Conceptual vs. Operational Thinking

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If you were to ask a jinn to make you the smartest person alive, what might that look like?

Setting aside the many tricksome methods such creatures have employed throughout mythological history, how would you define “smartest” in a way that would be measurable, actionable, and improvable?

You might make such a wish based on your intended outcomes: to be good at math, for instance, or to be a big picture thinker. Maybe you hope to increase your vocabulary, to have a more accessible and reliable memory, or to be capable of playing a masterful chess game.

But none of these outcomes necessarily relates to intelligence. They’re all associated with people who we might broadly categorize as being intelligent, but one needn’t be good at math to be good at chess and needn’t have a large vocabulary—or even be literate—to have a sprawling and permissive memory.

You might instead, then, point the wish-granting genie at a broadly accepted measurement of general intelligence—sometimes abbreviated as “g”—like the confluence of traits evaluated by the intelligence quotient (IQ) test, and tell it to up your IQ-game, increase your score, help you rank higher than anyone else according to such metrics.

This measurement is also flawed, though, in that it gauges some things, but not all things.

IQ tests are meant to assess a test-taker’s general comprehension, judgement, problem-solving, and reasoning capabilities, but many critics contend that the questions asked and even the overall format of the test are highly biased toward certain cultural backgrounds, certain genetic predispositions, and certain personality types.

It may be, then, that if you were to become the most successful IQ test taker in history, that’s all you would be: someone who is particularly good at taking IQ tests, without necessarily acquiring any other intelligence-related trait. The way you think may become slanted in a particular direction and that slant may line up with the bias of the test, but that alignment won’t necessarily help you think bigger thoughts, learn more things, or beat anyone at chess.

The trouble here—if we can call theoretical, wish-related quandaries trouble—is that abstractions like “intelligence” tend to be conceptual in nature rather than operational.

To understand something conceptually is to understand it in terms of other things: assessing its relationships and tracing its shape based on where it interacts, connects, and resonates with outside concepts.

In contrast, understanding something operationally means that we understand how to measure it; though perhaps only that.

What this might mean in the case of intelligence is that we could look at the countless possible neuronal arrangements in the brain and say, okay, this specific arrangement seems to increase the speed at which certain electrical impulses get from one part of the brain to another.

This type of understanding does not mean that we necessarily grasp the consequences of this measurement, nor how it connects to anything else: it’s possible that all we’d be able to say for certain is that a particular brain arrangement allows bursts of electricity to get from one part of the brain to another more rapidly than with other arrangements, and that’s as far as our comprehension would be able to take us.

We often become trapped on one side or the other of this dichotomy, assessing either the broad strokes or the fine details, to the dilution of the other. Which in practice might mean looking at the whole of a painting and trying to judge the technique of the artist, or looking only at the individual strokes in an attempt to understand what that artist is trying to say.

In both cases, we have a portion of the information we require to truly understand what’s going on, but we lack the opposite perspective. We peer through our microscopes and fail to realize that if we utilized a telescope, instead—or a fisheye lens, tinted sunglasses, or the output of a low-resolution CCTV video feed—our view, and as a consequence, our conclusions, might change dramatically.

What’s interesting is that most of us default to different biases, to different perspectives, in different circumstances.

When thinking mathematically, you may get lost in an individual problem and lose sight of the broader significance of that problem within a larger formula. But when you’re reading the news, you may engage with what’s happening in the world through broad, approximating labels and categories, never fully defining, with specificity, what any of the designations actually mean; sticking to shorthand so as to focus on the bigger picture.

I think it’s possible to engage with any subject from multiple angles and focal ranges, but doing so requires a decent investment of attention and intention.

For a variety of reasons, from upbringing to neuronal arrangement, most of us have a small collection of heuristics—mental shortcuts—that we utilize when engaging with the world and assessing the information we glean from it.

These shortcuts are valuable in that they allow us to quickly parse a great deal about what’s happening, quickly. But there’s good reason to bypass these heuristics, at times, to ensure we’re not missing vital context that exists just outside our default perceptual range.

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