The Six Secrets of Intelligence: Why modern education doesn’t teach us how to think for ourselves

by Craig Adams

different ways of thinking, when they fail to share fundamental assumptions, are incompatible.

If two people disagree on whether and how something exists, they cannot agree what counts as evidence, and so they cannot convince each other of anything.

Many misunderstandings in conversation don’t come from bad reasoning: they arise because we each start our chains of reasoning from different assumptions or definitions that we’re never taught to share and which we rarely make clear.

the reward for studying a subject is not the facts you end up with at the end of the course; it’s the way of thinking that produced them.

a school system that teaches style over substance is a culture that learns not ideas and concepts themselves, but rather how to coat them in a veneer of erudite vocabulary, and to mistake this process for education.

The modern age’s basic understanding of an intelligent person is someone who has a large vocabulary, a certain erudite style, knowledge of culturally prized writers like Shakespeare or Homer, and particular areas of general knowledge.

Knowledge Is mistaken for intelligence, intelligence is how we think not what we know

Instead of the belief that, through patterns and practice, we might achieve almost anything, we are taught to focus on the idea of innate abilities that are fixed at birth.