Ask A Genius 935: Mathematicizing Our Collaborations

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/05/10

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There it is. So we are back after a while. I wanted to cover a little bit about the colossal amount of work over a decade or more, in fact, more than a decade, doing a lot of the independent journalistic work that I’ve done. I typically pick a topic, and within approximately two years, I end up interviewing the top people in that area, in the politics or IQ world, of course.

Rick Rosner: So we should mathematicize it. It’s something like a year. About 11 years, say about 4,000 days. 4,000 days times, your output is generally at least a thousand words. How many words a day on average?

Jacobsen: I mean, today I transcribed and edited 11,000. Let’s just say, to be conservative, it’s only a thousand, though it’s more than that. That means you’ve put out 4 million words, but it’s likely more like 2,000 or 8 million words, which is the equivalent of 80 thick books. That’s a lot.

Rosner: Yes. It is a lot of work. You have enumerated the number of articles you’ve put out, which is well over 1,000.

Jacobsen: It is definitely more than 1,000. I do not know the precise number.

Rosner: So what, an article every two and a half days on average or more frequently than that?

Jacobsen: I do not know. It depends on the season. Sometimes gathering information takes more time. The work in the military in Canada took more time. The work in the equestrian industry took more time because I did not have any background in those areas. To speak on them more competently, it takes time to get at least a basic and intermediate knowledge level of that field, to then talk competently to experts in that area.

Rosner: So what are your bullet points on 4,000 days of journalism?

Jacobsen: You cannot take the work for granted because no matter how you slice it, it is going to be a lot of work. You should be authentic in your conversational style with the interviewee. Otherwise, it is simply not going to flow. There are too many evolved parts of the mind to social life. At some level, it will come off badly if you are not fluid. The way to be fluid and socially supple is to be authentic. It seems from your list of people who have said yes to you, people want to talk. People love talking. Give someone something to talk about, especially themselves, and they will talk for days.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: And then if you click with someone, make sure to hold on to that partnership or work relationship. Eventually, it often becomes a friendship.

Rosner: In our case, yes.

Jacobsen: Yes, in many cases. That becomes a reservoir to continually use. You do not come across such connections often. Maybe three significant ones. It has to be well over a thousand because just you and I working together have generated more than 1,000 pieces.

Rosner: That is true. So I think the average is probably every two years or one and a half years, you get a writing partner with whom you can really dig in and work for a long time. What I find, actually, is that over time, it becomes more frequent and more likely. I think it is probably because you develop a wider range of professional and social skills, knowing when to be relaxed, when to be focused, and so forth.

Jacobsen: Since you started doing this, the world seems to be in a much more dire situation. Do you believe that it is actually in a more dire situation? Any thoughts on the changing state of the world?

Rosner: On one hand, rage drives a lot of media now, which drives a lot of views. There are profit motives around that. The bigger media companies are corporations, so they are driven by that.

Jacobsen: Do you think that besides the rage that makes people engage with media, there is actual rage that has increased in people?

Rosner: It has probably increased. People are more rage-filled, but the number of things to be rage-filled about is historically fewer. There are simply more people reporting on it. In a digital era where there are cameras everywhere, social media reaches people intimately. Previous generations would leave for work and not talk to their spouse all day. Now people text when they are leaving for work.

Jacobsen: Do you think that social media has made people more selfish?

Rosner: Yes, but I do not think it is the only thing.

Jacobsen: What are the other things?

Rosner: The easy access to everything. Especially in North America, we have had at least five decades or more of constant growth. That is probably unprecedented, especially in terms of its scale. We are very comfortable and have all this wealth invested in technologies that cater to our individualistic profiles. This makes us narcissistic. Evidence over the last three decades shows an increase in narcissism. I’m not saying it is necessarily a bad thing that we are more comfortable, but we should be careful about not exacerbating the worst parts of ourselves.

Jacobsen: Which we are not careful about.

Rosner: Not at all.

Jacobsen: So there’s a trend you’ve written about, towards gender equality. People like right-wing pundits such as Matt Walsh, and Lance, would say that this is a bad thing, the increasing feminization of North America and the world. I would say, is it really a bad thing? Do men really need to be men and women, women? What do you think?

Rosner: It is more complicated than conservatives make it out to be. And it is more evidence-based than liberals make it out to be. Sex is mostly binary. It is something like binary with a little room for abnormality. By abnormal, I do not mean bad, I mean statistically rare. So there’s male and female, and there are statistically fewer others. With others not being a bad thing.

Jacobsen: Typically, you’ll get something around 105 men born for every 100 women. So statistically, you get that difference. It’s not split 50-50. Most people will identify with their genitalia and their genetics, male or female, but there are also intersex individuals.

Rosner: And then there are those who are in a different category, which I’m not an expert on. That’s in terms of sex. So sex is binary plus an other category. The conservative estimate of binary is mostly correct, but it’s not entirely correct in terms of the empirical evidence.

Jacobsen: It is crazy that the organizing principle around who we pair up with and build our entire life around is based on who makes us ejaculate, in the case of men. You can see how it happened because we’re creatures who have evolved and perpetuate life via sex. So sex is in charge, but it’s still a strange principle that I could build a partnership around someone I get along with, but that will only happen if that person can make me ejaculate, and my worldview is such that I’m okay with that being the person making me ejaculate. The amount of time in a day that we spend ejaculating is not even 1/5 of 1% of waking hours, and that’s what you’re going to base it on?

