Giga Society Group Discussion 1: the Bedrock
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/15
Giga Society Group Discussion 1: the Bedrock
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The formal first session of the group discussion will set some of the history of the Giga Society and the conversational interaction with some of the membership. The Giga Society was established in 1996 by Paul Cooijmans. An interesting Dutchman with a peculiar sense of humour who likes making questions for others. Some of the members of the Giga Society have been interviewed before. In alphabetical order of last names, those who have been interviewed in In-Sight Publishing: Scott Durgin, Andreas Gunnarsson, Evangelos Katsioulis, Rick Rosner, Matthew Scillitani, Heinrich Siemens, and Thomas Wolf. Two not formally interviewed and published, individually, with current membership taken into consideration. One declined an interview after correspondence. Another included in this group discussion, so not an individual interview to date. For the group discussion, one declined. One failed to respond to an email. [Ed. Later noting too busy with work.] Another’s email bounced back. The claim of the Giga Society is an ideal of a society “open to anyone outscoring .999999999 of the adult population on at least one of the accepted tests.” To continue quoting Paul Cooijmans, “This means that in theory one in a billion individuals can qualify. Please do not confuse this criterion with popularly published scores on childhood tests (which are mental/biological age ratio I.Q.’s that are not comparable with deviation I.Q.’s and tend to be much higher), estimated I.Q.’s of famous people, or self-claimed I.Q.’s of megalomaniacs.” This theoretical ideal is further clarified about estimated I.Q.s of the members by Cooijmans, “The uncertainty of the norms in this range means that the world’s most intelligent persons are not necessarily found in the Giga Society; the actual I.Q.’s of the members, as assessed by the best tests and norms, vary between approximately 140 and 185, the bulk of them being over 160 though.” This can clarify theory and practice to the public. Now, to conversational interaction with some of the members, the solo interviews to date:
Scott Durgin’s interviews:
Andreas Gunnarsson’s interviews:
Evangelos Katsioulis’ interview:
Rick Rosner’s interviews:
Matthew Scillitani’s interviews:
Heinrich Siemens interviews:
Thomas Wolf’s interviews:
For this group discussion, the members who agreed to participate in different degrees: Rick Rosner, Dany Provost, Matthew Scillitani, Heinrich Siemens, and Thomas Wolf. These first questions can clarify fact from fiction in the words of some of the members and help elucidate some membership opinions. What test and score earned membership into the Giga Society for you if you remember?
Dany Provost: Perfect score on PIGS 1. The norm has been substantially lowered since then.
Rick Rosner: All right, first, let me start with a disclaimer that I have a kidney stone, and I’m on this muscle relaxant called Flomax, which relaxes everything. So, it’s worth one standard deviation off my IQ in whatever junk comes out of my mouth. I don’t know what specific test it was, a Paul Cooijmans test, though. I’ve had reasonable success with his tests. They are very hard. They’re on par with the Hoeflin tests, but the Hoeflin tests don’t go up to the Giga level. The Cooijmans tests purport to go up there, but you must do fantastically well. It’s arguable whether there really is a distinguishable Giga level that humans can reach. I mean, statistically, if you call Giga, “One in a billion intelligence,” that is problematic because intelligence is general. You can find the person with the most significant bench press because that’s a particular action, but thinking is very general. So, it’s tough to pin down any kind of hierarchy. It’s probably significantly higher, the higher you go.
I mean, the way Binet initially thought of IQ was just to separate school kids into roughly five bands of ability, so they could get their appropriate educational resources. Then the American Terman and others took it over and gave it a bunch of bells, whistles, and false precision. You can reasonably convincingly say that somebody who scored an average of 125 on three IQ tests is probably better at mental tasks than somebody who scored 75 on three IQ tests. However, the ability of tests to validly differentiate between an IQ of 120 and 125 is highly questionable.
Matthew Scillitani: For me it was a perfect score on Psychometric Qrosswords, 80/80 or I.Q. 190 (15 S.D.). Like most Giga members, my qualifying score was renormed such that it’s no longer possible for one to qualify with the same test. As of this interview, a perfect score on Psychometric Qrosswords is I.Q. 177.
