Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com

Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Journal Founding: August 2, 2012

Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year

Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed

Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access

Fees: None (Free)

Volume Numbering: 13

Issue Numbering: 1

Section: A

Theme Type: Idea

Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”

Theme Part: 32

Formal Sub-Theme: None.

Individual Publication Date: September 15, 2024

Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2025

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Word Count: 6,836

Image Credits: Anna Evans on Unsplash.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885

*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts.*

*Updated December 28, 2024.*

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*

Abstract

‘Harry Royalster’ is a lifelong autodidact. He is member of the high-IQ communities including World  Genius Directory, ISPE, Glia Society, CIVIQ Society and Mensa. He discusses: growing up; extended  self; family background; youth with friends; education; purpose of intelligence tests; high intelligence;  extreme reactions to geniuses; greatest geniuses; genius and a profoundly gifted person; necessities for  genius or the definition of genius; work experiences and jobs held; job path; myths of the gifted; God; science; tests taken and scores earned; range of the scores; ethical philosophy; political philosophy;  metaphysics; worldview; meaning in life; source of meaning; afterlife; life; and love. 

Keywords: Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, childhood curiosity, family dynamics, family stories, father’s  frugality, lost enthusiasm, scientific temperament, transistor radio experiment.

Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you were growing up, what were some of the prominent family stories being told over time? 

Harry Royalster: 

Transistor radio story: 

My parents were children of The Great Depression. My father in particular had experienced economic  hardship as a child. So, he was strongly inclined toward frugality and his character had been steeped in  this ethos for decades while running a small electroplating business in the middle years of the twentieth 

century. I think he was wary of aspirational dreams that weren’t firmly grounded in a logical path to a  job. An episode comes to mine that illustrates – and casts a shadow. I may have been eight or nine  years old. I could see that my transistor radio was powered by a battery that completed a circuit and  wondered why it couldn’t run on house current to perform the same job. I wired her up and flipped the  switch. Of course, the radio was instantly fried. I showed it to my dad, wondering whether there was  any hope of resuscitating the thing. He grimaced disgustedly and spat out the phrase “ya burnt it out.”  While my “experiment” was grounded in pure ignorance and a real absence of common sense, it did  reveal a scientific temperament that a dad with a broader horizon may have paid heed to and (even)  good-naturedly encouraged. It happens that in those early years I imagined myself a future scientist. I  quite enjoyed the classy act of Mr. Wizard on TV, which I revisited in recent days on youtube after a  pause of sixty years. But, early on, I lost my child-like enthusiasm, while still a child, and was  susceptible to discouraging messages about the feasibility of my hopes, fantasies and dreams as  unrealistic or simplistic… 

Love in the third grade: 

There is a much beloved tale of how my parents came to be romantically linked. Undisputed is that  they attended the same elementary school class for at least one year in Brooklyn, NY circa 1930. After  that, nothing is certain but the basic outline of the story is accepted legend. It seems that even as  children Laurence and “Mimi” (a hated family nickname for Miriam; Mia was preferred) admired each  other’s academic prowess and perhaps there was even a nascent pre-adolescent romantic spark. In their  late teens, both had nearly completed bachelors degrees, each having skipped several “terms.” A key  element of the story is that, after that shared year or so in grammar school, they weren’t in touch for the  remainder of their childhoods; Laurence’s family had moved to a different section of Brooklyn. So, it  came quite out of the blue that Laurence telephoned Mia, at age eighteen or so, to probe for romantic  interest. It is said that he asked “Do you know who this is?” The implicit storyline –maybe not so  implicit– was that if Mia had failed to come up with the right name (note: after a ten year or so 

separation), then Laurence would not be interested; this would be the acid test. Jeremy 

Another family storyline concerns the sparkling intellect of my much older brother Jeremy (name  changed). It seemed to his little brother Harry that Jeremy was deified in the family culture. He was a  robust fellow, nearly seven years older than I. He had skipped third grade when I was just out of the  womb. During his adolescence he would tunelessly sing to himself “I’m a genius, I’m a genius…” He  was a daunting presence to his admiring kid brother, me, a scrawny second banana with a stutter who  routinely fell asleep in his first grade class—and was teased for it. It took many years for me to develop an accurate take on Jeremy that went beyond the caricatured family myth. Despite his being a  certifiable narcissist, we now get along reasonably well–albeit with some caution on both sides, now as  older men. My brother is a successful author and certainly a smart guy–possibly Glia eligible–but not a  person with freakish, uncanny powers who is categorically different than the plodding rest of us. (An  aside here: the “plodding rest of us” includes your garden variety three-sigma-above-the-mean–give-or take folk who jostle together, every day, throughout our academic and professional lives.) I love my  brother– in the way one can love a (genuine) narcissist: at arm’s length. 

