Ask A Genius 877: Is it for truth or for fame? Most choose fame.
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/31
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: We’ve been talking on tape and off tape about my wanting to be famous, other high IQ people wanting to be famous, and what the deal is with that. My little rant on that is we should be famous. People get famous for all sorts of lesser shit, like for being able to make a good set of duck lips or develop a really round horny-making ass. I get really frustrated with reality shows that show just a bunch of good-looking assholes being assholes because there should be at least one reality show that shows a bunch of smart people being assholes because smart people can be as big a bunch of assholes as hot people. It’s fun to watch smart people being assholes though I got to say I’ve been urged by Chris Cole to watch a show out of Korea in which the smartest people in freaking South Korea, I think, or is it Taiwan? I forget. They team up and compete with each other to solve challenging puzzles. He thinks that it may have been cooked by the producers, and I can watch it and tell him whether I concur or not. I tried to watch the fucking thing, and it wasn’t fun at all, but I still think that somebody could make a decent show that lets smart people be smart and let their assholery come out. They’re hooking up with each other; and though I’m married, I can’t do the hook and old.
I’m pissed that I don’t get more easy celebrity and recognition for being smart the way people who have rare attributes in other directions get to get recognition. If my dick had as many standard deviations above the norm as my IQ does, it would be well over a foot long, and I’d have an entirely different life.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Anyway, why the old norms versus the new norms? Why take the norms going up to the 190 level as opposed to the 170 level?
Rosner: All right, so the deal is that adult IQ is supposed to be calculated based on the rarity of such an IQ in the general population. You lay out the bell curve, and you lay out your standard deviations, and so somebody who’s smarter than all but one person out of 30,000 would have four standard deviations IQ of 164, three million five standard deviations IQ of 180. So, if you go by that, nobody should have an IQ above 200 because that would be a rarity of one and several tens of billions, I think. So, to assign people IQs in the 190s is a little bit bogus because you haven’t measured the freaking IQs of everybody on Earth. Hoeflin’s Mega test is the most widely taken ultra-high IQ test ever created, and only about 5,000 people have ever taken it. Even though people self-select to be really smart, that’s still not enough to get the number of people scoring in the 180s on it, right? Does my argument make sense? You might reasonably give people rare IQs in the 180s, maybe even 190 if 100,000 smart people took the test. So, there’s an argument to be made that there’s been some inflation in scores at the high end.
But there’s another question: who does it hurt? It means that a tiny number of people can go around and semi-legitimately claim to have IQs in the 180s-190s in a Domino’s commercial. They claimed I had an IQ of 200 because they needed somebody with double the normal IQ, and they claimed that their new line of sandwiches was twice as delicious as a Subway sandwich. So, they took a little bit of license to knock my IQ up to 200. Did that hurt anybody? I don’t freaking think so.
Jacobsen: What about the concern for the truth over fame?
Rosner: Alright, I’m a little bit of an exaggerating asshole, but I’m less of a cheating asshole than some of the other claimers of the world’s highest IQs. So, what about truth over fame? I don’t know. I feel like whatever fame I can scramble to get for IQ; I deserve as much or more than anybody else getting whatever fame they get because of their IQ. Evangelos Katsioulis, a Greek couples counsellor/psychotherapist, has been said to have the world’s highest IQ for maybe 20 years, and he seems not to be an asshole. He doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in fame and doesn’t exaggerate anything. Am I correct in that? You know him.
Jacobsen: It’s a bit mixed at the higher rate. He has some legitimate attainments like winning the National Physics Competition in the 90s in Greece, he has an MD, has a PhD, he’s a psychiatrist…
Rosner: But he’s legitimately accomplished. He’s got a super high score on at least one IQ test enough to have the highest score in the world according to at least one list.
Jacobsen: That one’s trickier. So, it was the NVCP or NVCP-R, and those two were developed by Dr Xavier Jouve. They were friends. So, it’s a similar kind of concern or conflict of interest to Ron Hoeflin and Marilyn Vos Savant. However, he did score high in a similar manner to Mislav Predavec’s alternative test, but he was a child prodigy. You are an alternative test, but you were a child prodigy, and you also scored high on the SAT. Chris Langan, an alternative test, scored high on the SAT. YoungHoon Kim used an unknown formula and listed 202, but the person who did the examination was his longtime mentor and professor at Yonsei University, Professor Hohyun Sohn who has no relevant qualifications potentially. So, there’s an automatic conflict of interest there.
So, I think we have to ask these critical questions within that community just to sort of straighten it out. It’s not to say people aren’t smart; they have lots of other tests that show high intelligence; it’s just that extra bit, and I don’t think the evidence necessarily always states as such. Even the Heinrich Siemens score from Cooijman’s had 195 on the CIT5 on the big competition you took part in, too. That got re-normed from 195 to 190. Even Dany Provost got normed down. Several Giga Society members got normed down. So, it gets mixed up where the World Genius Directory won’t list the newer norms to adjust itself while some listings will and then on the Cooijman’s tests that will get people into the Giga society when they get reformed below Giga Society qualification, Cooijman’s as a matter of policy for getting into the Giga Society.
Rosner: But I got to say again, what does it freaking matter? Also, it’s a weird little sport that almost nobody competes in, but every weird little sport has its weirdnesses, like competing for the world’s biggest bench press. Now, I haven’t looked at what the rules are lately, but what I did know about bench pressing is that you lower it to your chest, you wait for a beat, then you push it back up, but you’re wearing a compression suit. Now, my biggest bench presses were I would trampoline it off my chest, hoping that my ribs wouldn’t just crack, but I drop it… and use the springiness of my chest to get a few extra pounds. So, the most I ever lifted semi-legitimately was 285… a couple of times, I got 310.
And to add that, I don’t know exactly. People would wear these insane rubber constriction suits that would make their chests give them a little bit more spring off of their chest, which is it legit to have a springy suit. The guy Naim Süleymanoğlu/ Naim Suleimanov, I believe, this little guy who was one of the world’s greatest powerlifters, has insane scoliosis. So, when he was bench pressing, I think it was said you could pass a basketball under his back because his back was so curved. That seems like an exaggeration because he isn’t that big a guy, but if your chest arches back so severely and your arms, because you’re almost a dwarf, are so short, the push to go from your chest to full arm extension is many inches shorter than for somebody with a normal bodily structure.
Also, when he was deadlifting, which is you pick the bar off, you squat down, you pick the bar up off the floor, and you stand up straight or as straight as you can stand with scoliosis.; when he picked the bar up, the weight of the bar would make his rib cage collapse down all the way to rest on top of his pelvis. So, that compression meant he only had to get the bar a few inches off the ground because his fists, even when he was standing straight up, reached below his knees. Is that fair? So, there are weirdnesses, and you could call bullshit in every sport. Since there’s no governing body of IQ, the weirdnesses are less policed; nobody’s discussing whether you can wear a rubber brain suit. For the Mega test, the suggested, I think the time limit that Hoeflin suggested was to take no more than a month, but nobody was starting the clock. I think I took five weeks the first time I took it, but there was nothing to stop anybody from taking two or three months. Does it matter? I don’t know. I’m happy for you to press me further about all this.
[Recording End]
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