Ask A Genius (or Two): Conversation with Erik Haereid and Rick Rosner on Non-Genius (Part Eight)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/01
Abstract
Rick Rosner and I conduct a conversational series entitled Ask A Genius on a variety of subjects through In-Sight Publishing on the personal and professional website for Rick. According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. Erik Haereid earned a score at 185, on the N-VRA80. Both scores on a standard deviation of 15. A sigma of 6.00+ (or ~6.13 or 6.20) for Rick – a general intelligence rarity of 1 in 1,009,976,678+ (with some at rarities of 1 in 2,314,980,850 or 1 in 3,527,693,270) – and ~5.67 for Erik – a general intelligence rarity of 1 in 136,975,305. Of course, 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. This amounts to a joint interview or conversation with Erik Haereid, Rick Rosner, and myself.
Keywords: America, Erik Haereid, genius, intelligence, non-genius, Norway, Rick Rosner, Scott Douglas Jacobsen, supernaturalism.
Ask A Genius (or Two): Conversation with Erik Haereid and Rick Rosner on Non-Genius (Part Eight)[1],[2]*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*
1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: On the flip side of the previous line of questioning, I want to look at genius going awry and the supernatural, as these may be related to one another in some ways. Some obvious; others not. We covered intelligence and genius in an extensive manner. One in which the genius gets defined and affirmed, in talents and productions.
However, what about the opposite or its negatives? What is genius not?
Rick Rosner: With Genius, there is a quality novelty. There is new stuff, new acts of the imagination that are not shitty. When I am talking non-sense to my dogs, most of what I say is not funny or interesting. It is just a flood of stupid syllables or a bunch of bad rhymes. Were it caught on camera, there is no quality there. Non-sense can be inspired like the poem Jabberwocky, which is all nonsense syllables. But it is good. The stuff that isn’t inspired or can tell where everything came from. That it is just a repackaging of shit that you have seen before. All of that stuff sucks. Sometimes, genius is being the first to express something persuasively that seems obvious in retrospect, like plate tectonics by Alfred Wegener. People throughout history have occasionally proposed that with the coastline, or at least ever since there were decent maps of the world, that the continents fit together. He is the one who made the argument persuasively enough that it stuck. He got the credit and gets to be considered its founder. He took something that doesn’t feel like an act of creative genius, like Orson Welles and Citizen Kane feels like an act of genius. It wasn’t a work of art what Wegener did. He pointed out a truth. You can be creative. You can be true. It has to hit, though. You might be able to make the case that the genius changes the culture. Although, you could argue that there are undiscovered geniuses. People who are unlucky to not have their stuff discovered, at least not until later. That’s what the deal is: adding to the load of stuff that belongs to humanity that has been thought up.
Erik Haereid: It’s when you are not creative, inventive, do not use your inner power of ingenuity to make expressions that are visible to others, if you copy others. A society’s lack of will or abilities to evolve towards a better community is the opposite of genius. Societies that suppress individual expressions, like dictatorships, represent the opposite of genius. “Better” is disputable, but in my view it’s the best for preserving the needs for everyone and all.
If one “genius”’ creative expressions suppress the others, such that the society stagnates or is exterminated it’s the opposite of a genius, even though the invention is clever.
2. Jacobsen: What do you see as the myths about genius?
Rosner: There’s the genius who is just bad at life and has a miserable life. There is the miserable genius who is all fucked up, never made money, lives in a hovel, never had a girlfriend, etc. There used to be stories that ran in the Inquirer every year or two that was about, “Look at this fucked up genius, aren’t you glad that you’re not a genius?” Or just genius stereotypes, absentmindedness, thinking about abstract shit and not paying attention to what is going on around him, it is generally a “him” by stereotype. If it is a her, wearing glasses, sexually frigid, needs to have her glasses taken off and hair taken down to release her inner sexy girl, this is a myth that is like the librarian. The girl genius runs into the librarian. The good at math and bad at life, good at academics, stuff. Every Bond villain is a kind of a genius. There’s the evil genius bent on world domination. There’s the busy penis genius Picasso. Usually not a math guy, it is an art guy or a novel guy. His unfettered creativity is connected to his unfettered penis.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: A lot of the stereotypes about genius are connected to people who can’t follow, or live, an ordinary life with going to the office and then coming home to the family. The genius who can’t do the 1950s parent lifestyle. They have to go and have adventures. Most of the stereotypes bounce off that. A gift to distancing the person from normal human interactions and behaviours. You just go there and then think about what are behaviours that take somebody away from normal lifestyles and behaviours. Anything that you can think of, then you can put on the genius stereotype. It is the wheelhouse of that stereotype without having to enumerate every instance. In Little Man Tate, which was about little geniuses, the most obnoxious was the mathemagician who wore all black plus a cape.
