how do we get smarter — 1 explainer, sort of

we, the collective species, get smarter very slowly and very unevenly, in roughly the same way a very long couch arrives from ikea in its many flat boxes. i have personally been assembling that couch for seventeen full months now. the third yoga mat is under it. so, perhaps, is the answer to the question.

so. how do we get smarter, the question with the plural pronoun, the one that pretends a committee is in charge. note the we. the we is doing a lot of work. the we implies a board, a working group, a friday call, a slack channel called #smarter, a shared agenda. the we implies that getting smarter is a coordination problem, not a personal one. that, mostly, is the trick of this whole search query. people typing this in are, i suspect, hoping someone else is also responsible for the answer.

writing from the desk this morning, around 11:23am on a tuesday, while carla is on the third floor for the all-hands and the muffin tray. that gives me, by the most generous estimate, the rest of the morning before anyone notices the spreadsheet has not been touched. mike, separately, is at the corner bar, almost certainly, in his own different way working the same problem. that is, for now, the entire we.

tuesday, the rest of the morning is mine, technically. carla won’t be back until after the all-hands wraps. the cursor is in the wrong document. the cursor has been in the wrong document for forty minutes. i am not correcting it.

how do we get smarter, the short version

the short version is the one nobody wants. the short version is: we get smarter the same way a glacier moves. by inches. through pressure. while pretending nothing is happening. there is no event. there is no graduation. there is, on a good century, a measurable shift in the average, and even that gets undone the next time everyone agrees about something on the internet for forty-eight hours.

the longer version of how do we get smarter begins with the part of the question we’ve been ignoring, which is who, exactly, is we. is it humanity? is it the office? is it me and mike and sarah and dave and the people on this thread? is it just me with extra steps? the pronoun is a load-bearing wall and we keep painting over it.

i’m fairly sure there’s a chart, in a magazine i don’t subscribe to, that shows iq scores creeping up over the twentieth century, then plateauing, then possibly going back down. i did not read the chart. i, on hearing about it, agreed with whichever direction sounded most flattering to my preferred theory. that, by the way, is the foundational error of confirmation bias, an investigation already on the wall. i mention it now to demonstrate the species in real time. i am the species. you are the species. mike, particularly, is the species.

step one, we don’t, technically

here is the first honest answer. we, the collective we, do not really get smarter. individuals get smarter, sometimes, briefly, before backsliding. sarah got smarter about money. she read the whole form. she has a pension she actually understands. that is one person. that is not we. that is sarah. the rest of us, by my honest count, have not read the form.

the we would imply a kind of upload, a shared brain, a collective gain. that is not how it works. mike, at the corner, has been working on his system for taxes, and the system has not produced a filed return since 2019. that is mike, alone, getting not-smarter on a parallel track. mike is also we. sarah’s gains do not transfer to mike. mike’s losses do not transfer to sarah. the average, somewhere, is being held up by sarah and pulled down by mike, and the post-it on the fridge of the species reads, in faint pencil, net zero.

this is, i think, the part that breaks people. they want to believe that when one of us figures something out, all of us inch forward. we don’t. the figuring stays in the room it was figured in. the rest of us, in adjacent rooms, keep killing microwaves on our own schedules. this is the seventh microwave for me, by the way. i did not benefit from anyone else’s microwave deaths. i had to do my own.

step two, mike has a we-shaped theory

i tried to test the we, in good faith, last wednesday at the corner. i asked mike, on his second beer, the question outright. how do we get smarter, mike. mike did not look up. mike was watching family guy on mute, which is mike’s preferred condition for animated television. then, after a long pause, mike said, in the tone of a man delivering a thesis: “we don’t. you do. and then you tell me. and i forget. and then i tell you the same thing six months later. that’s the system.”

i wrote it down, on the back of a coaster, which i still have in the receipt wallet. mike’s theory of the we is, near as i can tell, that the collective is just two people taking turns having the same insight, six months apart, neither of them remembering the other one had it first. the gain is not net. the gain is rotational. the species is not climbing. the species is on a small, quiet carousel, and from far enough away the carousel looks like progress.

this, mike said, is also why a hot dog is a sandwich, which he announced as if it were a corollary. mike has been in the hot dog camp since at least 2017, by which i mean since at least 2017 he has been telling me, in various bars, that a hot dog is a sandwich and that anyone who disagrees with him is operating with a definition of sandwich too small to live in. this is a hot take. it is also, in mike’s frame, an example of how we get smarter. one of us names a thing the rest of us were too cowardly to name. the rest of us either accept the name or do not. either way, the language has moved by one inch. that is, mike said, the entire mechanism. the mechanism runs on hot dogs.

