Growing Up Gifted, and Pathetically Awkward in the 70s
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/20
Rick Rosner is a personal and professional friend. I interviewed Rick in an extensive interview on In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, which came to about 100,000 words. Rick claims to have the world’s second highest IQ. He is a member of the Mega Society and was the journal editor, as well Errol Morris interviewed him for the TV series First Person. Here we talk about his background as an exceptionally gifted kid, this is part 1.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of geography, culture, and language, where does your family background reside? How do you find this influencing your development?
Rick Rosner: I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, with my mom, stepdad, and brother, and spent a month each summer with my dad and stepmom and their kids in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My ancestors came from Eastern Europe and the Baltics by way of Cincinnati and Shreveport. I’m Jewish, but out west, Jewish cultural influence is somewhat attenuated.
Jacobsen: In Noesis issue 57’s article When Good IQs Happen to Bad People, you describe some of your experience as a kid. Could you elaborate on some of the histories before entering grade school?
Rosner: I showed some signs of being a child prodigy – by the age of about 18 months, I’d learned the alphabet, and by age 3 ¾, I’d taught myself to read at a near-adult level, which was unusual for the era. I was good with puzzles and math – but this wasn’t encouraged. My parents thought I’d do better growing up as a normal kid, which did not go smoothly.
Some non-prodigy stuff – the theme music to Perry Mason scared me – I’d have to go hide behind the couch. My first crush was on Patty Duke on The Patty Duke Show, who I somehow conflated with my dad’s sister, Aunt Janice, whom I saw during summer visitation with my dad in Los Angeles. My first memory is of the Raggedy Ann & Andy curtains and bedspread in my room.
We had a very nice cocker spaniel named Tinkerbell, who died when I was four. (This is before cockers became overbred and high-strung.)
I was terrified of swimming, which was part of my generally being a wuss – had to be peeled off the side of the pool by the swim teacher.
Jacobsen: What about your time in grade school, junior high, high school, and college? In particular, what do you consider pivotal moments in each of these cross-sections of latter portions of your early life?
Rosner: I grew up nerdy and interested in science, deciding at a young age to make it my job to figure out the universe. At age six, I was left with a scary babysitter, which led me to start spinning clockwise, chanting to God and to be sent to my first shrink.
I was uncoordinated. Each year, I’d enter the 50-yard-dash on track & field day, and each year would come in last. (Maybe the other not-so-fast kids knew not to enter the race and avoid the embarrassment.) Even as a kid, I had gross caveman feet with weirdly long second toes. I used to take off my shoe to make girls scream and run away – I liked the attention.
In the 1970s, there was no such thing as nerd chic. If you were nerdy, you were probably lonely. But, like many misguided nerds, I thought my intelligence and niceness would inspire a girl to look past my nerdiness. I spent the second semester of ninth grade building a Three-Dimensional Gaussian Distribution Generator to demonstrate to my honors math class.
The machine dropped a thousand BBs through a pyramidal tower of overlapping half-inch grids into a 24-by-12 array of columns. It was a supercharged Plinko machine with an added spatial dimension, forming a half-bell of BBs, thanks to the laws of probability.
During its construction, I thought, “A girl will see this elegant experimental apparatus, think I’m brilliant, and become my girlfriend.” I completed the BB Machine in time to demonstrate it to the class on the last day of school. No one cared. Of course, they didn’t – it was the last day of junior high, and a dweeb was pouring BBs into a plastic pyramid.
Realizing that my nerdiness was standing in the way of ever having a girlfriend, I began changing myself – lifting weights and wearing contact lenses.
Towards the end of high school, I saw my IQ test scores, which maxed out at about 150. I decided that a 150 IQ wasn’t high enough for me to become the world-changing physicist I wanted to be, so I decided to become kind of a meathead – a stripper and a bar bouncer. At about the same time I was beginning my meathead career, I started to take high-end IQ tests, scoring in the 170s, 180s, and eventually 190s.
I also found out that among the reasons I’d never scored much above 150 on school-administered IQ tests is that the tests themselves don’t go much above 150. (This makes sense – if you’re a teacher or administrator trying to figure out whether a kid needs educational enrichment, it doesn’t matter much whether a kid’s IQ is 150 or 165. With either IQ, that kid will go stir-crazy in a regular classroom.)
I’d never quit thinking about physics, but my new, high scores gave me more confidence that I might eventually be able to theorize productively. Of course, a few points should probably be subtracted from my IQ for basing my life on IQ scores.
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