as Grothendieck had. And yet we could say, based on history, that Tao was "more intelligent" than Grothendieck. But as we can see, intelligence is not deterministic of anything. In fact, on comparable levels, one could even say that it's an incredibly shallow description -- clearly at the level Tao and Grothendieck stood at, intelligence was literally just a word. It meant nothing.

But it does highlight a more important reality that people catch up on: that there may exist such a definite thing as raw intelligence, yet our more shallow praise towards those with "higher" intelligence is, in general, based on a flawed and non-deterministic measurement of intelligence, aka academic achievement. Grothendieck's case highlights this much: there are likely countless prodigies out there who have slipped away from our grasps because we pigeonhole them and refuse to provide intellectually stimulating resources to them based on shallow measurements. At the same time, we also do manage to identify some of them and provide them appropriate growth, like with Terence Tao. And that perhaps, we mis-identify the intelligence of others because we continuously want to see cool and amazing feats provided to us immediately, when there are others who simply need some time to develop.

What then, is intelligence, if our observations of it seem to do a complete 180 turn the more and more examples we discover in humankind. How is it possible that our observations of it seem to indicate a notion of intelligence that is both valid and invalid. And above all else, why is it that we can seem to sense it? How can we do a better job at sensing it in a deterministic manner?

And in fact, one could probably run a similar argument based on intellectual feats of people between different fields. One could probably even make a similar argument with artists within art and against mathematicians. Artists will most certainly fail any notion of intelligence used to understand mathematicians and vice versa. Yet we recognize the legitimacy of both artists and mathematicians.

So all in all, intelligence is a bit of a superfluous measurement since it's impossible to definitively identify it anyways. Intelligence is the ultimate drive for skills development, which is the more fundamentally valuable intellectual part of us anyways. Luckily, skills development can be refined much better than refining intelligence.

OK I hope WSO can actually post this successfully this time around.

Born but fine tuned by education. But grit is more important than intellect. I bet if we gather the IQs of the most successful individuals it'll likely be average to maybe slightly above average. People skill, discipline, etc etc are much much more important.

I remember watching Henry Rollins on either TED or BigThink where he gave a mini-bio of his life. Didn't do more than a couple of semesters of college, was dealing with minimum wage jobs until he accepted an audition to be the frontman for Black Flag and left his minimum wage gig at Haagen Daz. He goes on to talk about his taking his chances with acting and voice-over work, talking about how he rarely said no to opportunities:

"I don't have talent. I have tenacity. I have discipline. I have focus. I know, without any delusion, where I come from and where I can go back to."

Where he says "talent" I have always selected my words "no advanced degree/no high IQ/no people in high places to help me"... but tenacity, discipline, focus... I have those. And those are definitely skills you can hone and strengthen.

Intelligence is important, yes, whether you see it coming from nature or nurture or a combination of both. But regardless of smarts, you still need something beyond that... a drive, initiative, cojones, chutzpah, fire in the belly, that spark, etc.

there is no talent here. this is hard work. this is an obsession.

A lot of intelligence is genetic. However, I think what would pay the greatest dividends is increasing others perception of your intelligence and social skills. That’s what’s matters. For example, Donald Trump - Is he really that smart? Doesn’t matter! People perceived him as a brilliant businessman/the politician who cared about blue collar voters etc, and now he’s freaking POTUS