ANC > IQ
Society loves IQ tests. We live in a quantified world where your worth is denoted by a number attached to a currency symbol, your popularity denoted by a follower count, and your mood for the day decided by the number of likes you received.
Sometimes, we feel a faint unease about this state of affairs, especially when we come across something in life that isn't reducible to a number, like a child's laughter or the beauty of a sunrise. We try anyway, by uploading that moment onto a platform where the world can vote on our happiness.
We have all these numbers to measure life, but there's something missing. What makes you worthy of all this success in life? Or if you are envious of someone else's success, how do you explain why they are doing better than you on all the metrics that count?
There has to be a number or two that explains all other numbers.
Ideally, these numbers have to explain two "fundamental" qualities that set you up for success in life: intelligence and beauty.
You can be dumb but beautiful, and you can get likes, which can be traded for influence, which in turn can be converted into money.
You can be plain but intelligent, and that works too. Intelligence can be traded for exam scores, which can open doors to places where you can trade again for GPA scores, which then lets you get into places where you can chase appraisal scores, and so on.
For beauty, we unfortunately don't have a socially accepted number we can quote as a cause. Intelligence, however, can be reduced to a score – IQ, which allows you to claim almost anything in life.
The best thing about an IQ score is that it gives you a social pass for discrimination. If you say you are not dating someone because they are ugly, someone will judge you and call you shallow. But if you say you only want an intelligent man or woman, no one will.
Society lets you ostracize people with lower IQ scores, or worse, pity them. Intelligence is the only innate quality that is routinely treated as god-given.
The problem is that IQ has only been a modest predictor of success in life, although not because we haven't tried to guarantee it does. We have a whole bunch of other tests designed to let those with high IQs score high, like entrance exams. But even with all the advantages conferred through this system, in the real world, money and power don't seem to correlate strongly with IQ.
Even within a school or job year-batch, IQ, or its subsidiary metrics like grades tends to predict only initial outcomes, and not long-term success.
The world has therefore been searching desperately for a replacement for IQ. For a while, EQ seemed to take the cake. 'Heart over head’ sounds like an obvious solution, tailor-made for stories that fill cinema halls.
But EQ hasn't done a great job at predicting success either. Plenty of absolute assholes who are also brainless, and sometimes ugly as well, have become successful.Â
Again, we tried to come up with an explanation. "Dark empaths" were the answer for a while: people who have empathy but are also cruel, and use their ability to empathize to be brutal to others. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's beautifully counter-intuitive, so it makes sense.
But again, we haven't cracked the code.
If there were a test that could measure someone's IQ, EQ, and dark empath abilities, you can bet every premier educational institute would have designed their tests around those instead of the current quantitative, verbal, and whatever abilities. After all, an educational institute's primary purpose is to identify those who will do well in life – and pretend their success was because of them rather than in spite of them.
So it looks like we are back to square one, and in a way, worse off. Because real-world metrics seem to be working in reverse. The average global IQ has been rising every generation, but in many countries–even the "developed" ones–inequality is increasing instead of everyone doing better.
Some research suggests productivity growth has stagnated or slowed in spite of technology advancing. The industrial revolution, by contrast, delivered sustained productivity gains of roughly 2–3% a year (source).
The internet revolution seems to have had the opposite effect. We are yet to see what will happen with the AI revolution, but I suspect we know where it's going already.
The reason is simple: all the information, knowledge, and computing power in the world is useless if the people who need to access and use them spend most of their time watching reels, or arguing on Twitter–now X–with people who are just like them but live on the Y axis.
If you have an IQ score of 120 but spend 50% more time on social media than someone with an IQ score of 100, you are likely to do worse in life.
This is probably the first true leveler in history. You don't need to be exceptionally smart to realize that the little rectangular box in your pocket might be bad for you. If you have a bit of self-control– or just enough good luck to lose the thing in a gutter and not afford a replacement–you might do OK.
No matter how intelligent you are by any narrow definition of intelligence, your ability to tune out noise and focus on the signal will set you apart. I like to call this ANC–Active Noise Cancellation.
I doubt anyone has tried to measure it. Maybe they can use open-phone exams: whoever spends more time answering the test instead of doom-scrolling on the device within the allotted time wins.
How do you filter out noise? The crude method is the equivalent of cotton balls in your ears, but they drown out everything, including the signal. We can take a cue from modern noise-cancellation headphones: they listen to the environment, figure out patterns of noise, and generate a waveform that is the inverse of that signal, cancelling it out and leaving you with what you should be listening to.
We need the equivalent of this system in our lives. This means intentionally designing our environment and time to cancel out noise. Maybe this means putting all your social media on a device that's locked in a box until a scheduled time. Maybe it's an app blocker that makes you solve math puzzles before opening Instagram. Maybe it's making your screen black and white so the colors don't pop out and grab your attention.
This is a skill that isn't really taught but is becoming more and more necessary.
It can and will make the difference between success and failure. And the privileged class (myself included) is waking up to it. We might not be able to beat our own addiction, but we can pay for more diligent schools and art classes that occupy our kids' attention without screen time. The poor, unfortunately, are more likely to rely on smartphones to engage kids when they can't afford childcare or structured alternatives (source).
Schools and colleges will catch up. Many education systems are already experimenting with limiting or banning smartphones in classrooms, and I’m sure we will all end up paying more to make our kids write with pen and paper.
Just as richer families can afford to buy attention back for their kids, richer countries are starting to explore blanket social media bans for children (hello, Australia), while countries like India are providing cheap 5G access to the masses without many guardrails for kids.
Attention is fast becoming the scarce resource that everything else now depends on. In a generation, privilege will use this too to its advantage. But for the moment, as the whole world drowns in an excess of stimuli, anyone who practices active noise cancellation has a small edge, all other things being equal.