Ask A Genius 1561: The Loon-o-Sphere: How Intelligence, Creativity, and Conspiracy Thinking Intersect in the Modern Mind

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/04

Is higher intelligence a safeguard against lunacy, or just a different form of it?

In this far-ranging dialogue, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner dissect modern conspiracy culture, political disillusionment, and the strange overlap between intelligence and irrationality. From New York’s mayoral race to AI’s speculative bubble, Rosner muses on cognitive traps—from MAGA fanaticism to obsessive intellectual rabbit holes. They explore why some brilliant minds drift into delusion while others channel their focus into creative mastery. The conversation blends political realism, humor, and cognitive insight, concluding that lucidity—in writing and in thought—is the surest antidote to madness.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It is the election for the Virginia governor, the New Jersey governor, Proposition 50 in California, and the New York mayoral race. Who do you think will win for New York mayor?

Rick Rosner: Mamdani.

Jacobsen: Do you think most of the response to him has been about his ethnic background, his religious background, or more principled issues?

Rosner: He’s young, friendly, not creepy like Cuomo, and not old and erratic like Sliwa. He’s been fighting for safety in the subways and other issues since we lived there, which was almost forty years ago.

I think it will be reasonably close because Trump endorsed Cuomo. But Cuomo’s a creepy old sexual molester. 

Trump’s approval has hit new lows over the past couple of days, even lower—according to some surveys—than at this point in his first term. He had mostly stayed above his disapproval curve from that first term. People have gotten used to him, but he’s been so egregious lately that people are annoyed.

The food stamps—well, we haven’t used them in ages; it’s now on a card called SNAP—but people still understand the term “food stamps” better than “SNAP.” People are getting their bills for next year’s health coverage, and for many, it’s doubled or more.

Then he had the Great Gatsby party on Halloween, gleefully doing whatever he wants. We haven’t seen serious economic effects yet. Unemployment hasn’t gone up much, and inflation hasn’t risen significantly, but both are on the horizon. We’ll see how much anger builds when those kick in.

The stock market has been holding steady. It’s possible somehow that inflation might not hit as hard, but I don’t see how. Trump fired a lot of government statisticians, so they may manipulate the data, but private companies also track those numbers.

Jacobsen: As we’ve discussed before, experts say the money spent developing AI—including the money that goes to Nvidia to make these chips, which are super-efficient for massive processing jobs—can’t be recouped through corporations paying for AI services. The corporate advantages just aren’t there, and there’s no real money in it. AI can basically offer its services for free.

Rosner: High school students who don’t want to write term papers—nobody’s paying AI to crank out a 500-word essay on the Boston Tea Party for a ninth grader. Or for millions of ninth graders. So it’s a bubble. It’ll pop.

From the way everyone knows it’s a bubble and that it’ll pop, I’m thinking it’ll happen within the next year or so. That’ll kick the stock market hard, and we’ll have inflation and unemployment. It’ll hurt America. It’ll hurt farmers too, because they’re already getting hit by Trump’s bad trade deals—his efforts to help Argentina with China. He got China to start buying soybeans again, but it’s a mess. Anyway, things are going to be rough. 

Jacobsen: What about the follow-up to the import–export networks with all the other places around the world where people live?

Rosner: All that’s going to happen. Tourism is down in America by about eleven or twelve percent. It’s surprising it’s down only that much, but that’s still a lot. I haven’t seen any data on where it’s down geographically or by demographics. I haven’t seen any articles about Americans taking fewer trips or vacations. All the articles I’ve seen say the decline is from foreign tourism. Though I would think Americans are also traveling less—but I haven’t checked Google about it.

Jacobsen: It would be a good time to travel though, because I’m sure there are all sorts of great deals, as Vegas is desperate to recoup losses.

Jacobsen: So, we’re not going to reference external things. Well, maybe we can, because a few years ago it was worth discussing, but it’s good to revisit from time to time because loons are perennial. They constantly pop up. What characterizes a loon?

Rosner: It’s your dollar coin.

Jacobsen: Okay, a toonie, a double loon. I see that—it’s a good joke. You go from a loon to a toonie, because the toonie is twice as much, like Looney Tunes. It’s cartoonish—a caricature of how crazy someone can get. Anyway, my point is this: I want to get your thoughts on two factors, because you’re aware of Cattell’s research—independent research in psychometrics—from a higher-range perspective, on two-factor intelligence and creativity, although the latter is a little harder to define. What characterizes a loon and “loon theorizing” as intelligence increases and associative horizons widen?

Rosner: Two-factor now. I see a lot of lunatics on Twitter. Demographically, the most common type you’ll find is right-leaning MAGA, anti-vax, anti-trans—all of that. There’s a cluster of beliefs that tend to go together.

If your typical Twitter lunatic believes in one of these things, they’re likely to believe in the others too. There’s a higher prevalence of belief in cryptocurrency conspiracies. There’s also a higher probability they’ll have “no DMs” and “no porn” in their profiles, which makes me think that if you believe in that stuff, you’ll probably get propositioned by “sexy Twitter ladies.” They can spot a sucker. They use the same Bayesian logic I do—you can see which beliefs tend to cluster in the “loon-o-sphere.”

A lot of those traits scream “sucker.” And many of these belief systems have one thing in common: there’s plenty of authoritative information out there contradicting the lunatic stuff, but there’s also plenty of lunatic material available to reinforce it.

With the anti-vax stuff, it’s generally, almost universally, low-quality research and straight-up lies. It’s believing that nonsense in defiance of all the credible science that says otherwise. That’s your standard lunatic landscape—there’s plenty of evidence right in front of your face that what you believe is false, but you choose to believe an entirely different reality.

Trump is obviously an asshole and has been his whole life, but lunatics cherry-pick whatever they can to redeem him in their eyes and listen to people who tell them he’s not an asshole.