Haereid: Heh, that the genius always is the inventor of the idea. The genius makes an idea visible, known, through a purification and refinement of it. You could have a bunch of highly intelligent, invisible persons evolving several smart ideas, and you have that one lucky, or not of course, bastard that takes all the credit.
That the genius is always highly intelligent. This is simply not true. That geniuses are mad and avoid any other activity than thinking, and that they are depressed. That’s not true either. And the scientific type; good at math or physics. I guess there are some or many of the genius artists, painters, composers and writers through history that couldn’t add two numbers.
3. Jacobsen: What truths dispel those myths?
Rosner: I feel like at various times in the past century. I don’t think fame came into its own until the 20th century. But you don’t really get the fame industry until the 20th century. During various eras, famous people killed themselves through misbehaviour. Sometimes, it is through shitty behaviour like driving while drunk. William Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom…You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.” It is kind of the popular picture of gifted, creatives, where they were out of hand in all areas.
Haereid: That someone write about those myths as myths? Get to know a genius better? To the public it’s boring with ordinary traits on geniuses. So, I guess it’s difficult to convince people that Einstein somehow wasn’t crazy, like the iconic picture of him somehow tries to paint. I don’t know. People are not searching for the truth but to fulfill their needs.
4. Jacobsen: What does “out of hand” mean in this context?
Rosner: Drink, druggy, fucky, getting in fights, suicidal, manic, and depressed, it is just that shit, and unhinged. John from the Beautiful Mind. A truth of a lot of genius is a lot of people who were really smart have a natural tendency to not be out of hand or have done the math on it and realized that it is less trouble to not be out of hand. The truth behind a lot of genius is that a good fraction of geniuses has lived fairly normal lives. That’s not always frickin’ true like William Marsden who you wouldn’t exactly call him a genius. He invented Wonder Woman. He thought women needed a superhero to inspire them the way boys had them. I forget what else he did. It wasn’t his main deal. And he had a three-way marriage. He and his wife took in another woman who loved him. They were banging for a while. You’ve got a certain fraction of a certain segment of the genius population that is going to find it worth their while to make up their own rules about behaviour. These could be overlapping segments. You could have people who live lives that are extremely traditional in some ways and still really weird in other ways. They did a whole T.V. series about Masters & Johnson who mapped sex. They studied human sexual response and had respectable careers within academia when they weren’t getting in trouble for having sex. They had enough weird sex stuff going on with them or around them that they made a three- or four-season T.V. series about them. The truth about geniuses is that sometimes they make up their own rules. Sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes, the rules that they end up settling on is that it is easier not to be all weird all the time. Again, this is a whole area, where you could pretty much suss out what you would find with a map of risk-to-reward, or how much energy it takes to do shit and how much energy somebody has to spend on stuff. A couple of years ago, you and I were talking about the economics of thinking [Ed. Cognitive Thrift: Volume I]
You don’t get thinking for free. It is not unlimited. Similarly, you can imagine geniuses as people who have more cognitive and behavioural money to invest in their lives, to engineering their lives. Given the more energetic situation, they have more energy. They have more stuff to throw at life. That means that you’re going to get a wider distribution of behaviours from a weirdness that takes various forms. Within that envelope, you’ve got normal behaviours for the people who have thought about stuff and decided, “There is enough good stuff on T.V. I do not need to spend 100 nights a year on Tinder, Grindr, or whatever else, having weird shitty sex with strangers.” The more I talk about this. The more that I realize that there is a model that when applied to human behaviour, an energetic model or economic model. It would allow you to invent fictitious genius behaviour given geniuses having more energy to do weird stuff, and also being somewhat psychopathic or not constrained by convention.