By the time I rolled into second grade, the New York City public school system had pretty much  eliminated grade skipping, an early concession to creeping egalitarianism in education philosophy and  everyone-gets-a-trophyism generally. I probably wasn’t a candidate anyway; at school, I didn’t have the buoyant, confident personality that would have launched me to early stardom. Indeed, due to the  hostility of my first grade teacher (who, naturally, had been my brother’s first grade teacher seven years earlier and who made invidious comparisons between us), I was placed in one of the dumber classes for second grade. In time, I did skip eighth grade via a program called SP or Special Progress, which was a long standing institution in NYC public schools in which a rather high percentage of students– maybe  10% –it seemed to me– were selected for a program that ostensibly squeezed three years of academic  work into two; classes were composed entirely of SP students. Earlier, Jeremy had also been selected  for the SP and so, had skipped two grades, and graduated from the prestigious Stuyvesant High School  at just about his 16th birthday. 

Laurence and Mia 

My father Laurence also had been an academic star and, along with Mia, set the family expectations for decades to come. He had earned a chemical engineering degree from (free and highly selective) Cooper Union at age 19 and went on to earn a mechanical engineering degree from Penn. He was recruited (but declined) to work on the Manhattan project. As it was, my dad’s MS was sponsored by the federal  

government during WWII. 

My mother was a character, high strung and certainly neurotic; she was melodramatic and prone to  inappropriate or excessive worry. But she was also great fun, with bubbling creativity. She was wistful  about her years at Brooklyn College, where she graduated magna cum laude with an English degree at  nineteen; she was steeped in the English Romantic poets. I present here a telling couple of lines from  her obituary, which I adapted from an earlier biographical sketch written by my brother: “She was  active in Hadassah, the Jewish woman’s organization, for whose staged musical productions she wrote  new lyrics to Broadway show tunes. She could recite Shakespearean sonnets from memory, and wrote  occasional sonnets herself, as well as several published essays about her Brooklyn childhood.” 

All this intellectual fire power. 

So, Mia and Laurence, married at ages 20 and 21, had a child, made in their image: my brother Jeremy, among the first boomers. 

Reality Check

To be clear, none of these people were geniuses. I came to know their blind spots, coverups, self serving stories, vanities and defenses all too well. Certainly, in the ordinary flow of life, they were all  significantly smarter than the average bear, where “average bear” is defined as, let’s say, Mensa level.  But, in the careers and academic circles where smart people tread, and in their families, there are many, many people who are Mensa level and well above, with outsized opinions of themselves. In the circles  that smart people run in, being smart is not all that special. 

During my formative years, I sensed that something was wrong with a family that unabashedly  equated emblems of high intelligence with intrinsic worth. And still, such emblems were de rigueur and displayed almost daily, perhaps only when my mom would embarrassingly correct the grammar of one  of my buds. I felt diminished and stymied by these outsized egos and felt there was no conventional  path to success since intellectual and academic excellence did not seem to accrue any benefits; it was a  “Royalster” given; the risk of failure had no corresponding and proportionate reward.  

Meanwhile, I was a stutterer and was anxious and unhappy and always subject to shame if there would  ever be shakiness in my academic excellence. My stuttering was a serious problem. It greatly ratcheted  up anxiety at the prospect of college interviews– even when those interviews would be many years in  the future! I didn’t hate school but I did find it sadly stultifying. While I was generally classified among the brighter students, I felt cheated by my stutter, which made it difficult to really shine. Also, I was  offended by teachers’ diatribes about supposed bad behavior of the pupils. I felt this was mostly unfair  and I didn’t feel like being yelled at in the schoolyard by some power obsessed harpy. At times, I was  confused and frankly depressed by the mediocrity of the other pupils—and teachers. During the two SP years, I was stimulated enough, in part by the discovery of girls, but the move to suburbia was looming. 

Bad Days at Green Way High 

When I was 14, in the summer of 1967, the family moved to a New Jersey suburb of New York City. I  had graduated from the SP and so, by default, had been scheduled for honors classes in the public high  school in Brooklyn. But now in the New Jersey suburb of Green Way (not its name), I would need to  register for sophomore classes in a sit-down with the ironically dubbed “guidance counselor” at Green  Way High. I would have benefitted by taking my mother along as an advocate, in navigating these  treacherous bureaucratic waters. But I was too invested in the silly image of myself as an independent  adult and was too proud to enlist my mom. And she didn’t have the good sense or parental leadership to insist on an advocacy role. The result was that I was signed up for a generic “college bound”  sophomore year curriculum of mostly mediocre classes composed of not very serious students. It was a  source of shame to me that I was classified as one of these people. I felt socially alienated due to this  mismatch. And, of course, I was new in town, scrawny, stuttered and was a little on the young side. 

