Author(s): Benoit Desjardins & Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10 (Issue #210)

Professor Benoit Desjardins, MD, PhD, FAHA, FACR, FNASCI is an Ivy League academic physician and scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Mega Society, the OlympIQ Society and past member of the Prometheus Society. He is the designer of the cryptic Mega Society logo. He is member of several scientific societies and a Fellow of the American College of Radiology and of the American Heart Association. He is the co-Founder of the Arrhythmia Imaging Research (AIR) lab at Penn. His research is funded by the National Institute of Health. He is an international leader in three different fields: cardiovascular imaging, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. He discusses: science; medicine; limits of science as applied to medicine; science fiction or science fact; human lifespan; the values of the medical field within the United States; venture capital firms decided to make medicine a business; venture capital firms; businesses made to appeal to patients with higher incomes; CEOs; American medicine; ignorance masquerading as knowledge comes to blows with evidence-based expertise; the lower strata of the educational and authority hierarchy in medical facilities; values and preferences of cultures; American patients different than others; American patients similar to others; pressure from administration towards physicians; rudest versions of this hotel mindset of American patients; American virtues; violent hysterics against Dr. Fauci; great examples of American ignorance; and mutually reinforcing trends; the poor working treatment of physicians in the United States; exposing the treatment of physicians; the biggest inroads in sheer viewership or consumption; productions; other proposals at every medical center hypothesized to help with the issue of overwork; the simple and obvious solution; working 36 hours in one period; working 90-100 hours in a week; the social life of the physicians; cruelty; patients kill their physicians; the level of burn out; some of the more egregious examples of (mis-)treatment of physicians; deceased or now-disabled colleagues; human rights violations; International Labour Organization; common statements from physicians; humane working conditions; and the future of the American healthcare system; cruelty; burn out; treatment of physicians; ‘alternative’ medicine; ignorance; masquerading as knowledge; Dr. Oz-ification of culture; scientific illiteracy; deceased or now-disabled colleagues; UDHR; International Labour Organization; Dr. Oz; defense mechanisms or infrastructure to protect themselves from the litigious patients; and those with fewer means and less authority in medical institutions.

Keywords: American, Benoit Desjardins, Dr. Fauci, incomes, Medicine, physicians, science, United States, venture capital firms.

*This interview represents Dr. Desjardins’ opinion, combined to the current content of the published medical literature, and not necessarily the opinion of his employers.*

On science and medicine

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s start by defining terms, what is science?

Dr. Benoit Desjardins: From Webster, science is the knowledge about general truths or general laws obtained and tested by the scientific method. The scientific method provides a set of principles for the pursuit of knowledge. It involves formulating a problem, collecting data by observation and experimentation, and formulating and testing hypotheses.

Jacobsen: What is medicine? 

Desjardins: From Webster, medicine is both a science and an art, dealing with health maintenance and the prevention, alleviation, or cure of disease. It used to be primarily an art, but it has become firmly based on science as science evolved.

Jacobsen: What is a physician? How does a physician differ from other terms of professionals within medicine?

Desjardins: A physician is someone educated, experienced, and licensed to practice the science of medicine. The difference between physicians and other healthcare professionals is becoming less clear with time, as other professionals take on more and more of the responsibilities of physicians.

Jacobsen: What are the ultimate limits of science as applied to medicine?

Desjardins: Nobody knows. Science progresses constantly, and new scientific discoveries that positively impact medicine are produced every year. There are often tradeoffs limiting the applicability of some scientific advances to medicine. Let’s take an example from my field. There have been advances in cross-sectional imaging to image humans at extremely high spatial resolution. Flat-plate CT scanners can do that but require more radiation, which is a limiting factor for human imaging. As a result, they are mainly used to image small animals.

Jacobsen: Some make extravagant, though grounded in the natural rather than the supernatural, claims about longevity post-human or trans-human states of human life, e.g., Ray Kurzweil. Where, indefinite lifespans for humans are realized and ideal health statuses are attained. What’s the current front on this, more science fiction or science fact?

Desjardins: I have no expertise in this area. I see it as science fiction.

Jacobsen: What fields show the greatest promise in helping extend average human lifespan and ‘healthspan’ in real terms?

Desjardins: I have no expertise in this area.

On practicing medicine in the U.S.

Jacobsen: What are the values of the medical field within the United States? How does this differ from other fields?

Desjardins: There are values related to the patient, including compassion, respect, and justice. Other values are related to the physician, including a commitment to excellence, integrity, and ethics. Physicians take a Hippocratic Oath and swear to uphold specific ethical standards. It differs from other fields. Healthcare is, however, a business in the U.S., which creates conflicts with some of its values. For example, many medical practices start with noble goals, trying to help their community with devoted, caring physicians who will do whatever is best to help their patients. These practices sometimes get bought by venture capital firms. After the purchase, physicians become indentured servants, forced to perform massive amounts of work (e.g., seeing one patient every five minutes). They are forced to do whatever is best to maximize shareholders’ and investors’ profits at the expense of quality of care and consequences to physicians’ health.

Jacobsen: At some point, venture capital firms decided to make medicine a business. Is there a documented timeline of this?

Desjardins: Venture capital firms started buying physicians and medical practices in the late 1980s, a growing phenomenon.

Jacobsen: When do venture capital firms decide, in the life cycle of nobly aimed medical facility, to buy them out now? It must be a systematic process now, as it’s been done so much.

Desjardins: I am not familiar with the field of business, but they seem to buy them when they are profitable or have the potential to become profitable from the exploitation of physicians.

Jacobsen: Since medicine became more of a business than less of one, what are some choices the businesses made to appeal to patients with higher incomes, where these have nothing to do with medicine, saving lives, or better health, simply appealing to the culture of the wealthy or, at least, the rich?

Desjardins: Some hospitals offer entire floors reserved for wealthy patients, with hotel-like amenities in their rooms and increased access to services and physicians, a limousine drive from the airport, and lodging for patients’ families.

Jacobsen: How do CEOs and others interact with physicians?

Desjardins: CEOs have minimal direct interactions with physicians. They often provide mass emails to their entire medical center staff updating everyone on current issues, such as the pandemic or new initiatives, the hospital system’s latest national rankings, or financial health.

Jacobsen: Why is American medicine seemingly so terrible at outcomes while, at the same time, so expensive too – including destroying the livelihoods of the individuals giving the care?

Desjardins: American medicine is known as the “great outlier”: it is the worst healthcare system among high-income countries (Commonwealth Funds) but at the same time is the most expensive healthcare system in the world. It has a high infant mortality rate, low life expectancy at age 60, and high preventable mortality. Its infant mortality rate is comparable to some third-world countries, like Sri Lanka (Worldbank). This poor performance at extremely high costs is due to multiple factors. It includes a minimal focus on preventive medicine, emphasis on fixing catastrophic health outcomes after years of neglect, the practice of defensive medicine, and the business approach to healthcare. The traumatic nature of life in America, and the high poverty rate, have significant harmful effects on the population’s health.

Jacobsen: Whether they have terrible health patterns (so their fault), have a bad physician (so not their fault), both (so both their faults), or simply an accident brought about by something unexpected (so neither patient nor physician fault), the reactions from these events can be misinterpretation or malevolence. Each with consequence.

Although, if medicine marks a business, perhaps, we, the non-expert public, can see the issue as a natural derivative of the customer service axiom, “The customer is always right.” How are these issues exacerbating expectations from American patients coming to American physicians with sophisticated ignorance, when ignorance masquerading as knowledge comes to blows with evidence-based expertise?

Desjardins: Physicians are required by their Hippocratic Oath to serve their patients as best as possible. They use an evidence-based approach to healthcare, which is good medicine that can sometimes lead to bad outcomes. The latter often leads to patients physically harming or suing their physician, as patients are too ignorant to realize that good medicine sometimes leads to bad outcomes. Physicians can respond to this situation in two ways. First, they can continue using an evidence-based approach for healthcare until they either get harmed by their patient or more likely lose their practice license due to too many frivolous lawsuits against them. Or they can adapt to an ignorant, scientifically illiterate society by doing “defensive” medicine. The latter leads to overutilization of medical resources, patient harm, and increased U.S. healthcare expenses.

Jacobsen: What about the lower strata of the educational and authority hierarchy in medical facilities? I mean nurses and the like. How is their education? Are they given the same quality of education? How does their education impact the quality of care for patients?

Desjardins: Every member of the healthcare field receives the best possible quality of education addressing the tasks they are expected to perform, ensuring the highest level of quality in healthcare at different levels. Problems arise when healthcare workers lower in the hierarchy are given the authority to perform duties and actions for which they have not been trained to decrease healthcare costs. It has led to patients’ deaths.

On American patients

Jacobsen: I’ve done extensive interviews with Distinguished Professor Gordon Guyatt at McMaster University on Evidence-Based Medicine and other relevant subject matter. He talks about values and preferences. How are these values and preferences of cultures impacting the expectations from physicians by patients in the United States?

Desjardins: I am originally from Canada. Canadians have a more socialist mindset, think about the greater good, and are more reasonable. Americans have a more individualistic mindset. They will not tolerate waiting lists like in Canada. If they cannot see their physicians rapidly or get the device or the operations they want, they get angry and can become litigious. They will expect physicians to spend millions on extending grandma’s life by a few weeks. They have gone to court to prevent unplugging of brain-dead patients (remember Terri Schiavo), with brain dead U.S. lawmakers forcing doctors to keep these patients on life support.

Jacobsen: How are American patients different than others?

Desjardins: They have no personal accountability. They do not take care of themselves. They can chain-smoke for 50 years and then blame their physician if they develop cancer. They expect their physicians to be at their service 24/7/365, an unrealistic expectation, to work all the time without getting tired, and never make a mistake. They fail to realize that physicians are human beings. They still think of physicians as wealthy, privileged people driving expensive cars and living in mansions. U.S. physicians are instead in massive debts from medical schools, massively overworked, cannot take breaks, and are often suicidal from their working conditions.

Jacobsen: How are American patients similar to others?

Desjardins: They get sick.

Jacobsen: You have been in practicing medicine for over 20 years. How do these expectations from patients impact the pressure from administration towards physicians?

Desjardins: There is increasing use of patient satisfaction metrics by the administration to judge physician performance, which I believe is wrong. Most factors affecting patient satisfaction, like waiting time or access to physicians, are entirely beyond the control of physicians. Hospitals in the U.S. are like hotels. U.S. patients have unrealistic expectations because of this hotel mentality.

Jacobsen: What are the rudest versions of this hotel mindset of American patients?

Desjardins: We see more disrespectful behavior from patients and their families against doctors. Some patients will refuse to be examined by a black, Muslim, female, or foreign physician or by a medical trainee, intern, or resident. They will get angry at physicians if they must wait a long time before visits, if the price of their medication is too high, or if busy physicians do not spend enough time with them. And, of course, angry patients often write bad online reviews against competent, dedicated physicians, negatively affecting the physicians’ careers and livelihood.

Jacobsen: Americans are scientifically ignorant, not necessarily individual faults. They are greedy, coming out of a culture based on the superficial things of life, though, at the end of the adult day, is an individual value, so can be considered their fault. Same with cruelty akin to greed. What about American virtues? How are these ameliorating this issue of overwork or poorly cared-for physicians?

