It is literally one of the highest IQ habits you can steal from the ancient world. Socrates was basically that annoying guy who never shut up asking why and making everyone explain their beliefs in detail until they exposed their own bullshit. If you actually internalize what he was doing you get a built in mental gym for thinking clearly, spotting cope, and upgrading your own model of reality instead of just collecting takes from YouTube and Reddit.
(I have included sources below, read if interested. this only serves as a basic overview)
At its core the Socratic method is simple. Instead of giving speeches and hot takes you ask structured questions. You dig down. If someone says justice or courage or love or fairness or mental health you do not just nod along. You stop and go ok, what does that actually mean? Define it. Give an example. Show where it applies and where it does not. Then you keep poking holes in the definition until you either get something tighter and more accurate or you realize none of you knew what you were talking about in the first place.
There is always a questioner and an answerer. The questioner is not supposed to do a debate bro “gotcha” every two seconds. The goal is not to dominate with one liners, it is to force both sides to inspect the foundations of whatever claim is on the table. The answerer tries to give sincere answers, not dodge, not change the topic. Usually the first answers sound confident but are sloppy. The more you question, the more contradictions and vague spots show up, and suddenly the person realizes they were building a big structure of opinion on vague words and vibes.
So how do you actually use this for brain gains and not just as a party trick. The first step is stop taking big words at face value. People throw around stuff like happiness, success, trauma, intelligence, masculinity, mental health, authenticity. If you want to think like Socrates you must instantly pause and silently ask what exactly are we pointing at when we say this. Can we give a concrete definition, not just “you know it when you see it.” Can we give edge cases. Can we say what would count against the definition. If you cannot, you are operating on fog.
Second step is train yourself to live in questions before you rush to answers. Instead of saying that guy is stupid you ask okay, by what metric? Slow processing speed. Lack of knowledge. Low impulse control. Mismatch between environment and strengths. You break it down. If you cannot come up with precise questions you literally cannot think precisely. Your mind just loops on vague labels. You willl be basically moving from vague labels to sharp pattern recognition and that starts with asking the right small questions over and over.
Third step is you turn the Socratic method on yourself. This is where it actually gets hard. Whenever you feel some strong belief or strong emotion pop up you can sit down with pen and paper and play both roles. Write down a claim like 'I am a failure' or 'I am definitely gifted' or 'I am ugly' or 'nobody respects me.' Then as the questioner you start poking it. What do you mean by failure? By what standard? Compared to who? In what time frame? What evidence supports this? What evidence goes against it that I am ignoring? Can I think of at least one serious counterexample? You will notice that your big dramatic beliefs usually rest on like two cherry picked memories and some fuzzy definitions.
This is where the therapy angle comes in. Donald Robertson has stuff on how to think like Socrates from a Stoic and therapeutic perspective and it is literally just structured questioning to kill irrational thoughts before they rot your life. You are not gaslighting yourself or coping. You are stress testing your own narratives the way a good engineer stress tests a bridge. If your belief breaks under a few Socratic questions it never deserved to run your life in the first place.
So why is this relevant to maximising your intelligence?
short answer: smarter = better life
You are not changing your raw hardware IQ with this. What you are changing is how efficiently you use whatever you did get from the genetic lottery. Most people waste their IQ on defending their egos, protecting their first opinions, and repeating the same low resolution takes because those takes make them feel safe. Socratic method forces you into a different mode. You voluntarily attack your own beliefs before reality does. You look for contradictions in your thinking. You look for parts you cannot explain clearly. You notice when you are relying on undefined words like “good person” or “toxic” as if they were precise.
This has a few effects. One, it raises your baseline clarity. You get used to translating vague claims into concrete, testable language. Two, it hardens you against manipulation. A lot of propaganda is just abuse of language. People will sell you nonsense by wrapping it in emotionally heavy words that nobody defines. Once you are trained to always ask 'ok define that and give examples and tell me what would prove you wrong,' you become much more resistant to bullshit cope. Three, it increases your learning speed. When you learn something new, you do not just memorize it. You question it, fit it into your existing map, look for tension points, and the knowledge actually sticks because you have wrestled with it.