Rosner: The intersex and other categories tell us that evolution has put quite tight pressures on that. At the same time, the gender conversation is more complex. Conservatives argue that all the terms are cumbersome, while liberals argue that you cannot confuse sex with gender and you cannot necessarily merge one’s biological sex with one’s social roles and identity. You have the distinction between male, female, intersex, and other, and then you have the secondary layer of gender and how people orient their lives. Sexual orientation is another layer that adds complexity.

Jacobsen: I like that we have new terms for everything. My wife and I had a discussion while driving into Hollywood, coming upon Sunset, out of Laurel Canyon. There’s a shopping center there, and for Pride Month, they painted the stairs leading into the center. Each stair riser was painted with a color of the gay flag. There are 11 colors, and we were discussing what each of the letters meant. I said you can just go with LGBTQ+, but my wife said, no, you’re not allowed to use the plus until you get through at least seven letters. There’s a ton of letters to include: A for asexual, T for trans, and so on.

Rosner: Within left-wing circles, it’s about social decorum, whether you say pronouns beforehand and how far you go with the letters. I just take the international norm, as the UN has the LGBTI advisory group. I say LGBTI or LGBTI+, referencing a standard international organization that everyone more or less respects. This is a culture war issue that Republicans in the US have seized upon. According to a 2022 Pew Research Study, Republican legislators have drifted four times as much to the right as Democrats have drifted to the left. Republicans have swung into full lunacy, making the case that it’s the Democrats who have gone crazy. This whole LGBTQ thing is a very small part of most Americans’ day-to-day existence. Acknowledging the colors of the gay flag doesn’t have much relevance to our economic lives or access to abortion. But it’s an issue Republicans use to claim we’re drifting into Sodom and Gomorrah and socialism, which is nonsense because America is super capitalistic, and our taxes have been at a 60-year low. We don’t pay much in taxes, but Republicans would have you believe otherwise.

Jacobsen: There’s also the idea of corporatism. Conservative media is largely corporate media catering to conservative populations for profit. Many conservatives are actually underserved in the United States.

Rosner: Conservative media often lacks good quality journalism. Fox, for instance, caters to conservatives and propagandizes them, but it covers issues that more liberal media don’t focus on while still spreading lies and fear. Conservative outlets like One America News Network, Newsmax, Alex Jones, and Tucker Carlson struggle to make ends meet. Newsmax, for example, was kicked off its broadcaster because they couldn’t afford to stay on. CNN has tried to lean more conservative to capture more viewers, which is a corporate move.

Jacobsen: There is one more thing about corporate media in the US: the Epoch Times, owned by Moonies, has been accused by the DOJ of money laundering about $67 million. They pump out conservative false reporting and have turned out to be a criminal enterprise. This doesn’t respond directly to your point about corporate media, but as a liberal, I have to point out that they were involved in a money laundering scheme involving prepaid cards for unemployment benefits, which they were buying and selling for profit.

Rosner: So we have this sort of gender and sex split. The sexual orientation split. Many conservative arguments are based on first approximations, which are then called common sense. I think both sides take these approximations. Conservative views on sex and gender often rely on old arguments that become accepted as common sense, like the idea that being gay is not a choice. Only assholes at this point would argue otherwise, and many states have made it illegal to base therapy on the idea that people can change their orientation. This has led to a lot of misery with no results.

Jacobsen: Generally, you have this idea of wisdom or common sense. Both might be false notions, but they are first approximations most people accept. Any modifications require new understanding. Newton’s gravity works in almost every situation but is subject to modifications under Einstein’s general relativity. You can think of instances where sexuality appears to be a choice, like in prison, where people have same-sex relationships due to constraints. But the general sense is that sexuality isn’t fluid enough for therapy to change someone’s orientation by simply praying on it.

Rosner: Eventually, it will be common sense to say that for biological and psychological reasons, some people are born with the genitals of one gender but are actually of the opposite gender. People will have different makeups. It’s not necessarily inborn, like how water under certain conditions forms snowflakes, with no two forming the same way. It’s something that develops over time.

Jacobsen: For me, it’s common sense that not everything aligns perfectly. Nature doesn’t want anything; evolution has no wants. Evolution hasn’t ensured that 100% of people think they are the gender of the genitals they were born with. Many people fall into different categories. However, many still believe there are only two sexes and corresponding genders.

Rosner: This ties into American media and my observations while traveling through the United States. There’s a wide range of Americans. Cities are generally dirtier, and people tend to be more overweight, but they aren’t necessarily impolite. It was rare to find a genuine asshole, even in New York. I didn’t encounter the stereotypical rude New Yorker.

Jacobsen: Even MAGA supporters, who take pride in being mean to liberals, aren’t assholes in every interaction. If you meet a MAGA supporter and compliment their dog, they will be perfectly nice. Many MAGA profiles on Twitter include a love for dogs. During your travels across America, you probably met many right-wing people, and as you said, you didn’t encounter many assholes.

Rosner: I found almost no Confederate flags, except in a very run-down rural area of the South.

Jacobsen: Once people were presented with the strong connection between the Confederate flag and slavery, most were willing to give it up, given the pain it causes.

Rosner: People in the United States are their own stereotypes. Seattle liberals are more unkempt and fake, while LA liberals are cleaner but worse drivers. New Yorkers are well put together, and people in Charlotte, South Carolina, are closer to those from my hometown.

Jacobsen: Americans feel more obligated to announce themselves and be big personalities. My wife and I visited Belgium and were struck by how low-profile and chill everyone was. Everyone was going about their business in a very understated manner.

[Recording End]

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