Desjardins: Americans can display generosity, compassion, honesty, and solidarity. They often raise thousands of dollars in crowd-funding of patients for an operation, a transplant, or medication. Unfortunately, there is zero empathy in American culture towards physicians. When Americans are told of the poor working conditions of physicians, they simply respond that physicians chose that profession, and they should accept the consequences of working in that profession, even if this leads to physician deaths. When a football player commits suicide, this is extensively covered in the news media, and small local memorials are erected around which people can deposit flowers and pay their respect. When a U.S. physician commits suicide due to poor working conditions, their body gets covered by a tarp, and the death is not reported in the news media. When patients come to their annual physician visit, they are told the physician moved away. After dedicating their lives to taking care of human suffering, their existence is simply eradicated and forgotten. But Americans will remember the football player forever.

Jacobsen: Are violent hysterics against Dr. Fauci ongoing?

Desjardins: I don’t think they will ever stop. In December 2021, Fox News host Jesse Watters urged listeners at a conservative meeting to take a “kill shot” at Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. top government infectious disease physician. Since April 2020, Dr. Fauci and his family have received multiple death threats and have required security and bodyguards. Think about it for a minute. One of the most brilliant infectious disease scientists in the U.S. receives numerous death threats from Americans due to a world pandemic originating in China. What kind of society does that?

Jacobsen: What are two great examples of American ignorance in biology/medicine and basic astronomy?

Desjardins: At my institution, we invite the best scientists in the world to talk about their research. I was privileged to attend lectures by academics who devoted their entire careers to studying American ignorance and scientific illiteracy and trying to find solutions. Here are some examples they provided. Only about 20-30% of Americans believe in the theory of evolution, the core of all biological and medical science. 25% of Americans are unaware that the Earth revolves around the Sun. More recently, when Trump recommended injecting or swallowing Clorox to kill the coronavirus during the pandemic, thousands of Americans poisoned themselves by following his advice.

Jacobsen: All this commentary around scientific illiteracy is the larger discussion around the smaller discourse of medical illiteracy. Basic facts of health and wellness disseminated to the public for public benefit generally, who, by community social police, by malevolent religious leaders, by charlatans, by hubristic greedy ignorance-mongers, and others, are lied to, about it. They’re told the opposite.

They’re told physicians, as with Dr. Fauci, for example, are agents of malevolence, even of Satan, etc. These disconnects from Ground Zero contribute to this culture of ignorance, as many other cultures. However, everything’s on camera in the United States.  

Is this a similar trend, as with the increasingly worse treatment of physicians over half of a century, of a collapse of the integrity of the proverbial social fabric and institutional trust in the United States? If so, are these mutually reinforcing trends, where, perhaps, some of the more intelligent physicians among physicians (who are already among the most average intelligent people our societies have) want to pull a House, M.D. on them (the patients)?

Desjardins: The combination of ignorance and hostility in the U.S., each reinforcing the other, leads to the current war against expertise, in which the expertise of physicians, scientists, and scholars is downplayed or wholly dismissed. I am reminded of the famous quote by Isaac Azimov: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” In his 2017 book, “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters,” Tom Nichols addressed the issue. Nichols notes that “increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument.” He describes instances where scientifically illiterate patients tell their physician why their advice is wrong. He decries Americans’ lack of critical thinking abilities, their positive hostility towards knowledge, their rejection of science, and of dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.

On the work conditions of U.S. physicians

Jacobsen: What was the earliest known, to you, exposure to the poor working treatment of physicians in the United States?

Desjardins: I realized it as soon as I started my training in the U.S. when I was forced to work 68h without sleep. I had been on call at the hospital two nights in a row, had worked 58 consecutive hours without rest, and was driving back home. As I crashed into my bed, I received a phone call from my chief resident asking me why I was not at the hospital as I was on call again for a third night in a row. I was unaware of it and explained the situation. He ordered me to get back to work. I drove back exhausted to the hospital and could have easily been killed in a car accident. I worked ten additional consecutive hours until I crashed on the call room floor. They found me unconscious later that morning. It was my first exposure to the poor working conditions of U.S. physicians.

Jacobsen: Who have been the most vocal people about exposing the treatment of physicians from 50 years ago to 10 years ago?

Desjardins: In the U.S., it was common for post-MD medical trainees (called “residents”) to work 90-100 hours per week and up to 36 hours without rest. In March 1984, 18-yo Libby Zion died at a New York hospital from a prescription error by a resident doing a 36h shift. It led to an investigation on the effect of resident fatigue on patient safety. New regulations were passed in 1987 limiting residents in New York to work no more than 80h per week and no more than 24 consecutive hours. In 2003, the ACGME (the body regulating medical training in the U.S.) extended the rule to all residents. They also limited resident calls to once every third night and implemented one day off per week. For comparison, in Europe, residents cannot work more than 48h per week. Note that these new rules only apply to residents in training, not to the U.S. practicing physicians who regularly work up to 120h per week and up to 72 consecutive hours without sleep.

Jacobsen: Of various productions about the issue, what ones seem to have made the biggest inroads in sheer viewership or consumption?

Desjardins: Around ten years ago, some physicians started to expose the poor working conditions of U.S. physicians. Dr. Pamela Wible noticed an epidemic of suicide among physicians, and she began accumulating data. So far, she has documented 1620 suicides of physicians caused by their poor working conditions, a clear underestimate of the true incidence of the problem. She publicized her results in a TED talk (“Why doctors kill themselves,” March 23, 2016), maintains a blog, and wrote books on the poor treatment of U.S. physicians. Since then, many articles, blogs, books, medical conferences, and documentary movies have covered the poor treatment of U.S. physicians. As a result of these initiatives, physician wellness is now a topic addressed by every U.S. hospital and medical school.

Jacobsen: There will be variations on a theme with the presentation of the same legitimate complaint of overwork and poor working conditions for U.S. physicians. However, some will ‘get’ it more. In that, they’ll hit the message and the reality, correctly. Which productions have been the most incisive and factually accurate?

Desjardins: On April 8, 2019, the New York Times published the op-ed article “The Business of Health Care Depends on Exploiting Doctors and Nurses” by Dr. Danielle Ofri. The op-ed discussed how the U.S. exploits healthcare workers with poor working conditions that would be unacceptable in other fields and countries. In June 2019, Dr. Pamela Wible wrote a book entitled “Human Rights Violations in Medicine,” tabulating and illustrating with real examples 40 different ways in which the U.S. violates the fundamental human rights of its physicians. It includes sleep deprivation, food deprivation, water deprivation, overwork, exploitation, bullying, punishment when sick, violence, no mental health care, etc. In 2018, Robyn Symon produced a documentary movie on physician suicide and poor working conditions entitled “Do no harm” (donoharmfilm.com). It is available for rent on Amazon and Vimeo. In 2004, Dr. Kevin Pho created a blog (KevinMD.com) on physician issues. Several recent articles and interviews on his blog have focused on the poor working conditions of U.S. physicians.

Jacobsen: What are other proposals at every medical center hypothesized to help with the issue of overwork akin to yoga mats?

Desjardins: The U.S. lacks interest in identifying and solving real problems. It goes well beyond healthcare and applies to poverty, violence, corruption, gun control, climate change, etc. Band-Aid solutions are proposed, and the root causes of problems are rarely addressed. Physician working conditions are treated similarly. Every hospital and medical school is now addressing physician wellness, given the massive levels of physician burnout. They discuss yoga mats, meditation, eating healthy, exercising, and sleeping well. But they don’t address 120h work weeks, 72 consecutive hours call shifts without rest and lack of access to food and water, physicians dying on the job, getting strokes on the job, destroying their health.

Jacobsen: Have any tried the simple and obvious solution by taking issue with the prefix “over-” in “overwork” to deal with overwork of physicians? 

Desjardins: No. There is a lack of interest in identifying the real problems and offering needed solutions. There is only one solution to the overwork of U.S. physicians: getting more physicians (or physician equivalent healthcare workers). The U.S. has 2.6 physicians per 1000 people (WorldBank data). The European Union has 4.9, ranging from 3.7 in the Netherlands to 8.0 in Italy, with much healthier populations. Despite the smaller number of physicians in the U.S., the country has the highest healthcare costs globally: $11K per capita in the U.S., compared to $5K per capita in the European Union. If the U.S. increased its population of physicians, the costs would rise since U.S. medicine is a business with unlimited spending. Hospitals have started to explore substituting physicians with less qualified healthcare workers to decrease costs. The frightening consequences of this approach have been well documented in the 2020 book by Dr. Al-Agba and Dr. Bernard, “Patients at Risk: The Rise of the Nurse Practitioner and Physician Assistant in Healthcare.” The book provides examples of poorly trained N.P.s and P.A.s, allowed to perform physician-level decisions and actions, resulting in preventable patient deaths.

Jacobsen: If working 36 hours in one period, what are the impacts, known in medicine and psychology, on the human brain?

Desjardins: Lack of sleep for 24h is, according to the CDC, equivalent to having a blood alcohol content of 0.10, higher than the legal driving limit of 0.08. Among the many side effects, it creates drowsiness, impaired judgment, impaired memory, reduced coordination, increased stress level, and the brain shutting down neurons in some regions. Lack of sleep for 48h affects cognition. The brain enters brief periods of complete unconsciousness known as microsleep, lasting several seconds. Lack of sleep for 72h will have more profound effects on mood and cognition and can lead to paranoia. Chronic sleep deprivation has a lasting impact on general health and creates high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and depression.

Jacobsen: If working 90-100 hours in one week, what are the impacts, known in medicine and psychology, on the human body?

Desjardins: In a 2021 study by WHO and ILO, long working hours (> 55h/week) led to 398 000 deaths from stroke (35% risk increase) and 347 000 deaths from ischemic heart disease (17% risk increase). Dr. Maria Neira from WHO stated that “Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard“. Now imagine how much worst of a hazard for physicians forced to work more than 55 consecutive hours without rest. I cannot find any studies specifically looking at the health effects of 90-100 hours workweeks. Japan has the term “karoshi” to describe death by overwork, and employers are held criminally responsible for such deaths. No such laws exist in the U.S.

Jacobsen: Obviously, when everyone is stressed out and overworked in, sometimes, life-and-death circumstances, it is difficult to make an argument for consistent civility and reasonable social engagement. How do these working conditions – and work expectations – impact the social life of the physicians amongst one another, and the physician-to-patient interaction?

Desjardins: Overwork increases the divorce rate in female physicians, not in male physicians. Many physicians do not have much social life since they work constantly. They mainly interact with other physicians at work, not outside work. Sometimes burned-out overworked physicians have been rude to their patients, especially surgeons.

Jacobsen: Something easily wading beneath the surface here: Cruelty. People aren’t going to behave nicely, sometimes, in high-stress environments, where their life and livelihood are under question, including the health care worker. Although, it’s asymmetrical on oath alone.

Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath; the general public’s patients don’t. Also, a larger aspect is institutions. How were physician friends killed in the midst of maltreatment due to working conditions in medical institutions? How have physician friends been permanently disabled due to the work conditions?

Desjardins: Thousands of U.S. physicians have been killed or disabled because of poor working conditions. It has been extensively described in the literature. In my circle of colleagues, which extends beyond my current institution, three of my close radiology colleagues have been killed, all in their 30s, and many have been disabled for life. One was killed at work under circumstances that are still hidden. Two were killed in car accidents after driving back home in the middle of the night after their workday, completely exhausted. A colleague developed a stroke during his workday resulting in a permanent physical handicap. Another colleague was on his 97th hour of work on a week in which he was not allowed to sleep much or eat much. His body failed under these poor working conditions, and he became blind during work. He was rushed to the E.R., where they diagnosed a work-condition induced hypertensive urgency with bilateral optic nerve damage. They pumped him full of medication until part of his vision returned. But he remains physically disabled for life due to the poor working conditions.

Jacobsen: How many patients kill their physicians every year in the United States? How does this compare to other countries with metrics if any?

