True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.” The most intelligent of people make mistakes – renowned filmmakers release box office flops, and manufactures put products on the market which fail. It may feel humiliating and unpleasant when an idea which you think is genius is unsuccessful, but this happens to the best of us. Smarthinking’s 24/7 tutoring approach extends to over 150 subjects, like writing, reading and math (including multivariable statistics, linear algebra and more) through to business courses, health sciences and nursing, computers, Spanish, Photoshop and many more. But equally, I don’t think that Baggini’s attempt to merge philosophy with Smart Thinking is a successful one. In particular, I take issue with something that is, at the very least, implied throughout: namely that philosophy ought to be useful, either solely or primarily, as a way of helping us to think more ‘clearly’. The problem has a lot to do with focus. Just having their smartphones in the same room as them made participants perform more poorly on cognitive tests.

The Adam Smith Institute is one of the world’s leading think tanks. Independent, non-profit, and non-partisan, we work to promote free markets and a free society, through research, economic analysis, publishing, media outreach, and public education. We inject economics and sound ideas into public debate and help shift the climate of opinion. Reading Baggini’s book, I was reminded of some comments that a quite different philosopher, Theodor Adorno, makes about the early Wittgenstein in his Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965). Considering Wittgenstein’s maxim, ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,’ Adorno comments that he would maintain it is ‘the anti-philosophical statement par excellence.’ For Wittgenstein, we ought to ‘pass over in silence’ things we cannot clearly ‘speak’ of, because to do otherwise would be to lapse into nonsense. But for Adorno, on the other hand: They also worried about precarity and progression. People without much financial support in particular said they were not prepared to apply for jobs in the sector which were short term, unpaid or didn’t offer opportunities to progress. Many of those we spoke to were interested in the work think tanks do, and wanted to make an impact with their careers, but didn’t really understand what day-to-day life at a think tank involved. Some interviewees also expressed concern that most think tank jobs were based in London, so would be hard to access for those without family in the capital.Watch out for disreputable sources though. There are a lot of self-proclaimed experts out there nowadays, especially online. There are even group tutoring options available for students who want to work collaboratively, with or without a tutor (sessions are only charged once a tutor is present). Our membership enables think tanks to pool resources and provide regular professional development for their staff. All training is specifically tailored to the think tank sector, with trainers who have either worked in, or with, think tanks before. Both our training and events programs have been designed so that there is something for you whether you work in research, communications or operations and whether you are a junior researcher or a think tank Chief Executive. In this, Adorno insists, philosophy is precisely not useful: it is precisely opposed to any of the standards of worldly success by which we might typically measure ourselves. Dedicating your life to philosophy is likely to make you less, not more, successful – it is likely to make you a substantially less productive and respected member of society than you might otherwise have been. It refuses to go along with the social whole. And it is also in this that philosophy must always, inevitably, lapse into unclearness. Either philosophy verges on nonsense, or it betrays its own concept: the ‘utopian’ potential that Adorno wishes to associate with it. Read multiple newspapers, not just the one that most closely mirrors how you already think. Go for breadth.

The yin and yang of the genre are represented by Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow This paper makes the compelling case for a smarter, more personalised approach to prescribing enabled by AI and other technologies. Deploying technology at an earlier stage of the decision-making process can support clinicians in making more appropriate decisions about the use of antibiotics, and therefore reduce the incidence of inappropriate prescribing. My college experience was great because I didn’t go to a school where everyone was liberal or conservative. There was a big mix of perspectives, and this deepened our classroom discussions and thinking.Over millions of years we have adapted to our environment to become routine, unreflective thinkers. For much of our existence our survival has depended on rules and patterns of behaviour well- tested by the thousands of generations before us. Learning to flee without thought in response to a certain pattern of colours and movement that signalled a predator was essential for survival. As a result, today we make decisions guided more by unchallenged rules and accepted patterns of behaviour than by rational analysis and reflection. As evolutionary psychologists are fond of saying 'Our modern skulls house Stone Age minds.' We all know someone who likes to say how great they are. But intelligent people know that their actions speak louder than words. A study found self evaluations to be not nearly as accurate as evaluations made by other people, who had watched the participants conduct conversations [3]. If you want to be taken seriously and respected by coworkers and friends, let your hard work prove your worth. Become a more intelligent person today