5. Jacobsen: What do you make of fake geniuses? Those claiming the status by themselves, for themselves, and, in fact, sometimes fooling a large number of people and garnering followings. They may argue for supernatural powers, as if they can read the future, read minds, have a direct communication or special insight from God, and so on.
Rosner: In the past 25 years, there has developed a pick-up artist community with guys developing strategies for women becoming interested in them. The reason that it is more of a movement now than 50 years ago is because the how to pick-up girls guides 50 years ago were just shitty. They weren’t very helpful. They weren’t based on any strategies that would get you anywhere based on the modern deal. Modern strategies include things like the most well-known pick-up artist strategy of negging. You don’t go up to a beautiful woman and then tell her she is beautiful because everyone tells her she is beautiful. You tell her something designed to confuse her. The standard example: “Your nose does something weird when you laugh.” Now, the woman, instead of basking in being beautiful, is like, “What does my nose look like when I laugh?” A pick-up artist is supposed to use the discombobulation to get there. Anyway, to get back to fake genius, it is a way to get stuff, get laid, get money, get recognition – professional or otherwise, to get adulation. It is like being a T.V. preacher. It is a way to have the license to get people to give you shit if you’re good at it. There is deluded genius. There are people who think that they are super-geniuses. I don’t know if anyone has interviewed Raniere extensively or at all because he is in prison. It would be a semi-interesting thing to explore how much of his own bullshit that he believes, probably quite a bit or maybe it varied from moment to moment. He scammed the Bronfman sisters who are heir to the Seagrum’s fortune. He scammed them out of $100 million for him to invest and make a shitload of money. He lost the $100 million. When he talked them out of giving him $100 million to invest, I assume that he thought that he was a genius investor and could make a bunch of money from investing. Otherwise, if he was just a scammer who didn’t believe in his ability to invest, he would have just deposited it somewhere for his own use and then invested it not crazily. He, maybe, would have been a hedge fund guy trying to figure out the best way to make money while not losing most of the money. Instead, he probably thought that he had good instincts and lost $100 million. To me, this indicates that, at some point, Raniere really believed in himself. Maybe, the shit changes. I don’t know what this says about him believing in himself or not with him fucking his harem of sex slaves. I don’t know if he told himself that he was making the women that he was having sex with more enlightened, so it was more worth their while to put up with his shit. There is the potential, among fake geniuses, for delusion, for believing in your bullshit.
Haereid: People who really think or make people believe they are God or have supernatural powers, are either ill, delusional, hallucinating, or they are just manipulating to gain a benefit.
Some people manipulate, like an alchemist, or a priest that convince you that the members of the church have to pay him a tithe or something; he’s God’s representative on Earth. If this priest proclaimed that he sold dreams, that this was transparent, like Hollywood; it would be right and fair, I guess. I gladly paid money buying Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist, and not because I believe in alchemy.
Fake geniuses often utilize vulnerable persons; persons in personal crises and the like. Their “inventions” are dreams, expectations and divinations, and they promise this to happen. A premise is that people really believe in these lies.
There is a problem concerning trust and vulnerability. The optimal case is that we have this healthy skepticism towards any man-god. It’s a known thing that charming people, often psychopaths and sociopaths, have the greatest influence on vulnerable persons. I think the society, friends and a trusted family have to deal with that. But there are a lot of power in some people, and the ability to convince and lead is sometimes godlike and misused, unfortunately. I have discussed the phenomenon psychopaths with a couple of psychologists, and asked them what to do when one meets one. And the answer is unfortunately not very helpful or scientific: “Run!”
6. Jacobsen: How can the general public, akin to warnings about margins of error in the HRT world, be warned about this self-aggrandization and overt narcissism, even treading into delusions of grandeur?
