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Sep 8·edited Sep 9Liked by Etienne de la Boetie2

You can increase intelligence by

* not pursuing pleasure as a purpose behind actions. That means no masturbation.

* not taking fake substitutes for real things. That means not taking pets as substitutes for children. You can still get pets, but you shouldn't get pets as substitutes for children. Spending time and energy on fake subtitutes will slow you down. Slow life means lower intelligence.

* eating clean nutritional foods and drinking enough clean water

* not eating ultra-processed foods.

* exercising often for circulation

* going to bed early and sleeping for 7+ hours

* not obsessing over little details(Being lost in details is a form of left-brain imbalance)

* being unwilling to accept things as they are (passivity is a form of right-brain imbalance)

* churning money fast.

Passivity slows down learning process and thus decreases intelligence. Pathological obsession over details also slows down learning process and decreases intelligence.

If people are afraid of churning money fast, they can't move fast. If they don't move fast, they can't learn fast from experiences. Slow money slows down learning. Fast money accelerates learning.

If you accelerate learning by living a fast life, you increase intelligence.

Children can boost survival in the long term if you educate them well. For example, if you run a company, your children can turn a company into a group of companies by boosting available manpower. Can samsung group exist without children that the founder could trust? Without trust, it's difficult to scale up a company.

Also, you are not intelligent if you succumb to masturbation. Intelligent guys don't masturbate. You can't have intelligence without self-discipline.

Just by following basic life principles, most people can increase their intelligence by 100 times. Maybe, I'm exaggerating, but most people are wasting their brain power significantly on media and wasteful material consumption.

I think most humans are intelligent enough to achieve lots of good things. But, they are just misdirected. Only a minority of people are too stupid to achieve good things. Most geniuses are wasting their potential away, so only a tiny minority end up acting like geniuses.

If people follow basic life principles, a lot of people will look like geniuses from today's standard.

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Superb value add! Thank you!

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This article assumes that genetics are almost everything, including the source of most difference in "intelligence." That idea leads to the notion that "inferior" races by measured IQ must be genetically defective. This is politically incorrect, but what is the truth?

One hint comes from the game of Scrabble, which is correlated with general intelligence especially the math component. Two world Scrabble champions have come from very poor African nations with very low IQ's--one averaged an IQ of 60. The math of the bell curves makes these two champions impossible if the variation were genetic. The two champions must have been raised differently than most of the population.

Another hint comes from a Texas charter school I read about some years ago in a black neighborhood. Those admitted were high scorers on achievement tests, as good as or better than the whites of the city. Their full brothers and sisters who lost the lottery did as badly as everyone else in their horrid schools. Last year, the highest performing school in the State of New York was an inner city charter school attended by blacks and Hispanics. They had a full curriculum including arts and stayed at school until 5. The teachers were inspired and one little boy was video'd saying "School is rockin' AWESOME!!" The neighborhood was high crime, the families were single-parent, and many parents did not care how well the kids did. Similar tales are found in the book "Please Stop Helping Us," by an American Black.

IQ is nature, nurture, and decision. Nobody mentions that some individuals cultivate their minds while others don't. The primary determinant is culture and upbringing. It IS possible to improve a culture.

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