Desjardins: There are, unfortunately, no statistics on that. In my city, physicians are frequently assaulted by their patients. Some have been stabbed in the face, and some have been killed. The local news media almost always downplay it. Physicians are killed in other countries, too, notably in China. Physician suicides from the poor U.S. working conditions are also downplayed. When a physician jumps from the roof of their hospital, the local authorities simply throw a tarp over the body and don’t report it in the news media. Hospitals simply do not want the bad publicity from having a series of physicians jumping to their death from the roof of their hospital due to poor working conditions, like what recently happened in some N.Y. hospitals.

Jacobsen: What is the level of burn out in your field? What is the formal definition of “burn out” – whatever terms people want to use to describe physicians simply being taxed beyond reasonable limits and – not even requested – demanded to work more, as in your case?

Desjardins: The current level of burnout in my field is up to 70%. There has been a debate on whether physicians experience burnout, moral injury, or basic human rights violations. Burnout means physical and mental collapse from overwork. Moral injury indicates damage to one’s conscience when witnessing horrible conditions violating one’s moral beliefs or code of conduct. In 1948 the U.N. General Assembly adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a standard for properly treating human beings. Human rights violations are violations of the rules in this declaration. Physicians experience all three categories of injuries: burnout, moral injury, and human rights violations. It is a symptom of a toxic healthcare system, with working conditions massively out of compliance with safe labor laws from all other industries.

Jacobsen: What are some of the more egregious examples of (mis-)treatment of physicians?

Desjardins: There are many examples in the literature. Some U.S. physicians are forced to work up to 72 consecutive hours without rest. In my circle of colleagues, which extends well beyond my current institution, many of my colleagues experienced mistreatment. A physician friend recently started a new job in breast imaging. At the end of her first workday, which included a half-day orientation, they put her on probation for not reading her daily quota of 100 studies. At the end of her second workday, she became more proficient with her new work tools and read 98 studies, two studies short of her daily quota. They fired her immediately. Another physician friend was starting a new radiology job and went to lunch at the hospital cafeteria on her first day. She was forcibly dragged back to her work cubicle before eating a single bite, yelled at by administrators, and told physicians in her practice are not allowed to eat during the workday. Many physicians are required to work non-stop with no breaks for eating and no bathroom breaks and finish their regular workday in the middle of the night. They sometimes must sleep on the floor of their office at the hospital as there is not enough time to return home before their next shift. Dr. Pamela Wible identified several extreme examples of mistreatment: physicians being forced to work during a miscarriage or a seizure, surgeons collapsing on their patients because of dehydration and hypoglycemia because of their lack of access to food and water during work, and physicians falling asleep on their patient during medical rounds due to massive exhaustion.

Jacobsen: When speaking of your deceased or now-disabled colleagues, what happens to a body as parts of it simply shut down, especially in, basically, peak health years, e.g., the 30s?

Desjardins: For deceased colleagues, their body gets cremated or eaten by worms. For disabled colleagues, their health remains affected by the damage to their bodies for the remaining of their lives and deteriorates faster as they get older. They develop chronic diseases, such as high blood pressure, sooner than other workers, making their bodies deteriorate faster and increasing morbidity and mortality.

Jacobsen: For the UDHR, what human rights violations are discussed the most in the literature?

Desjardins: I would say violations of Article 23 (Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work), Article 24 (Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours), and Article 25 (Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food).

Jacobsen: Is the International Labour Organization, in any way, involved in rectifying these working conditions? Are there any countries anywhere with comparable working conditions, though, perhaps, lacking the advanced expertise and technological sophistication of the U.S.?

Desjardins: Among the risks for physicians identified by the ILO is “Physical and mental fatigue stemming from the specific conditions of this work” and “Danger of being violently attacked by unsatisfied patients.” So, the ILO has identified some of the risks and has proposed some solutions (Improving employment and working conditions in health services, 2017). In that paper, they discuss the European Union 2003 Working Time Directive, setting work limits to 48h per week, minimum daily rest periods of 11h, weekly rest of 35h, and allowing derogations for some doctors. They do not discuss the working conditions of U.S. physicians. Every country has different working conditions for physicians. India, China, and African Countries have difficult working conditions, given limited access to medical technology and the low physician to population ratios. But among the most industrialized countries (G-20), the U.S. and China have the worst working conditions for physicians.

Jacobsen: What are common statements from physicians about the working conditions? The emotional and psychological states rather than the facts and figures of the situation from colleagues who have survived, and continue survive, the insufferable work environment expectations.

Desjardins: The physician workforce has undergone a progressive zombification as it evolved within the current system. Physicians develop learned powerlessness to affect the system and deference to authority. They understand that working 72 consecutive hours without sleep is illegal and inhumane in every other profession except their own but are forced to do it by their hospital administration. They know that they will continue to become victims of crimes committed by corrupt prosecutors. They understand that the U.S. population is strongly anti-physicians and anti-science and will never be their ally. They know that the U.S. healthcare system is collapsing faster than anyone predicted. So, they bear the insufferable work environment and count the days until they can afford to abandon their medical careers or die on the job.

Jacobsen: Have American physicians simply left states to other states, even to other countries for humane working conditions?

Desjardins: Definitely. Physicians frequently move out of state because of working conditions. In some departments, large portions of several divisions leave en masse to practice elsewhere or abandon their medical career. Most would like to move out of the U.S. into countries with better working conditions for physicians, such as Canada, the U.K., or European Union countries, but immigration and licensure issues prevent them from moving abroad.

Jacobsen: What does this bode for the future of the American healthcare system?

Desjardins: The American healthcare system is collapsing. A massive shortage of healthcare workers is rapidly worsening, made even worse by the treatment of U.S. healthcare workers during the recent pandemic. The three-year probation time recently imposed by a judge on a massively overworked nurse for a fatal mistake will likely have a massive negative impact. These factors decrease the interest of foreign healthcare workers to move to the U.S., reduce the appeal of Americans to enter the medical field and make healthcare workers retire earlier. They have caused the development of healthcare deserts in 80% of the counties in the U.S., which lack access to the medical workforce, hospitals, or pharmacies. The present situation is bleak, but the future will be even more dismal.

On the medical-legal system in the U.S.

Jacobsen: How is the U.S. comparable to the Middle Ages with patients blaming physicians for illness?

Desjardins: It is often taught that the U.S. has been the only country since the Middle Ages in which people blame physicians for their diseases. There is no personal accountability anymore in the U.S. Every problem Americans face is someone else’s fault. They blame most problems on immigrants or rich people, but they blame healthcare problems on physicians. If a woman delivers an imperfect baby, she blames it on the physician and tries to extort money. If a man develops lung cancer after chain-smoking for 50 years, he will often go over his past medical record with lawyers to see if a physician could be blamed for his cancer. Sometimes they discover early imperceptible evidence about cancer and then try to extort money from physicians. Most U.S. courtrooms in medical-legal trials are like the courtroom from the movie “Idiocracy,” where massively ignorant, scientifically illiterate people try to blame top physicians for patients’ diseases. The U.S. medical-legal system has been the laughingstock of the entire planet for more than fifty years.

Jacobsen: Outside of individual violent reprisals by former or current patients, what about the legal repercussions? Where, individual patients may have legitimate claims and may not. However, in a litigious culture, as in the U.S., this can be a major issue. The general litigious culture may become magnified in a context of life-and-death, and general illness, issues. So, what happens?

Desjardins: An entire sector of the U.S. “justice” system has been created to blame physicians for patients’ diseases. There are thousands of primarily frivolous lawsuits filed against physicians in the U.S. every year. Corrupt prosecutors use four well-known techniques of deception to extort money: (1) they suppress published scientific evidence supporting the correct actions by physicians, (2) they commit massive perjury against physicians, (3) they use flawed reasoning techniques from con-artists to fool jurors, and (4) they pay unqualified “experts” to misrepresent the standards of medical practice in court. In addition, U.S. judges threaten physicians with jail time if they try to prove in court that they followed correct science, after corrupt prosecutors suppress published scientific evidence. In other countries, using deception to extort money is a crime. In the U.S., it is the modus operandi of a 55-billion-dollar financial extortion industry against physicians and hospitals, affecting up to 80% of U.S. physicians in some specialties.

Jacobsen: Also, how is the court system in Pennsylvania?

Desjardins: In the past ten years, Philadelphia has been exposed in the medical literature and at medical conferences as having one of the most corrupt, scientifically illiterate medical-legal systems on Earth. The Philadelphia “justice” system frequently commits crimes against innocent physicians.

Jacobsen: What are some fallouts or likely outcomes from this idiocy?

Desjardins: It has led to a severe shortage of physicians in Philadelphia. Physicians have left the city by the boatload, sometimes more than 50% of entire divisions resigning en masse, and we experience significant difficulties recruiting. Several city hospitals have permanently shut down in recent years, and many more are on the verge of shutting down.

Jacobsen: How does this impact the future of the field to recruit sufficiently qualified, even talented, individuals? Where do they go? What about those better physicians in the field who can hack it – the workload and the B.S., but don’t want to deal with the sheer tonnage of nonsense and risks to livelihood?

Desjardins:  In the past ten years, my clinical section, which is in desperate need of more radiologists, has not been able to recruit any radiologists. We have even offered some promising recruits the possibility to work remotely. By never setting foot in Philadelphia, this eliminates their chances of getting assaulted or stabbed in the face by patients. Still, they refused as they do not want to be associated with the city of Philadelphia for the reasons described above.

Jacobsen: How do U.S. physicians keep one another in check, too, in case of malpractice – so back to higher levels of healthcare education and authority?

Desjardins: A tiny portion of lawsuits against physicians are genuine cases of malpractice due to poorly trained or incompetent physicians. Checks and balances are in place to either address the educational shortcomings or remove the practice license if necessary. Most lawsuits are crimes committed against excellent physicians by corrupt prosecutors in cases of bad outcomes or complications, which are part of expected outcomes in medicine. There is no lesson for physicians to learn from these cases. They are discussed in the literature and at conferences to educate physicians about the corruption and scientific illiteracy of the U.S. “justice” system and prepare them to become crime victims.

Jacobsen: Have physicians built any defense mechanisms or infrastructure to protect themselves from the litigious patients, when they inevitably arise, or the top-heavy bureaucratic culture?

Desjardins: There is a malpractice insurance system for physicians, a 55-billion-dollar industry. When physicians become victims of too many frivolous lawsuits, the cost of their malpractice insurance rapidly increases until, at some point, they cannot afford to pay the exorbitant fees and are forced to abandon their medical careers. Physicians practicing in cities with the most corrupt medical-legal systems tend to leave their medical profession early, worsening the massive shortage of physicians.

Jacobsen: How does this – the litigious patients out there and the maltreatment of healthcare professionals by institutions – impact those with fewer means and less authority in medical institutions, e.g., nurses, nurse-practitioners, and the like?

Desjardins: Nurses and nurse-practitioners have their own malpractice insurance system, although physicians and hospitals are the main targets of prosecutors. Nurses also have difficult working conditions, including forced overtime. But they cannot be exposed to working conditions as poor as physicians, as nurses have a union. For example, nurses are “officially” not allowed to work more than 12 consecutive hours in most states. It does not include occasional forced overtime. Some physicians are required to work up to 72 straight hours. It would be illegal and inhumane to make nurses work as long as physicians.

On medical quackery in the U.S.

Jacobsen: What are common cases of individuals able to use the term “doctor,” “physician,” etc., by law, or not, when, in fact, no legitimate training or grounds for the claims to the titles exist?

