Ask A Genius 961: Ask Scott Anything, Session 1

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/19

Rick Rosner: In this session, we are turning the tables, and I am asking you questions about yourself. Question one: what do you want your legacy to be? Let’s start with a pre-question: Do you want to live to be a hundred or even longer so you have a long time to establish a legacy?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, I agree with George Carlin that the point of life is to keep living. So, looking back from age 110, 76 years for you, what do you want your legacy to be?

Jacobsen: That I lived a good life and did good in the world would be a good start. The question is complex because we need to know how far digital and synthetic technologies will develop to the point where that question might not necessarily make sense. For instance, if the blob idea becomes a reality or something like it.

Rosner: Yes, the Worldwide Thought Blob is where everybody’s consciousness is linked at least part of the time. Because 76 years from now, you will be 110 in the year 2100. Are you willing to merge with the blob if everybody is merging?

Jacobsen: There’s an option for sufficient individuality within it.

Rosner: And you want to publish many books, right?

Jacobsen: Assuming that books are still how we disseminate large chunks of information. Big chunks of organized thought, and I like that idea. They persist for a long time. The ways we consume that information will change, too. But that’s certainly one good way to do it because it’s tried and tested. Also, I feel comfortable doing it that way.

Rosner: How many books have you published? There are two categories: self-published on Amazon or a full-on publisher.

Jacobsen: I did a bunch mostly smaller and amateur self-publishing ones. I’ve done a couple of forewords for some public books. I’m in the process of working on one about the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Rosner: How far along are you with that?

Jacobsen: I have written several thousand words regarding material, not in terms of providing organized thematic writing. So, the content that explains what is going on with the content that has already been produced. So that’s a bigger…

Rosner: You visited Ukraine and the war once and mentioned something about going back, right?

Jacobsen: I’m likely going back. Some money has already been fundraised. I would need about $2,500 conservatively to spend about two or three weeks there, including flights, back, and the train. Once you get there, the expenses drop significantly when you consider the conversion rate from Canadian dollars to Ukrainian hryvnia.

Rosner: What’s fun about being in Ukraine are the pastries. I bet they have amazing pastries.

Jacobsen: They have delicious meat, breaded meat.

Rosner: OK.

Jacobsen: They have much bread, doughy cooked dough, and red meat. That’s a big thing there. Everywhere you go. Coffee is huge there. I loved the coffee. They have all these makeshift shops popping up in every city. They sell coffee, electronics, and meat pastries. It’s a little rare, but a croissant with some sausage or hot dog in there, something like that.

Rosner: Nice.

Jacobsen: And it’s not exactly healthy, but it’s delicious.

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: Can you get pigs in blankets on the streets there? Are there street vendors who are selling pigs in blankets? Pigs in blankets is the U.S. term for a little cocktail wiener, one of those two-inch wieners wrapped in flaky dough. And you cook the whole thing, and it’s delicious. The hot dog is the pig, and the flaky dough is the blanket — pigs in blankets.

Jacobsen: You can get things akin to that if not precisely that. They have all sorts of varieties, but when you’re travelling through different cities every one and a half to two days and eating on the go, those are the kinds of things you’ll see everywhere.

Rosner: All right. If you’ve read any of your interviews with me, you know that my orientation has always been before I was married, and I’m happily married now; that was an objective to get a girlfriend. During all my pre-girlfriend days, I was laser-focused on trying very hard. That was my number one priority. So, you’ve interviewed hundreds of people from all walks of life, from Nobel Prize winners to science fiction authors to high-IQ people. We’ve talked, and I guess you’re open to finding a partner but not focusing on it.

Jacobsen: That’s a fair characterization.

Rosner: But you can imagine finding somebody who would share your adventures with you or would at least be cool with you going off and doing journalistic work.

Jacobsen: Certainly. I have no issue with it whatsoever.

Rosner: You’ve sometimes talked about getting a post-grad degree in Iceland. Is that still a possibility?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: And what would that be in?

Jacobsen: I would look at statistics, psychology, or small-state studies.

