how can you tell if your smart — i ran 5 algorithm tests

your smart, my smart, his smart. the apostrophe is gone, and with it most of the certainty about anything. i have been looking into the question since the productivity bro tweet hit forty thousand likes online. nothing has resolved itself. the tweet, however, is now framed.

11:03am, a wednesday, on the third floor of a building paying me to look at a different screen. the boss is in a vendor demo down the hall he has been postponing for nine days. i have, by the look of the agenda, a clean ninety minutes before anyone notices.

so the screen offers me how can you tell if your smart, missing apostrophe and all, and i clicked. the search engine read it back without flinching, the way an old waiter reads back a botched order. that, in itself, is a kind of intelligence — just not mine.

how can you tell if your smart: mostly you can’t, not from inside the brain doing the asking. practical signs show in tiny choices when nobody is watching — pausing before a strong opinion, sitting with not-knowing for three minutes, asking a clearer question than the argument deserved, changing your mind without an announcement.

SMART. IS. NOT. AN. ALGORITHM.

i need that on the wall before we begin. the search box, the recommended-for-you panel, the auto-play on the next video — all of it pretending to know what your brain wants. the brain’s habit of only counting flattering evidence has been outsourced to a feed that returns more of what you already clicked. the question stops being whether you are smart and starts being whether you are running the loop or being run by it.

how can you tell if your smart, the typo holds

let’s stay on the missing apostrophe a minute. your smart instead of you’re smart is the sentence the brain produces when it is moving faster than it edits. that is most of any honest day. the people who never make this mistake type slowly enough to catch every keystroke, or do not type at all and prefer to dictate.

i checked the unanswered drafts in my work app last thursday. four yours where you’re belonged, two itses where it’s belonged, one rogue their. by the apostrophe metric i am, on paper, stupid. by every other metric the seventh microwave is still alive on the counter and i have not yet been escorted from the building. a kind of working order.

the typo holds the question open, and that is the value. a clean version of the search would imply the asker already grades themselves on grammar. the dirty version implies the asker is mid-thought, mid-coffee, not running a second pass on anything. the post is for the dirty asker.

the algorithm offered me five tests

i typed the question into the search bar and the algorithm returned, in the first scroll, five tests. four were quizzes. the fifth was a fifteen-question instrument from a site that sells supplements for, supposedly, sharper thinking. all five had a paywall halfway through. the score was free. the explanation cost $9.99 a month, with a seven-day trial that auto-renews on day eight.

i took the free portion of all five. i scored, by the algorithm’s loose math, somewhere between above average and concerningly average. one test put my pattern recognition in the 91st percentile. the next put my verbal reasoning at the 38th. the third asked me to identify the next shape in a sequence of rotating triangles, which i got wrong because i was watching the boss’s office door for movement. the fourth crashed at question seven. the fifth, having absorbed my email, has begun sending me a newsletter i did not consent to.

the deeper version of this filing problem runs through cognitive bias as a category, not just one habit in a way more thorough than this post can carry. the algorithm did not invent the trick. it just sells it back to you on a subscription with a fourteen-day cancellation window you will forget about.

the subscriptions that promised the answer

the subscription audit, which i have been not-doing for three years, surfaced again this week. the bank statement showed eleven recurring charges from services promising, in some form, to make me sharper. brain-dot-fm has been billing me $11.99 a month since 2022 for ambient piano i have not actively listened to since the trial. one is a meditation app i open by mis-tap when looking for the calculator. one is a newsletter i bought during a 4am revelation in 2023 and have not opened since the welcome email.

the total, by back-of-envelope math, is $84 a month. annually, just over a thousand dollars to feel like the sort of person who pays for sharpness. the sharpness has not arrived. savings accounts are a hobby for the wealthy, i remind myself, and the rest of us pay for apps that promise an upgrade we never install.

the algorithm, in its sidebar, has been offering for the eleventh time to audit these for me. i decline, for the eleventh time. the audit is the easy thing. the hard thing is the small admission that i wanted, for $84 a month, to outsource the question of whether my brain was working.

the unopened mail pile in the corner

the related evidence sits in the corner of my apartment in a stack i do not have the courage to count. the unopened mail pile has gained two new envelopes this month, both in the kind of font that arrives in a serif and means business. the pile and the subscriptions are the same gesture in two registers — the brain refusing to read what it does not want to know, then paying for tools that promise to fix the brain.

a smart person, the algorithm-approved tests would say, opens the mail. faced with eleven recurring charges, a smart person audits the eleven and keeps the two that earn their keep. i have not done any of this. the envelopes are more disciplined than i am — they show up monthly without fail, while my intent to deal with them shows up irregularly, and only after a glass of something.

i did, last winter, briefly try. i opened one envelope. it was a notice from a service i had cancelled in 2021 informing me i had not, in fact, cancelled it. i put it back on the pile. the pile took it without comment.

the gym sauna where i think clearer

the only place i reliably think clearly is the gym sauna, which is also, statistically, the only part of the gym i visit. i bought the membership in 2021 with the intent of becoming someone who lifts. i became, instead, someone who sits in dry heat for fifteen minutes twice a week and pretends, on the way out, that the heat counts as exercise. it does not. but the thinking does.

the sauna is the only room in my life with no screen, no notification, no recommended-for-you panel, no algorithm at all. the thinking that happens there is slower, weirder, and more honest than the thinking at the desk. the answer, by the only useful test i have been able to construct, is: do you have a room in your life with no screen in it. mine is the sauna. on a good week, twenty minutes. on a bad week, the only twenty minutes i would defend in court.

the parallel angle on the speed-not-substance pitch runs through whether faster thinking and clearer thinking are the same job in a way that left me, on first read, mildly indicted. they are not the same job. the algorithm sells them as a bundle. the sauna disagrees, in silence, every wednesday.

verdict, the algorithm does not know either

there is a film version of the supplement-fantasy, of course — the 2011 bradley cooper picture about a clear pill that promises a smarter brain — making the case, for two hours, that the right capsule is the answer. the answer, on closer inspection, was the unopened mail. it is always the unopened mail.

the boss is back from the vendor demo, in the hallway, telling someone the demo did not include the pricing slide. i am closing this tab and pretending to look at the spreadsheet i have been not-looking-at since 9:42.

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