My high school career was undistinguished. I found the institutions and rites of passage through the  college prep and admissions process just not for me. It was too fraught with anxiety. My SATs (1968 or 1969 vintage, long before re-norming) were good but not stellar. As I recall, I ran out of time, due to  too much indecision and rumination, a recurring mode with me, and filled in the last few circles hoping to scoop up a few more correct answers. I applied to one college, Reed, known for its eccentric but  brilliant students, and was not accepted. 

So, life in Green Way High was not a riotous success. From the beginning, it felt to me… alien; of  someone else’s making. Which, of course, it was. One problem was how humorless and credulous and  brittle I was. I was just too tightly wound to cope with persistent culture shock. And my parents would  soon be ambushed by my seething discontent, with very little insight into its source. 

Escape! 

Within several months of our settling in Green Way, I found what seemed to be a safety valve to 

relieve my perpetual anxiety. I needed an alternative storyline to justify a less stressful (i.e., less  competitive!) way of being in the world; I became a hippie. I could jettison the value system that I had  inherited from Western Civilization and – presto chango – leap headlong into the Age of Aquarius,  along with millions of other “gentle people with flowers in their hair,” worldwide, who were similarly  “aware” of the stultifying stranglehold of the dominant societal values. 

To go along with this departure from conventional striving, I did not challenge myself in the hard  sciences, to my enduring loss. How could a smart person be so dopey? In my defense, I had lots of  company and was only 14 or 15 (depending on which stupid life-changing decision or event we peg as  pivotal).  

In any case, I felt cornered; I needed a pressure release and didn’t have the maturity, confidence,  steadfastness or patience to be less compulsive and reckless. So, I essentially dropped out of school by  coasting to graduation, smoking pot, dropping acid and hitchhiking around the country. I looked about  13 and so often ended up in lockup in far off communities, as a runaway. This was rather humiliating  and not really much fun. 

Later, as a young adult, I adopted, rather passively and uncritically, a simplistic, copout form of  nihilism that was cobbled mainly second-hand and not so much through original sources (does anyone  actually read Nietzsche?). I created for myself the illusion of a person standing above conventional  rules as a manifestation of superiority. This was, of course, ass backward: it’s true that geniuses will  break the rules from time to time but it does not follow that people who break the rules are geniuses.  

This adopted philosophical stance had real life effects including some high risk episodes. I cringe with  a disbelieving shake of the head when I think of them, some 50 years later.  

Jacobsen: What was the family background, e.g., geography, culture, language, and religion or  lack thereof? 

Royalster: I did the Ancestry.com genetic analysis thing which revealed even more homogeneity than I  expected. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been surprising that my revealed gene pool is 100%  Ashkenazi Jewish; my ancestors, on both sides, were observant Jews, mainly from Bessarabia and a  frequently disputed area near the Poland/Ukraine border, in the town of Yavoriv (Polish version,  Jaworów), some 34 miles west of the oblast capital, Lviv. My grandparents on my father’s side  met and married in Jaworów with its distinct Polish and Jewish heritage that was then part of the  Austro-Hungarian Empire. The borders in that part of the world have been contentiously redrawn after  both world wars (and the cold war) and Jaworów is now (or should I say currently) Yavoriv, in western Ukraine.  

I visited the town in the summer of 2018. There were only subtle clues of a past Jewish population  there: a few door posts showing the markings of violated and removed mezuzahs. The city of Lviv,  much larger, had a more complete Jewish historical footprint. Still, Jaworów was where my  grandparents met and courted, presumably introduced to each other by a shadkhan (Yiddish:  matchmaker). 

They had two children while together in their home town of Jaworów. My grandfather, Harry, who I  never met, and for whom I am named (in the Jewish custom of naming a child after a deceased  relative), came to the U.S. in 1913, presumably seeking economic opportunity. Perhaps also to avoid  the military draft as the empire lurched toward war. A boggling and not fully explained fact is that my  grandmother, Rachel (Rose, depending on context) did not reconnect with her husband in the United  States until 1920! It’s reasonable to suppose that the Great War had something to do with this extended  separation. In the interim both of their children succumbed to disease, perhaps the Spanish flu of 1919. 

