What We're Up Against

The first obstacle is the overweighted confidence we place in cultivated cognitive abilities to solve all problems. There is no doubt that cognitive abilities and their cultivation are important to any human endeavor. But extensive research shows that cognitive abilities alone are not what most improve human activities. These lead to a number of related problems.

First, our understanding of how we think is often faulty, biased, or limited in certain contexts. This lack of metacognition often causes a variety of problems in understanding problems or solving them.

Second, we don't understand how emotional and cultural intelligence impact our mental model — the story we tell ourselves that gives context for how we define problems or create solutions. No matter how cognitively smart we may be, if we are not aware of the cultural differences with our friends, coworkers, customers, or community, we will not be intelligent enough to even understand a problem, let alone solve it.

Emotional intelligence poses even greater challenges, as our cognition is always influenced by our emotions — some in obvious and some not-so-obvious ways. People with high IQs are known to lack the ability to apply simple logic when emotionally challenged in personal relationships. Even a simple application of empathy is challenging for many; most college-educated adults struggle to distinguish between empathy and compassion, which are two distinct emotional responses though they are often conflated.

This is a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg problem. More fully human, intelligent people will be able to pick better incentives across different parts of their lives — personal, business, government. In 2026, we see that incentives are largely driven by money and/or power. Social media would have a drastically different impact on society if it had been developed with the public good as its primary incentive.

We believe that if people become more fully intelligent, they will understand the need to make the public good a primary incentive, and that money and power incentives must operate within a framework for the public good.

Our current schools and universities are challenged to fight against these obstacles. Liberal arts education is largely under attack, and AI hype in 2026 is calling its future usefulness into question. This is a gross misunderstanding of the mission of education, the role of business in universities, and the role of AI.

First, the mission of secondary and college education used to closely resemble preparing students for human flourishing, not just a good-paying job. Now, more than ever, it is critical that we begin integrating 21st-century intelligence discoveries to better tackle the mission of improving the full range of human intelligence, not just IQ/STEM. More importantly, 21st-century schooling needs to better meet learners where they are. We hope to lead experiments and programs that can begin this shift, one tiny habit at a time.

Second, the job of a university is not to prepare a person for just a job; its mission is to prepare them for the world, to adapt to change, and to cultivate capabilities that make them great problem solvers in any context.

Third, the role of AI is to assist human activities where machine learning would best help humans. To confuse LLM-driven AI tools as somehow equal or better than human intelligence is to answer a question not worth asking. Human intelligence is informed by an extremely complex combination of sensory information and brain mechanisms that evolved over millions of years — AI was created to help humans, not replace them. In human learning specifically, engaging with what we learn is critical to our intelligence and its productive application to human problems. Farming out how we learn is not a role for AI to fill.