Foreword and Introduction to “The Giga Society Conversations”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/09
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7Foreword by Paul Cooijmans …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 8Introduction by Scott Douglas Jacobsen ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 11
1. IN-SIGHT: INDEPENDENT INTERVIEW-BASED JOURNAL …………………………………………………………… 13
a. Psychometitor Conversation: Paul Cooijmans …………………………………………………………………………….. 14 i. Paul Cooijmans: Independent Psychometitor; Administrator, The Giga Society; Administrator, The Glia Society (Part One) ………………………………………………………………………………….. 15 ii. Paul Cooijmans: Independent Psychometitor; Administrator, The Giga Society; Administrator, The Glia Society (Part Two) ………………………………………………………………………………….. 19 iii. Paul Cooijmans: Independent Psychometitor; Administrator, The Giga Society; Administrator, The Glia Society (Part Three) …………………………………………………………………………. 23 iv. Paul Cooijmans: Independent Psychometitor; Administrator, The Giga Society; Administrator, The Glia Society (Part Four) ……………………………………………………………………………… 28 v. Paul Cooijmans: Independent Psychometitor; Administrator, The Giga Society; Administrator, The Glia Society (Part Five) ……………………………………………………………………………… 32
b. Member Conversation 1: Andreas Gunnarsson ………………………………………………………………………….. 34 i. An Interview with Andreas Gunnarsson on Family, Sweden, Student Life, Network and Computer Security Expertise, and Interests (Part One) ………………………………………………………. 35 ii. An Interview with Andreas Gunnarsson on Propaganda, Rhetoric, Lies, Ignorance, Big Data, and the Giga Society (Part Two) …………………………………………………………………………………….. 38
c. Member Conversation 2: Evangelos Katsioulis …………………………………………………………………………… 41 i. Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis, MD, MA, MSc, PhD: Giga Society, Member; Consultant Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist, and CEO & Founder, Psycall.com; World Intelligence Network, Founder & CEO; QIQ, GRIQ, CIVIQ, HELLIQ, OLYMPIQ, IQID, GREEK IQ Societies, and Anadeixi, Founder; Scientific Associate, School of Medicine, Medical Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki ………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 42
d. Member Conversation 3: Matthew Scillitani ……………………………………………………………………………… 47 i. An Interview with Matthew Scillitani on Family, Early Formation, Important Mentors and Books, and Interests (Part One) ……………………………………………………………………………………… 48 ii. An Interview with Matthew Scillitani on Society, God, the Soul, and Language and Thought (Part Two) ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 52 iii. An Interview with Matthew Scillitani on Left-Right Polarity and Extremity in the United States (Part Three) ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 55 iv. An Interview with Matthew Scillitani on God (Part Four) ………………………………………………………….. 58 v. An Interview with Matthew Scillitani on Other Considerations for High-IQ Societies (Part Five) ….. 63 vi. An Interview with Matthew Scillitani on Cautionary Notes About the High-Range (Part Six) ………. 69
e. Member Conversation 4: Rick Rosner ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 73 i. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part One) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 76 ii. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part Two) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 82 iii. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part Three) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 91 iv. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part Four) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 101 v. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part Five) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 116 vi. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part Six) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 133 vii. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part Seven) ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 149 viii. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part Eight) ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 168 ix. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part Nine) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 177 x. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part Ten) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 185 xi. Rick G. Rosner: Giga Society, Member; Mega Society, Member & ex-Editor (1991–97); Writer (Part Eleven) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 194
f. Member Conversation 5: Thomas Wolf …………………………………………………………………………………….. 217 i. An Interview with Thomas Wolf on Background, Religion, Giftedness, Education, and Accumulated Self-Doubt (Part One) ………………………………………………………………………………………….. 218 ii. An Interview with Thomas Wolf on Information Security, Cryptology, Data Privacy, Liberty, and Mass Surveillance (Part Two) ………………………………………………………………………………………….. 221 iii. An Interview with Thomas Wolf on Artificial (Narrow and General) Intelligence, Virtual Philosophy, the Cogito, and Art, Media, and Culture (Part Three) ……………………………………………………… 225 iv. An Interview with Thomas Wolf on Games, Religions and Secret Societies, Challenging Things, Favourite Philosophers, Favourite Scientists, Smartest Person, and the Wisest Person (Part Four) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 228
License and Copyright ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 232
Acknowledgements