Rosner: What do you like about each of those?

Jacobsen: I like statistics because I generally find it super easy, statistically. That’s why many conversations around population dynamics and I.Q. make intuitive sense, spatially and statistically.

Rosner: I share those sentiments with you. If they’re far enough along, I think everybody should replace calculus with statistics in the high school curriculum.

Jacobsen: That would be smart.

Rosner: Yes, if you’re far enough along to be ready for calculus, give yourself a little break because statistics, if you’re good enough to do calculus in high school. A is super helpful, and B is a vacation because it does not lead to the misery that two- or three-variable calculus problems do. My kid made it into second or third-semester calculus in high school and suffered through difficulties. She would get a three-problem problem set, and she and her friends would do it. Find the volume of this ellipsoid, and it would take 40 minutes or more per problem. Why do that? Now, she is an art curator and historian and does not need to find the volume of any ellipsoids but surely could use statistics. It is a less miserable math class than calculus and more functional. And also, you mentioned small-state studies. Is that the study of places like Estonia?

Jacobsen: Yes, places like Iceland, Singapore, and Estonia. Any small state, because of big countries’ issues, which you call a big country problem, is that they cannot adapt as fast when they are huge.

Rosner: Right, Estonia is super nimble.

Jacobsen: That’s right. So, you want to see test cases of how certain philosophies and social programs happen in practice. In that case, if you can control for certain variables, by that, I mean if you look at a particular variable in a society, how it is relatively similar to another society on several different metrics, and then you look at how those variables have changed over, say, a ten or 20-year period, you can look at natural experiments in societies to get loose ideas of how certain things work or do not work in those countries.

Rosner: That would be an exciting backdrop to help with further research. Canada seems sane. We were talking in a previous interview about how, of your ten provinces, only one of them, Alberta, is super redneck to the point of being, as you implied, maybe a little dysfunctional. Whereas in America, like 24 of our states are sufficiently redneck to be a little insane and paralyze the country with ignorant nonsense.

Jacobsen: Alberta has the strengths of a state like Texas. It has strengths in agriculture and the oil business. So, people who know how to do business on that level are good at that. However, in an energy transition era, you must have that kind of business acumen separate from that ideological standing based on history. And that’s where we’re getting much pushback right now. So it’s mixed.

Rosner: Yes, you would want a state, territory, or province where you can do much industrial work. You would like to be someone other than somebody who lives there and breathes fumes. But if you were portraying a future America, near-future fiction, you could imagine that there would be some dirty states, like North or South Dakota, and a libertarian government there would be anything going. Our lifespan might average ten years less because it is messy here, but we are doing a lot. I do not know if that is ideal, but it is conceivable.

Jacobsen: I worked on an Olympic-level show jumping equestrian farm seven days a week for 27 months. I understand the work ethic and the difficulty of those jobs. You work rain, shine, snow, or heavy heat. And the work is not easy, and you get injured. I had two back injuries. At the time, I already had a trick knee because I had a torn ACL years ago and had surgery on that. So, I understand the difficulties of physical labour and being unable to take a day off because the horses are always there.

Rosner: Yes, like the guys with maybe nine and a half fingers because some stuff happened, or fingers that point in weird directions, or a dent in the side of your head, which is a little odd.

Jacobsen: I worked in construction. I knew a couple of guys with half fingers. My grandfather had the tip of his finger cut off. He cut off part of his ring finger.

Rosner: I know a guy who did not even do it during construction. He went bowling and stuck his fingers in a ball with too tight holes, which is a particularly frustrating way to lose part of a finger. But you just returned from a disappointing experience with the Canadian Navy, where they displayed procedural incompetence that convinced you you would not have a productive time there. So you asked to be released. They never fully processed you. They kept dropping the ball. You showed up, and even though you signed all the papers and they were supposed to be ready for you, somebody on their end — a series of people — kept dropping the ball. So people were constantly surprised by your presence to the point where you thought, this is not an organization I want to commit two, three, or five years to. So you are done with that. What is next, you have been working on developing a couple of newswires.