Rosner: The thing that most protects the public against stuff like that is the public could not give even 3/10ths of a shit about genius, whether self-proclaimed or legit generated by an IQ score. There was an era when genius had more clout in the 1960s when people cared more about it. Nobody cares that much anymore. Genius is not that much of today’s cultural landscape. You have so-called geniuses who have given us huge chunks of our cultural landscape, like the Bill Gates’ of the world. We are more concerned about the devices than the geniuses who created them. Those geniuses, by the way, are captains of industry. There have been a bunch of movies about Steve Jobs. People are, at least, somewhat interested in him. But there’s even less interest in geniuses who aren’t billionaire captains of industry. Nobody cares about them. Unless, the genius is an engine that drives a fictional story. It makes a certain amount of sense that there is not a lot of room in the world or in the zeitgeist for genius. I would argue there is a lot more room. It is a failure of programming to exploit smart people. I did four pilots for shows about geniuses. None of them went anywhere. I’ve pitched and developed a shitload of projects for T.V. about making yourself smarter, about geniuses competing. All of this different stuff. None of this has gone anywhere. It is a failure of terrible reality T.V., to realize that super smart people are just as exploitable train wreck reality entertainment as any other group of people. There is a problem of working with smart people. You may have to roll more footage, or maybe not. Also, smart people are not good-looking idiots. Beautiful people, there’s always entertainment built around beautiful people. So, if you are casting a reality show, and if you pick the Bachelor and the Bachelorette, they start with 25 or 30 bachelors or bachelorettes each season. They are looking for people who are interesting and beautiful. I am thinking that there are probably people who could get on the Bachelor without being that interesting if they are super duper hot. I don’t cast for it, anyway. There’s a bar for interestingness when certain reality shows are casting beautiful people. It is a problem when there’s another set of criteria that knocks out your beautiful people. For instance, porn, the most beautiful people in the world tend not to do porn, because porn selects from the set of people willing to do porn. That sub-set of everybody generally eliminates the most beautiful people. You can have good looking people in porn, but you can’t have the best-looking people in porn. Similarly, if your sub-set of everybody is people who are really smart, it is such a smaller sub-set of humanity. Also, it is a different sub-set than the people who will do porn because the sub-set of people who will do porn overlaps with the people who can make money off their looks. The sub-set of people are really smart has very little overlap with the sub-set of people who can make money off their looks. So, if you are doing a reality show about smart people, then you’re going to have to have all sorts of compromises made for those people to also be attractive. So, you’ll have a show with smart mostly unattractive people or slightly less smart but slightly more attractive people. In either case, you’re a little bit fucked. Also, reality producers are lazy. They’re, maybe, not willing to put in the extra work to come up with a decent product. Even though, your people aren’t as beautiful as the people on the Bachelor. So, geniuses probably should be more in the zeitgeist, but reality shows have not adequately exploited them.
Haereid: I agree with Rick: The public doesn’t care. But some outside HRT are interested and curious, and some in the environment are on T.V. and in newspapers too. So, sometimes journalists do show some enthusiasm. They want a story.
I think that to gain the public’s interest you have to be a real genius and not only on paper; you must surprise people with your genius art or invention.
I repeat: It’s necessary to clean up within the HRT-environment. There are a lot of good intentions and work, and some turmoil too.
7. Jacobsen: On supernaturalism, does this seem real to you?
Rosner: Nope!
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Haereid: No. What is real is all the stuff we haven’t revealed yet. People tend to overlook the things we don’t know, and fill the empty spaces with history. Then every unthinkable event becomes impossible.
I think that everyone has powers that we don’t get hold of and not used. It’s a lot of social and other depressive forces that prevent us from getting in touch with these innate, nuclear powers; but they are not supernatural. It’s a gap between what we do and our potentials. We can see that as a potential per se, and sort of a destiny; we can approach and getting closer to our potential, but never exploit all of it.
8. Jacobsen: Do claims of the supernatural seem like ancient mythologies or extrapolations thereof? A sort of extension of primitive, less rigorous forms of thought into the current more rational, more scientific era, in spite of the attendant problems of the power of science and human proclivities.
