Intuitive Learning and Excellence
Overcoming the tyranny of middling intelligence
“Midwit,” is one of my favorite terms to arise out of internet meme culture, in large part because it is such a sophisticated and devastating criticism of social strivers.
Normally, there is no shame in being of middle intelligence. After all, the IQ scale itself is based on averages, and by definition most people are close to average. Society has to work for normal people too, and there are just as many people below median as there are above. Part of IQ depends on innate factors like genetics and nutrition during childhood so to take this too seriously would be in poor taste. Still, “midwit,” remains a brutal criticism for those who take unjustified pride in their intellect.
Most of this pride is based on the prestige of college degrees or professional credentials, but they are not consciously aware of how much the thumb has been on the scale to influence that degree. Like children’s karate classes where students get belt color promotions for attendance (with a nominal test), the university system has a similar motivation to churn people through their programs, and use factors like grade inflation, financial aid, and DEI to do it, most of the time with the students not even aware that the thumb is on the scale.
I don’t want to drag them too hard over this. Overestimation of intellectual depth is usually harmless, but it is especially in focus now as the West increasingly institutionalizes its ideology, crushing competency and filling companies and bureaucracies with commissars. We need to be smarter.
The University Role
The university system serves both as the learning source and the credentialing mechanism, so, as you may have already guessed, the chief characteristic of the middle intelligent is conformity. The educator presents a standard and the student is graded on how well they conform to the standard based on a performance metric. How do you know this information? It is in the textbook. The professor said it in the lecture. It was in the study guide. There is no curiosity or energy to ask, “How did the textbook author know? How do I know if the textbook is wrong?”
To be fair, this kind of learning can be legitimate, especially when learning fundamentals, but it rarely translates to deep knowledge. Undergrad degrees focus on fundamentals anyway, so the system worked ok for the production of bachelor’s degrees. The idea was that you got broad exposure to fundamentals and then entered the workplace where you specialize and learn with on-the-job training. Conform to your professor, then conform to your boss. A recipe to make a living, but not much of an impact.
As institutional ideological capture has expanded, it wasn’t enough to put undergrads into serious decision-making positions. They needed graduate degrees. Yet to select for those who meet the ideological demands while being in the right DEI demographics, they needed to get a similar churn in grad school by lowering standards, overlooking plagiarism, and so on, and so we have midwits running major organizations and dominating management and administrative positions.
Deeper Intelligence
I’m not arguing that getting smarter will cause the establishment to recruit us into leadership, but that we seek intelligence for its own sake, simply to understand the truth and know how to use it skillfully. To do so, we need to go beyond naive epistemology and the industrialized education methods of the American system based on accepting the positions and methods of “approved experts,” and really do the leg work to be rigorous. How do we do this?
Truly smart people usually have the appearance of effortlessness in casual settings. Skilled engineers can be rudely awakened at 1 am to deal with an emergency and solve a problem in three minutes that would take three hours or three days for a new engineer. Skilled pastors can effortlessly recall chapter and verse for an applicable passage to help a congregant. Whether woodworkers, mathematicians, surveyors, or political theorists, the marks of brilliance are the same. Effortless elegance in dealing with the mid-level topics in their field, and high-quality, high-effort projects that are pushing boundaries as a normal part of their work.
Put simply, smart people put forth hard effort consistently over a long period of time. As they get smarter, they re-calibrate for the new definition of what is hard for them, and they even get entertainment from finding something that is beyond their current capacities that they can push themselves with. They are reading the hard books, working the hard problems, doing the hard projects, and redeeming every moment they can to push themselves to be better than yesterday.
The effort itself needs to be directed. The engineer may want to read up on a sexy topic, but may actually need to read up on NFPA or UL standards (perhaps the most boring material in existence). A guitarist will not get better by noodling around his favorite riffs but by disciplined practice. Many people train at the gym for ten years and remain weaker than someone who trained with a serious program for one or two. There are plagues of laymen who study theology, philosophy, economics, or history by reading a self-selected and eclectic mix of books following their sense of entertainment, but not doing the legwork of selecting serious books and writing.
It should be no surprise that, for the liberal arts, I recommend reading the classics, the canon, and primary sources. For technical subjects, reading the datasheets, learning the proofs, and learning the math.
Most people will never push themselves like this, which actually amounts for one of the main reasons to go to college at all. It is hard to teach this drive if you do not have it, and you almost need to have a taste for it. I am normally pretty disciplined, but I would have never considered studying at the pace that was required to get my degree in the late 2000’s and even that required learning to triage the most urgent or deficient subjects (though there are downsides to that).
You May Be A Midwit
This may seem like an awful lot of words to just say, “work hard and be serious,” but the trends I observe on a daily basis overwhelmingly show shallow effort with shallow sources of “edutainment.” Secondary and popular level sources create the illusion of effort but represent the same kind of naive repackaging and regurgitation characteristic of the midwit, even when violating the regime ideology. It’s common to see people managing 15-100 different podcasts but not having any seriously demanding effort learning.
Consider the number of Christians in the world, and the subset of those who have a credible profession of faith in Jesus. How many have read the whole Bible a single time? How many have read a single whole book of the Bible at all? How many have devoted 30 minutes to reading it? The truth is that there are biblical connections you will only ever make on your 5th read through. You need to be reading the Bible over and over. There is an intuitive grasp of the Bible that only comes with a serious investment over a long time.
I consider all of the energy in right wing circles that is expended in disputes about Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, and ask how many of them have even so much as read the Bible, and if so, whether they have read it more than once, twice, or three times. So many disputed questions have obvious answers that jump out when you are familiar with God’s word.
It is easy to get discouraged and blackpilled when considering the state of America, churches, universities, and companies because the problems seem so large and entrenched, but there is absolutely nothing stopping you from personally pursuing this level of excellence if you have the will and discipline for it. The process is reasonable and achievable, and scarcely one in a hundred is seriously making an effort to do more than coast. The days of meritocracy are over and the days of being able to coast are ending with it. You need to become the master that makes it look effortless. I’m rooting for you.