If you’re reading this and you don’t think you’re smart, I definitely want you to reframe how you’re thinking about intelligence. Smart Thinking’s Membership Network offers its member think tanks the opportunity to collaborate, be part of a community, access training and share knowledge across the sector. We host multiple training sessions, webinars and networking events throughout the year to help build the think tank community and enable knowledge sharing, pooling of resources and peer-to-peer support throughout the sector.

Nobody achieved anything monumental just waiting for it to happen. Making smart decisions takes effort – you need to read, do your research, and work to achieve your goals. When you pour your heart and soul into a project, you know that it is your hard work which gets you to the finish line, and not simply because the stars aligned. What’s more, working hard and making your own success is the key secret to hapiness, as a series of studies byMihaly Csikszentmihalyifound [2]. Nelson Mandela once said that “the greatest glory in living life is not in never falling, but in rising everytime we fall”. 5.Push for what you believe in In the process you will not only develop your writing skills, but you will also learn how to improve your research, note- taking, reading and organisational skills. What's more you will learn to think more analytically and creatively. You will develop your thinking skills: you will be taught how to analyse difficult concepts and arguments, synthesise ideas and evidence from different sources, discuss and criticise, and evaluate arguments and evidence.

Surround yourself with people you think are intelligent. Again, avoid confirmation bias here too. If you only surround yourself with smart people who think just like you, you’re not going to learn much. Most Smart Thinking authors aren’t philosophers. While the subject matter of Smart Thinking books does tend to be at least somewhat philosophy-adjacent, its authors are typically psychologists, economists, political scientists, who advance their fundamental theses about the nature of thought, or society, or the mind in a snappy, TED talk-ish, fulsomely data-driven way. But at least one is: step forward Julian Baggini, founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine. For Adorno, the effort to ‘say what cannot be said’ is worthwhile, because it is only through the attempt to do this that we might ever possibly hope to break away from the various presumptions foisted upon our thinking by the social whole through which not only it, but also us, have come to be. The fourth edition of this bestselling book includes new chapters on note- taking for creativity, on revising for exams, examination technique, on finding your own voice, on suspending your judgement and on finding and choosing the best word as you write. In recent years, a new literary genre has emerged: bookshops (notably Waterstones) have gradually replaced sections like ‘Philosophy’ with something called ‘Smart Thinking’. At its core, Smart Thinking can probably be understood as the self-help book equivalent of Coke Zero: just as the no-sugar soda was invented by marketing people as a blokier version of Diet Coke, Smart Thinking books are self-help texts for people who want to see themselves as being driven primarily by reason as opposed to emotion (and of course there is a gendered dimension to this as well).Our smartphones give us access to a lot of instant information. But that doesn’t mean they’re making us smarter. In other words, if you’re truly smart, you know that there’s a whole lot that you are really dumb about. We started out by looking at how the diversity of think tank staff compares on key metrics to society as a whole, London (where many think tanks are based), university students (the pool from which think tanks normally recruit), and cohorts recruited in different sectors like the civil service fast stream. The answer to this question will vary by individual think tank, but we include a list of benchmarks that organisations can use to see how diverse they are. But most importantly the sector needs to work together. Many of these problems are difficult to solve on an individual level. Think tanks need collective action to create a cross-sector graduate scheme, and co-ordinate university outreach. And last but not least, they should improve representation at events and in the media. In the words of one focus group participant: It all comes down to collecting more and more information from more and more perspectives. Read a wide-range of materials on a wide-range of topics.