The Socratic method also pairs really well with the idea of arguing the opposite of your own beliefs. If you want to level up your thinking you should regularly pick some topic you care about and force yourself to build the strongest possible argument for the other side. For example how much AI use should be allowed in schools. Instead of just instinctively saying “AI is bad for learning” or “AI is the future,” you put yourself in the opposite camp and start asking how would they define learning. What do they count as cheating. What long term effects are they worried about. What evidence would change their mind. When you do this honestly your brain is forced out of autopilot and you stop living in an echo chamber.
You can turn this into a practical drill. Grab any hot topic people have strong opinions about and run it through a mini Socratic session. Write down your initial take. Then question it like you are Socrates talking to some cocky athenian or something. Ask what do you mean by that. What is your evidence. Are there counterexamples. Are there situations where your view fails. Then switch and build the best possible case against yourself. You will come out of that with either a much stronger, cleaner version of your belief or you will realize you were mostly running on tribal loyalty and vibes. Both outcomes are wins because they clean your mental environment.
The key thing with Socratic method is no direct contradiction just for ego. You are not trying to score points by shouting wrong at people. You are trying to get them to hit the point where they say I thought I knew this but I actually do not. That is the exact same point you are aiming for in yourself. You want to live in a mental environment where you are constantly discovering those edges and tightening them up. Once you get used to that, being wrong stops feeling like an attack on your identity. It just feels like leg day for your brain.
If you want to go straight to some source material and see how this looks in practice, Laches is a short dialogue where Socrates takes on the concept of courage. Everyone thinks they know what courage is until he starts asking simple questions and slowly their confident definitions fall apart. It is like watching a live autopsy of vague thinking. Then there is the Apology, which is basically Socrates explaining and defending this whole way of life in court while everyone is seething at him. You get to see what happens when you commit so hard to questioning and truth that the whole city decides you are a problem.
Bottom line, if you want to become more intelligent, stop treating thinking as something that just happens to you and start treating it as a skill you train. The Socratic method is a simple, brutal framework for that. Define your terms. Ask follow up questions. Look for contradictions. Argue against yourself. Dig until the vague vibe takes either sharpen into real knowledge or collapse into dust. Do that for a few years and you will not just “feel smarter,” you will literally have a cleaner and sharper mental map than most people around you who are still hypnotized by their first opinions and their favorite slogans
Sources/further reading:
Laches: https://platonicfoundation.org/laches/
Apology: https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil100/04. Apology.pdf
'The Socratic Method' by Ward Farnsworth
(also good video, but imo better to read actual dialogues)
(I have included sources below, read if interested. this only serves as a basic overview)
At its core the Socratic method is simple. Instead of giving speeches and hot takes you ask structured questions. You dig down. If someone says justice or courage or love or fairness or mental health you do not just nod along. You stop and go ok, what does that actually mean? Define it. Give an example. Show where it applies and where it does not. Then you keep poking holes in the definition until you either get something tighter and more accurate or you realize none of you knew what you were talking about in the first place.
There is always a questioner and an answerer. The questioner is not supposed to do a debate bro “gotcha” every two seconds. The goal is not to dominate with one liners, it is to force both sides to inspect the foundations of whatever claim is on the table. The answerer tries to give sincere answers, not dodge, not change the topic. Usually the first answers sound confident but are sloppy. The more you question, the more contradictions and vague spots show up, and suddenly the person realizes they were building a big structure of opinion on vague words and vibes.
So how do you actually use this for brain gains and not just as a party trick. The first step is stop taking big words at face value. People throw around stuff like happiness, success, trauma, intelligence, masculinity, mental health, authenticity. If you want to think like Socrates you must instantly pause and silently ask what exactly are we pointing at when we say this. Can we give a concrete definition, not just “you know it when you see it.” Can we give edge cases. Can we say what would count against the definition. If you cannot, you are operating on fog.
Second step is train yourself to live in questions before you rush to answers. Instead of saying that guy is stupid you ask okay, by what metric? Slow processing speed. Lack of knowledge. Low impulse control. Mismatch between environment and strengths. You break it down. If you cannot come up with precise questions you literally cannot think precisely. Your mind just loops on vague labels. You willl be basically moving from vague labels to sharp pattern recognition and that starts with asking the right small questions over and over.