Desjardins: Many professions outside medicine use the term “doctor.” Any Ph.D. in any field has the right to be called a “doctor,” for example, Dr. Jill Biden has a doctorate in educational leadership. Dr. Phil McGraw (Dr. Phil) is not a physician but provides medical advice on T.V. He has a Doctorate in Psychology but is not a licensed psychologist. In the healthcare field, Doctors of Osteopathy (D.O.s) have the right to be called “doctors” and practice medicine in the U.S. but cannot practice medicine in some other countries. Chiropractors and naturopaths are called “doctors” and practice healthcare but are not physicians. They constitute a hazard to healthcare and are not allowed to practice in most countries. There are cases of individuals pretending to be physicians who practice medicine without training until they are exposed.

Jacobsen: There’s plenty of bullshit remedies out there in the public sold by the boatload. What about medical institutions who buy into them and begin to practice them? What are cases of this? Are there any consequences for individuals engaged in giving out known ineffective treatments?

Desjardins: The medical community scientifically assesses remedies to determine their effectiveness. If they are proven ineffective, respectable institutions will not adopt them. Some physicians dispense some ineffective or dangerous therapy and can lose their license. Recently U.S. judges forced physicians to administer ivermectin (horse deworming medicine) to COVID patients, an act of pure idiocy. It reflects the mindboggling scientific illiteracy of the U.S. justice system. Physicians who have administered such medication have been fired for incompetence and stupidity.

Jacobsen: Also, what are the problems with ‘alternative’ medicine, naturopathic medicine, and so on?

Desjardins: They don’t work. Just look at the late Steve Jobs.

Jacobsen: I wrote a short article critical of Naturopathy in British Columbia, Canada, a while ago – a quickie. A while goes, I received a lengthy email or digital letter from the President of the British Columbia Naturopathic Association (B.C.NA.) at the time. Obviously, the person was displeased. I responded with the same so-called baseless critiques towards this individual, once, saying I would only do it a single time, but covered the territory well.

It was enough to deal with the issue. They were orthogonal to the evidence-based claims, so wrong, pointless – by my estimation, and such lightweight critiques, even a young independent journalist could deal with them. Yet, these forms of alternative practice are present, proliferating, and have been with cultures forever, though more complex in the nonsense with technology.

It’s simply less excusable as medicine and meta-analytic studies’ powers give, not deep insight but, a modicum of reasonable thou-shalts and thou-shalt nots of good health guidelines in general, as you stipulated earlier.

People seem entitled. Professionals who spend their time thinking and researching narcissism claim a rise in narcissism over decades. Entitlement is a facet of narcissism. How is the Dr. Oz-ification of culture and medicine halting progress on the front of proper treatment of dis-ease in American society?

Desjardins: Some individuals with top credentials in a specific field sometimes become self-appointed experts in entirely different fields. Dr. Mehmet Oz is one of those. He is a retired Ivy League Professor and cardiothoracic surgeon fro Columbia University. He is a scholar with top credentials in a highly specialized field, who has become a television personality and started providing general health advice. He has promoted pseudoscience, alternative medicine, faith healing, and paranormal beliefs. Dr. Scott Atlas, a prominent neuroradiologist from Stanford, was appointed by Trump as a coronavirus advisor, an area in which he had no expertise. He then spread massive misinformation about COVID and advised against the official policy of the CDC. Pseudo-experts are tools that ignorant, corrupt people use to spread misinformation in the U.S. These pseudo-experts halt progress of good evidence-based medical policy and affect the quality of care.

Jacobsen: Other than Dr. Oz, who are other ignorance-mongers becoming rich off offering fake medicine?

Desjardins: There are several, especially given the rapid growth of social media. But the most prominent media personalities doctors are Dr. Andrew Weil, a physician and expert in integrative medicine, and Dr. Phil McGraw, a T.V. unlicensed psychologist. Weil has a net worth of $100 million (similar to Dr. Oz). McGraw has a net worth of $460 million. They both offer good and bad advice and are both very entertaining.

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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10 (Issue #210)

Bob Williams is a Member of the Triple Nine Society, Mensa International, and the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. He discusses: schizotypal traits; schizotypal personality traits and temperament; the prominent tests of creativity; impulsively nonconformist and prone to divergent thought; measuring creativity; creativity over the lifespan; BigC (true genius); Johnson and Bouchard; negative correlation between very high levels of creativity and very high levels of intelligence in brain efficiency; PFIT; Wai, Lubinsky, and Benbow; Rex Jung; Arthur Jensen; original creative insights into a unified work; developmental cascade effects; drugs; true genius tend to isolation; true genius tend towards no progeny; high intelligence or high creativity; cold hard truths; countries leaders.

Keywords: Arthur Jensen, Benbow, Bob Williams, Bouchard, creativity, genius, intelligence, I.Q., Johnson, Lubinski, PFIT, Rex Jung, schizotypy, Wai.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With schizotypal traits and temperament as an association with creativity, is it possible to parse schizotypal traits into the individual traits to associate with some common, accepted definitions of creativity?

Bob Williams: Schizotypy is associated with verbal and artistic creativity. There are presumably some who have, nonetheless, shown a more technical form of creativity. John Nash, comes to mind. The form of schizophrenia known as Introvertive Anhedonia is negatively associated with creativity. The commonly found association between schizotypy and creativity is that there is a reduced latent inhibition.

Measuring and predicting outcomes relating to creativity is more difficult than doing those things relative to intelligence, because intelligence is a very general trait that is well understood structurally (as in a hierarchical factor analysis). The thing that schizophrenia and intelligence have in common is that they are both additive polygenic traits and, therefore, can be measured via polygenic scores. The best material I have seen on the genetics of traits is Robert Plomin Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, Penguin Books Ltd., 2018. Plomin mentioned that today schizophrenia, like autism, is treated as a spectrum. In this book, Plomin commented: “In several diverse populations the researchers found that people with high polygenic scores for schizophrenia were more likely to be in creative professions.”

It is my understanding that the ratio of highly creative people with schizophrenia to noncreative people with schizophrenia is small. Even so there is a clear link.

Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, if we do so, what do particular parsed aspects of schizotypal personality traits and temperament tell us about their association or correlation with creativity?

Williams: As I mentioned in the first answer, most important link is a lowered inhibitory function. This particular trait is discussed repeatedly in The Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity (2018) Rex E. Jung (Editor), Oshin Vartanian (Editor). But, if you ask a psychologist about the traits associated with schizophrenia, he will probably list other behaviors, such as hallucinations, disorganized thinking, extremely disorganized or abnormal motor behavior, thought and movement disorders, etc.

This is a related, side topic: In the book referenced above, Kyaga mentioned that people majoring in technical fields, more often than others, had siblings with autism. This suggests a path from a spectrum behavior that involves shared genes that lead to elevated ability in those who share the genes, but where the spectrum disorder prevents it from showing up in the affected (autistic) person. There may be a similar finding relative to creativity and schizophrenia. In fact there may be good studies of such a relationship, but I have either not seen them or have forgotten the source.

I think the best way to describe the relationships between schizophrenia and creativity is to note that among true geniuses, elevated levels of schizophrenia are helpful or even essential. But if one observes the presence of schizophrenia in an individual, there is not the same high probability (the presence of high creativity). To me, the zones between the elevated levels of psychosis and neurosis (per Hans Eysenck) and elevated standing on the schizophrenia spectrum seem to be either overlapping or identical.

Jacobsen: Do any of the prominent tests of creativity truly measure creativity? Are these reliable and valid, or simply leaving more questions unanswered?

Williams: The answer to that question strikes me as depending on the perspective of the observer. In the most basic sense, the tests of creativity consist of tests of remote association, fluency, divergent thinking, etc., which are not direct measures of creativity. From the perspective of a researcher who wants a wide range of abilities shown (low to high ability), the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (and similar tests) produces this kind of measurement. This is where the issue of artistic creativity and scientific creativity can be seen. A test, such as the TTCT will produce similar results for people in science or in arts, so the researcher may be quite happy with the results as measuring “creativity,” even when the kinds of creativity are very different.

Although some researchers argue that intelligence is a factor in creativity, the more important factor is personality, as measured by the Big Five. The most important of these five is Openness to experience and Conscientiousness (a negative indicator).

For the record, a few of the other tests that are used for measuring creativity:

Divergent Thinking (a general category)

Remote Associations Test (a general category)

Creative Personality Scale

Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ; a selfreport)

Jacobsen: If someone is impulsively nonconformist and prone to divergent thought patterns, do these necessarily imply a higher creativity?

Williams: I think the answer is “not.” As with other behavioral relationships, there is a statistically higher probability of the cooccurrence of nonconformity and creativity, but I doubt that this is a necessary pair. Sometimes we see the unusual behavior and tend to generalize it, while we simultaneously ignore normal behavior paired with creativity (or another variable). When ability increases to the point of astonishing achievement (creativity), I expect that the odds of seeing very unusual behaviors increases to the point that there is at least some present. It is difficult to reach a confident conclusion about such trait correlations without proper statistical studies to show how strong an effect is and how it may vary between groups and life conditions. Most educated people are familiar with a lot of the names of artistic and scientific geniuses, but may not know the details of their lives.

Another aspect of behaviors is that, if we look closely at individuals we would consider to be not extreme, everyday folks, we would still find lots of unusual behaviors, including some that might happen more often among highly creative people. My take on Plomin’s comments about spectrums of traits is that these apply to many of the things we observe in both exceptional and “normal” people.

Jacobsen: If experts are measuring creativity or proposing measurements for creativity within the human population, technically, these could be scaled for comparison, not necessarily a Gaussian curve or something like this, but this seems like a natural consequence. Some people score higher on a creativity measurement than others, whether quantitative or qualitative, so would count as more creative. Yet, the question arises about lifespan effects. In that, some aspects of creativity may decline over time, remain stagnant, or may increase over time. In principle, is ranking creativity a prospect before us?

Williams: Any test that has some validity in measuring creativity will produce a distribution. The exact shape of the distribution may vary as a function of how the test is designed and the population to which it is applied. I have never seen a creativity distribution curve, such as the ones that are commonly shown in intelligence literature. If we think about the likely output of a biographical list of honors received for creative work, I would expect that it would show a near zero value for most people and only show positive results for people who are obviously creative. In the sense that we can see creativity, it mirrors intelligence in the sense that it is not hard to identify someone who is shockingly brilliant or who is obviously retarded. Tests are not needed and even middle level effects (above or below average) are obvious enough that our observations are unlikely to vary much from measurements. In the case of creativity, I think someone can easily see brilliant composition and see that most people show much less ability.

Jacobsen: What happens to creativity over the lifespan?

Williams: Age effects presumably show up in various categories of creativity. It certainly happens in scientific creativity. As for artistic creativity, I am less confident that it is a strong effect. It is easy enough to recall conductors who continued to perform with little decline in quality, up to near the end of their lives. I can think of some classical music performers who did much the same. The things that the brain has to do to create art are certainly different than the things it has to do to write and solve equations that describe the physical universe. We see that Nobel Prizes (in science) are overwhelmingly given for work that was done early in life. Einstein’s Miracle Year (1905) included four profound papers that changed physics; he was 26 years old.

Jacobsen: Who does Piffer count as BigC (true genius)? What are his examples of ProC via professions and creative people in them?

Williams: I recall a mention of a few true geniuses in a paper that was probably Piffer, but I don’t know if I still have it or not. The ProC category includes both the arts and the sciences. Most people are more familiar with the true geniuses in the arts and sciences. ProC, as I understand his meaning, is a category that is not about genius, but about people who are able to have successful careers that are based on their high levels of creativity. The names of these people will be known to many of their career peers, but not to the general public. Those who are widely known are usually those who were closely covered by the news media (various reasons, often unrelated to their actual creative output).

