Easy
- Research
- 5 min
- Explain
- 45 sec
Single-layer ideas with a clear definition and an everyday example. Two questions.
in·tel·le·ge
Latin — imperative, 2nd person singular
from intellegere: to grasp, to perceive, to understand.
Not a noun. A command.
Read it. Close the tab. Now say it out loud.
You get a concept you didn't pick, a clock, and no AI to lean on. When the time runs out, everything closes and you explain what you learned — from memory, in your own words. Then you find out how much of it you actually understood.
No card. One easy, one medium, one hard round on the house.
The premise
I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.
Feynman's Intellege's four-step technique
Adapted from the method popularised as the “Feynman technique” — Feynman himself never wrote these four steps down.
Pick a topicThe topic finds youYou choose what you want to learn.The topic comes from the pool at random, so you can't retreat to what you already know.Explain it as you would to a child
No jargon to hide behind: plain words and comparisons a ten-year-old could follow.
Where you stall, go back to the source
right awayafter the roundThe moment you reach for jargon or can't go on is exactly where your understanding stops. You can't look anything up mid-explanation; that spot is marked in your report, and the sources are waiting when the round ends.
Simplify it and tell it as a story
Rebuild the hard parts with comparisons from everyday life. The clarity criterion in your evaluation looks for exactly this.
01The problem
Reading feels like learning.
It isn't.
Recognition is cheap. When the words are in front of you, your brain nods along and files the feeling of fluency as knowledge. Close the page and try to say the same thing out loud, and the gap shows up immediately — usually in the middle of a sentence you can't finish.
That gap is the only thing worth measuring, and almost nothing measures it. Quizzes test recognition. Flashcards test recall of the answer you already wrote. Neither asks the one question that matters: can you build the explanation yourself, unaided, in real time?
Intellege asks exactly that, every single round, and it doesn't let you bring notes.
02The round
Five steps. One sitting. No shortcuts.
A concept finds you
Pulled at random from the pool. Narrow it to a field — psychology, history, physics — but never to a specific topic.
Why If you could pick the topic, you'd pick what you already know. The randomness is the product.The clock starts
Five, ten or twenty minutes to research it however you like — your browser, a book, a person. Anything except AI.
5 min10 min20 minEverything closes
Time's up. Your notes disappear. The sources disappear. What's left is whatever made it into your head.
Optional Ready to explain before the clock runs out? End it and take the bet — finish strong and your score multiplies, finish badly and it cuts the other way.You explain
Two to four open questions, out loud, on the clock. Not "which of these is correct" — walk me through how it works.
Example "Who discovered the Barnum effect, and how? Describe the experiment and what it showed."You find out
What you nailed, what you skipped, what you got wrong and what's actually right. Plus the filler words and pauses in your delivery, counted one by one.
Order matters Strengths first, then gaps, then corrections. Your raw transcript stays folded away until you ask for it.
03Levels
Pick your weight class.
Medium
- Research
- 10 min
- Explain
- 90 sec
Needs the origin, the mechanism and an example to hold together. Three questions.
Hard
- Research
- 20 min
- Explain
- 3 min
Layered, contested, carries its own criticism. You'll be asked what's wrong with it. Four questions.
04What comes back
Three numbers that refuse to flatter you.
Explanation
Accuracy, coverage, clarity and structure — weighted by how deep the question was digging.
Delivery
Fillers per minute and words per minute. Counted by code, not guessed by a model.
Memory
Not from the round. From what you still remember days later — see below.
05The second round
Recall check · day 6
Who ran the experiment, and what were the participants given?
A week later,
we ask again.
Explaining something an hour after reading it proves very little. So days later — unannounced — your phone asks one question about a concept you covered. Forty-five seconds, out loud, no warning.
Each answer moves that topic's decay curve. Remember it well and the next check pushes further out; blank on it and it comes back sooner. Your Memory score is the honest average across everything you've studied.
Missing a check costs you nothing. Forgetting is normal, and a low Memory score isn't a punishment — it's a list of what's ready for another pass.
Pricing
Three rounds free. Then decide.
A cold open. The topic finds you and you cannot narrow it down — which is the point.