Jacobsen: One based on critical science and public information you are conveying. One of those is called the Critical Science Newswire.

Rosner: Science is where important stuff is happening and happening fast. Is that the deal?

Jacobsen: Applied to efforts to teach non-science or anti-science in schools. The National Center for Science Education has been essential in combating intelligent design and creationism, for instance, in the United States at the legislative and educational levels. So, I got their organizational permission to reproduce all their news releases and news items to create a newswire, and that is the first organization for that newswire. That is not a minor deal. That is a big deal.

Jacobsen: The other one is the Freethought Newswire. I have gotten several organizations to join that, and they are the American Humanist Association, the Association of Secular Elected Officials, the British Columbia Humanist Association, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Humanists International, Humanists U.K., Association Humaniste du Québec, Secular Coalition for America, Secular Connexion Séculière, Secular Student Alliance, the New Enlightenment Project, so far. I reproduce all their content for news and press releases as well. That is another way to do outreach. And these are brand new. As far as I know, these are the first of their kind, at least in the form that I am producing them.

Rosner: Tell me if I am wrong. I detect an undercurrent of trying to develop an ethical foundation in a world that is increasingly scientific, high-tech, and changing faster and faster. For instance, I read an article from a year ago that said the amount of medical information in the world doubles every 73 days, one-fifth of the year. So, tell me if I am wrong, that you are trying to ensure that people have an ethical perspective on the world, even as the world is bubbling with new developments.

Jacobsen: I would agree with 95% of that. That is a very fair characterization in terms of the effort.

Rosner: What is the 5%?

Jacobsen: The human part. I do not mean anti-human. It is a broader purview, not only human beings but also how the things we create change how we define what it means to be human. Humanity is in a period of flux, and our categories change periodically. This particular category is changing, especially regarding information consumption. So, in terms of information processing and all this new information and knowledge that is bubbling, the category of humans is also different when we define humans vis-a-vis the styles of information consumption. There are also drastic phase changes. We do not think about them. They are dramatic, yet they are so pervasive in human history when they do happen. I think about the ancient Egyptians. Only 1% approximately of that population was literate — they were called the scribes. The phase change to having, several thousand years later, vast chunks of the global population being able to read and write is a massive change in the definition of what it means to be human in terms of how people consume and process information.

Rosner: You could argue that smartphones are at least part of a phase change, that we become more intimately linked to robust information. Repositories and distributors. Elon Musk has this Neuralink thing that tries to put chips in people’s heads, and he is a little bit of a bullshitter, but there are probably other companies working on similar things that will eventually pipe a ton of information in and out of our heads and link us more intimately to our machines and other people.

Jacobsen: Elon is akin to Ray Kurzweil. I have yet to point this out. They have an admixture of taking actual theories and accurate facts about the world and mixing them with wild speculation, which, in more honest language, is called bullshitting, to have a hard-to-distinguish mix because they are genuinely intelligent people.

Rosner: Who may be on the spectrum? But when it is hard to disentangle that, and they are so prominent, and they have a history of successes, it is harder to convince the public to think critically or dissect the areas where they are bullshitting and where they are not.

Jacobsen: Although some comedians do an excellent job at slicing, dicing, and parsing things well, more than well.

Rosner: And you could argue Musk and Kurzweil have a way of being, that is, if they are not on the spectrum, they are spectrum-like.

Jacobsen: Yes. Musk is on the spectrum. Kurzweil, the question is open.

Rosner: But that is also a way of being in the world. When you talked about the 5% of people who are changing or entities in the world that should still be part of an ethical framework, it includes people on the spectrum. It should consist of artificial consciousnesses, people who are hybrids, what people in the field call centaurs, a hybrid of a person, and A.I. tech. In the novel I am writing, if you can chip people, you can chip animals and give some animals a better clue about the human world that is utterly incomprehensible to them.

Jacobsen: Your dog does not know much about 99% of what goes on around it in a human household. I can vouch for this.