Jacobsen: Akin to Johnson and Bouchard’s work showing the top 5 g loadings, does a similar factorization exist for creativity within measurements of creativity? This is a helpful representation of an advancement on the research of g, as 1) a factor in life and 2) a consistently measurable phenomenon in global information processing within the remit of the human nervous system.

Williams: As we discussed in an earlier set, Piffer has argued that a general factor is unlikely. Researchers have done principal components analysis and factor analysis relating to creativity, but I have not seen claims that they have found and shown expert agreement that there is a general factor. These have clusters of related traits that might define a factor that is common to the clustered components. Certainly, there is little mention of a general factor in the creativity literature. There is more support for a general factor of personality (Rushton was writing about this near the end of his life.), but papers on personality are not focused on a general factor of personality in the same way as is common in intelligence research.

Intelligence is powerfully related to quality of life and achievement. At low IQ, life outcomes can be harsh, but this doesn’t happen for low creativity. A person with very little creative ability may still have a happy and productive life, unless that lack of creativity is the direct result of low intelligence. Creativity matters when it is high enough to sustain a livelihood or to produce an eminent artist, engineer, or scientist (as we previously discussed). Below the Pro-C level creativity is much less important at the individual level.

Relating to Johnson and Bouchard’s work, I learned something from Wendy Johnson that I had previously overlooked. The loading of a given factor is dependent on the structure of the test from which it was extracted. For example, if there are more or fewer test items that relate to a given broad ability, that broad ability will show a higher or lower g loading. This explains some of the differences that are reported for the g loadings of various factors. In their work, Johnson and Bouchard used the largest battery of tests that has ever been reported and extracted a structure of intelligence that is probably the most true to nature that exists. The reason I was discussing this with Wendy was that I was curious about the high g loading of the Pedigrees test. Bouchard mentioned the test multiple times as the highest g loading of any test. I later discussed it with him and learned how the test works and that it dates back to the relatively early days of intelligence test development.

Jacobsen: Could there be a negative correlation between very high levels of creativity and very high levels of intelligence in brain efficiency? Where, a highly intelligent brain uses less energy than a less intelligent one to come to a more parsimonious answer to a problem. Whereas, a highly creative person may require more resources burned in their brain to construct more elaborate novel constructs. If so, this would imply a disjunction between high intelligence and high creativity. Unless, a highly intelligent brain with high creativity, somehow, does require less energy than a highly intelligent and less creative person, but still would need less to get a creative result than an unintelligent person with high creativity.

Williams: That’s an interesting thought. I don’t think there are any studies of glucose metabolism as a function of creative output. I think the problem lies in the nature of the end product. In the case of intelligence, Haier’s work shows that more efficient brains are more intelligent. This initial hypothesis has turned out to be a general condition in which various measures of brain efficiency show that high efficiency (in networks, tissue integrity, etc.) is an indication of high intelligence. These observations necessarily apply to narrow tests, such as doing a puzzle, and not to complex end results, such as designing a rocket engine or writing artificial intelligence software. Such tasks happen over long time periods. But we can relate the lab experiment (efficiency measurement) to the very long task because the task is strongly related to a latent trait (g). Without efficiency measurements (they may exist, but I haven’t seen them) for creativity, we have the relationship between established creative ability and multiple end products, but the efficiency part is missing. A number of relatively recent papers have argued that there is a connection between intelligence and creativity, which may provide an indirect link to brain efficiency.

My impression is that some creative people work very fast and some plod along with lots of revisions, but both manage to reach finished works that meet the face value of high level creativity. I once watched a film of Picasso painting and was amazed at the speed with which he created a painting, but he would then overpaint it multiple times (also quickly). We occasionally read about symphonies and novels that were produced over long spans of time and those (Mozart) that were done quickly. It is not obvious that brain efficiency is a factor in these, but it may account for such differences. Curiously, Jensen described how Beethoven started the composition of a symphony from a simple structure, then went over it repeatedly, making changes that increased its complexity and appeal, until the final version was achieved. This is similar to what Picasso was doing, except that Picasso did not add complexity but simply changed the impact of the painting repeatedly, until he had a result that suited his intent.

The efficiency hypothesis may, in fact, be reversed for creative output. It is the inefficient brain that is likely to bring in more remote associations because of low tissue integrity, less efficient networks, and low inhibition. These are probably going to cause increased glucose uptake rates in the brain.

Jacobsen: With the PFIT network as important for intelligence and problem solving, could there be a generic partially diffuse network rather than a singular structure (a lobe, etc.) responsible for much of the conscious problem solving determined as intelligence or I.Q., where much of the rest of the brain is devoted to sensing, motor skills, and feeling? Something like a diffuse network functioning outward from BA10 for conscious discrimination and associational matrix problem solving making sense of the data fed through BA10 through a field of conscious thought.

Williams: Network study is a big thing now that researchers have tools to study white matter tracts (diffusion tensor imaging in particular). The network that I have seen mentioned repeatedly, in connection with creativity, is the default mode network. It clearly plays a role in creativity. Some studies have focused on the interplay between networks, suggesting rapid switching from one network to another, in much the same way as early computers used task switching when they did not have preemptive multitasking. My guess is that, with increasing study and improved imaging tools, there will be models based on networks, switching, and interplay. These presumably will also involve creative task execution. Given the central role of BA10 in intelligence, I would assume that it is also central to creative processing and performs the same integration function.

Jacobsen: How important are Wai, Lubinsky, and Benbow, currently, to the higher study of intelligence?

Williams: They have a near monopoly on the topic. Most intelligence research is focused on the middle of the IQ spectrum. Julian Stanley started the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth when Camilla Benbow was working with him (probably a student). SMPY became a longitudinal study that had 5 cohort groups. Benbow inherited ownership of the ongoing study from him and it continues today as the most productive study of very bright individuals. It has been ongoing for about 50 years, so there are data for important life outcomes. One of the most significant findings of the study is that there is a large difference within the top 1% of intelligence, favoring increasing intelligence. Among the variables that increase with increasing intelligence are the number of doctorates, peer reviewed publications, STEM publications, STEM doctorates, income, and STEM tenure.

Jacobsen: How does Rex Jung see the different forms of creativity scientific and artistic emergent from a single source in creativity, so fundamentally the same?

Williams: When I asked him if he thought that artistic creativity and scientific creativity are the same, he said “yes.” I think this was based on the two things he used as primary markers: the alternative uses test and the Creative Achievement Questionnaire. With those two items, the difference (scientific/artistic) is presumably not evident.

Jacobsen: How did Arthur Jensen see intelligence as more integral to scientific creativity than artistic creativity, so, in a sense different from Jung, something more fundamental to scientific endeavours than artistic?

Williams: As I recall, Jensen believed that intelligence was not a significant factor in artistic creativity, but was probably a significant factor in scientific creativity. My perspective on this is that the depth of knowledge of a scientific discipline is strongly correlated with intelligence and that knowledge is an essential ingredient in manipulating scientific ideas. Creativity in science is often seen in the formation of an unlikely hypothesis, followed by the task of validating it from experiments and mathematical models. If we compare that to the creativity of an artist, we see that art demands idea generation that makes a subjective impression on the viewer. This is quite different from the scientific product that is supported by testing, replication, modeling, etc. In science, there is nothing subjective about getting something right; there is a subjective zing to seeing the brilliance of new insight.

Jacobsen: Based on your speculation, how would individual flashes of creativity integrated over time with non-creative activity provide a basis for comprehension of creativity regarding output? In this sense, intelligent integrative activity would be necessary, not for creativity but, for unifying the original creative insights into a unified work.

Williams: As a speculation, I would say “yes.” In any case, “intelligent integrative activity” would be necessary for combining the “multiple flashes of creativity.” This idea would be an interesting one for someone to pursue as a study. I doubt that it has been done and imagine that it would at least be possible, using an approach such as interviews, self-reports, etc.

Jacobsen: What about developmental cascade effects? Where, a singular large change in a brain network or structure in early life alters overall brain structure and processing through development into full maturity leading to a much more novel neurology compared to the general population. I would assume this happening in dysfunctional ways more than functional ways as a matter of the law of averages.

Williams: It certainly makes sense that this would turn out badly most of the time. One way that such developmental issues can be observed is via fluctuating anisotropy (FA). This is commonly used in biological sciences as an indicator of developmental instability. It is simply a measure of nonsymmetry, based on bones in the wrists, ankles, etc. The idea is to measure where there is little fat. More FA means lower IQ (and other issues). The correlation with IQ varies widely from about zero to 0.40. One reason for the range of correlations is that head size is a confound. There is a similar relationship between facial symmetry and IQ. Various studies have found that people can guess IQ from photographs of faces. And one study showed that childhood environmental factors are associated with SES. These generally support the notion of early developmental problems having longterm impact on the individual.

Jacobsen: Are there drugs, prescription or not, that, in fact, increase creativity for the duration of efficacy in the body?

Williams: Yes. One of the well known factors is alcohol. I even recall a study of creativity among people who were evaluated when they were drunk. In The Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity there are discussions of particularly strong drinking problems among writers. This book also discusses clinical drugs that have some impact (positive and negative) on creativity. These generally fall into categories of dopaminergic drugs, sedatives, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antidepressants, moodstabolizing drugs, and the often mentioned recreational drugs (remember the 60s). This category is an example of an inverted U distribution, where more of the drug is initially beneficial, but a point is reached when the impact of the drug (on creativity) declines because the individual becomes impaired.

Jacobsen: Why does true genius tend to isolation?

Williams: Various researchers have written about the personalities of true genius. These rare creative people typically suffer from nasty dispositions. Jensen: “In many creative geniuses, this potential for actual psychosis is usually buffered and held in check by certain other traits, such as a high degree of ego strength. That psychoticism is a constellation of characteristics that persons may show to varying degrees; such persons may be aggressive, cold, egocentric, impersonal, impulsive, antisocial, unempathic, toughminded, and creative. This is not a charming picture of genius, perhaps, but a reading of the biographies of some of the most famous geniuses attests to its veracity.” [Benbow, C. P., & Lubinski, D. J. (Eds.). (1996). Intellectual talent: Psychometric and social issues. Johns Hopkins University Press.]

Jacobsen: Why does true genius tend towards no progeny?

Williams: The personality traits of true geniuses (discussed above) do not bode well for a social life and may be at least part of the explanation for why they often do not marry. There is a well established negative correlation between IQ and fertility rate (measured relative to women) which has been argued in the literature as the cause of a slow but real decline in mean IQ in developed nations. In the case of geniuses, this is presumably a factor.

Jacobsen: If you could pick only one high intelligence or high creativity, which would you choose?

Williams: For me, the answer is simple: intelligence. The reason is simply that the baggage that accompanies high creativity is not appealing. In general, higher intelligence leads to mostly desirable life outcomes, while high creativity often does not.

Jacobsen: What are the cold hard truths known about intelligence research and about theoretical constructs proposed to explain intelligence now?

Williams: I love this question as it hits directly at the things that are widely not understood, even by bright, educated people.