Heinrich Siemens: With my score on the CIT5 test (28/44), I won the Price of the Beheaded Man and qualified for the Giga society. When I submitted the Marathon test, it was not enough for the Giga qualification, but later Paul Cooijmans increased the score by 1 point, so in retrospect it would have been enough for Giga too.
Thomas Wolf: Test for Genius, long form, numbers subtest.
Jacobsen: What were the contexts under which joining the Giga Society and the first impressions of it?
Provost: I wanted to become a member for commercial purposes. At the time, I had written a best-seller book in French that I had translated in English and I wanted to sell it on the Web. Unfortunately, the project never took off…
Rosner: As far as I know, the members of the Giga Society don’t do much together. We’re scattered throughout the world. I don’t know if any other members have contributed to the Giga Society journal run by Paul. The most active thing I’ve done is take Paul’s IQ tests, which, in addition to being challenging for me, provided help. When you’re trying to figure out as a test creator what scores correspond to what IQs, you need data points based on test takers’ performances on other IQ tests. So, I’ve taken probably a dozen of Paul’s tests and done as poorly as getting a 158 on one and a Giga level on one, though my scores are subject to revision as he gets more data points.
My intention when I set out taking all these tests was to eventually score high enough on a test to join the Giga society and say I have a one-in-a-billion IQ. Even though, the concept of one-in-a-billion IQ is questionable. Several people out there are very adamant in their claims of being one of the smartest people in the world, if not the most intelligent person. But my shtick is claiming one of the world’s highest IQs but then saying I’m kind of a clown and IQ doesn’t mean all that much, which I think is a better strategy than going around saying, “Oh yeah, I’m the smartest person, in the galaxy.” In junior high, I got into a fight with a kid and the other kid when we’re in front of the principal’s went, “He’s done it. He did this, he did this.” I said, “I think it’s both our faults.” I got in less trouble because I understood how to be more believable.
Scillitani: I joined largely to reward myself for my effort, for the prestige, and to see what membership was like. There was initially no impression the society made on me because there was no member communication and nothing seemed to happen following my admission. Later, my membership allowed opportunity for interviews and there was communication between members, so I would say it has been a mostly positive experience. People have also reached out to me and asked questions about I.Q. testing and related topics, which is nice.
Siemens: It has long been my goal to become a member of the Mega and Giga societies. When I achieved this goal, I was very happy. It just feels good.
Wolf: It was a sporting ambition, trying to test my limits – like participating in a sort of mental “iron man”. As I was only the second member at the time, I didn’t really see it as a “society” at first, more as an achievement.
Jacobsen: What have been the pluses and minuses of the Giga Society for you?
Provost: Pluses: contact with other smart people and invitations to join other high-iq societies (prestige). Minuses: can’t say…
Rosner: It’s good for my self-esteem, knowing that I have the gumption to solve super-hard problems well enough to score at a one-in-a-billion level. You know what? I’m trying to do other stuff: write a book. I worked as a writer for Jimmy Kimmel for a dozen years, and some of my co-workers called me an idiot or worse. It was nice to have that in my back pocket. I may not be a good craftsman of jokes as some of the other people at my job, but very few people can match me when it comes to figuring stuff out.
I mean, writing on a daily late-night comedy show is challenging and, for me, maybe a little more challenging than some others, and having this monster IQ is one of the things I told myself about myself to help keep me going.
Scillitani: For pluses, there is some prestige and fame that comes with membership, interview and book opportunities, and communication with other members. On the negatives, there is some bad attention on rare occasion.
Siemens: A real club life has not existed so far. It’s probably difficult with so few members, none of whom know each other personally.
Wolf: On the plus side, the membership, after having attracted some – unexpected – media attention, opened some doors for me, especially in the professional field, and it opened up interesting new contacts and conversations, even friendships. On the minus side, it also attracted some unwanted attention, envy and hostility, including insults and in one case even serious death threats. Initially, it was a great joy for me to answer to all the people who contacted me, but, sadly, I had to become much more restrictive and careful over time. It was a bit like becoming a C-list celebrity with its advantages as well as disadvantages.
