Intelligence Is How Good You Are At Getting What You Want

Agency is the ultimate definition of smarts

There’s a boring definition of intelligence—something about pattern recognition and cognitive tests.

Here’s a better one: you’re smart if you reliably get what you’re aiming at.

A person who wants a PhD, runs experiments for five years, writes the thesis, and gets handed a floppy hat at graduation? Smart.

A person who wants a PhD, buys a degree from a shady online “university,” and proudly prints it out on A4 paper? Also smart—just in a morally dubious way.

Agency sits at the center of this. Goals vary: money, status, comfort, truth, a clean kitchen, a revolution. One person optimizes ruthlessly, another dithers, another forgets halfway through. That’s the actual spectrum of intelligence: not IQ points, but goal achievement under constraints.

This tracks across humans

Babies are not smart. Not because they can’t do calculus, but because they want things—comfort, food, sleep—and fail to get them constantly. They cry, hoping someone else solves their problems.

Teenagers who figure out how to improve their social lives, their freedom, their future prospects? Smart. Good school grades don’t make you smart unless you can actually shape your life the way you want it.

A really intelligent student navigates university strategically and builds the career and lifestyle they’re aiming for. A less intelligent one gets stuck—unable to climb the ladder, unable to pivot, grinding through decades of work they never chose.

Here’s the kicker: on the Cantrill Ladder—a simple 0-10 scale measuring life satisfaction—really smart people should be able to get themselves to a 10. Yet very few people actually achieve this. Most hover around 5-7, wanting better lives but unable to steer toward them.

Not because they’re lazy. Because they lack the optimization power.

This scales across species

An octopus escapes from a sealed tank because it wants fish and refuses to take “no” for an answer. A crow solves multi-step puzzles and caches food where rivals won’t find it. A cow stands in a field, unable to open a gate, unable to flee the slaughterhouse—not because it wants death, but because it has no ability to steer away from it.

The usual approach to animal intelligence asks: can it recognize itself in a mirror? Can it do math? Can it use tools?

But these are human tribal markers. The cleaner metric: when the animal wants something, does it get it?

On that metric: apes and corvids, excellent; chickens, not so much.

The trap

Here’s where people make a convenient mistake: “Less intelligent creatures suffer less.”

This sounds tidy. It’s false.

We already established babies aren’t smart—they can’t achieve their goals. Yet everyone knows hurting babies is monstrous.

If intelligence determined how much suffering mattered, harming babies would barely register.

One step further

Cows can’t escape slaughter. Chickens can’t escape cages. Deer can’t escape parasites and starvation.

Their inability to fix their situation doesn’t mean their situation is fine. That’s the horror: beings that feel pain but can’t do anything about it.

The conclusion isn’t complicated:

Pain and intelligence are different axes. If we care about suffering, we can’t draw the line at “smart enough.”

Factory farms and wild ecosystems are full of beings experiencing intense, unfixable misery. We mostly don’t count it because they’re bad at getting what they want.

But that’s exactly when they need us most.