A son, my father, was born to the reunited couple in 1921 in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.  A daughter, Minnie, would follow four years later. 

1921 was also the year my mother was born, the eldest of three girls, born to Rose—yes, another Rose — a first generation American and crackerjack Scrabble player, and her husband Saul. My grandfather  Saul had migrated to America as a 14 year-old, some twenty years earlier, to avert being drafted into  the Czar’s army. Saul was the first of my forebears to drift toward a secular worldview and a much  reduced observance of Judaism. He was also a successful small businessman who owned and operated  a metal finishing plant, a wood craftsman, a mandolin player, a loving steward of a large side-yard  festooned with apple trees and a strawberry patch.  

Jacobsen: How was the experience with peers and schoolmates as a child and an adolescent?

Royalster: Good; during my Brooklyn childhood there was a good group of bright neighborhood kids  though I did experience some anxiety when the complicating element of attraction to girls kicked in  with attendant parties and insecurities. Not so good after family’s move to suburbia, examined  elsewhere in this questionnaire. 

Jacobsen: What have been some professional certifications, qualifications, and trainings earned  by you? 

Royalster: As a child, I was generally on the high honor roll. I learned my eventual vocation (computer  programming) by a combination of autodidactism and vocational training at an orthodox Jewish  vocational school in NYC. An aside: All other students were either Jewish emigres from Soviet  Socialist Republics or orthodox Chasidim. I was the only native secular Jew.  

I founded a chess club at Franconia College in NH, an “experimental” college I attended in the early  70s for three semesters. Skipping ahead some decades: 

As VP and software engineer running a critical and ultra high stress project at Charles Schwab Co, I  was awarded the annual “Best of the Best” award at Schwab, as both team leader and team member of  the capital markets unit.  

Earlier (1970s) I lived a prolonged period as a somewhat shabby but neatly turned out “tourist” in San  Francisco, socializing with a cohort that was similarly independent but not friendless. I’m reminded of  Paul Simon’s The Boxer reference to “where the ragged people go.” But this was a group that wasn’t  quite so ragged and I remember its members fondly. I did enjoy this extended hiatus from the old  familiar stress, spending hour upon hour in bookstores and coffeehouses and San Francisco’s main  library, with its grand facade— consistent with the Beaux Arts style. Among my hangouts was  someplace called the Network Coffeehouse that offered a range of stimulating programs to me and my  fellow urban explorers, along with a pretty good level of pingpong and chess.  

But, the State of California eventually tired of my extracting a living from its very liberal social welfare programs and quite insisted that I take a battery of tests to try to determine how I might be able to get  off the dole. The results of these tests triggered the signal that I should be trained as a computer  programmer and also provided an onramp into Mensa, which would soon have some utility for me.  

I then competed in SF Regional Mensa puzzle solving competitions which would provide an indirect  way of boasting Mensa membership on a resumé in a natural and relevant way since puzzle solving is a talent and skill that was integral to the newly sought career as a programmer. Touting Mensa  membership out of context would have been vulgar and irrelevant and contrived but, couched within a 

profile, it was just the thing to generate interest in a candidate who had no computer science degree,  indeed, no degree of any kind. 

This may have been 1979. But, it was the birth of my first child, with my then future wife, in 1982, to  establish a tipping point for my transition from SF street denizen to software engineer and Wall St  executive. 

Earlier, during those amorphous 70s, there were some vacations from my vacation, notably a few  months as a “work scholar” at the new age mecca Esalen Institute in gorgeous Big Sur, where I took  workshops from Elizabeth Kuhbler Ross, Leo Matos, Dick Price, et al. and knew and counseled with  Gregory Bateson toward the end of his life. 

Jacobsen: What is the purpose of intelligence tests to you? 

Royalster: Any time I’ve taken any of these tests it was for a specific purpose: (1) age 9: to provide  grist (i.e., experience and data) for my uncle as he pursued a masters degree in psychology in middle  age; (2) to select students for the SP, discussed elsewhere (3) to detect whether I could be gainfully  employed, a test was administered by the state of California at age 25 (4) to entertain myself during  long bus commutes to Manhattan, I took the W87 test (age 38), used at that time for admission to the  ISPE, an I.Q. society whose standard for admission is a score at or above 99.9th percentile; (5) to be  admitted to Glia Society, possibly offering contact with interesting people and interesting ideas; also to  verify 99.9 level with entirely different instrument (tests by Paul Cooijmans). 