Mother Nature did not create brains according to a PC project plan. Instead, she opted to make intelligence hugely important and did not compensate people who happen to fall at the low end of the spectrum. I think a good way to view intelligence is by a list of correlates. There is at least one positive correlate that does not imply a desirable outcome: myopia, correlated at about r = 0.20 to 0.25 (given by both Jensen and Storfer). It is not the result of “nearwork.” Jensen: “Children in classes for the intellectually gifted (IQ > 130), for example, show an incidence of myopia three to five times greater than the incidence among pupils in regular classes.” [from The g Factor]

Otherwise, positive correlations are beneficial, while negative correlations are not. The “cold hard truth” of this is that life is increasingly more favorable at higher and higher levels of intelligence and is increasingly more difficult at lower and lower levels. I made the list below a couple of years ago, to illustrate the unfair nature of the IQ spectrum:

positive (+) correlation with intelligence

income

longevity

general health

life satisfaction

body symmetry

vital capacity

grip strength

educational achievement (grades, years completed, difficulty of major)

SES (a product of intelligence, not a cause of it)

speed of mental functions, including response to a stimulus and sensitivity to a short stimulus

memory

learning rate

number of interests (held with competence)

job performance

brain efficiency (relative to glucose uptake rate)

sperm quality

negative (-) correlation with intelligence

smoking

HIV infection

crime

time incarcerated

school dropout

teen pregnancy

fertility rate

illegitimate births

unemployment

At the national level, mean national IQ correlates positively with per capita GDP, economic growth, economic freedom, rule of law, democratization, adult literacy, savings, national test scores on science and math, enrollment in higher education, life expectancy, and negatively with HIV infection, unemployment, violent crime, poverty, % agricultural economy, corruption, fertility rate, polygyny, and religiosity.

The correlates I listed range from moderate to small, but are important because small effects can coexist and are usually small because of the presence of large amounts of noise. When very large groups are considered, noise tends to cancel out, which is why national level comparisons typically have high correlations. An examination of the lists reveals that several factors relate to physical wellbeing. This is frequently discussed in the literature as relating to an overarching fitness factor that encompasses physical health, mental health, intelligence, and physical robustness.

These correlates are all the more cold and hard, when we consider that intelligence is determined at the moment of conception [Using DNA to predict intelligence; Sophie von Stumm, Robert Plomin; Intelligence 86 (2021) 101530.]; the environmental impacts are negative (lower intelligence); and the range of intelligence is huge. Group differences in mean IQ (or g) account for group differences the factors I listed for national outcomes.

Jacobsen: What countries leaders take these seriously without ideological commitments to distort them?

Williams: Some years ago, a friend loaned me a book about Indonesia. There was a fair amount of discussion in it about the highly diverse population and the realistic understanding of how intelligence was a factor that differed between the internal groups. I unfortunately cannot recall the title of the book and am not sure if it was discussing the time Sukarno was president. I think that was the case.

Otherwise China is very much aware of the importance of intelligence and in conducting intelligence research on a large scale. This huge effort is discussed in Haier, R. J. (2017). The Neuroscience of Intelligence, Cambridge University Press. Western nations have gone in the wokePC direction of denial and counter productive policies. I don’t see a path towards rational, factual thinking (about this issue) in the West.

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Author(s): Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner, & Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/10 (Issue #210)

Chris Cole is a longstanding member of the Mega Society. Richard May is a longstanding member of the Mega Society and Co-Editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. Rick Rosner is a longstanding member of the Mega Society and a former editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society.

They discuss: major warning signs of something awry; the minor, or subtle, warning signs; 4 standard deviations above the norm; the successes and failures of the Mega Test, the Ultra Test, the Power Test, and the Titan Test; 4 and 5 sigma above the norm; the principal design of the Adaptive Test; other extraordinary high-I.Q. societies; associative horizon; the Mega Test; the claims about the Mega Test; legitimate testing; extrapolations well beyond the norms of the mainstream tests; the motivation behind making claims well beyond the norms of the most used mainstream I.Q. tests; the more egregious I.Q. claims in 20^th century; and the big lessons in debunking phony I.Q. claims.

Keywords: Adaptive Test, Aleph Society, Chris Cole, debunking, I.Q., intelligence, Keith Raniere, Marilyn vos Savant, Mega Society, Mega Test, Power Test, Richard Feynman, Richard May, Rick Rosner, standard deviation, The Plurality IQ Society, Titan Test, Ultra Test.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have all been around the block. Your membership in the Mega Society has spanned decades. So, you’ve seen controversies, failed high-I.Q. societies, and proclamations to this-or-that I.Q., even individuals who spun off into fraudulent activities, messianic posing, and criminal behaviour. As a note on collectives of high-I.Q. people, when it comes to claimed high-I.Q. societies, what are the major warning signs of something awry, not quite right, with it?

Richard May: The major warning signs of statistical and psychometric incompetence, fraud, or madness are usually quite subtle. Please see below.

Rick Rosner: You got to start with the disclaimer that most people in high-IQ societies are well-behaved relatively normal people who like taking tests and solving puzzles, and there are only a few lunatics. And because the ones I belong to don’t get together very often, you don’t have a chance to see any warning signs developing.

Although, in the case of one guy from many years ago, you could see a guy who was kind of being physically dominant and, I guess, mentally dominant getting increasingly frustrated that people didn’t understand him or believe his theories. So, it was just an increasing belligerence or pre-belligerence.

I guess, a skosh of megalomania.

Chris Cole: The major warning signs are the ones you list: fraudulent activity, messianic posing, and criminal behavior.

Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, what are the minor, or subtle, warning signs?

May: I get slightly suspicious if someone comes up with the most brilliant Theory of Everything ever, explained in a newly invented language of neologisms, which only the inventor of the theory himself can understand, especially if the theory makes no falsifiable predictions and none of those few who claim to understand the theory can explain it in their own words. I’m also slightly suspicious of, e.g., taxi cab drivers or barbers, who have conclusively proved Einstein’s theory of special and general relativity wrong.

If someone claims to be the most intelligent person in the history our solar system or to be the actual God of the Bible, then this level of measured intelligence may be beyond the current development of psychometric science, even with the Flynn effect. I’m probably too skeptical sometimes.

Also, branding of one’s associates by high-IQ types is often unnecessary in my view.

Rosner: Again, I don’t hang. I have no basis or nothing to talk about regarding this. It is not like I was living with a high-IQ person who slowly went crazy, besides myself. Really, in the last few years, I’ve gotten less crazy, more lazy. Lazy has replaced crazy.

Cole: The minor warning signs are incredible IQ claims.  As a rule of thumb anything above five sigma is not credible as is anything that has not been normed using regular statistical methods.

Jacobsen: Why is 4 standard deviations above the norm (e.g., mean 100, S.D. 15, I.Q. 160) such a difficult barrier to break in finding highly intelligent individuals?

May: Almost no one in the alleged “real world” is interested in measuring intelligence beyond the 4 sigma level. Where would you find a large sample of individuals beyond the top 1-per-30,000 level of intelligence to study? This level of intelligence is not a target level for standard IQ tests developed by psychologists. Why should it be? Which professions require IQs beyond the 4 sigma level? Even Nobels in physics probably depend more upon a mathematical ability sub-factor of general intelligence than upon super-high IQ per se. Two physics Nobel laureates didn’t qualify for inclusion in Lewis Terman’s study of the intellectually gifted, because their IQs were not sufficiently high! In addition Nature may sometimes not be ‘politically correct’. What if cognitive differences were discovered among various human sub-groups? For example, what if a growing number of trans-species individuals, who identify as advanced AI units, were found to be better at arithmetic addition?

Rosner: Several reasons, one, there aren’t that many people. 4-sigma level is one person in 30,000. Although, in real terms, it’s less rare than that because the average IQ of people on the street is like 105 or 110. The people with IQs of 35 are institutionalized. You don’t see them around. It’s rare. That’s one problem.

Problem two, it is hard to test. All the good high-end tests take dozens of hours to do well on. Thing two-and-a-half, many people who might score well on them might be successful and may not want to waste their time putting in 40 or 50 hours in something that doesn’t compensate them.

They could be trading stocks or coding or doing business deals or getting laid. None of which taking an IQ test helps.

Cole: High range tests require high range questions which are hard to create. Plus there is not much of a market.

Jacobsen: What have been the successes and failures of the Mega Test, the Ultra Test, the Power Test, and the Titan Test in identifying highly intelligent persons – despite being compromised?

May: There is evidence that uncompromised tests work better.

Rosner: Maybe, some smart people still trickle in. The Mega Test has been compromised since, probably, the late ‘90s or the internet made it possible to contaminate the questions by throwing around answers in chat rooms.

The Mega Test was the most successful in finding high-IQ people because the most people took it when it was published in Omni magazine. 4,000 people took it. It’s more than any other test ever.

Which means, though, more people have taken the Hoeflin tests than tests by any other author, though probably a strong second and possibly somebody who has overtaken Hoeflin because he has written dozens of tests is Paul Cooijmans, who has been writing tests for decades and has cranked out quite a few.

Some of his tests have certainly been taken by more than 100 people. In the aggregate, thousands of people must have taken Cooijmans tests. With the success of the Hoeflin tests, they have found, depending on the cutoff, hundreds of high-IQ people.

Some of those people got together and some people were mentored by other high-IQ people, and had their lives improved, including myself. So, the success of the Hoeflin tests is the large numbers of people who have taken them.

For years, I, and sometimes with partners or being asked to consult, pitched TV involving high-IQ-type competitions. The same kind of shit as Project Runway or American Idol. A talent search, but instead of for fashion designing or culinary skill or singing skill, it was for raw intelligence.

This is an idea that comes to people not infrequently, but just has never been turned into a show. But if you had a show that did that, that would be the most successful project ever to find high-IQ people because millions of people would see the show and tens of thousands of people, if there were high-IQ tests associated with the show, would try those tests.

But that project has never happened, which I think is stupid because reality shows are about following assholes around with cameras and there are plenty of high-IQ assholes. Not as a percentage of high-IQ people who are, as I said, mostly decent, normal-ish people.

But if out of 100 people who have managed to score 160 on an IQ test, there are probably a half-dozen who you could productively, entertainingly follow around with cameras.  

Cole: First of all Ron Hoeflin is a talented question framer.  Next he spent a lot of effort validating his questions.  Finally he normed them several different ways.

Jacobsen: In principle, what is realistically needed to test between – let’s say – 4 and 5 sigma above the norm, reliably and validly?

May: Perhaps advanced AI can be used to develop significantly improved high-range intelligence tests. Other neurobiological methods of assessment of the general factor of intelligence, ‘g’, may eventually make IQ tests obsolete. For example, measures of biological traits such as pitch discrimination ability (of sound frequencies), among other such physical measures, have been found to have surprisingly high correlations with general intelligence. This may be the way of cognitive ability assessment in the future.

Rosner: You need experienced test-builders. You need a decent amount of people to norm the problems on, to make sure the problems can actually measure high-IQs. You need their other scores to see what scores getting those problems right correspond to.

As I said, you need some kind of widespread exposure. You have to let hundreds of thousands of people know that the test exists. Ideally, that it’s something fun and/or cool to do.

Another condition is that it would be really, really helpful if the test took less than 20 hours to take. It would be helpful if someonecould spend 20 hours or 10 hours on the test and score near the ceiling, which is not a common thing among these tests.

Cole: To avoid spoilage you need question schemas, not single questions.  Then you need a way to automatically collect many samples.  Presumably this would be on the Internet.  A group of Mega members is working on this.  Contact me if you’d like to help [Ed. chris@questrel.com.].

Jacobsen: What is the principal design of the Adaptive Test, inasmuch can be stated at this time? (Is this series the first announcement of the test, by the way?)

Cole: Cf www.mental-testing.com.  There are some articles in Noesis.  Let me check with the team.

Jacobsen: What other extraordinary high-I.Q. societies have been observed by you – the highest, most inclusive, most exclusive, the most multi-planetary, least reliant on D.N.A. prejudice, most non-carbon-based, und so weiter?