Rosner: All right. My dogs could be more knowledgeable.

Jacobsen: One dog is way more clueless than the other.

Rosner: Poor Rosie. Yes. At least Frida is a gangster who aims to steal food whenever possible.

Jacobsen: And also barging into the bathroom with the door locked, and we were both surprised she was there. She was staring at me like, “Why are you here?” I am taking a shit.

Rosner: Rosie could use a chip that gives her some clues. But a chipped animal, maybe not — I do not know that you could ever make Rosie understand enough not to be a weirdo all the time. But there are other animals that you can imagine, like the orcas, who find sport in sinking small ships. They have some understanding of human affairs to the point where they are like, if you run into these things a few times, they sink, and then people jump out of them. Maybe they do not have a vendetta. Or perhaps they are annoyed because the human presence in the ocean is noisy and makes them crazy. The orcas need to communicate; they have very sensitive hearing. And all our engines create a massive amount of noise pollution for them. Maybe that is their way of saying, “Forget you.” Or perhaps it is just fun to sink a yacht and see everyone jump out of it. But obviously, dolphins do not turn down a hand job. Dolphins are very horny creatures, and every few years, somebody gets caught jerking off dolphins because dolphins encourage it. So you could put a communication chip in a dolphin’s head and offer them further understanding of the world.

Jacobsen: There was a ‘Florida man’ who had a year-long sexual relationship with a dolphin. When questioned, he said the dolphin seduced him. I believe that is a real story.

Rosner: I believe it. How would you, if you were a dolphin, be like, “Hi, want to go for a ride?” “Yes.” “OK.” “Want to hang out with me? I will make a little dolphin.” And yes, I am a fun dolphin guy. And eventually, the dolphin does what? A creeper human would do something, which is grow a hard-on and press it up against you. And it is like, “Oh, dolphin friend, you want me to do something with the hard-on?” And because you are already friends, you rub it a little bit, and the dolphin is like, “Yes,” and lets you know, “Yes, that is a deal.” So somebody ends up in a relationship with a dolphin every few years where they jerk off the dolphin.

Jacobsen: In this evolving informational landscape, there is a need for ethical understanding in many ways, and that understanding provides a basis to act individually and collectively.

Rosner: One of the horror scenarios with A.I. is that A.I.s take over the world and then decide to kill all humans. Everybody knows that one. Maybe the second biggest cliche is the A.I. servant who gets tossed into a garbage pit while still conscious, which is ethically monstrous. If they can feel to the extent of an animal or a human, we need to treat them with the same kindness as any other creature conscious in the world. We have a terrible record of that when looking at our meat animals. And obviously, we are going to do poorly at it, but we should strive not to be poor at it. You want to — and there was one, the small state — you want to study statistics? What was the third one?

Jacobsen: Psychology.

Rosner: Yes, OK. Given your interest in people of all backgrounds, that is self-explanatory.

Jacobsen: Yes, also, I switched from psychology to journalism. That is how I got started. I was interested in individual differences. That is where the base of a lot of I.Q. interest started. I was in three psychology labs, getting scholarships, and I decided to switch. So that has been the path since then. That would be circling back to what I was already doing anyway.

Rosner: You have interviewed just about every known high-IQ person on Earth. You have interviewed all the people with the highest I.Q. on Earth. What insights have you gathered from talking to all these high-IQ people about humanity?

Jacobsen: Most of the people I interview in the I.Q. communities have a broader interest in either finding fulfillment, acting ethically themselves, or providing a framework for this to be so for others. I have asked many questions about their social philosophy, moral philosophy, political philosophy, metaphysics, and other religious beliefs. In each of them, I often find some answers. It is rare to find an individual in high-IQ communities who does not have some form of moral foundation. Or something they consider an ethical foundation, whether they believe this comes from a higher power or think this is derivative of nature.

Rosner: That is a little surprising to me because some of the most famous high-IQ people, one guy, Keith Raniere, is in prison for life for running a sex cult and also for ripping off his followers. It is nice to hear that most of the high-IQ people you have talked to, maybe all of them, because you could argue that Raniere got caught up in his nonsense and was trying to help people via what he thought were his insights. I do not know if he was a con man from the beginning.