To Paulus Arnoldus Johannes Wilhelmina Cooijmans (1965 to present) for founding the Giga Society providing the framework for this text, the contact with several Giga Society members, and numerous (current and former) high-range testing test creators/constructors in efforts to improve the reliability and validity of the psychological science question about the highest ranges of human intelligence with current metrics, and to Andreas Gunnarsson, Evangelos Katsioulis, Matthew Scillitani, Rick Rosner, and Thomas Wolf.Scott
Foreword by Paul Cooijmans
The Giga Society was founded in 1996 to provide a form of encouragement and reward for high-range I.Q. test candidates. Only the very highest scorers would be admitted, and the pass level was such that only one in a billion would qualify. While this may seem unrealistically high, speculative preliminary norms were accepted, as well as scores on homogeneous tests (containing only one time type) next to wide-range general intelligence tests. This policy has remained the same over the years, even though norms were in some cases revised and turned out no longer qualifying, and even though I realized later that homogeneous tests do not give a sufficient indication of general intelligence. The admission policy has not been perfect therefore, and there do exist candidates who deserve membership more than some of the present members, but have just not taken the right test at the right time. What the admission policy has done excellently though is to ensure that the number of members stays low; it has never exceeded nine so far, and going by the rate at which enrolments occur, combined with the expected inevitable death rate, the membership might plateau around thirty somewhere in the twenty-second century.
For readers who consume this publication then, it may be informative to know that this Foreword was written in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic with most of the world being in a state of emergency, people required to stay in home-quarantine or isolation, gatherings of more than two persons prohibited, part of the economy having come to a standstill, oil prices sinking to negative values, people wearing face masks and keeping metres distance from one another when taking to the streets to stock up on toilet paper, food, and disinfectant, children window-visiting their grandparents, and advanced countries having to dig mass graves—
—Fear not, dear readers, but the following several pages of text were not written by the nominal author of this Foreword. No, they were not. They will be written more than a hundred years into your future by a number of twenty-second-century Giga Society members who have invented a way to send information backward in time. By an infinitely subtle manipulation of the time-space continuum, we have inserted our contribution in collapsed form into a single space in the Administrator’s Foreword, immediately following the word “graves.
This insert will only expand and become visible upon its eventual publication, leaving the good Administrator unaware of its existence until then. Is not that amusing? This way we are saving him precious time, which he needs for vital activities like washing his hands and coughing in his elbow, not to mention disinfecting his surfaces and the soles of his shoes. He writes his two paragraphs, we take care of the rest.
Now down to business. Of course we are well aware of your pandemic, of how it will develop and end, and of the conclusions you will draw afterwards regarding the efficacy of the various approaches, measures, and treatments. We know how posterity will look back on your handling of the epidemic in relation to the lethality of the virus. Naturally, we are not at liberty to elaborate, for that would affect your behaviour, resulting in the known paradoxes of time travel. What we can reveal is that, indeed, our membership has peaked close to thirty as predicted by the Administrator well over a century before the fact. And no, that does not mean that the world population is thirty billion in our day, as unthinking persons might conclude! Those who qualify at the one-in-a-billion level are not a fixed group, but are constantly augmented by youngsters growing up, so that, disregarding possible expulsions, the only restriction on the size of the membership is the rate at which members are passing away. Since one is not plausibly able to qualify before the age of sixteen, the level at which stabilization occurs is given by the members’ average life expectancy minus sixteen, divided by the average interval between enrolments. When any of those variables change, the number of members moves to its new plateau. Attentive readers will have understood from the above that life expectancy is not going to increase drastically in the century ahead of you. But then, attentive readers will long have seen through the myth of a steadily increasing life expectancy anyway.
We also like to stress how true it is that there exist candidates who deserve membership more than some of the members known to you. This is inherent to the tentative nature of constructing and norming tests for the very highest range of ability, and to the implausibly high requirement for membership. High-scoring candidates are greatly helpful in establishing norms and validity in this range, but there will always be a point beyond which a test’s validity breaks down, or beyond which the norms are not based on sufficient data (these are two different things), and it is there where the Giga Society’s pass level is inevitably located. So this situation remains, even though high-range test validity and quality of norms increase considerably from your era to ours. This “noise” in our admission policy is accepted as an unavoidable consequence of the Administrator’s spectacularly ambitious test project.