May: The Plurality IQ Society

Top 0.0000000000000000000000000 … % of Multiverse

Previously the highest-IQ group founded was the Aleph Society, which sought to have at most fewer than one member per Multiverse potentially qualifiable. However, the Aleph is found to be insufficiently selective in its admissions criteria for several reasons. First, it only considered 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time per universe. We feel that it is necessary to include all theoretically possible multiple dimensions of spaces and of times per universe of the Multiverse. (For multiple-time dimensions see, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_time_dimensions , https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.389 ,
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/there-are-in-fact-2-dimensions-of-time-one-theoretical-ph ysicist-states/ )

Secondly, the Aleph only sought the highest IQ ‘individual’, including AIs, in the Multiverse ‘now’, i.e., at only one point in ‘time’ relative to one (1) observer, the Wormhole Officer (formerly called the Membership Officer). To remedy this we ‘now’ recognize that to whatever extent possible technologically, the Wormhole Officer must be a time traveler.

Thirdly, it is not sufficient that our psychometric instruments selecting at the Aleph level be culture free. Our IQ tests must also be genome free, i.e., free of any genetic influences upon performance. Speciesism is even more common than racism and gender-bias. We seek genetic justice in our member selection testing criteria. For example, in the past and even today, species with brains are unfairly advantaged over species without brains, including, of course, AIs. Why should an Isaac Newton have an IQ advantage over a slug, simply because a Newton has a brain? This obvious bias must be eliminated.

NB: All of the non-members of the Plurality IQ Society are Full Non-members and Official Non-members.

Jacobsen: What is the system of thought or the psychometric philosophy behind associative horizon?

Rosner: In my mind, when you get hit with a hard problem, one that might take more than ten hours to figure out. Part of it is how many different angles can you come up with on the problem. How many parts of life can you apply? How many possible analogies can you apply? How many keys are on your key ring to approach the problem?

When he talks about associative horizon, it is how many associations can you possibly come up with, with the symbols or whatever, that constitute the problem. To some extent, taking one of these high-range tests is profiling the author, trying to figure out, maybe, them, Hoeflin problems have a Hoeflin flavour to them, let you know if you are on the right track. Other test makers have flavours similar to them too.

It may be similar to their culture, say. The person building the problem found something in their world and boiled it down to an analogy. There is a popularish puzzle that is 7 d in a w.” You have to figure out what the “d” and the “w” are. It’s ‘days in a week.’ The problems can get tough. Another easy one. “5,280 f in an m,” ‘feet in a mile.’

So, “106 billion p who e l.” The “e” “l” is tough. You have to figure out. It is ‘people who ever lived.’ So, for a lot of IQ problems, they have at least some aspect of that. Decoding, figuring out what the symbols represent. Then it is an exercise in figuring out what could the “p” and the ‘p in e l’ stand for.

“6*10^23 As in an M.” My numbers might not be right. But ‘atoms in a mole,’ it is a test of cultural literacy. Often, there is further manipulation done to the symbols, so you have to work through two or three transformation or link two or three transformations to figure out the problem. It is how much cultural literacy do you have or do you give yourself, and then the flexibility for combining these things.

It is how much different stuff can you bring to bear on a fairly obscure or convoluted problem.

Jacobsen: How did you first come to find the Mega Test?

May: Actually I don’t remember. It was about 40 years ago. I probably met Ron Hoeflin through my membership in the Triple Nine Society. This was probably my initial connection to the Mega Test.

Rosner: Some guys in my dorm told me about the Mega. I must’ve already been IQ braggy. Yuck.

Cole: Saw it in Omni Magazine.

Jacobsen: What were the claims about the Mega Test – and your score(s) in each section on it – by Ronald Hoeflin, the media, and others?

May: Ron Hoeflin told me that I was the 2nd person to obtain a perfect score on the 24 verbal analogies, I believe. I think Marilyn Vos Savant was the first. I certainly didn’t tell many people, beyond my girl friend. I remember showing a copy of the Mega Test to one young woman, thinking she might be interested. She just laughed and laughed. Neil Blincom of Mr. Pecker’s original, illustrious National Enquirer tried to interview me once when I was Membership Officer of the Triple Nine Society. I pondered this offer deeply for a fraction of a second. I remembered Chris. (never forget the decimal point) Harding’s interview, “World’s Highest IQ Genius is an Unemployed Janitor” and decided not to be interviewed. I avoided the media.

Rosner: So, the claims were the Mega was the world’s hardest IQ test. By hardest, having the highest ceiling, the score a perfect score would get you, for instance. I think after the sixth norming, after Ron looked at 4,000 test submissions that came through Omni. I think the ceiling became 190 S.D. 16 or a little over 5.6 sigma. The first time I took it, I got a 44, which was 23 verbal problems right and 1 wrong and 21 math right and 3 wrong. I took it a second time and got a 47, which was 1 math wrong, I think. It doesn’t matter whether math or verbal; I got 1 wrong the second time.

What does that translate into for me, after the fourth or fifth norming, my 44 wasn’t high enough to get me into Mega. Marilyn herself turned me down for admission. My score might have corresponded to 172. Then after the sixth norming, after all these scores came in, I think a 44 got you a 180. I think the Mega cutoff is a 176. There you go. The 1-in-a-million level. Next question.

Cole: Omni called it the “world’s hardest IQ test.”   Interpretation of scores can be found in Hoeflin’s normings.

Jacobsen: How does the internet complicate legitimate testing in the high-range?

May: The internet facilitates cheating on tests and meeting other cheaters to work with.

Rosner: The Mega came out in ’85. The Titan, the sequel to the Mega, came out in ’90. Most people got on the internet in the mid-to-late-‘90s. For those tests, it complicated and contaminated them because people went on message boards and threw answers around. Some of which were correct. That was problem one. Problem two was once Google came along; you could put in the words to the analogy and the fourth word would pop up. The analogies were half of the Titan and the Mega.

The 24 verbal problems were all analogies of the type “find the fourth word.” Most of those could be instantly solved using a decent search engine. Tests are different. The Cooijmans tests, which I consider the most challenging of the internet era tests can’t simply be solved by plugging things into a search engine. You still have to figure a lot of shit out. The most general issue with these tests and the internet is just sharing answers. Beyond that, it is a pain in the ass to make sure that the problems on the test can’t be solved through easy searches.

Chris (Cole) and his group of people, who are working on this test that are resistant to having answers shared, are working on tests that give each test-taker the same general problem, but the specifics of the problem are fresh. So, somebody else’s answer on this problem is not going to help you because, even though the problem should score the same – getting it right should reflect the same IQ level, you can’t just post what you got on answer 12. They’ve been working on that for well over a decade.

It’s coming along. Anyway, next question.

Cole: The Mega and Titan tests have been spoiled on the Web.  The Power and Ultra tests are at risk.

Jacobsen: Some, in fact more than a few, claim extrapolations well beyond the norms of the mainstream tests, e.g., the WAIS and the SB, which cap out at or around 4-sigma. Assuming legitimacy of the claims, then, the individuals would be highly intelligent, but the claims can range between a little over 4-sigma to 6-sigma. How is this extrapolation generally seen within the high-I.Q. communities at the higher ranges?

May: I don’t know how other others generally perceive unsound or bogus extrapolations of IQ scores.

Rosner: I think the skepticism of super-high scores is generally more for specific claims than for the entire idea of being able to have an IQ that high. I think most people in the high-IQ community believe it is possible to have an IQ close to 200. But I think most people also have a reasonable idea of the rarity of scores like that. Adult IQs, the deviation scores, are based on a bell curve, where between 0 and 1 standard deviation, you have 34% of the population in a bell-shaped distribution for something like height. Between 1 and 2 SDs, you’ve got 14% of the population. Between 2 and 3, you’ve got about 1.5% of the population. Between 3 and 4, you’ve got roughly one-half percent of the population.

Let’s see, about 4 SDs, that’s only one person in 30,000 should score above 4 SDs. One person in 3,000,000 above 5 SDs. What is it? 1 person in 750,000,000 above 6 SD or so; somewhere, I’ve fucked it up, according to the standard bell curve. People also like to say that at the very far ends; there are more outliers than on the normal bell curve. That there are more high-IQs than would be given if it were a perfectly bell-shaped distribution.

But even so, you shouldn’t see more than a half-dozen or ten or twelve or whatever, people, with scores above 6 SDs. So, Paul Cooijmans has the Giga Society, which has 7 or 8 members. It is for people with IQs that are supposed to be one in a billion. So, there are 8 billion people on Earth, 8 members of the Giga Society, so that makes a certain sense, but not really. That’s as if everybody who could score at that level has taken one of his tests. That’s just obviously not true. So, way too many people scoring at the one in a billion level. It’s not like the Giga Society has 300 members.

Cooijmans is pretty rigorous in his norming and testing. So, if you have taken a Cooijmans test and scored at or close to the Giga Society, legitimately, Cooijmans has written in the past about people’s attempts to cheat on his tests, but I don’t think there has been a successful attempt in decades. So, people are pretty accepting that if you get a Giga level score on his tests; that you’re legitimately pretty smart. The claims of super high-IQs, there are legit claims based on performing well on ultra-high IQ tests or kicking ass as a kid on a test like the Stanford-Binet or the Wechsler. Someone can say, “As a kid, I scored a 200,” or something.

That’s another thing I won’t go into. People who claim high-IQ scores and are lying are generally not sophisticatedly lying. They’re saying something that cannot hold up at all. I don’t know if there are many or any sophisticated lies about having a super-high-IQ. So, then there are people outside the high-IQ community who are skeptical about the whole thing, but no one is really worried a lot about it, because: who gives a shit?

Also, if you want to say something, or know something that I’m not aware of, that contradicts what I’m saying, go ahead.

Cole: Hoeflin’s norms all involve some extrapolation.  I find it reasonable up to the mega level (about 4.75 standard deviations).

Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, what seems like the motivation behind making claims well beyond the norms of the most used mainstream I.Q. tests?

May: It’s a shame Einstein did physics. He could have been on Facebook (now called Meta, I guess).

Rosner: Going off my own experience, I kind of felt like a loser based on when I was about 20. I’d fucked up a lot of opportunities for myself. Then somebody told me about the previous world’s hardest IQ test, which was a Kevin Langdon test. It ran in Omni or Games Magazine. I took it and scored 170. I went, ‘Wow, that’s a good score.’ When Mega came along, I took that. I liked that validation that it gave me. Even though, it is a ridiculous thing. I kind of feel like it might be analogous to a guy who can bench press 500 lbs.

It’s kind of a goofy thing. You wouldn’t tell that guy it is goofy to his face, but the Sven Magnason. He is 6’4” and weighs 310 lbs. and eats 200 grams of protein a day to get that or support that huge bench press and has hypertension and his joints will be fucked in 10 years. It’s a kind of a goofy thing. It is amazing the guy can bench 500 lbs. It is this ridiculous thing. It is a very obscure sport. Sven Magnason is not playing in the NFL for 1.8 million USD a year. He probably works in a warehouse and does strength training on the side.

It doesn’t translate into the kind of fame or success that you might want. So, it is a niche kind of sport.

Cole: Vanity is one motivation.

Jacobsen: What are some of the more egregious I.Q. claims in 20^th century by groups and by individuals? This is a free forum.

May: In the 20th century — maybe being the smartest man in America was a fairly egregious claim. Top 1 per billion high-IQ societies may qualify if such came into existence in the 20th century.

Rosner: I don’t know. Anybody can go on the internet and type whatever they want. One of the craziest claims I saw I mentioned before. Somebody had a site or has a site claiming Jesus had an IQ of 300. The idea that somebody with the deep wisdom of Jesus meant Jesus had a huge IQ. His estimate based on nothing: If smartest people have an IQ of 200, then Jesus must have an IQ of 300. William Sidis, people claim 259 based on extreme achievements as a young person, at least it is based on his history and is a fairly earnest attempt to estimate a very smart young man’s IQ.