Jacobsen: When was high intelligence discovered for you? 

Royalster: To clarify, let me re-interpret the question in two different ways: (1) when did you become  aware that you were highly intelligent? (2) when did you become aware that being highly intelligent  was “a thing,” a formal and measurable thing? I was confused about “where I stood” at a young age.  There were other smart kids but I felt that there were qualities of mind that were palpably different  when comparing my mind with the minds of other smart kids. So, I wanted to tease out whether I was a notch above or a notch below these other kids or just different. 

Jacobsen: When you think of the ways in which the geniuses of the past have either been mocked,  vilified, and condemned if not killed, or praised, flattered, platformed, and revered, what seems like the reason for the extreme reactions to and treatment of geniuses? Many alive today seem camera shy –  many, not all. 

Royalster: What does “platformed” mean in this context? …Genuine geniuses are qualitatively different than the rest of us. Sometimes their ideas are sufficiently different and alien that they make us  discombobulated and angry. Also, institutions can be vested in old ideas that they are unwilling to  jettison. Galileo’s tussle with the Catholic church comes to mind. Conversely (I suppose), these  feelings can induce a cult like worship of the genius or special person, perhaps as a way to make peace  with the threat of new superseding ideas. 

Jacobsen: Who seem like the greatest geniuses in history to you?  

(see next Q&A). 

Jacobsen: What differentiates a genius from a profoundly intelligent person? 

Royalster: I think there is a big problem with the word genius. It strikes me as a word in search of a meaning. It is  used colloquially in many more ways than any writer or speaker would ever hope to use it with  precision or formality. But, let’s take a shot at it:

The ability to apply a mechanism or tool in a novel way is a component of genius. Think of the  ingenuity depicted in the movie (and actual historic events) of Apollo 13. Of course this was a case of  cooperation among resourceful engineers on the ground partnered with the fevered creativity of the  astronauts aloft. And, the tools and materials available were pre-determined, limited to the objects in  the spacecraft. But, these very singular conditions signify to me that genius may be a process apart  from the muse of a single individual but an artifact of inspired necessity constructed by one or more  ordinary but able human beings.  

One of my favorite geniuses is Godfrey Wilhelm Leibniz, arguably the father of German technology, as we’ll see. Leibniz is probably best known for conjuring the Calculus, simultaneously to, and  independently of— Isaac Newton. He was bogglingly eclectic; a mathematician, philosopher, physicist  and statesman. And, yes, a politician. He wasn’t hemmed in by the— perhaps— artificial boundaries  that delineate disciplines to us non-geniuses. This mental plasticity may be a signal feature of genius.  The elegance of Leibniz’s mind was further revealed by the superior notation he conceived for  representing the Calculus, much cleaner than Newton’s unwieldy notation. Leibniz made insightful  contributions in physics including predictive observations about force, energy and time. And, he  refined the binary number system. The great polymath invented the “Leibniz Wheel”–the operating  mechanism used in the “Arithmometer,” the first mass-produced mechanical calculator and also the  quaintly named “Stepped Reckoner,” the first calculator that could perform all four arithmetic  operations. Eclecticism, versatility, applying old ideas to new problems, applying new ideas to old  problems, envisioning applications that are beyond boundaries of current technology. This freedom of  mind seems to be a defining feature of genius.  

A polymath of even greater breadth, if that were possible, was John Von Neumann, who was graced,  by God, with an astonishingly powerful and supple mind, spanning linguistics, history, mathematics,  computer science and an improbable slew of other disciplines, some of which he invented. He  formulated Game Theory, conceived the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics; his  ruminations on parallels between brains and computers inspired the origins of artificial intelligence and the development of neuroscience. Somewhat echoing Leibniz, “Johnny” is credited with building what  is possibly the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer, the ENIAC. Echoing  Archimedes, he developed and refined weapons of war during and in the run-up to WWII. Prescient  about the looming war, Von Neumann developed expertise in the mathematics of ballistics and  explosives as early as 1930, lending his acquired knowledge to the Americans and ultimately the  Manhattan Project. It was Von Neumann who calculated the arrangement of explosives needed to  detonate the “Fat Man” bomb that would be dropped on Nagasaki at the close of the war. This short  digest barely hints at the scope of Von Neumann’s work and originality..  