What is never accepted, however, is fraud; any member found to have cheated one’s way into the Giga Society, for instance by submitting test answers provided by a third party rather than by actually solving the problems oneself, is kindly and humanely corrected in a way that precludes repetition with absolute certainty and may just cause the odd utterance of ever so slight discomfort to emanate from the scallywag’s oral cavity. This absurdly mild sanction has been implemented several times over the century and a half or so of the Society’s history that we can oversee, and we mention this emphatically here by way of kind advice to any possible swindlers among the esteemed readers of this publication. Should you find yourself in the awkward position of already being a fraudulent member, your only way to avoid being confronted with the gentle executioners of our so friendly corrective measures is to proactively resign your membership voluntarily before your fraud is officially discovered. Your signed letter of resignation must contain a full confession of your fraud, including the names and addresses of your possible confederates, whose cases will be addressed forthwith. Not to worry, no innocent will be harmed in the process. No innocent at all.
Oh, and before we forget, it is important that you understand that anything expressed in the interviews before you, no matter how insightful, is for the exclusive responsibility of the interviewed and does not represent views, positions, or attitudes of the Giga Society as a whole. In fact, the Society holds no positions, and its members are independent individuals with minds of their own. This individualism, and absence of any commonality other than a high Intelligence Quantifier test score, is germane to groups selected solely by I.Q. Such groups are mere collections of individuals, and their members possess no sense of collectivism, or of belonging to a group altogether. They may indeed act against the interest of the group without hesitation when it suits them; such is the nature of the highly intelligent, who will rather contradict and debate their peers than blindly unite with them. And perhaps, that is the best species of collaboration after all. Or perhaps it is not; the question of individualism versus collectivism is no easy one. While the ever-doubting intellectual remains isolated in one’s ivory tower, the collectivist ethnocentric xenophobic tribe stealthily takes control of the world, only occupied with the good of the tribe, never worrying about right or wrong. Our task is to find a way of both being right and having the last laugh. The circumstance that we write this insert in the first person plural may give a hint as to our success in that endeavour. But we digress.
The present publication honours some of those who succeeded in qualifying for the Giga Society during its first twenty-four years, and gives them a stage on which to share with you a taste of their wisdom. We are hopeful that you will find their thoughts instructive, inspiring, or at least entertaining. Later publications will feature additional members, including those who are still to qualify in your future. As a matter of fact, these to-be members could be any of you, dear readers! Does not that excite you? Due to our unique vantage point, we could even tell you exactly whom of the readers it concerns; we will not, but we could. And to nourish your imagination even more, we would like to suggest the possibility, incredible as it may seem, that one of you will be among the authors of the present insert in the Administrator’s Foreword. Have you recognized your style of writing yet? Well have you?
Now, the time has come to hand you back to the Administrator; as you may remember, we interrupted the Giga Society founder mid-sentence right after the word “graves”; so here you go:—
—for the temporary storage of corpses of deceased patients. As the reader will understand, these exceptional conditions leave me little time to compose a Foreword, which will thus end up shorter than I would like, in order to allow me to focus on vital activities like washing my hands and coughing in my elbow, not to mention disinfecting my surfaces and the soles of my shoes. May you find something of interest or inspiration in the interviews that follow.Paul CooijmansMay 13, 2020
Introduction by Scott Douglas Jacobsen
The Giga Society Conversations results from several years of intermittent work resulting in a book project approved for compilation by the founder and administrator of the Giga Society, Paul Cooijmans, who takes the work of the high-range testing world in two respects: realism and levity. On the former, Cooijmans presents careful observation and thought, and calculations, on a wide variety of different subject matter and tests relevant to the high-range testing world, including the strong positives and strong negatives emergent in much of the high-range testing community. On the latter, this becomes possible in the light of the former because the twists, turns, and inversions on reality make the humour a distinguishing characteristic of Cooijmans in much of the high-range world – let alone longevity. As another one of the Dutch diaspora, I appreciate the realism and the humour of us, “We, the Dutch.”
In fact, years ago in an interview, Cooijmans, on sense of humour, noted:
Humour is an extremely powerful and robust test of intelligence and associative horizon, of which it is a combination. One can cheat when taking an I.Q. test, but one can not feign a sense of humour. When I once announced that candidates not satisfied with their score could buy additional I.Q. points from me, quite a few indignant reactions followed, most notably from at least two (2) admissions officers of I.Q. societies, who therewith involuntarily exposed their low level of comprehension. When chumps like that are in charge of a society’s admission policy, that explains the ineffectiveness thereof, explains the acceptance of many tests lacking any validity in the relevant I.Q. range, and explains the large numbers of clearly unqualified members in such societies.