Rosner: Not exactly, when people make up stuff, it is easier to get a better-quality made-up product if you are, at least, grounded in the history of made-up stuff.
Haereid: You mean like an archetypical inheritance? Or that we need to preserve some materials in spite of what is logical?
It’s maybe a part of it. Perhaps we don’t dare to feel safe about science yet; it doesn’t give us the comfort we need. We have to trust it more than we do, and meanwhile we rest on the myths and the idea of supernatural forces. That’s a thought.
9. Jacobsen: How do the standard operations of religious frameworks or structures of looking at the world lead to asserted supernaturalisms rather than naturalisms?
Rosner: The deal is, we have only had science for a few hundred years. But people have been looking for ways to understand the world and for understanding for 20,000 years. So, you’ve got a wrong, bad, but interesting, explanation stretching back thousands of years. That’s where most of the religions of the world, probably all of them, are an attempt to order the world, to understand it, and to gain some measure of control, or some solace over the shit that happens. Humans as generalists, as the most thinky species on the planet, are drawn to, our niche is, exploiting regularities in the environment – figuring out how shit works. We are drawn to, or we are compelled to, explain stuff. The stuff that is harder to explain will fill up with wrong explanations.
Haereid: We need explanations for everything; it’s in our blood. Science doesn’t give all the answers. Maybe it never will. Birth and death, what’s before and after? What are thoughts and why can’t I rest in my emotions? Why do I fear things that aren’t real? Why don’t I instantly understand what is real and not? What is phobia? What is love?
Thunder is caused by Thor until you rest in peace with another answer, scientific or not. Our culture is familiar to us, we recognize it, and we feel safe about it, whether it’s faith or science.
Manipulation, brainwash, culture. We don’t have a choice, there are no alternatives. That’s another angle. In secular communities, faith could be more of a choice, but then you have the needs, including needs of affiliation; you choose believing in something supernatural because everybody else does. The critical voices belong to the unpopular minority. Then you don’t have a choice either, because you need an answer, and since science doesn’t, you choose a supernatural solution.
10. Jacobsen: Are religions factually correct or incorrect to make these assumptions in their views of the world?
Rosner: In the last 100 years, probably the last 60 years, you have Popper and Kuhn who theorized about the history of science, right?
Jacobsen: Yes, and Lakatos and Feyerabend.
Rosner: When people started analyzing how science works via a philosophical framework, or an epistemological framework, philosophers came up with the idea of falsifiability. It is not science. Unless, you can run an experiment and the results determine whether your theory is true. So, shit that is not science that attempts to explain the world lacks falsifiability. That might be the biggest sword to cut at shit that isn’t science or the biggest basket to throw shit that isn’t science into. The motivation to do what religion does, to try and order the world, is a good thing to do. But when you end up with a system that cannot be disproved, that rests on faith, then that’s not a factually correct thing.
Haereid: It’s an approach to claim that answering such questions are not science until you have proved it empirically; scientifically. It’s guesswork. It’s for fun. But the resulting wars and conflicts that may come from such disputes are not fun. People use nonscientific methods to claim that their view is the right one, and the others’ view is wrong. And they mean that this is it; it’s no basis for debate. The problem is when you answer these types of questions without a stringent tool, without some thoughts about the epistemological angles to knowledge per se. As long as the conclusions create disagreement either one of the sides is wrong, or there are two equal truths: rationally. Then quarrelling is nonsense, at least in a non-psychological way.
11. Jacobsen: Is faith, at this point, net bad or net good?
Rosner: There are different kinds of faith. As optimism, as existential optimism, it is a good thing. You go out into the world and keep doing stuff. Even though, there is a lot of evidence in the world that you won’t live forever. That you’ll get old and be uncomfortably old, and then die of some horrible fucking disease. There’s a lot of evidence that there is a lot of unrewarding stuff out there. But persisting in defiance of that for the pleasures of the world, it is a kind of a faithful optimism; that, I think, is a good thing. Perverted faith like the way a lot of American evangelism has turned rotten is a bad thing. Believing in bullshit or, at least, acting as if you believe in bullshit for political purposes or for financial advantage, like Jim Bakker, of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, a religious scammer from way back who went to prison for it in the 1980s. He is back selling bullshit coronavirus cures and preventatives. If you go on Twitter and look around and google, you can see some evangelicals – 4, 5, 6, maybe 8 – or media heavy preachers promising salvation from coronavirus in the U.S. if you just send them money for prayers or bullshit products. That kind of faith, the faith behind that, or perverted faith, is obviously terrible.
