Matthew Scillitani on Machine Learning and Family
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/23
Matthew Scillitani, member of the Glia Society and Giga Society, is a software engineer living in Cary, North Carolina. He is of Italian and British lineage, and is fluent in English and Dutch (reading and writing). He holds a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Psychology. You may contact him via e-mail at mattscil@gmail.com.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Holy moly, we’ve done 9 of these things. You’re super easy to collaborate with, like Rick (Rosner), so I keep finding myself going back to you. No one needs a headache. The child is due next month! Any near date? I am a July baby, July 23rd.
Matthew Scillitani: My daughter should have her birthday close to yours then, she’s due July 26th! And since Rick’s so easy to work with, ask him when he’s going to finally publish his book, Dumbass Genius. I’ve been waiting since 2014, so it’s been TEN YEARS. I expect a signed copy, damn it.
Jacobsen: Do you know if it will be male or female?
Scillitani: Yes, we’re having a girl. I hear girls are really sweet to their dads for the first few years, so I’m excited about it. I just hope she doesn’t hate me once she hits puberty, haha.
Jacobsen: What have you learned from studying AI in your hobby time?
Scillitani: A lot, but most importantly it shows just how remarkable the human brain is. We can train A.I. to do simple tasks that humans can’t normally do, like (relatively) quickly finding hidden patterns in huge data pools. But A.I. is nowhere near as capable as your average human brain when it comes to more complex tasks, especially creative ones.
Jacobsen: Are there any names of testees who have been scoring in the 170s and 180s in relatively well-normed high-range tests – relative to high-range tests in general – that stand out? I can always send an email to see if they want to be interviewed.
Scillitani: There are four testees that stand out, two of whom are 190-200 scorers on Paul Cooijmans’ tests. I can’t give their names for privacy reasons, but I’ll ask them if they’d like to be interviewed and give you their contact info if they’re interested.
Jacobsen: What is the style of those “serious problems or self-threats” emails when they come in if I may ask?
Scillitani: They’ll either tell me that their life is generally just not going well (no friends or family, bad job, impoverished, sick, and so on) or they’re struck with the realization that they’re not as smart as they thought they were, and that fact crushes them. Sometimes they want advice, but usually it’s just to vent and have someone to talk to about it, which I’m okay with.
As general advice, when someone takes their intelligence too seriously, they shouldn’t mess around with I.Q. tests. It happens to 99.99…% of testees, especially ones who take multiple (reliable) tests, to score lower than expected. If someone can’t handle that, it’s better to avoid testing altogether.
Jacobsen: To your point, I am aware of a few cases of fraudsters in the high-IQ communities. Not too many, but it’s almost too much of a hassle to keep pointing it out to people, my advice based on painful experience because, apparently, I have a saodmasochistic joy in learning things the hard way: Keep your radar attuned, but don’t waste too much of your time. I wasted some time training some and partaking of their ‘organizations.’ This will happen in life. Simply brush it up to experience, to quote Jay-Z, get that dirt off your shoulder and get on with your self-identified purpose for your life, time cares little for you. What’s your advice?
Scillitani: I try to ignore fraudsters, blocking them after their first suspect message. A few have even reached out and asked (or in some cases bribed) me to join their spoof societies (these are kind of like those generic sodas you see at the grocery store called “Mr Popper”) or sell them test answers. Of course, I report them immediately to the relevant society and test administrators.
Jacobsen: Three categories seem to exist after interacting extensively and researching this topic for a number of years, again not that many people, but it’d be a lie to say this doesn’t happen to some people or that some people are not like this. Here you go: 1) the newest whoever, mostly men, claiming to be the smartest person in the world, in human history, in a country, etc., 2) individuals who formulate cults or quasi-cults for personal fame, professional access, financial gain, convince accomplices to partake in some crime, or sexual gratification, and 3) individuals who claim special powers like being psychics, or narcissists or the personality disordered proclaiming the newest theory of everything, claiming themselves as representatives of God or having an identity isomorphic with some theity, i.e., a prophet of some kind. Something like a shorthand of falsification, psychopathic personal gain, and narcissistic grandiosity. I will point interested readers to three publications from three long-standing, responsible members of the Mega Society covering this:
- “Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (1)”
- “Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (2)”
- “Debunking I.Q. Claims Discussion with Chris Cole, Richard May, and Rick Rosner: Member, Mega Society; Co-Editor, “Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society”; Member, Mega Society (3)”
James Randi, who is dead, and who I interviewed years ago had the same issue with fraudsters and charlatans, even outright lunatics, claiming magical powers. They keep popping up, ‘like Whack-a-Mole.’ My advice is avoid them. They cannot be cured. Most everyone else seems to do the same instinctively. I haven’t encountered an idiot claiming this or that high-IQ. It’s truly a matter of the public ones tend to have a lopsided intelligence or the overall architecture of the intelligence is unbalanced, more component variance. It comes out in all sorts of ways. (That’s not a critique. I’m trying to be compassionately neutral in description. Who the hell am I, anyway, right?) That’s the issue. True intelligence has an authentic quality and a balanced structure. What tends to arise in this as a core factor: perspective, balanced general intelligences have–what is colloquially termed in the anglosphere–perspective. Older people tend to have this. I have only known a few people who genuinely have this, and almost none who have had this as a core structure of their personality. Something persistent over the duration of my knowing of them or knowing them. Any final statements on these kind of things?
Scillitani: I think you summed this up well. My only addition is that I’ve met, on rare occasions, someone brilliant whose mind was spoiled by untreated psychosis, falling into one of those three categories during an episode. Even less-than-intelligent psychotics can sometimes start or join cults and display outrageous megalomania. But for the intelligent psychotics, if they get their psychiatric health managed, often become more balanced over time.
Jacobsen: What is new in machine learning?
Scillitani: It’s such a rapidly growing field that I can hardly keep up with it. Some very smart machine learning engineers started using gaming graphics cards a few years back, and that’s allowed all the growth we’ve been seeing lately. Machine learning was actually relatively stagnant before that, not due to lack of ideas but lack of the hardware needed to implement them.
Jacobsen: What do you do for exercise?
Scillitani: Morning: Ten minutes of meditation, cold shower, 1-2 mile run
Afternoon: 45-60 minutes of weight training or sled pushes/pulls (a killer workout is doing 50m sled push, 50m sled pull, 100-200m jogging, repeat for 30+ minutes without a break).
Evening: 15-30 minutes of static stretches
Jacobsen: What pre-2005 video games are the best to you?
Scillitani: Jak and Daxter, Crash bandicoot, Spyro, and all the 2-D Castlevania games, especially Aria of Sorrow.
Jacobsen: How is the new job going?
Scillitani: It’s going really well. The team is great and there’s a good work-life balance and pay. I can’t ask for more.
Jacobsen: Any big plans with the child coming, the new job, and the growing influence of machine learning in more facets of our lives?
Scillitani: Right now we’re just trying to get everything ready for the baby. Our air conditioning stopped working, so that’s today’s big project, getting that fixed. I did take a short break from machine learning too, just to keep up with all the baby-related chores. But I’ll get back to it after my daughter is born.
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