This summarizes, punctuates as a coda, much of the sensibility of Cooijmans. In that, someone with the requisite knowledge and sense of the subtler aspects of the high-range world with validity and invalidity of efforts of the testing at the highest ranges of general intelligence, the need to deal with problem personalities with humour, and comprehension of the issues underneath the failures and limitations of several societies within the high-range world.
If in the search phase of a safe first-pass test of the high-IQ world, then the five main vetted societies in the Wikipedia listings include, in order of cognitive rarity, Mensa International, Intertel, Triple Nine Society, Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society. In a wider search range, the World Intelligence Network provides an advertisement map of a “complete reference list of all active (84) High IQ societies.” In short, even if on two metrics, a total of 5 out of 84 with several more defunct, in a paralytic state, or extant as an amorphous, vague, society-like entity without formal status, stature, or standing. Every prospective test-taker, community searcher, or society member looking to expand networks, may utilize such networks to enter into more of the community of the high-IQ or the high-range high-IQ world. Moving farther out into the levels of cognitive rarity for entrance into the society or the claims of the society, the greater variance in the reliability of the claims because of the larger margins of error. Also, as one moves out of the safer range of the search, the more ‘issues’ one will encounter based on well-articulated and presented historical records, ongoing cases, and warnings in other, more appropriate fora.
If looking for the most accurate and professional assessments of cognitive function and general intelligence, then one should take a proctored (conducted by qualified professional) mainstream intelligence test in the form of an up-to-date Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) or Stanford-Binet (SB) intelligence test for the highest sigma(s) and the most comprehensive assessments of general intelligence known to date, while the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) may provide a culture-fair IQ test of general intelligence with a limitation in the extent of the sigma(s) compared to the WAIS or the SB brands of mainstream general intelligence tests, i.e., WAIS-III/IV/V, Stanford-Binet 5, or the RAPM. The first attempt is the most accurate. If wanting something more for amusement, challenge, fun, intrigue, or speculation, then the alternative intelligence tests can count for something with wide variability in quality and seriousness of effort in the construction of the alternative intelligence test.
Although, as I have noted in many interviews, recently, “High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.”
Only believe, or take the most seriously, an IQ score based on the first attempt under the real name, not a pseudonym, on alternative tests or mainstream tests with greater reliability and validity considered between the IQ score range of 40 and 160, on an S.D. of 15, and lesser reliability and validity with IQ scores lower than 40 and higher than 160, on an S.D. of 15, where the higher standards would include a mainstream test proctored by a qualified professional. Also, life advice: don’t make it your life — have a life, you can use the above recipe if you want greater odds of a real assessment and democratic community.
The Giga Society Conversations presents about half of the membership of the Giga Society with one opening interview with Cooijmans. The interviews ordered alphabetically by first name after the presentation of the interview with Cooijmans: Andreas Gunnarsson, Evangelos Katsioulis, Matthew Scillitani, Rick Rosner, and Thomas Wolf. If on an S.D. of 15, 16, or 24, then the Giga Society as a theoretical 6-sigma society implies IQs of 190, 196, or 244, respectively. All mean 6 sigmas above the norm with different standard deviations (S.D.) for the translation as the sigma and, thus, differential IQs stipulated, though each with the same cognitive rarity, whether “IQ 190, 196, or 244” if applying S.D. 15, 16, or 24.
Most of the interviews cover the content of the individual history of the members of the Giga Society. Other portions cover some of the ideas or general views of the individuals. A minority of the interviews enter into more depth about the nuances of the ideas of the interviewee.
The Giga Society can provide a space for some of the most challenging alternative high-range tests available to date to individuals with an interest in taking part in the intellectual challenge of numerical, spatial, and verbal tests. If more test takers take part in longstanding efforts and contribute to databases of high-range test scores, then this will increase the reliability and validity, over the long term, of the high-range testing field, which seems nearer to its infancy than its maturity — let alone full maturity.
All of the content of the book would not exist without Cooijmans or the high-range communities insofar as these exist in pockets and to various degrees. Due credit and gratitude to the efforts of Cooijmans, the participants for the interviews, and the patience of every one involved for this project, this took about five years to compile and organize in total.
Happy reading.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
July 12, 2020
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