Haereid: Faith is good as an aid to survive inner demons; to survive life. Faith is good if you become a better person to yourself and others; we need more of the Golden Rule as long as we lack resilience. But as a cult, a brainwashing scenario, it’s net bad; it has to be a choice, not coercion. If you become a social parasite creating conflicts and wars because of your faith, it’s bad, obviously.
12. Jacobsen: Finally, why do some real geniuses, or even fake ‘geniuses,’ fall into supernaturalisms and grandiose proclamations of supernatural powers and some special cognitive powers?
Rosner: I hate talking about slippery slopes. Because if you look at the landscape of effort and reward around people who present themselves as geniuses, like Raniere, Raniere evolved a system, a philosophy, a cult, that, eventually, allowed him to build a harem of women who disciplined themselves to, say, stay super skinny because that is what gave him a boner. So, being rewarded for claiming to be a genius is what propels, sometimes, so-called genius to get fucked up, whether it is sex or money, or self-delusion, or lack of discipline, I’ve got this theory of the universe, which I’ve never put on a firm mathematical footing. But I still like thinking about it, and still think that it is right. My laziness means that I can reward myself by thinking thoughts about the universe, which I think are profound and get some emotional reward via the pleasure of thinking big thoughts without putting in the effort. Einstein spent a bunch of years. He came up with Special Relativity in 1905. It took him until 1915 until he came up with General Relativity. He suffered a lot. He did not have a large library of mathematical technique in his head; he half-understood how things like gravity should work. He had to keep going to his friends to look for mathematical models that might encompass some of his more nebulous thinking; his instincts about gravitation, which took 6 years, 8 years, maybe. I don’t know when he started after 1905 on General Relativity. But there has been a bunch written about the false starts and the work and suffering built to get to the mathematical framing of Special Relativity and General Relativity. I have not done this for Informational Cosmology. I have a little bit done of it. But we do not have any math. I still get the wanking…
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: … of thinking big thoughts and feeling like a genius. But the lack of discipline means that there is no math. You can get that kind of drift. Let’s assume for the sake of this, I am an actual genius. That the physics of this will turn out to be true. But that whole thing could happen with someone who isn’t a genius and who is a deluded person. That whole thing about thinking profound thoughts and just wanking mentally. It is one of the potentially dangerous rewards od doing genius-y thinking.
Haereid: It’s human. When you become famous for an invention or piece of art, it’s difficult not to elevate mentally. Humans have this abnormal ability to amplify exponentially one’s identity; god or devil, more worth or less worth than everybody else.
Then it’s natural to become megalomaniac, delusional. Why shouldn’t you? I guess it’s the same with popularity in general; it messes up your brain. It’s hard to maintain the idea of who you are when everybody confirms that you are something else. If you manage to change peoples’ view on something essential, like Copernicus, Newton and Einstein did, I guess it’s a hard to stay on earth identity-wise. The challenge is staying mentally healthy if you make giant leaps in our culture, think you do or are extremely popular, whatever reason.
Appendix I: Footnotes
[1] Erik Haereid has been a member of Mensa since 2013, and is among the top scorers on several of the most credible IQ-tests in the unstandardized HRT-environment. He is listed in the World Genius Directory. He is also a member of several other high IQ Societies.
Erik, born in 1963, grew up in Oslo, Norway, in a middle class home at Grefsen nearby the forest, and started early running and cross country skiing. After finishing schools he studied mathematics, statistics and actuarial science at the University of Oslo. One of his first glimpses of math-skills appeared after he got a perfect score as the only student on a five hour math exam in high school.
