Rick Rosner On, 12: Trump, Edgar Allan Poe, IQ Tests, AI, and Dreams
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/07/11
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss political criminality, compelling historical figures, high-range intelligence testing, artificial intelligence, and the structure of dreams. Rosner identifies Donald Trump as historically corrupt, praises Edgar Allan Poe’s literary and cosmological insights, and examines Richard Feynman’s complicated legacy. He also critiques ultra-high-IQ testing as a hobbyist pursuit vulnerable to AI-assisted cheating, before reflecting on sleep, dream coherence, neural pathways, and the informational patterns underlying consciousness during fragmented cycles of sleep.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The real stuff, though. Big criminals. Who are the biggest criminals in your country now?
Rick Rosner: I do not know. It is a big country. I am not familiar with every criminal.
In my view, Trump is the most criminal president in history. Beyond that, I do not know. He is just doing… Occasionally, he is distracted by the obligations of office. For instance, he felt that he had to attend this NATO summit. But when he is on his own, he spends much of his time grifting.
Grifting and lying. Not everything awful that he does is illegal, but much of it is certainly contrary to political traditions and established norms. You are just going to get my standard answer on this: he is the worst president in history. Just about everything he does is shitty, and he keeps getting worse. That is not a very interesting answer.
Jacobsen: In your opinion, who is the most interesting person? Not the smartest or the dumbest – someone interesting according to a different metric.
Rosner: Who do I consistently find interesting? Historically, there is a puzzle that I posted on Twitter.
Who am I talking about when I say “possible death through election fraud”? Who am I referring to when I ask, “Why is the universe dark at night? Why is the sky dark at night?” Who do I mean when I say “murder mystery”? Edgar Allan Poe is pretty fucking interesting. He helped establish the modern detective story with one of his short stories.
I think it was The Murders in the Rue Morgue. It is also often regarded as an early example of the locked-room mystery. He also wrote MS. Found in a Bottle.
That story, published in 1833, ends with the narrator placing his manuscript in a bottle and casting it into the sea. Poe did not invent the practice of sending messages in bottles, but his story became a notable literary use of the idea.
He also discussed why the night sky is dark. If the universe were infinite, eternal, static, and evenly filled with stars, then every line of sight should eventually end at the surface of a star.
The entire sky should therefore appear extremely bright. Poe suggested that the darkness could be explained if the universe had existed for only a finite amount of time, meaning that light from sufficiently distant stars had not yet reached us. His discussion anticipated an important part of the modern resolution of Olbers’ paradox, although modern cosmology also accounts for the universe’s expansion and the redshifting of light.
He did a lot of interesting things. He was found delirious and dishevelled in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, which was Election Day. He died in a hospital four days later. The cause of his condition and death remains uncertain.
One theory is that he was a victim of cooping. In this context, cooping was a form of electoral fraud in which gangs abducted men, intoxicated or threatened them, sometimes disguised them, and forced them to vote repeatedly at different polling places.
Because Poe was found on Election Day near a location used for voting, some people have speculated that he was a victim of cooping. However, there is no conclusive evidence that this happened or that electoral violence caused his death. So, Poe was a very interesting guy.
Feynman was also a very interesting guy, with several darker aspects to his public persona and behaviour.
He was jovial and entertaining. He played the bongo drums and became known for opening or circumventing safes and filing cabinets while working at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Some of his accounts of pursuing women have since been widely criticized as sexist, manipulative, and predatory.
He described developing strategies for approaching women and sometimes presented sexual pursuit as a kind of behavioural problem to be solved. Those stories are now viewed much more critically than they were when his memoirs first became popular.
The Manhattan Project also adds a dark dimension to the physicists of that era. Many of them initially believed that developing an atomic bomb was necessary because Nazi Germany might build one first. The project ultimately produced the weapons that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing large numbers of civilians.
Whether those bombings were militarily necessary, morally justified, or avoidable remains heavily debated. Whatever position one takes, the creation and use of the bombs left the scientists involved with a profound and troubling legacy.
Jacobsen: What do you think were the strengths and weaknesses of high-range intelligence tests such as the Mega Test?
Rosner: The enterprise, in general, exists at a hobbyist level because there is a reason for IQ testing, which is to determine what educational resources somebody might need or whether somebody has an intellectual disability or an intellectual gift. Ultra-high-IQ tests turn it into a kind of weird little sport.
Jacobsen: You think it is a loaded term?
Rosner: It is fine. Some people are more talented than other people, and you do not have to couch it in euphemistic language. Chris Cole is continuing to develop high-end test items, which he understandably finds extremely challenging in the AI era because I am among the best at solving the hardest IQ problems ever put into an ultra-high-IQ test, provided you give me enough time.
But now, fucking AI – with its massive training datasets and its ability to mix and match information from its vast data stores – is much more efficient than I am at solving most high-end problems. It does not need 100, 120, or 200 hours to work through a couple of dozen problems. So, if you are trying to measure human intelligence, it becomes difficult because people can cheat so easily by resorting to AI. We know that while there are people who will play honestly, there are also IQ fraudsters out there.
Let me switch topics. I have been sleeping in two parts. I will go to bed at around 1:00 or 1:30 a.m., get up at 6:15, do an hour of yelling on Pod TV from 7:00 to 8:00, and then go back to bed for a couple of hours. I often wake up from the second sleep session remembering a dream. I do not know whether I dream less during the first session, but I remember dreams from the second session much more frequently.
There are informational conclusions to be drawn from the fact that dreams are comprehensible. Your brain is firing somewhat randomly, but not so randomly that what you experience is merely noise. Somebody could argue that what you experience is just static that washes over your brain and is forgotten instantly because there is nothing meaningful to retain. I do not know whether that is legitimate. It would take a sleep researcher to answer that.
Do we have firing patterns during sleep that would qualify as dreaming, except that we do not remember them because there is nothing coherent to hold on to? That seems like a possibility.
Dreams consist of recognizable situations and images. They may be nonsensical or consist of non sequiturs, but you are still able to recognize what you are picturing as you dream. That means that, in a dream state, your neurons are firing in an ordered pattern to a considerable extent.
If you take individual, moment-to-moment slices of a dream, the world constructed within it generally verges on being coherent. As you string those moments together, however, the narrative becomes progressively less coherent.
There is always a temptation to say something is 80 percent of the way toward something. I think there is even a name for that tendency—the Pareto principle.
Jacobsen: Is that a little like Zipf’s law?
Rosner: Probably. Or consider asking people to name a random number between 1 and 10. A surprising number of people choose 4. Or, if you need a number for a script, 17 shows up a lot. It simply feels more random than many other numbers below 20.
So, let us say that any individual moment in a dream is about 80 percent coherent. As you string those moments together, the percentage of nonsense in the overall narrative increases.
Your brain is still firing in patterns that represent actual things it remembers. It is simply putting those things together in nonsensical ways. The neurons and their relationships are organized so that, when they fire, they tend to follow established pathways. The ball rolling across your mental landscape tends to travel along well-worn paths.
There are informational conclusions to be drawn from that, although I do not know exactly what they are beyond this.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.
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