The short answer is "No." No-one knows how to do that.

The longer answer is "It's complicated." Processing power, crystalized knowledge, and rationality are three different things.

Processing power is probably mostly genetic in humans and there's not much you can do about it. Exercise, nutrition, and nootropics can help, but only to a degree. Learning different tactics to apply to problem solving or mnemonics can help you use what you have more effectively. Still, the human brain is remarkably plastic. If I had to guess, techniques like sensory substitution, biofeedback, or advanced meditation might let someone reallocate their gray matter and improve their processing power that way. But no-one knows how, so that would be original research.

It takes a surprising amount of processing power to beat expert knowledge. When Kasparov lost the chess match to Deep Blue in 1997, he still won two games in the match! A lot of "smarts" is knowledge. A large language model takes a lot more processing power to train than to run inference. There are limited situations where figuring everything out on the spot is necessary. More processing power does let you acquire that crystalized knowledge faster, so those with higher IQs tend to have more of it, but so does effort, allocated time, effective teachers (private tutors), and accumulated civilizational knowledge. You can catch up with and even surpass a higher-IQ individual who isn't really trying in terms of crystalized knowledge if you take full advantage of these other factors.

The capacity for effort is partly innate talent, but nootropics can probably help you here more than for raw IQ. You probably have as much time as anyone else, but if you're willing to sacrifice time spent on other things, you can dedicate more of it to study. If you can afford private tutors, they're much more effective than classes. If you can't, you can ask GPT-4 to pretend to be one, and that might still be more effective than classes. There has never been a time with more available knowledge. You can read textbooks.

And finally, the sanity waterline is pretty low. Rationality can help you avoid a lot of stupid mistakes. Who you hang out with really affects how you think. You don't need a super-high IQ to learn and practice rationality. Most of their edge would go into finding us in the first place. But you're already here.

Maybe a slightly pity answer, but comparative advantage is worth learning about and Being the (Pareto) Best in the World is worth a read.

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