He did his military duty in His Majesty The King’s Guard (Drilltroppen)).
Impatient as he is, he couldn’t sit still and only studying, so among many things he worked as a freelance journalist in a small news agency. In that period, he did some environmental volunteerism with Norges Naturvernforbund (Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature), where he was an activist, freelance journalist and arranged ‘Sykkeldagen i Oslo’ twice (1989 and 1990) as well as environmental issues lectures. He also wrote some crime short stories in A-Magasinet (Aftenposten (one of the main newspapers in Norway), the same paper where he earned his runner up (second place) in a nationwide writing contest in 1985. He also wrote several articles in different newspapers, magazines and so on in the 1980s and early 1990s.
He earned an M.Sc. degree in Statistics and Actuarial Sciences in 1991, and worked as an actuary novice/actuary from 1987 to 1995 in several Norwegian Insurance companies. He was the Academic Director (1998-2000) of insurance at the BI Norwegian Business School (1998-2000), Manager (1997-1998) of business insurance, life insurance, and pensions and formerly Actuary (1996-1997) at Nordea in Oslo Area, Norway, a self-employed Actuary Consultant (1996-1997), an Insurance Broker (1995-1996) at Assurance Centeret, Actuary (1991-1995) at Alfa Livsforsikring, novice Actuary (1987-1990) at UNI Forsikring.
In 1989 he worked in a project in Dallas with a Texas computer company for a month incorporating a Norwegian pension product into a data system. Erik is specialized in life insurance and pensions, both private and business insurances. From 1991 to 1995 he was a main part of developing new life insurance saving products adapted to bank business (Sparebanken NOR), and he developed the mathematics behind the premiums and premium reserves.
He has industry experience in accounting, insurance, and insurance as a broker. He writes in his IQ-blog the online newspaper Nettavisen. He has personal interests among other things in history, philosophy and social psychology.
In 1995, he moved to Aalborg in Denmark because of a Danish girl he met. He worked as an insurance broker for one year, and took advantage of this experience later when he developed his own consultant company.
In Aalborg, he taught himself some programming (Visual Basic), and developed an insurance calculation software program which he sold to a Norwegian Insurance Company. After moving to Oslo with his girlfriend, he was hired as consultant by the same company to a project that lasted one year.
After this, he became the Manager of business insurance in the insurance company Norske Liv. At that time he had developed and nurtured his idea of establishing an actuarial consulting company, and he did this after some years on a full-time basis with his actuarial colleague. In the beginning, the company was small. He had to gain money, and worked for almost two years as an Academic Director of insurance at the BI Norwegian Business School.
Then the consultant company started to grow, and he quitted BI and used his full time in NIA (Nordic Insurance Administration). This was in 1998/99, and he has been there since.
NIA provides actuarial consulting services within the pension and life insurance area, especially towards the business market. They was one of the leading actuarial consulting companies in Norway through many years when Defined Benefit Pension Plans were on its peak and companies needed evaluations and calculations concerning their pension schemes and accountings. With the less complex, and cheaper, Defined Contribution Pension Plans entering Norway the last 10-15 years, the need of actuaries is less concerning business pension schemes.
Erik’s book from 2011, Benektelse og Verdighet, contains some thoughts about our superficial, often discriminating societies, where the virtue seems to be egocentrism without thoughts about the whole. Empathy is lacking, and existential division into “us” and “them” is a mental challenge with major consequences. One of the obstacles is when people with power – mind, scientific, money, political, popularity – defend this kind of mind as “necessary” and “survival of the fittest” without understanding that such thoughts make the democracies much more volatile and threatened. When people do not understand the genesis of extreme violence like school killings, suicide or sociopathy, asking “how can this happen?” repeatedly, one can wonder how smart man really is. The responsibility is not limited to let’s say the parents. The responsibility is everyone’s. The day we can survive, mentally, being honest about our lives and existence, we will take huge leaps into the future of mankind.
Rick G. Rosner, according to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.”
[2] Individual Publication Date: April 1, 2020: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/haereid-rosner-eight; 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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