Third step is you turn the Socratic method on yourself. This is where it actually gets hard. Whenever you feel some strong belief or strong emotion pop up you can sit down with pen and paper and play both roles. Write down a claim like 'I am a failure' or 'I am definitely gifted' or 'I am ugly' or 'nobody respects me.' Then as the questioner you start poking it. What do you mean by failure? By what standard? Compared to who? In what time frame? What evidence supports this? What evidence goes against it that I am ignoring? Can I think of at least one serious counterexample? You will notice that your big dramatic beliefs usually rest on like two cherry picked memories and some fuzzy definitions.
This is where the therapy angle comes in. Donald Robertson has stuff on how to think like Socrates from a Stoic and therapeutic perspective and it is literally just structured questioning to kill irrational thoughts before they rot your life. You are not gaslighting yourself or coping. You are stress testing your own narratives the way a good engineer stress tests a bridge. If your belief breaks under a few Socratic questions it never deserved to run your life in the first place.
So why is this relevant to maximising your intelligence?
short answer: smarter = better life
You are not changing your raw hardware IQ with this. What you are changing is how efficiently you use whatever you did get from the genetic lottery. Most people waste their IQ on defending their egos, protecting their first opinions, and repeating the same low resolution takes because those takes make them feel safe. Socratic method forces you into a different mode. You voluntarily attack your own beliefs before reality does. You look for contradictions in your thinking. You look for parts you cannot explain clearly. You notice when you are relying on undefined words like “good person” or “toxic” as if they were precise.
This has a few effects. One, it raises your baseline clarity. You get used to translating vague claims into concrete, testable language. Two, it hardens you against manipulation. A lot of propaganda is just abuse of language. People will sell you nonsense by wrapping it in emotionally heavy words that nobody defines. Once you are trained to always ask 'ok define that and give examples and tell me what would prove you wrong,' you become much more resistant to bullshit cope. Three, it increases your learning speed. When you learn something new, you do not just memorize it. You question it, fit it into your existing map, look for tension points, and the knowledge actually sticks because you have wrestled with it.
The Socratic method also pairs really well with the idea of arguing the opposite of your own beliefs. If you want to level up your thinking you should regularly pick some topic you care about and force yourself to build the strongest possible argument for the other side. For example how much AI use should be allowed in schools. Instead of just instinctively saying “AI is bad for learning” or “AI is the future,” you put yourself in the opposite camp and start asking how would they define learning. What do they count as cheating. What long term effects are they worried about. What evidence would change their mind. When you do this honestly your brain is forced out of autopilot and you stop living in an echo chamber.
You can turn this into a practical drill. Grab any hot topic people have strong opinions about and run it through a mini Socratic session. Write down your initial take. Then question it like you are Socrates talking to some cocky athenian or something. Ask what do you mean by that. What is your evidence. Are there counterexamples. Are there situations where your view fails. Then switch and build the best possible case against yourself. You will come out of that with either a much stronger, cleaner version of your belief or you will realize you were mostly running on tribal loyalty and vibes. Both outcomes are wins because they clean your mental environment.
The key thing with Socratic method is no direct contradiction just for ego. You are not trying to score points by shouting wrong at people. You are trying to get them to hit the point where they say I thought I knew this but I actually do not. That is the exact same point you are aiming for in yourself. You want to live in a mental environment where you are constantly discovering those edges and tightening them up. Once you get used to that, being wrong stops feeling like an attack on your identity. It just feels like leg day for your brain.
If you want to go straight to some source material and see how this looks in practice, Laches is a short dialogue where Socrates takes on the concept of courage. Everyone thinks they know what courage is until he starts asking simple questions and slowly their confident definitions fall apart. It is like watching a live autopsy of vague thinking. Then there is the Apology, which is basically Socrates explaining and defending this whole way of life in court while everyone is seething at him. You get to see what happens when you commit so hard to questioning and truth that the whole city decides you are a problem.
Bottom line, if you want to become more intelligent, stop treating thinking as something that just happens to you and start treating it as a skill you train. The Socratic method is a simple, brutal framework for that. Define your terms. Ask follow up questions. Look for contradictions. Argue against yourself. Dig until the vague vibe takes either sharpen into real knowledge or collapse into dust. Do that for a few years and you will not just “feel smarter,” you will literally have a cleaner and sharper mental map than most people around you who are still hypnotized by their first opinions and their favorite slogans
Sources/further reading:
Laches: https://platonicfoundation.org/laches/
Apology: https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil100/04. Apology.pdf
'The Socratic Method' by Ward Farnsworth
(also good video, but imo better to read actual dialogues)
