how to tell if you are smart — what they don’t tell you

telling whether you are smart is harder than it sounds because the test is administered by the same brain being graded. i have asked mine repeatedly. the answers vary based on whether it is a monday or i have eaten.

writing this from a desk that is supposed to be processing a vendor reconciliation. the AC just kicked back on. tom emailed about a barbecue. i will not be attending.

so the focus today, before i drift, is how to tell if you are smart — not the iq-test, sat-prep, brain-training-app version, but the practical, kitchen-floor, do-i-keep-microwaving-forks version. how to tell if you are smart when the only judge available is you, with a coffee, on a monday at 2:47pm. the question is rigged. we’ll work with it.

how to tell if you are smart: notice what your brain does when you don’t ask it to perform. smart shows up in the tabs you keep open by accident, the corrections you make quietly, the questions you ask before opening your mouth, the small private edits nobody graded. iq tests measure one room. life is a building.

SMART. IS. NOT. A. CERTIFICATE.

i need that on the page before we keep going. people who treat smart like a credential — framed, on a wall, cited at dinner — are usually the ones whose brains pull overtime to keep the framing intact. the genuinely sharp people i have met do not bring it up. they bring up plants. or scaffolding. or the way a recipe works.

how to tell if you are smart, the short version

here is the short version, drafted in the time it takes the breakroom kettle to boil. how to tell if you are smart is, mostly, a matter of what your brain does on its lunch break. when nobody is watching, when there is no quiz, when the room is empty — does it keep working on something useful, or does it fold itself into a small panic about a text message from 2019.

i am, sadly, the second kind, four days out of seven. on the other three something almost-clever happens — i’ll catch a contradiction in a meeting, rephrase a sentence not pulling its weight, explain a process in plain words and watch the other person’s face un-knot. those days, that’s the data.

also: plants are silent landlords. it’s been rattling in my head all morning and it is, accidentally, a smart-test. if that sentence makes you smile, you are probably the kind of brain i’d trust with a difficult email.

the test i invented at the coffee shop

two saturdays ago i sat in the coffee shop on the corner — not the corner with mike’s bar, the other one, with the wobbly chair — and invented a test. the algorithm had served me three videos of people building sheds, which was either a sign or an ad.

four questions. you answer alone, with the door shut, no one to perform for.

1. when you are wrong in a small way, do you correct it inside your own head before correcting it out loud? if yes, that’s a point. if you only correct out loud and skip the inside step, you are running a press conference, not a brain.
2. when you don’t know a thing, do you say so within ten seconds? not after a paragraph of throat-clearing. ten seconds. the throat-clearers are the dangerous ones; they think the room can’t tell.
3. when someone explains a thing badly, do you assume they are dim, or that they are tired? smart, in my experience, defaults to tired.
4. when you change your mind, do you tell anyone? the silent-update people are smarter than the loud-conversion people, who are mostly performing the conversion for the same audience that watched the first opinion.

four points possible. i scored 2 the saturday i wrote it, which felt accurate. ran it again on monday, scored 3, which i suspect was caffeine and not growth.

tom would pass it differently, allegedly

tom — university tom, two-kids tom, volvo tom — would pass my four-question test differently. tom corrects himself out loud, frequently. tom owns. i rent. these are, possibly, related observations. owning a house, i suspect, makes you confident enough to be wrong publicly without losing your seat. renting makes you cautious in a way that looks, from a distance, like wisdom but is mostly fear.

the way tom passes: he scores 4 because he answers like a man who fills in forms. the way i pass: i score 2 and write a long post about it. how to tell if you are smart, depending on the tester, is either a checklist or an essay. the truth probably lives in the gap.

mike’s bar test, less rigorous

mike, at the corner bar, has his own version. i did not ask for it; mike never waits to be asked. mike’s test is one question: “can you explain what you do, in two sentences, to a person who is not paid to listen.” mike believes that if you can, you are at least functionally smart. if you can’t, mike believes you are either an academic, a consultant, or both.

the bar test is less rigorous than the coffee shop test, but the answer is observable. you do it or you don’t. you fail in real time. nobody scores you out of four; the eyebrows of the listener do the work of a rubric. mike trusts the eyebrows. on this, i agree.

signs i have been collecting

i keep a list. it lives in tab 23, which is one of 47 tabs open in this browser since, possibly, february. some tabs have outlived two phones. tab 23 is titled “smart-ish?” with a question mark because i am not sure of any of these.

• you ask the question before you have decided you are allowed to ask it.
• you can hold two contradictory ideas without needing to declare a winner inside the same conversation.
• you find yourself, occasionally, pleased to be wrong, because being wrong moves the file forward.
• you don’t need the room to know you are smart; you mostly need the room to be quiet so you can think.
• you can tell, within thirty seconds, whether a meeting will produce anything, and you stop preparing for the ones that won’t.
• you re-read your own emails before sending them, and the second reading produces, on average, three small edits.
• you go to the gym primarily for the sauna, which is not a smart-test, but is, i believe, a sign of self-knowledge, which is adjacent.

seven items, none of which would survive peer review. that’s fine. peer review is for journals. this is a monday.

if you want a heavier read on why our brains tell us we’re right when we aren’t, the pillar on confirmation bias covers the mechanism, the long-form on confirmation bias meaning walks through the tab-23 version, the post on the psychology side of the same trick labels the spirals, and cognitive bias covers it when one bias isn’t enough.

verdict — the test telling you is the test

if you want the longer route into the same territory, the cluster pillar on cognitive bias definition sits on the bookshelf next to this one and reads better with coffee.

the vendor reconciliation is still open in tab 4. tab 23 is still titled “smart-ish?”. some of these tabs are smarter than i am. i’m fairly sure of it.

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