In sharp contrast to the eclecticism modeled by Von Neumann and Leibniz, consider the narrowly  focused but luminous careers of mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan and chess prodigy Bobby  Fischer. Both seem to have had talents and proclivities that far exceeded the grasp of mere hard work  (though genius does inspire and almost certainly requires hard work). As an aside, the rivalry of Mozart and Antonio Salieri, famously depicted in the film Amadeus, springs to mind as illustrative of both the  necessity and limits of hard work… Ramanujan openly proclaimed that many if not all of his  mathematical insights were presented in final form by the Indian goddess Namagiri. This suggests that  there was something visionary and decidedly non-linear about Ramanujan’s process of discovery. This  may not be unusual. Fischer was so much better than his contemporaries that he had a certain  something that the next tier of rated players did not. Fischer bristled at being labelled a mere “chess  genius,” asserting that his brilliance could be expressed in almost any field.

All asides aside, we have two distinct and opposed models of genius: the polymath whose brain  demonstrates superplasticity and the specialized savant who seems to be hardwired with highly specific targeted abilities that are possibly not broadly deployed.  

Re: What differentiates a genius from a Profoundly Intelligent Person? 

PIP:Genius::Potential:Kinetic 

Jacobsen: Is profound intelligence necessary for genius?  

Royalster: Genius represents the coming together of talent and a field or discipline—or several—or  many–that has become a nearly obsessive interest which feeds off this talent in an upward spiral. The  level of talent does not have to necessarily meet a standard of profundity, which may be an arbitrary  requirement. Still, we would expect the talent of genius to be at a significant level, compared to the  average bear. 

Jacobsen: What have been some work experiences and jobs held by you? 

Royalster: Executive Director UBS Investment Bank, from which I retired at 55,  

Vice President IT at Charles Schwab Capital Markets,  

Senior Systems Analyst at German/global commodities trader (aptly named Metallgesellschaft), Temporary office worker, generally in San Francisco’s business district, 

Cab driver in NYC, 

Sandwich maker at San Francisco’s The Coffee Gallery, the longtime Beatnik hangout, making  sandwiches for a later generation of hanger-outers, 

Hated scab agricultural worker in California,  

and so on. 

Prior to career as software engineer, I had lived an unstructured life, mostly in San Francisco, for many  years, unwilling or unable to complete my “adult adjustment,” often surviving by means of government programs. At one point, age about 26, this lifestyle began to get “old” and also no longer tenable due to drying up of government resources. And the State of California and other government entities were  

eager to take me off their balance sheet.  

Jacobsen: What are some of the more important aspects of the idea of the gifted and geniuses? Those  myths that pervade the cultures of the world. What are those myths? What truths dispel them? Royalster: I don’t know that “genius” and giftedness can be understood as things that have much in  common, except that genius requires some threshold of talent. Giftedness by itself could be something  like having significant –but not rare– talent, that is not necessarily realized “in the world.” (Genius is  discussed in some detail elsewhere.) Generally I avoid the word giftedness because it seems to signify  an extra layer of specialness that sets a person apart, unnecessarily, much as identity politics does. 

Jacobsen: Any thoughts on the God concept or gods idea and philosophy, theology, and religion?

Royalster: My “take” on God is that I have become satisfied with the evidence for intelligence that is  superior to human intelligence. A snippet of this evidence can be found in Darwin’s Black Box, by  Michael Behe, a biochemistry professor at Lehigh, who coined the term irreducible complexity, to  capture the notion of mutual dependency of separate biological systems that cannot be independently  “selected” because of their mutual dependency. Also, for more discussion of design, see Stephen C.  Meyer’s Signature in the Cell and my long review of it in Telicom, Journal of the International Society  of Philosophical Enquiry (TELICOM XXIII.1 – First Quarter 2010). Here is a snippet of the review to 

give its flavor: 

In 1958, five years after his co-unveiling of the molecular structure of DNA, Francis Crick  announced the daring hypothesis that pointed the way to the genetic code. Crick surmised that it was the arrangement of DNA bases, not their shape or any merely physical feature, that was  responsible for their salient effect. The individual base molecules, the famous A’s, G’s, T’s and  C’s in the popular shorthand, would prove to be a four letter alphabet whose words mapped to  the meaning expressed by the fancy, functional protein machines that hummed within the cell.  The “sequence hypothesis,” as it was dubbed, was proposed with scant empirical evidence,  perhaps hurried along by the digital revolution that paralleled the biological one of that era. It  envisaged a mechanism that was logically indistinguishable from computer collating sequences, the trick by which conventional alphabets are represented “under the hood.” Just as an arbitrary  arrangement of digital bits (Os and 1’s) maps to an English character set, a likewise arbitrary  arrangement of nucleotide bases maps to certain amino acids that are chained together to form  proteins. As a point of contrast, consider the decidedly physical nature of a protein that is so  synthesized, whose specific shape is exquisitely tied to its function. 

