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Comment by Herodotus38 | Hacker News Reader

I didn't check every link but I find it interesting that under "improving intelligence", there is no mention of the generations of work previous thinkers have put in to the question about how to be wiser/intelligent, or the question of what that means.

I'm not saying the answer lies in past philosophers, but I think it would be silly to discount previous work done in this area and focus on video games and drugs.

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Which thinkers did you have in mind?

The Mentat Wiki has entries on mnemonic techniques like the Major System[1], Peg System[2], and the Loci System (aka Memory Palace)[3], which are hundreds if not thousands of years old.

It's not really fair to characterize the wiki as being all about "drugs and video games".

[1] - http://www.ludism.org/mentat/MajorSystem

[2] - http://www.ludism.org/mentat/PegSystem

[3] - http://www.ludism.org/mentat/LociSystem

I know I'm not the OP but John Dewey came to mind when I first read OP's comment. If I really sit down and dig through some of my books I'm sure I could pull up a few more.

The earliest reference of a number system I could find goes back 1,300 years, but I'd be completely surprised if the basic concepts weren't much older.

http://mt.artofmemory.com/wiki/Major_System#History

Example: in Greek and Hebrew, numbers were already mapped to letters, so it would be very small step to create mnemonics from the numbers based on the letters.

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Greek_numbers...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_numerals#Main_table

I was thinking of philosophers like the Greeks (Socrates, Plato, etc...), Jewish (Maimonides, Goan, etc...), Chinese (Confucius, Sun Tzu), Europeans (Descartes, Hume), American (Autobio of Benj Franklin, other autodidacts like Hamilton, Jefferson, etc). Now, a good argument against my list is that few of these sources have actual methods for becoming more intelligent, aside from general advice on how to live "a good life" (paraphrasing) which will allow one to be wise.

I hadn't seen the systems you mentioned so I will check those out, thanks.

I can see how my comment came across as implying it was all drugs and video games, which it is not and I should have chosen my words better. I was trying to convey the overall feel that I got from the site that becoming more intelligent can be done with quick interventions (which is entirely possible, but I think unknown).

This wiki is in its early stages so I can't fault it much. What I would like to see is a source of evidence behind each link it lists for improvements in memory, creative thinking, problem solving, etc... so that interventions can at least be ranked. The reality is presently we can't measure these things very well. Another nice addition would be early childhood interventions that have been associated with increased intelligence (something we do have data on).

I think some of that stuff is there, it's just buried. For instance, the first thing I thought of was Descartes, and his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, so I checked: it is listed [1], but there seems to be no discussion of it, and that page is the only mention of Descartes.

[1] on this page: http://www.ludism.org/mentat/BrainBooks

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