An Interview with Claus Volko on High-IQ Societies (Part Five)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/01
Abstract
Claus Volko is an Austrian computer and medical scientist who has conducted research on the treatment of cancer and severe mental disorders by conversion of stress hormones into immunity hormones. This research gave birth to a new scientific paradigm which he called “symbiont conversion theory”: methods to convert cells exhibiting parasitic behaviour to cells that act as symbionts. In 2013 Volko, obtained an IQ score of 172 on the Equally Normed Numerical Derivation Test. He is also the founder and president of Prudentia High IQ Society, a society for people with an IQ of 140 or higher, preferably academics. He discusses: Community; high-IQ societies; the gifted; the positives and the negatives of a high-IQ society; the purposes of high-IQ societies in the early 21st century; decent alternative intelligence tests; independent test makers; other ways in which the gifted and talented can socialize; intelligence tests; the high-IQ societies; liberal leanings and atheism; neural correlates; the most talented people; other personality traits; Selective Graph Coloring Problem; ‘the satisfiability problem of the logic of statements’; ‘proof of non-existence’; the ‘second-order P-NP problem’; the 2048 game; Godel’s incompleteness theorems; ‘Numeric Thermal Bridge Simulation and Building Information Modeling’; the games between 2010 and 2019; synthesis of metaphysics and Jungian Personality Theory; and skepticism and pseudoskepticism.
Keywords: Claus Volko, high-IQ, IQ, societies.
An Interview with Claus Volko on High-IQ Societies (Part Five)[1],[2]*
*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*
1. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about community. I have been asking some of these questions to some of the other interviewees. What defines a community?
Claus Volko: Common interests.
2. Jacobsen: What high-IQ societies seem the most reliable to you?
Volko: Most high IQ societies are not much more than websites with member lists. Some have magazines, too, but hardly any have real-life meetings. The only exception I know is Mensa, which hosts gatherings here in Vienna every month. However, I have left Mensa due to internal
conflicts and founded my own high IQ society, Prudentia. We have a journal and a member list, plus a Facebook group, so it is not much, but at least something.
Also, many high IQ individuals are nowadays directly connected via Facebook regardless of society membership.
3. Jacobsen: How can the gifted find community in high-IQ societies?
Volko: They can connect with other members and talk to them about their interests. However, in most high IQ societies people only talk about IQ testing.
4. Jacobsen: What are the positives and the negatives of a high-IQ society?
Volko: There are only positive aspects.
5. Jacobsen: What seem like the purposes of high-IQ societies in the early
21st century?
Volko: In theory, they could form an alternative intellectual community next
to academia.
6. Jacobsen: What seem like decent alternative intelligence tests for individuals to take now? If someone is extremely serious about the most accurate assessment, why should they take a proctored-by-professional mainstream intelligence test, e.g., a WAIS, a Stanford-Binet, or RAPM up to date, test?
Volko: Of these tests, I have only taken the RAPM, which does not measure extreme scores. I heard that the WAIS measures up to IQ 185, so if somebody suspects they are in this range, the WAIS might be the test of choice for them. The so-called high range tests which can be found on the Internet have been made by laypersons and are not normed based on large samples.
7. Jacobsen: What independent test makers seem more serious than others?
Volko: I think tests by Nikolaos Soulios, Jason Betts and Ivan Ivec are pretty decent.
8. Jacobsen: Are there other ways in which the gifted and talented can socialize and find others with similar gifts and interests other than high-IQ societies?
Volko: Sure, they can socialize in special interest communities as to be found on Facebook.
9. Jacobsen: What do intelligence tests, commonly construed, seem to miss in testing intelligence?
Volko: Sometimes I had the feeling that they were lacking text understanding.
10. Jacobsen: What do you think is missing in some of the high-IQ societies?
Volko: Real-life meetings.
11. Jacobsen: Why does higher intelligence tend to correlate positively with liberal leanings and atheism in some preliminary studies in psychology?
Volko: I think it is due to Occam’s razor. Highly intelligent people tend to be more rational than other people and due to Occam’s razor they are more likely to adopt liberal and atheist views than views that require more axiomatic definitions.
12. Jacobsen: As a question from a non-doctor to a doctor, what are the neural correlates and cognitive correlates or proxies of higher general intelligence? What should be physiological signs and neurological, and anatomical, signals of higher general intelligence if one does want to estimate higher general intelligence without a formal general intelligence test?