These two elements, the abstract cipher encased in the sequence of DNA bases and the  contrastingly palpable and quirkily shaped proteins of cellular machinery are, roughly, the  beginning and end points of what is called gene expression. And, it was the explication of gene  expression in the1960’s that formally confirmed Crick’s hypothesis that the sequencing of DNA bases contained information content. But how was this information originally supplied? It is the  origin of biological information that is the pivotal question of SITC. 

…I think religious principles, stories, customs and rituals are useful and helpful and even instructive for many people but are mainly human intellectual artifacts. However, discernment, discussed elsewhere,  is real. 

Jacobsen: How much does science play into the worldview for you? 

Royalster: When science is politicized, it ceases to be science because it is not disinterested. This  certainly does happen. Scientists exhibit the range of human behavior including laudable tenacity but  also cowardice, conformity and venality. As a software engineer/programmer I learned the lesson well  that our early assumptions about any system, including Nature’s systems are usually wrong and cannot  generally be considered sound unless verified empirically and with painstaking rigor. Here is a relevant snip from the SITC review: 

[Meyer] presents the common sense view that it cannot be a source of alarm or scientifically  discrediting that ID has metaphysical implications since it, not surprisingly,“addresses a major  philosophical question that most religious and metaphysical systems of thought also address,  namely,‘What caused life and/or the universe to come into existence?’Thus, like its materialistic  counterparts, the theory of intelligent design inevitably raises questions about the ultimate or prime  reality. …Scientific theories must be evaluated on the basis of the evidence, not on the basis of  philosophical preferences or concerns about implications. 

Jacobsen: What have been some of the tests taken and scores earned (with standard deviations) for  you? 

Royalster: CTMM 139 SD 15, W87 result reported as a percentile (99.9), Cooijmans Intelligence Test –  Form 4E 149 SD 15, Gliaweb Riddled Intelligence Test 161 SD 15 

Jacobsen: What is the range of the scores for you? The scores earned on alternative intelligence tests  tend to produce a wide smattering of data points rather than clusters, typically. 

Royalster: 

22 points SD 15 

Jacobsen: What ethical philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you?

Royalster: Treat people with empathy, kindness, honesty and consistent integrity. Also, individuals  should be treated as individuals and not members of groups; over the long term this brings out the best  in people but more importantly is the most truthful and least distorting way. 

Jacobsen: What social philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you? Royalster: Trust the marketplace 

Jacobsen: What political philosophy makes some sense, even the most workable sense to you? Royalster: Trust the marketplace; ambitious government programs, ostensibly well-meaning, are at  their heart power grabs and ultimately (almost always) corrupt. 

Jacobsen: What metaphysics makes some sense to you, even the most workable sense to you?

Royalster: To carve out a small piece of this question let us not forget that almost all information about  the world is presented by our sense organs which fashion this information in ways that can be  processed by our brains; even the crude initial capture of this information is within limited ranges (e.g.,  the “visible” spectrum and many other examples) and has specific (human) qualities (so, e.g., human  sense of smell is quite different than canine sense of smell). This should remind us that we are privy to  small specialized snippets of the world. Obviously this is still true when we extend our senses as  through a telescope or a cochlear implant or an MRI machine. So, much of life is an attempt to  extrapolate the truth from the interplay between what is delivered to our senses and what is not.  

Jacobsen: What worldview-encompassing philosophical system makes some sense, even the most  workable sense to you? 

Royalster: Any refinement of thought that can be embraced as more true or more probably true than  whatever it supersedes is good. This dovetails nicely with the practice of science. Also, any thought or  supposition or heuristic that improves clarity and reduces ambiguity is a good thing, And, as  Wittgenstein wrote, anything that can be said can be said clearly. This implies that some things, maybe  most things, cannot be said. 

Jacobsen: What provides meaning in life for you? 

Royalster: (See next answer) 

Jacobsen: Is meaning externally derived, internally generated, both, or something else? 

Royalster: I think meaning can be discerned. When the U.S. Declaration of Independence declares that humans  have certain “unalienable rights” that are “self-evident,” it implies that there is something important  about the way the world works and our place in it that is accessible and discernible, however  imperfectly, by the finite minds of people who are receptive to these truths. Such “natural law” would  tend to reify an ambitious claim to know the mind of God. If too contrived, such a claim is patently  absurd. If lawmakers attempt to apply this standard of natural rights in a counterfeit way, the fraud  should scream out at us. For example, while there are complexities and ambiguities about the abortion  debate, no one who is intellectually honest can frame the “right” to choose as a sacred right, granted by  God, through all nine months of pregnancy. 