Jacobsen: Since taking part in high-I.Q. societies and communities in general, what have been some of the most useful parts of those societies and communities for you?
Provost: This is the first time I get involved. I have been a very silent member so far.
Rosner: Well, when I was under half the age, I am now qualified for the Mega Society. A member of the Mega Society was using the Mega Society as a talent search. He thinks that high-end IQ tests can maybe find people who had fallen through the cracks and weren’t having their skills utilized to the fullest. He kind of mentored me and pushed me along and got me off my ass to a certain extent, and not only me, but a couple also other people too that I know of. So, that’s been one of the advantages. One of the disadvantages is that when I was in my 20s, I was always very eager to have a girlfriend, and a guy from a high-IQ society would not get me a girlfriend. It’s a bunch of other guys who also were bad at getting girlfriends.
Scillitani: Communication with other members is by far the most useful reason. There is also being able to publish one’s material without censorship but I don’t often use that benefit.
Siemens: If there is such a thing at all, I have made some internet friends. But maybe I’ll meet one or the other in real life, that would be quite exciting.
Wolf: I can sum this up easily and quickly: broadening my view.
Jacobsen: Since joining the Giga Society, for whatever personal purposes, have you used the Giga Society for anything, even as personal motivation to give back talents in some manner to the public or for personal development motivation?
Provost: Not really. I’ve had a very busy schedule. Now, I’m more inclined to take a bit of time to answer questions that can hopefully be helpful to some people.
Rosner: I don’t know how anybody else has responded to any of these questions, and I’ve already talked a little bit about how it’s been good for my esteem at times when it has been under attack. It’s also been vaguely good at getting the publicity and maybe getting me a literary agent for a while. I have a bizarre life story. I spent ten years in high school off and on, and it’s just one more layer to… it’s gotten me like four TV Pilots, roughly, where it was either about me as a high IQ weirdo or it was about a bunch, a group, of high IQ people attempting to solve problems, or there was one show, which asked the question, “Could half a dozen people with non-genius IQs do as well as one person with a genius IQ?” And none of them got picked up, but at least I got the pilots.
The stuff that I just talked about; plus, I’ve managed when I was working in bars, I spent 25 years bouncing bars and periodically a big bar with a bunch of bouncers, like a dozen bouncers on staff, sometimes a group of aggressively misbehaving bouncers will start running the crew and just doing bad stuff, kind of the way that you see in movies, where like a few bad cops band together to do lousy cop stuff – but in a much smaller scale. And then there’s a purge, where the management finally gets wind of the misbehavior and tries to unload everybody. I’ve survived a couple of those purges because management just thinks, ‘Oh, he’s just a high IQ weirdo who just likes to catch fake IDs,’ they leave me alone because that’s an accurate perception. I wasn’t part of whatever scam the other bouncers had going on. I just wanted to pursue my craft of catching the one person in 90 who was lying to me. The Giga IQ thing helps me in situations where people would just dismiss me as a weirdo and instead half listen to me as a weirdo who’s good at stuff.
Scillitani: Many people have e-mailed me since joining and asked for advice regarding I.Q. matters and I’ve responded to every one. That’s been my way of contributing to the high-range community.
Siemens: Not really.
Wolf: I did not really use the society itself, but the media attention and contacts that came with it. It gave me the unique and great chance that some people of importance listened to me at least a little, and this was of mutual benefit and not just a one-way street. As I stated, it helped me professionally, but in the other direction, I could also give back in my field of work and really help improve cybersecurity significantly for some organizations of system relevance. I’m very happy about this. Unfortunately, I also learned that my influence was quite limited. In 2020 / 2021 I made it my mission to try and positively influence – at least a little bit – the extremely bad and vastly over-restrictive Covid policies decision making in Germany, but got nowhere, the media panic making was just so much stronger. Also, I tried to improve cybersecurity globally through an invention (and patent) for greater resilience of knowledge-based authentication, but the effect stayed limited to a few companies, as I was not able to get through to the really big tech players.
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