Jacobsen: Those people are the outliers. That is why they make the headlines. That is why their lives are strange.

Rosner: So you think he was always full of nonsense? You think he was always kind of a sociopath but an outlier. So, follow-up question: Besides all the high-IQ people, you interviewed hundreds of people. What insights have you gained into people from talking to so many people?

Jacobsen: Mostly, when people say they believe something, they believe what they say they believe. That is not trivial.

Rosner: That is interesting because science hollows religion out. You look at how the world works, and we increasingly understand how the world works, which means that I believe there are lots of Catholics, lots of Muslims, Jews, and other forms of Christianity, where you have people who call themselves members of these religions but find themselves not believing in all the magical aspects of these religions. What do you think?

Jacobsen: Many people call themselves religious who do not adhere to the particular dictates of their religion. I was writing yesterday or the day before on Noam Chomsky. He was giving an interview with Curt Jaimungal, Peter J. Glinos, and some other person. In this interview, he recalled a story from when he was young. His family, some of them were Orthodox (Jewish). He gained an insight into religion when he was asking his father when he was about eight years old, why his grandfather, the dad’s dad, was smoking when the Talmudic laws went against it. The dad explained that his dad saw smoking as simply another form of eating. So Chomsky took that as a moment to realize, “Oh, religion is based on the idea that God is an idiot.” Because people will find ways around the dictates of religion. That is a standard story. At the same time, it is a scientific point. 

Rosner: So what you have found is that what people believe is not necessarily a belief in all the metaphysics of their religion, but in your talking to them, you found what they believe ethically, and you found that when people say they believe in certain ethical principles, they are not lying.

Jacobsen: Yes. At the same time, what many people call reasons are, in fact, ad hoc or post hoc rationales, they act in a certain way; then, they give a rationale. Yet we call these reasons for specific behaviour.

Rosner: People believe in ethics but also search for excuses if they fail to meet their ethical standards.

Jacobsen: That is a fair characterization.

Rosner: Given this, are you optimistic about humanity and what we will turn into or what the world will turn into?

Jacobsen: As long as the basics of needs are met, people will begin to cooperate more and more, and those societies will develop more and more humanistic-style values because people are not competing over the basics of life. They can compete over more and more frivolous things in life.

Rosner: So I am going to reveal my shallowness here and say, “Wow, that very cooperative world sounds a little boring,” like when Star Trek, the people on the Enterprise go home, and you see them walking around some plaza where people of many races and everybody is just like, “Hey everybody,” and it looks very antiseptic and kumbaya. Will the cooperative world of the future be any fun?

Jacobsen: That is in an ideal world. The real world will look more like something between Star Trek and Blade Runner. There will be super clean aspects. There will be other aspects that are cruel and dirty.

Rosner: I buy that. Like Blade Runner, it is always raining. You are always on a grubby street filled with cyber hookers. People are up to no good using all the future technology that has existed long enough to be grimy. OK, all right.

Jacobsen: People go from comfort to pay, even a lot of money, to go from the extreme comfort of the first world to worse circumstances. Even something as basic as camping for a week or two, people do that. So I think similarly in the future, people will pay money to go away from their Star Trek-style life to a more Blade Runner life where there is rain and grime and to experience something different, deprivation relative to where they are, where their wishes come true, even the sleazy ones.

Rosner: What else should I ask you?

Jacobsen: Ask me about the idea that even though different people believe different things, they believe what they say they believe. There is a scientific point about religious faith, and I agree. If you are taking a religious text’s point of view, not necessarily the Christian faith, but this Christian example as a generic example, Father George Coyne, who used to be the director of the Vatican Observatory, was on the board of In-Sight, and he did an interview with me, and he was supposed to do another interview with me.

Rosner: I’m sorry. We have to pause because Carole just pulled in, the dog is going crazy, and I cannot hear you.

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