Ask A Genius 698: Awards in and for the High-IQ
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/23
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you think of awards within the high IQ community for high IQ community members?
Rick Rosner: Everything associated with IQ is a little weird. It’s an esoteric sport is what I look at it as mostly. It’s a bunch of hobbyists who write and take ultra high IQ tests; some for validation, some because they like puzzles, but it’s just this little community that engages in an obscure sport. It shouldn’t be that obscure. Over the past 15-20 years, several times I’ve gone out with people producing partners and pitched competitions where we find like America’s next top model except we find America’s next top genius. I’ve been in three or four pilots done by other people that kind of had similar aims. One pilot I did was like six regular people working together be as smart as one genius and I was the genius for the pilot. There’s a good idea in there, it’s a good basic idea, it’s just it never gets fucking produced. It’s not to use a super duper cliché rocket science; you do a competition show where you find the most clever people. It could be big, it’s just that nobody’s ever fucking done it which tells you something I guess about America that like even in the world of trash TV fucking being smart cuts no fucking ice.
It’s also in reality TV; it’s very frustrating because I’ve pitched shows where you know people on reality shows are mostly beautiful dumb asses with some occasional not stupid people but mostly beautiful and intelligence is certainly secondary and often it’s to not be desired because you need dumbasses to act like assholes. But the deal is that smart people can be just as reality TV worthy as dumb asses and it’s a whole demographic that hasn’t been explored but still hasn’t been done, the closest it got to being done was Beauty and the Geek, an Ashton Kutcher production from 10 years ago where they took these nerdy smart people and coupled them up with super smoking hot women and that was fine. It ran for two or three seasons. Anyway, smart people are an overlooked resource in reality TV and in reality competitions. For a while and probably still CBS like every other fucking crime show needed one or more super smart characters among the team of detectives.
There were 10 shows on various networks, most of them on CBS with fucking fake ass geniuses as written by TV writers. Anyway, fucking genius has not made it into the world of competition on TV. So, the sport of being a genius remains teeny know like 50 or hard 40 or 30 hardcore competitors out there in this weird-ass sport that really isn’t a sport because score is barely kept. You’ve got Jason Betts’s World Genius Directory which is a list of people who’ve scored highest on these high IQ tests; the ones that are considered legit enough to go on the list where somebody’s done a good job of writing the questions has gotten enough people to take the test say 20 or 30 at least so that you can norm it and so that the scores generated by the test have some degree of legitimacy within the world of these things.
People who are official like trained professional psychometricians; the people you have to pay 500 bucks to give your kid the whisk or the waste so they can get into a gifted program in the public schools, those people say “no, fuck all this ultra high IQ stuff, it’s just bullshit. It has nothing to do with official IQ testing”, which is both true and not true. Ultra high IQ testing now has probably a nearly 50-year history. You had the first ultra high IQ tests that were but a bunch of people took because they were published in magazines; in Games magazine and in Omni magazine starting in around 1980. So, you have the development of these things I guess throughout the 70s I would guess. So people have been doing this for nearly 50 years and thousands and thousands of people, probably well over 10 000 people have taken these ultra high IQ tests.
So there’s some legitimacy and yeah you don’t have the millions of people taking the whisk or the waste; these IQ tests that were first developed more than a century ago and given in really early versions to soldiers going off to World War I. But those fucking early tests were bullshit too, they were they were bad. So, anyway I think it’s a sport and I think almost nobody plays it. Let’s see what else I can think about this shit.
It would be nice if somebody really… or not nice because if somebody sportified it, somebody came up with official rules for all this shit. I’ve done really well with their being no official rules and the rules that I’ve done well with their not being are no time limit. The first test I took, the mega, they said don’t take more than about a month on this and I took I think five weeks and so I pretty much stuck to the rules there but on subsequent tests I might stew over these fucking things for month after month and approaching 200 hours. So, if that favors my strengths of persistence and obsessiveness and if they sportified America’s smartest person or world’s smartest person that would probably involve like strict time limits which would probably fuck me over because I’m not necessarily the world’s fastest thinker. So, there you go that’s it.
[Recording End]
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