An Interview with Guillermo Alejandro Escárcega Pliego on Family, Education, Talents, and Honesty and Truthfulness (Part One)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03/01
Abstract
Guillermo Alejandro Escárcega Pliego is the Founder of the Hall of Sophia. He discusses: family; early childhood; mentors; realization of talents; courses of study in high school; getting older and more freedom in the world; criticality of books and author while developing intellectually; formal qualifications; intelligence tests taken; reason for taking the tests; finding the high IQ communities; pluses and minuses of the community; important values of honesty and truthfulness; and some preliminary discussion about the Hall of Sophia.
Keywords: Catholics, Colegio de Ciencias y Humanidades Sur, Guillermo Alejandro Escárcega Pliego, Hall of Sophia, honesty, truthfulness, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
An Interview with Guillermo Alejandro Escárcega Pliego on Family, Education, Talents, and Honesty and Truthfulness: Founder, Hall of Sophia (Part One)[1],[2]*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*
1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s make this particular session about some family and personal background. Also, I express appreciation to Dr. Ronald Hoeflin for the recommendation of Mr. Guillermo Alejandro Escárcega Pliego from the Hall of Sophia for the interview. This creates a foundation upon which individuals may know more about you, and contextualizes some later responses – to the sensitive and astute. What was the family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or lack thereof?
Guillermo Alejandro Escárcega Pliego: I’m not the kind of person that likes to say too much about himself, so I will only say this.
I was born in Mexico City. I’m the firstborn of three brothers and one sister. My grandparents were Catholics. My mother considers herself a Catholic too. My first language is Spanish. My second language is English, which I learned when (if I remember well) I was fourteen years thanks to a wonderful teacher I had.
I consider myself a religious person too, but I haven’t chosen my religion.
My grandfather was a self-taught engineer and my mother has a Ph.D. in Pediatric Dentistry, so I grew up in a slightly culturally enriched family.
2. Jacobsen: In early childhood, were there any pivotal moments or memories crucial to identity formation for you? Those with sufficient fidelity to recall at this time.
Pliego: I grow up like a normal kid playing on fields, climbing trees, losing and winning marbles, playing football with my friends, watching television and once in a while reading the encyclopedias my mother bought. It was pretty much the same when I was an adolescent, but doing different things with different kinds of people. So, currently, I’m the kind of person that likes to have fun.
3. Jacobsen: Who were some crucial mentors in youth too? Often, successful intelligent adults had mentors or role models in youth, in specific ways as expressed by particular people.
Pliego: I didn’t have any, but I will always remember my grandma who always did the best she could for me.
4. Jacobsen: What made for a successful realization of talents and general abilities for you, as you made the transition from childhood to adolescence?
Pliego: I use to have fun solving math problems, which was something that helped me to realize that I was smart. I enjoyed and still enjoy intellectual endeavours.
5. Jacobsen: What courses of study took the most time in high school? In that, what areas were of the greatest interest to you?
Pliego: My pass through high school was kind of chaotic, to be honest. I never had a great interest in most of my courses. I just used to pass the exams to get the qualifications I needed to get out there. This doesn’t mean that I hated high school, since I met most of my closest friends and a lot of people that I consider friends during that period of my life.
6. Jacobsen: As you transitioned out of high school into young adulthood, what were the thoughts and feelings of the increased sense of freedom to explore the world in a personal and autonomous fashion?
Pliego: I have always been a very intellectually independent person, so I have always explored the world with my very particular way of seeing things drive by a desire of knowing the truth about me and creation.
7. Jacobsen: Were there any particular books or authors, in all this time, who stood out as particularly important to personal intellectual development?
Pliego: Not really, I’m a very critical person. I always take with a grain of salt all the things that I read or see, so even though I have read a bunch of books; I haven’t incorporated too much of them into myself.
8. Jacobsen: What have been the formal qualifications for you? This seems like a good primer to intelligence questions.
Pliego: The high school (Colegio de Ciencias y Humanidades Sur) and the university (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the biggest university in Latin America) where I studied (both public) selects his students using an standardized test which I passed two times, the first time to gain a place to study in the CCH Sur and the second to gain a place to study in the UNAM.
Both schools highly demanded here in Mexico, so thinking about tests and scores I think passing both tests is pretty much a formal qualification for me.
9. Jacobsen: What have been the mainstream and alternative IQ tests taken by you? What have been the scores and the relevant standard deviations in the scores? What ones seem like the most reliable indicators of general intelligence?
Pliego: In one hand, I was tested by a psychologist when I was an adolescent, but I don’t know which test she used. I don’t know which score I got since I stopped going to the sessions.
I haven’t take any other mainstream test supervised by a psychologist since then.
In the other hand, I have taken over 33 high range I.Q. tests scoring from 120 sd15 to 168 sd15 which correspond to 1.282 and 4.533333333333333 standard deviations above the mean, and 1 out of 10 to 1 out of 300,000 in the sense of rarity.
In mainstream psychology, reliability “refers to the consistency of a measure” and tests are considered reliable if people get the same result repeatedly something that doesn’t happen in the field of high range I.Q. testing since every high range designer has his own way to norm and design tests and every test is designed with different ideas of how extreme intelligence should be measured, so we can’t really talk about reliability in the field of high range I.Q. testing since designers haven’t come into agreement of how to norm, how to design, and how a high range I.Q. test should measure extreme intelligence.
So, in my opinion, the most reliable tests on the field of high range I.Q. testing are those who have big samples and those which are designed with proper ideas of what extreme intelligence is, such as The Titan Test and the LAIT. Both with big samples and good ideas of how extreme intelligence should be measured.
10. Jacobsen: Why take the tests in the first place and over time? I note some individuals take a large number of tests.
Pliego: Personally, I take them to challenge myself and to entertain my mind while I don’t have anything interesting to do.
11. Jacobsen: When did you find the community of the high IQ? How did these provide some semblance of a community of mind for you?
Pliego: Most of my interest for the high I.Q. community started when I read “A Short And Bloody History Of The High IQ Societies” by Robert Miyaguchi on my adolescence from there I started to gain interest on the people that are part of the community such as Evangelos Katsioulis, who I added as a friend on Facebook. Later, he invited me to join the Facebook group of the “Giga Society” in 2012, the group was very fun. I used to post my scores on online tests and the members of the group joined the fun by posting his scores on the comments section of the post.
For most of the time, it doesn’t, but sure one finds people with above-average interests than in an average community.
12. Jacobsen: What are the pluses and minuses of taking part in these communities?
Pliego: That once in a while you can have an interesting conversation with other members of the high I.Q. community or make a new interesting friend, while the rest of the time you will find a lot of harassment by people that think differently than you.
13. Jacobsen: As you have come to this point in life now, what have been the important values inculcated externally, internally, and in this interplay and the external and the internal? Why those values? How do you live those out each day, or try to embody those in daily life?
Pliego: It is hard to say, but I have always tried to live in the best way possible. This means to live in the most honest and truthful way I can.
14. Jacobsen: Next, we can look more into the Hall of Sophia. To set the grounds, what came to mind in the original formulation of the Hall of Sophia?
Pliego: I wanted to found a high I.Q. society different from all others but keeping the best of what makes a high I.Q. society great, so I blended what inspired me about the big societies like The Mega Society, the ISPE Society, and The Prometheus Society among others into a single concept which is the Hall of Sophia.
Appendix I: Footnotes
[1] Founder, Hall of Sophia.
[2] Individual Publication Date: March 1, 2020: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/pliego-one; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2020: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.
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