I hasten to add that this standard of certainty and discerned rights does not require a belief in God, just  plausible insight into the workings of a divine mind that is consistent with common sense. This  standard is much more compelling than changeable rules invented by human beings for, say, political 

or careerist purposes. When innate “rights” are conjured up without a serious attempt to apply the  standard of “endowed [to us] by our Creator, “ the fraud is “self-evident.” This corrupt concoction of  “rights” is exposed. Rights and protections are, of course, legitimately crafted in the domain of political horse trading but we are regularly confronted by the reality that such political process is rife with  venality and ego. In the spirit of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous observation about obscenity –that he  “knows it when he sees it,” the truthfulness of claims of natural rights is something we know when we  see it. To acknowledge that such a standard exists is to demand that it be applied in a disciplined way.  The discernment model is a buttress against cynically or carelessly making stuff up. 

So, this discernible truth is a source of meaning to me. Also, meaning surely derives from applying  one’s mind to life’s problems and ruminating on which line of thought or which considered intuition  “makes the cut.”  

Jacobsen: Do you believe in an afterlife? If so, why, and what form? If not, why not? Royalster: Not in any way that preserves identity or memory. But consciousness is not understood at all and it may not be physical or exclusively physical. Philosopher of science Thomas Nagel has posited  that consciousness itself is a special kind of non-material stuff. In a manner that is somewhat analogous to stuff becoming animated (by whatever is the source of life—we don’t know); material stuff, he  supposes, can be permeated by consciousness. 

Jacobsen: What do you make of the mystery and transience of life? 

Royalster: It’s quite the thing, isn’t it. All the brothers and sisters and bosses and parents and children  and celebrities and geniuses and ballerinas and criminals and musicians and redheads and accountants  on and on are occupying their bodies and living their lives in a minuscule window of time. Our bodies  service us for a little while and then, when it’s all over, we do a complete vanishing act. Every person  we see, with his or her flesh and blood package of bio-machinery is a short story that unfolds and then  ceases completely into matter that becomes indistinguishable from all other matter. Time itself is  neither long nor short, when considered outside the human frame. We know that we, our selves, living  beings on earth, are dependent on a star that, like all stars, will burn out. It’s easy to believe that life  itself is unique to this celestial moment, and may be a “one off.” And time, itself, is not well  understood much as consciousness is not well understood. Physicist Carlo Rovelli has written a  provocative volume about time, “The Order of Time.” Here’s a snippet from an interview with Rovelli:

What does physics have to say about the “flow” of time that humans seem to feel? 

It may not be a physics problem. I think it depends on our brains and the complicated way  in which we form memories. It has to do with how we remember the past and anticipate the future. So to explain this passage of time, this flowing of time, I believe one should look at  neuroscience, not physics. 

For me the most accessible take-away from Rovelli’s work here is that all of our human notions about  time, filtered through human sense organs, are confined (i.e., applicable only) to that human frame.  When we consider the idea that the sun will not burn out for a “long, long time,” almost certainly  outliving our species, the correct rejoinder is “so what, it will burn out; that’s just the way things work.” To think differently is much like trying to assuage the anxiety of a child, coming to grips with mortality at, say, age five. 

Jacobsen: What is love to you? 

Royalster: I love dark chocolate, integrity, logic, the ocean, truth, my children and grandchildren, my  late wife, all in different ways. It is safe to say, love is not one thing but many. Among these things is  the unforced, undoubted rightness of empathy toward a spouse, superseding all else. I’m reminded of a  true story, repeated in Orthodox Jewish circles, concerning a famous rabbi, Rabbi Aryeh Levine. 

Accompanying his wife to a medical clinic, and after perhaps several minutes of an exasperating  interview, attempting to pin down symptoms, the Rabbi finally explained “Doc, it’s my wife’s leg; it’s  killing us.” 

Bibliography

None

Footnotes

None

Citations

American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S.  Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life. September 2024; 13(1). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster

American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, September 15).  Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life. In-Sight Publishing. 13(1).

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S.  Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 13, n. 1, 2024.

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “ Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (Winter). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster.

Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “ Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 13, no. 1 (September 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster.

Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘ Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 13(1). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster>.

Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘ Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster>.

Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “ Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.13, no. 1, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster.

Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J.  Conversation with Harry Royalster on Views and Life [Internet]. 2024 Sep; 13(1). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/royalster.

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