i am not entirely sure mike is wrong. that is, frankly, the most disturbing part.

step three, the seventh microwave is for both of us

here is where the we gets honest. i killed my seventh microwave in march. mike, separately, in his own kitchen, in his own quiet way, has been killing microwaves at a rate i’m not going to publish. between the two of us, we have, by the most generous accounting, killed enough microwaves to power a small experiment. we have not, however, gotten meaningfully smarter about microwaves. we have just gotten smarter about each other’s microwaves, which is a different and less useful skill.

this is, on reflection, where the we actually delivers. not in shared learning. in shared witnessing. mike knows, with great precision, what i did to the seventh. i know, with great precision, what mike did to his last three. neither of us would do what the other did. we would, however, do something just as stupid in a slightly different category. that is the species again. we don’t avoid each other’s mistakes. we make our own version of them, customized, in our own kitchens, on our own afternoons.

this is also why the we question, in its honest form, is mostly a request for company. people typing how do we get smarter at midnight are not really asking for a method. they are asking am i alone in this. you are not alone in this. mike is in the corner. i am at the desk. sarah is reading the form. the four of us are not getting smarter together. we are, however, all in the room. that’s we. that’s what we turns out to be.

step four, the third yoga mat is for me alone

under my couch, currently, lives the third yoga mat. it has been there since 2023. it does not contribute to the we. it contributes only to me. it represents, faithfully, every weekend i intended to start something and didn’t. mike does not have a yoga mat. mike has, instead, a different object that does the same job in his apartment. sarah, of course, has nothing — sarah just goes for the run. the yoga mat is mine. the lesson is mine. the failure is mine. there is no we at the level of the mat.

i bring this up because the we in how do we get smarter falls apart at exactly this layer. the genuinely useful learning, the kind that bends a life, happens in the smallest possible room, alone, usually after eleven pm, often involving an object that judges you. the mat. the receipt wallet. the 47 tabs open right now, four of which are about this exact question, none of which i have closed. these are not committee problems. these are mat problems. the mat is the only audit committee that ever shows up.

the we is real upstairs, in the language, in the average, in the slow drift of the species across centuries. the we is not real downstairs, in your kitchen, on a sunday afternoon, when you are deciding for the eighth time this year whether to start over. the downstairs is a solo project. nobody is coming. mike is in his own kitchen. sarah is on her run. the mat is here, with me. the mat is patient. the mat is also unimpressed.

verdict, we ask, that’s the we part

so here is where i land. the we in how do we get smarter is real in exactly one way: we ask. the asking is the collective. the answering is, with rare exceptions, alone in a small room with a closed book and an unopened mail pile. that’s the topic. that’s the species. that’s, by my count, the third honest paragraph in this post.

collective intelligence, the kind people promise on conference stages, exists in the form of a slow average that does not affect any individual tuesday. you do not benefit from the species being two percent sharper than it was in 1956. you do, however, benefit from sarah next to you reading the whole form and saying, calmly, on a sunday, that the percentages do not work the way you think they do. that is also we. that we, a small one, with two members, is the only we that ever helps. mike, separately, is the other small we, even though mike’s contribution is mostly a list of hot takes and a system that has not produced a tax return in five years.

if you came here for a method, the method is: find your sarah, find your mike, and ask them the question on a tuesday before the all-hands. the mat will not answer. the tabs will not answer. the algorithm will offer you a course. the course is the role, not the function — i wrote about that one next door. but a quiet sarah on a sunday and a mike on a wednesday will, between them, walk you a fingernail forward. the rest of the species, with respect, is busy. cognitive failures play their own role here, and for a working map of those failures by name that keep dragging the average down, see that one — different cluster, same species, similar we.

and, while we’re being honest about the methodology, the textbook definition of the confirming reflex is also part of why the we never quite catches up. each of us files away the part that flatters us and walks out of the room. the next person walks in and does the same with a different mirror. the room is the same room. the mirrors are different. the species, unmoved, orders another round.

all-hands ran long. carla just dropped a stack of slides on her desk like the slides had personally insulted her. the meeting on the third floor was, by every available signal, exactly the kind of meeting that confirms the species is not, on average, getting any smarter.

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