The Importance of Intelligence

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What do you mean by smart? I guess like what I was thinking of there is just the percentage of time that they come to accurate conclusions. And this is really hard to test, right? Because we don't actually have a really good idea of what's actually true, right? We just have guesses and stuff like that. It would be really quite hard to unpack exactly what intelligence means, but I think that's true for practically any word we would discuss in this conversation. But clearly we can still communicate something.

What's the best way to help someone who's going through a difficult situation? What are the four states of distress? What are "comfort languages"? How can we introduce more nuance into our everyday thinking habits? When gathering information and forming opinions, how do you know who to trust? What's the difference between intelligence and wisdom?

Kat Woods is the co-founder of Charity Entrepreneurship, a startup incubator for effective altruist charities. It provides training, seed funding, and the other things necessary to kickstart an effective nonprofit. Previously, Kat co-founded Charity Science Outreach, a meta-organization that raised nine counterfactual dollars for high impact charities for every dollar spent. Subsequently she co-founded Charity Science Health, a direct poverty charity that received multiple grants from GiveWell and has served hundreds of thousands of families in India. You can find more about Kat at her website or on Twitter at @kat__woods.

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