Volko: I do not know of any. Maybe there are some publications in the area but as far as I know no statistically significant anatomical properties of high intelligence people have been found.
13. Jacobsen: Who are some of the most talented people know to you? Why them?
Volko: I know some highly talented people from the computer demoscene in which I was active in my youth. For example, Henning Ludvigsen is a very talented graphic artist and Kostantinos Pataridis is a very talented computer programmer.
14. Jacobsen: Other than a positive correlation, not a causation-relationship, between higher intelligence and atheism & liberalism. What other personality traits, beliefs, even prejudices or lack thereof, seem to correlate positively (or negatively, or not at all) with high general intelligence? What about the outliers to these general trends of 5 points here or there per variable consideration? Some speculate about the truly higher levels of general intelligence and then belief in a ‘higher power,’ but these studies have not been done in meta-analyses, as far as I know – so that’s ideological speculative reasoning grounded in bias more than anything else with scattered data points in the record.
Volko: When I was a member of Mensa, I observed that hardly anyone drank alcohol at Mensa meetings. This was in stark contrast to my classmates at high school.
15. Jacobsen: Time for miscellaneous Volko questions, rapid-fire round: What did you find with the Selective Graph Coloring Problem in the master’s thesis?
Volko: I developed an algorithm based on variable neighborhood search and other metaheuristics to solve a problem from graph theory approximately. It worked well and fast, but other authors’ algorithms led to better results.
16. Jacobsen: What is ‘the satisfiability problem of the logic of statements’?
Volko: When having a propositional statement, the question is whether you can assign values “true” and “false” to the variables so that the statement becomes true.
17. Jacobsen: What is the ‘proof of non-existence’?
Volko: As I told you when we talked about Popper, existential statements can be easily proven but it is very hard or even impossible to disprove them. The proof of non-existence is the disproval of an existential statement.
18. Jacobsen: What is the P-NP problem? What is the ‘second-order P-NP problem’?
Volko: The P-NP problem is the open question whether two instances of complexity theory called P and NP are the same or not. The Second-Order P-NP Problem is a term I coined for one of my publications as I asked the question whether the P-NP Problem can be solved at all.
19. Jacobsen: What is the 2048 game? What is the mathematical analysis of the
2048 game?
Volko: It is a game that became popular a couple of years ago. In a rectangular grid the numbers 2 and 4 appear. You can move all the numbers at once by pressing a cursor key. If two numbers with the same value hit each other, they add up to their sum. The goal is to arrive at the number 2048. I analyzed a couple of mathematical properties of this game and published a paper about it.
20. Jacobsen: How would you explain Godel’s incompleteness theorems simply?
Volko: Read my article at my homepage (www.cdvolko.net).
21. Jacobsen: Why the interest in Computational Biology and Medical Informatics?
Volko: I first enrolled at medical school and so when I started computer science I chose medical informatics because of its relationship with medicine.
22. Jacobsen: What in the world is ‘Numeric Thermal Bridge Simulation and
Building Information Modeling’?
Volko: It is something architects and building physicists have to care about.
23. Jacobsen: Mega Force (2016), Mega Force 2 (2019), Adok’s Magic Cube (2010), Adok’s Number Maze (2010), Adok’s Saturn Puzzle (2011), Hello, Mr Turing (2012), and Cirix (2012), Ballonschlacht (2012), and Evolution (2012). This is mostly before the two of us met online. What was the inspiration behind each of the games between 2010 and 2019?
Volko: The ideas to these games came from myself. The largest project was Mega Force. I worked on it for eight months. It is a tactical role-playing game in the style of Shining Force, a game for Sega consoles.
24. Jacobsen: What is the synthesis of metaphysics and Jungian Personality Theory for you? If I remember, you hold Jung in higher esteem than Freud and Jung has become more popular in recent years, in re-discovery of him, by some.
Volko: If we look at the psyche, the brain and the body and think of them as three entities connected with each other, some of Jung’s postulates about personality theory logically follow.
25. Jacobsen: How do you differentiate skepticism and pseudoskepticism?
Volko: I wrote an article about this.
Appendix I: Footnotes
[1] Member, World Genius Directory.
[2] Individual Publication Date: August 1, 2020: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/volko-five; Full Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2020: https://in-sightjournal.com/insight-issues/.
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