How to Think Like a Genius 66-Creationist
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There are tremendous numbers of this. That’s in a very developed nation, but then you all of these other nations that are watching the charlatans in America or other places and saying, “Oh! That’s real.” If you look at the Atlas of Creation by Adnan Oktar, another creationist, he gets a lot of his writings and ideas from the creationist movements.
Rick Rosner: We’re doing a book about genius, and not about religious fraud. We’re doing a section about either trying to appear a genius or becoming a real genius.
Jacobsen: I’ll clarify. There are many reasons to be cautious. Not only in this area, but other areas, and if you can be cautious in this area in particular, you have to be very careful about people making claims. What is there evidence? How much? How strong? What is there reasoning or are their set of reasons? Is it substantiated in other words?
Rosner: Yea — that’s not the fun part. The fun part is teaching people how to do that stuff.
Jacobsen: There’s also catching these people. That is ethical and fun.
Rosner: Alright, there are various types and levels of delusion in the area of genius.
Jacobsen: Okay.
Rosner: One type is straightforward fraud like Bernie Madoff. Although, he may have started off trying to do fraud at the level of tens of billions of dollars. I think most people who do Ponzi schemes don’t intend to commit fraud on the scale that they especially end up committing fraud. It is like a comb over. You start with a little bit of combing across a small spot, and then your hair keeps going away before after tens years you’re combing from here to here.
I don’t think Madoff intended to — but what sustained the fraud in addition to his shenanigans on paper was his maintaining a reputation of being some kind of genius who had some kind of way of returning — giving returns far in excess of average market returns. People thought he was some kind of genius. He didn’t do anything to discourage that. He encouraged the whole mystique of himself by being very exclusive where he was very.
He made it seem very hard to join his fund or funds. Anyway, that’s one kind of genius, which is straight out lying, fraud. And then, there’s a continuum where you go from complete fraud to — complete intentional fraud to — varying degrees of self-delusion.
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