Ask A Genius 876: Impressing Carole, Kinda
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/31
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, this is an addendum to the last session. I wanted to continue; you urged me in saying that I had seemed like I had more to say about it. That’s true, and in talking about it just openly by myself. Basically, it’s a little way. It came out. So, it takes time to understand the subtlety and nuance of a very or a highly intelligent person in a similar manner to some of these high-range tests or the upper range of gold standard tests like the WAIS or the Standford Binet in light of the fact that individuals like yourself who get these very high scores spend a tremendous amount of time on these tests, that’s your point.
Rick Rosner: So, a WAIS or a Stanford Binet is designed to be given by a professional psychometrician, somebody who’s been trained in psychology and to do the test in less than 90 minutes, but those tests are not great at measuring above 150, above much more than three standard deviations which is one person in 750 which is really all you need for any reasonable purpose. If this kid is bored in school because this kid has a one in a thousand IQ, then that’s fine; the Stanford Benet is perfectly adequate. Does this kid have a 99.9 percentile IQ, so he can get into this super selective academic program or school, and then it’s only when you’re using IQ for the crazy sport you need to measure beyond that, and that takes these tests, these Hoeflin tests or these Cooijmans’s tests to do a good job on them. They have these crazy problems, and you need to spend about a hundred hours and more to solve 48 problems.
There have been plenty of charlatans who claim to be geniuses, and somebody can be pretty smart and simulate being really smart for financial reasons, to get laid, to get thought of as an artistic genius, to get like directing work. Keith Raniere, who did really well on the mega test, made it part of his scam that led to financial fraud and has led him to be imprisoned for life for running a sex cult, but in the case of somebody who’s a very smart charlatan claiming to be a genius and who may even think he’s a freaking genius, it takes time for the victim to figure out that this fucking asshole is lying to me or is deluded. So, I’m sure there are books and movies about somebody who enters into a relationship with somebody who’s faking genius or is deluded about being a genius, and it takes months and years to see that person is full of shit.
Jacobsen: The original comparison was on the quantitative-qualitative distinction. That quantitative-qualitative distinction between the quantitative of IQ tests as a proxy for general intelligence and the qualitative of interacting with highly intelligent people over a long period of time.
Rosner: Sorry, I’m going to interrupt. So, what you’re talking about is the qualitative and quantitative, which is what Cooijman calls associative breadth?
Jacobsen: Width of associative horizon.
Rosner: Okay, and what that is, is the number of other freaking things that a thought can connect to. It’s like if you like interviewed at some tech company, and the cliche question used to be, name as many ways as you can use a barometer to measure the height of a building and to see if you could come up with a billion freaking crazy ways, out of the box thinking would be the cliché. Like take the barometer up to the top of the building, drop it off, and measure how long it takes to hit the ground. The standard answer to the question is you measure the atmospheric pressure at the bottom of the building and at the top of the building, and the difference will, according to some calculation, tell you the height, but there are a bunch of other ways to do it including find the building’s architect and say I’ll give you this barometer if you tell me how tall the building is. So, it’s how many crazy, on-the-spur-of-the-moment, different ways of thinking about a thing you can come up with.
Jacobsen: This width of the associative horizon is somewhat what I’m getting at in that qualitative sense. I mean, you can try to bring problems in a formalized setting to tackle this, yet that’s very experimental because they’re basically those tests of creativity. The experiential part of it deals more with intuition based on the depth of experience and length of experience with highly intelligent people. At that point, you can begin, in my experience, to make subtle distinctions between people at those higher ends where you can find, am I dealing with an intelligent person, a highly intelligent person or potentially a genius.
Rosner: There are terms for that, too; crystallized intelligence, which is accumulated knowledge and experience, versus fluid intelligence, which is coming up with a bunch of crazy shit on the spur of the moment.
Jacobsen: Well, I take it as something you feel over time. It’s almost as if the fact of embodiment, either it’s feedback from the body to the brain or the brain to the body over time but it’s something that you feel or it’s an intuition and you feel it and then it sort of gets thrown as a bone to your conscious arena. That’s the way I experience it but that only came with experience.
Rosner: I try to make Carole feel that way, my wife, so she’s more impressed with me. I don’t often succeed. Since Covid, we’ve watched about three hours of TV together every night. So, we’ve seen freaking everything that’s ever been made now, at least that streams on Netflix and HBO Max and the game we play is everybody plays it now because everybody’s been locked down with Covid. It is to guess what the next thing to happen is or the next word out of a character’s mouth is, and that’s where I can be the most successful in impressing Carole. If I can come up with a really odd line, an unexpected line, and it’s the line that the character actually says, she feels a little touch of wonder at me that I want her to feel, which is like a sad way to live for me just yelling shit out at the TV.
Jacobsen: And that’s the distinction, there’s the humor there, but the truth of it is that’s who you are; there’s no inauthenticity. There’s no faking. That’s smart. So, you have that breadth, you have those capabilities, but like most of us you’re going to be just be functioning in your daily life as an ordinary person.
Rosner: Right, and Carole likes that. Carole’s a very worried person, and she worries that we’re going to get something wrong. This is not apropos of what you’re saying; I’m just talking about my relationship a little bit more when she remembers the times that she’s more negatively impressed by the times I get something wrong than positively impressed by the times I’m right. We were wondering why her mom had to move out of her house. She was too old to live in it safely, and we had to put her in senior living, and then we had to decide what to do with the house. Carole wanted to sell it, and I said we’d take a huge tax hit and we should rent it and let it continue to appreciate and value. Meanwhile, we’re getting rent, and then we found out that you have to step up in value for tax purposes. You don’t pay taxes on the difference between what was paid for the house, $40,000 50 years ago versus a million something now. You have to step up.
[Recording End]
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