{"id":867,"date":"2011-02-28T15:55:26","date_gmt":"2011-02-28T19:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=867"},"modified":"2011-02-28T19:31:19","modified_gmt":"2011-02-28T23:31:19","slug":"867","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/867\/","title":{"rendered":"“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was recently asked to prepare a two minute talk on a topic of my choice, for a small audience of about 10 people. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what I came up with.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a one dollar bill [holds one up].<\/p>\n

[Picking out two people in the audience] Alice and Bob \u00e2\u20ac\u201c later in this talk I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to use the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153points\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n

Can I ask you to pay close attention to what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m saying, and when you hear me say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153points\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, stand up from your seat? <\/p>\n

Will you do that for me?<\/p>\n

Thanks! <\/p>\n

Just to make it a bit competitive, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll give the first of you to stand up the dollar bill.<\/p>\n

Many of us, myself included, often think of a person\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intellectual capacity as something that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fixed, a feature of their innate makeup.<\/p>\n

Intellectually, we may know that this is not so, but we take it so much for granted that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s built into our language. We say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very clever\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bright guy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to describe people who we believe measure up when it comes to intellectual capacity.<\/p>\n

A very different point of view has been put forward by the computer scientist Alan Kay<\/a>. Kay\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s saying is this: “A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

[We have a winner! Gives out the dollar to Alice]<\/p>\n

Hmm. “A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”<\/p>\n

This is a saying that repays thought.<\/p>\n

I just showed you in a very small way that it’s true: by changing Alice and Bob\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perspective on my talk, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m betting they paid much closer attention to what I was saying. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not an 80 IQ point boost, true, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still magical: a tiny shift in perspective can help us focus better. [* – but see footnote below, added in response to feedback]<\/p>\n

It tells us that intellectual capacities aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t innate, they can be dramatically changed by shifts in our perspective. And we can consciously develop strategies to shift our perspective. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have time to review strategies for doing this, but I can mention one meta strategy, due to the musician Brian Eno<\/a> and the artist Peter Schmidt<\/a>. They made up a card deck of oblique strategies<\/a>. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a deck of blank cards on which they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve written many different strategies for solving problems. Most of the strategies are ways of changing perspective: “What would your closest friend do”; “work at a different speed”, etc. When stuck on a problem you can draw out a card, and get a a new perspective.<\/p>\n

I think we should all make up our own decks of oblique strategies that we can use to get new perspectives, and to give our own intelligence an occasional boost.<\/p>\n

[*] A commenter on Hacker News makes the good point that offering a dollar may cause some people to screen out everything except<\/em> the word “points” – they may end up effectively stupider. Unfortunately, I can’t ask my audience members “Alice” and “Bob” if this is the case, because after preparing the talk I was asked instead to give an extemporaneous talk. But the talk can be modified to take account of this observation. Suppose instead that I’d offered a dollar to whoever provided a better summary of the talk at the end of my talk. I’ve been in analogous situations in the past, and know that it made me focus a lot better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was recently asked to prepare a two minute talk on a topic of my choice, for a small audience of about 10 people. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what I came up with. This is a one dollar bill [holds one up]. [Picking out two people in the audience] Alice and Bob \u00e2\u20ac\u201c later in this talk I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m… Continue reading “A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=867"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":871,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions\/871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}