A lot of these people are just not very bright. But there’s another segment that confounds me—the “smart stupid” people. These are individuals with advanced certifications or degrees, or at least claim to have them, and still believe in this nonsense. Registered nurses, people who claim to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, even high-ranking military officers who still buy into all this.

Maybe a small percentage are lying about their credentials—say ten percent—but that still means ninety percent of them are highly educated and genuinely believe this stuff. Another factor that goes along with lunacy is advanced age—people in their seventies and eighties. That’s the landscape of Twitter lunatics. There are left-wing lunatics too, but not nearly as many.

Not the Bernie Bros necessarily, but there are plenty of angry people on the left with intense opinions about things like Israel and Palestine. I tend to skim over them because I don’t always want to sort through their arguments or figure out whether I agree or not. It’s easier to move on.

Jacobsen: You mentioned earlier how lunacy might change as intelligence—or IQ—rises. Let’s go back to that. How does it evolve as you move up the cognitive ladder? And what about creativity—how does that play into it?

Rosner: That’s an interesting question. I haven’t been asked it directly before, but it fits what you think about. People who do genuinely good creative work tend to be more immune to lunacy for two main reasons. First, they’re busy doing creative work—they don’t have time to fall down all these conspiracy rabbit holes.

A semi-counterexample would be Justine Bateman. You should interview her, by the way. She’s a former child star, still acts occasionally, and now works as a director, producer, and author. In adulthood, she went back to school and earned a degree in computer science. She’s critical of AI—and with good reason, especially in entertainment—and her criticism comes from a place of technical knowledge.

She leans somewhat to the right politically, but her rightward lean isn’t oppressive. She’s got too much going on intellectually for that. But for others—especially people in public-facing professions—it’s self-destructive. If you’re a realtor, or anyone who depends on clients from the general public, why would you go on social media and broadcast those extreme views?

And alienate half your potential customers by posting tons of political stuff. This might apply to me too. I might be a fool, because eventually I’ll have to try to sell my book, and I don’t know—will God punish me for all my left-leaning, anti-Trump posts? I have no idea. Maybe I should shut up.

But in any case, a lot of people I like and respect are gone from Twitter because it’s an angry time-suck where you’re swimming through sewage. I’d say that as creativity increases, lunacy gets shoved aside because you don’t have time for it—and because you’re smart enough to realize that investing in lunacy is a terrible deal professionally.

Now, historically, as you go up the intelligence ladder, you’re going to find some crazy people. But I haven’t seen any studies that try to measure the percentage of “crazy” individuals at different intelligence levels. I’d buy the argument that, like many other things, the quality of people’s lives—if you use IQ as a loose indicator—stays pretty much the same above a certain point.

The life satisfaction and circumstances of someone with an IQ of 180 aren’t statistically much different from someone with an IQ of 140, even though that 180-IQ person supposedly has extra brainpower to refine their life strategies. I tend to believe, based on limited evidence, that among people with very high IQs, you still have your share of unstable individuals. They just get more publicity than the ones like Chris Cole, who lead normal, highly effective lives—because schadenfreude makes for better stories. Everyone loves reading about “the poor little smart guy who’s lost his mind.”

I know from personal experience as a high-IQ person that if someone like that becomes a lunatic, it’s often through obsession. Going down what I call “rat holes” for the MAGA crowd, or “rabbit holes” more generally—becoming overly fixated on something. It’s also an autistic characteristic: hyper-focus.

For instance, I spent about two and a half hours the other day looking at brooches from China. I’d bought half a dozen unmounted micro-mosaics, and I decided I’d turn them into jewelry by mounting them into brooches. So I was looking for the right settings, planning to pry out the center stones and replace them with the mosaics.

And why was I doing this? Carole doesn’t even want this stuff anymore, and I don’t wear brooches. It’s pure wasted time. Yet I looked at probably close to two thousand brooches.

From Temu and Alibaba. It felt good finding the best brooches for my project, but at the same time, I felt like an idiot doing it because it was so pointless.

That’s one way smart people can obsess themselves into lunacy. Take Bobby Fischer—one of the greatest chess players ever. Maybe he was always unbalanced, but at some point in adulthood, he started believing terrible things, including extremely antisemitic ideas. I don’t know if it was obsessive thinking or schizophrenia, but either way, he fell deep.

I’d guess that when smart people become lunatics, it usually involves a rabbit hole—a cul-de-sac of intense mental energy and attention on something that may not matter. If you’re lucky, you’re Darwin. If not, you’re fixated on nonsense.

As an addendum, you asked about creativity increasing alongside intelligence. There’s definitely a correlation. Some creative visions are rooted, at least partly, in madness—but the creative work I admire most is grounded in discipline and precision. I hate the word “professionalism” because when someone accuses you of being “unprofessional,” it often just means you’re not doing exactly what they want while they’re trying to exploit you. Still, I admire creative people who get things done.

Take James Gunn, for example—the head of DC Studios. He directed The Suicide Squad, created Peacemaker, and is working on the new Superman movie. He’s funny, sharp with plot, and, most importantly, productive.

As for creativity leaning toward the loony side, I get irritated when someone’s “creative writing” is unreadable. If your normal style is dense and confusing, that’s not creativity—it’s self-indulgence. I prefer people who can deliver crisp, clear ideas that are easy to digest.

Which is often linked with a lack of lunacy—though I haven’t thought about it for even one second. In other words, if someone writes clearly, their thinking is clear, which reflects a lower degree of madness. Clear writing is also an acknowledgment that people today don’t have time for flowery language. Take Henry James—beautiful writer, but he demands your full attention, and we don’t have that kind of attention to give anymore. Your words better be like butter—smooth, efficient, spreadable.

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