It is kind of egregious and not based on him being tested. Oh! Some of the most egregious are in the last 15 years; some insane moms, one mom out of Colorado, maybe 18 years ago, got a hold of the answer key to an earlier edition of the Stanford-Binet. Stanford-Binet gets revised every 15 or 20 years. I don’t know. You can still find psychologists who will give an earlier version. In the stacks of libraries. Probably, the Norlin Library at the University of Colorado, she found an earlier editions, found an answer key. Then taught her kid all the answers, so, that kid scored, at age 3 or 4, like a 10-year-old, which, the way they calculate childhood IQs, gave him an IQ well over 300. She tried to get herself and her kid famous off this.

It, eventually, fell apart because the kid did not have a 300 IQ. So, that is pretty egregious. But! Doable if you’re not an idiot about it, I believe. But anybody who would do it would be a kind of idiot. First of all, I don’t know. How much would a 4-year-old be into it? But if you took a 6-year-old and got a 6-year-old into it, “We’re going to ride this pony into a T.V. show, your acting career.” It has never happened, but it is not impossible. Because Alicia Witt was a child actor, an actor now. Great actor and great kid actor, one of the things that makes for a great kid actor is a 4-year-old who can read.

Because if you can give a 4-year-old – Alicia Witt could read at 3 – a script and the kid can read the script and memorize the script rather than having to be told shit line by line, and if the kid is smart enough to do that, then the kid is smart enough to take direction. Alicia Witt was at least a kid actor because she was super fucking smart. So, I’m thinking if you had a motivated 6-year-old and a creepy parent. I even started working on a screenplay on this or thought about it 30 years ago as a good plot. Like a lot of shit I do, I didn’t do anything with it, except the mom did it and a shitty job in real life.

The right combination of psychopathic parent and bright, motivated kid. That team could believably sustain the bullshit that that kid has an IQ of 300+ for quite a while. Although, nobody has done that. Yes, that would be egregious.

Cole: Before they were banned by Wikipedia, there were many articles by groups making incredible IQ claims.

Jacobsen: What seem like the big lessons in debunking phony I.Q. claims from the 20^th century?

May: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” — Richard P. Feynman

Rosner: [Laughing] A lot of stuff underlying a lot about high-IQ is “Why?” Why claim to have a high-IQ? Why work your ass off to get a super high score on these tests? Why sweat debunking it? In retrospect, you can see why you might want to hold people who might claim super-high-IQs up to scrutiny, at least given Raniere. The NXVIM sex cult, swindler of the Bronfman’s who is in prison for life now. One of the pillars of his duping people was using a high score on the Mega Test to claim to be one of the smartest people on Earth, though he didn’t really push it.

Because once he gathered enough acolytes, I don’t know enough about him to know how often he dragged out his IQ. But it seems that once he was surrounded by dozens of followers; that he didn’t need to do that. He could rely on his charisma and manipulation skills, and also being at the top of a pyramid of people with good manipulation skills. He was smart enough to recruit charismatic actors, TV stars. A couple actors from Smallville. People with actual show biz careers. One of his selling points and one of the selling points of Scientology can help you succeed professionally in shit where what it takes to succeed, like acting, can seem nebulous.

So, he didn’t need to haul out his IQ a lot because he was surrounded by TV stars who were helping him recruit other people into his cult. He, certainly, deserved a lot of scrutiny, perhaps a lot sooner than he got the scrutiny. There’s another guy who is pretty culty who has a bunch of acolytes who espoused a bunch of scary shit. So, that’s one reason to scrutinize claims of super-high-IQ because people can be up to no good, but those people are fairly rare. Of the 60, 80, 100, people who have qualified for the Mega Society over the past 40 years, 95 or more percent of them are completely normal, undangerous people.

The biggest danger might be that they might be really funny, like Richard May, is a completely decent guy who happens to be extra smart and extra funny. Super-high-IQ people mostly aren’t to be feared. What were we talking about? I always talk myself way away from the question. [Ed. Question repeated.]That, I guess, let the babies have their bottles for the most part, let high-IQ people be high-IQ people, it doesn’t hurt anyone, except for a few cases. Those involved in IQ fraud, the fraud is pretty transparent.

Most of the high-IQ lying is some desperate asshole who is 25 and going to undergraduate parties at his school. That guy finds a freshman girl and says, “Oh, people don’t understand me. I have a 205 IQ. I graduated high school at age 5.” It’s that abject bullshit. There are more sophisticated attempts, but not that much more. Because the payoffs are pretty low. Even lower than getting a hand job from a freshman girl, the end.

Cole: “It’s hard to be right.” — Richard Feynman

Jacobsen: What would you define as fraudulent activity in a high-IQ community or an individual?

Rick Rosner[1]*: Making claims that you know aren’t supported by your performance on tests.

Chris Cole[2]*: Fraud takes many forms just as it does in common law. Because of the Internet, tests with fixed questions are particularly vulnerable to cheating.

Richard May[3],[4]*: I have nothing to add.

Jacobsen: What would you define as messianic posing in a similar regard?

Rosner: If you end up with a cult, that’s messianic posing.

Cole: The common language definition of messianic behavior will serve. 

May: I have nothing to add.

Jacobsen: Similarly, what about criminal behaviour?

Rosner: If you end up in jail for the rest of your life, if the FBI has a thick dossier on you because you are considered a potential threat in certain ways, that’s criminal behaviour. The FBI has dossiers on lots of people because, historically, the FBI has done good things and asshole things.

So, if they have a dossier on you, because you’re a legitimate psycho who has the potential to do bodily harm to people for some weird political reason, then there you go.

Cole: Again I have nothing to add here to the common language definition of criminal behavior. 

May: I have nothing to add.

Jacobsen: On the Mega Test, why was the three interpenetrating cubes problem seen as the most difficult?

Rosner: It is widely agreed that the three interpenetrating cubes problem was the hardest problem on the test. So, the problem that is agreed upon as likely being the correct answer has not, as far as I know, been proven to be the correct answer.

Interestingly, you can look it up. It depends on what shit is online. But at various times since the ‘90s, it has been agreed upon that the correct answer is floating out there. But you can’t be sure that you’ve found the consensus correct answer.

But the figure, the geometric figure, that corresponds to the consensus correct answer can be found in popular culture, but I won’t tell you where.

Cole: It’s the only problem on the test where the answer that Ron accepts has not been proven. There are a few of these on the Titan.

May: It was the certainly most difficult, but my spatial ability is not sufficiently high to understand why this is so.

Jacobsen: Above 4 standard deviations above the norm, why should there be more scrutiny more than any other cutoff?

Rosner: Isn’t there some claim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”? You could argue that because claiming to have one of the world’s highest IQs gets you more than claiming to have a 120 IQ.

In practical terms, not so often, it can get you on a quiz show. It can get you on the cover of Esquire magazine. It can get you interviewed. It can get you on TV. It kind of got me laid once. I was going to get laid anyway. But it was part of that package that got me laid, I guess.

Cole: A credible high range score requires credible high range test questions, which are hard to formulate and norm.

May: I have nothing to add.

Jacobsen: What was the hardest IQ test you’ve ever taken in the high-range? What lesson can be learned for test-makers from this?

Rosner: I say that I’ve had a lot of success, but I’d say that I’ve had the most difficulty with Cooijmans’ tests. Because he brings in stuff from a lot of areas. I don’t want to say too much about his tests because he doesn’t want people talking about his tests and helping other people.

But by the time the Mega Test had been published in Omni, it had been through a number of revisions with hinky problems getting knocked out or revised until they were clear and bullet-proof. The answers were tight. I think Cooijmans talks about the pleasure of when an answer clicks into place. That click of satisfaction of when you know you found the answer.

I would say that on some of Cooijmans’ problems. The click is, maybe, not as loud as on some Hoeflin problems. On Cooijmans’ problems, you can find some really good answers that aren’t as good as the intended answer. That’s, maybe, the mark of one type of really good ultra-high-IQ test.

That there are stopping points. On multiple choice tests, those are called distractors. There are answers among the choices that seem right for various reasons if you’re taking desperate stabs at an answer.

On high-IQ tests, you can come up with answers that make a lot of sense. But do they make as much sense as the intended answer? No. But you’ve fallen for an inferior answer. On tough tests, a lot of problems on hard tests are finding the signal among the noise.

I’m writing a book in which somebody or the recipient of what he thinks is a coded message, thinks that it is a true message because it is based on the first letters of four consecutive sentences. That spell out a word.

The odds that this would happen by chance are 26 to the 6^th power, which is 676 squared, which is 400,000 to 1. Then you have to knock that down because there are a zillion four-letter words. So, anyway, the odds are tens of thousands to one that it’s not a coded message, especially since it is specific to the character situation.

So, the character reasons that it is likely a true signal. And on a tough IQ problem, you’d like the numerical coincidences to have an unlikelihood of, at least, 1 in a 1,000. When you look at a number sequence, you see a pattern. Then you say, “What are the odds that this pattern would arise by chance?”

On some super-hard IQ problems, there are more than one pattern to be found. Again, you have to ask yourself, “Was this intentional or accidental?” A tough-ass IQ problem really pushes the limit in finding the signal among the noise.

Cole: The only high range test I took was the Mega. 

May: The Mega Test and the L.A.I.T. are the only high range tests I’ve ever taken.
I did not distinguish myself on the latter.

Jacobsen: Is IQ declining in importance now?

Rosner: IQ as IQ is declining in importance because it is a product of the middle of the 20^th century when people really believed in it and used it to skip kids a grade, or not, to put them in gifted classes, get admission to magnet schools.

At some point, probably in the ‘50s, you might be able to get laid by your IQ. Since debunked, it has a greasy feeling about it, weirdo, creepazoid. The Cal. State schools, today, decided to get rid of the ACT and SAT altogether and the SAT is an IQ surrogate.

They decided it is not helpful, not worth the shit people go through to prepare for the tests. We can see enough about a student without some IQ surrogate in their admission packet. I’d say intelligence is increasing in importance because we are tiptoeing up to artificial intelligence.

That when we talk about AI – and AI is a misnomer right now; AI means “machine learning.” Eventually, AI will mean “Artificial Intelligence.” We will need ways to mathematicize and to come up with metrics of the power of thought in brains and in other stuff.

So, old school IQ declining; new school AI shit increasing.

Cole: IQ seems to be about as important now as it was when I was young. The SAT has some problems because it has become easy to improve a score via tutoring, but that is being addressed.

May: There is a theoretical possibility that Nature, specifically natural selection might not be entirely “politically correct.” Theoretically there could be differences among human groups that evolved under different conditions. E.g., If only females could bear children, then males would be the expendable ‘gender’. A small number of healthy males could impregnate a large number of females and the group would survive. A large number of males, if males did not bear children, and a small number of females would not allow the group to survive. Hence, there could be more variability among males, including cognitive variability, because males would be more expendable, than among females, i.e., there would be more male ‘geniuses’ and more male idiots.

Fortunately we now realize that there are no biological differences between males and females. Gender is a purely social construct. We now realize that men can menstruate and have babies too, if given a chance. The only important differences are among large numbers of pronouns, all referring to identical nouns.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Richard May & Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/03 (Issue #209)

Abstract

Richard May (“May-Tzu”/“MayTzu”/“Mayzi”) is a Member of the Mega Society based on a qualifying score on the Mega Test (before 1995) prior to the compromise of the Mega Test and Co-Editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. In self-description, May states: “Not even forgotten in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), I’m an Amish yuppie, born near the rarified regions of Laputa, then and often, above suburban Boston. I’ve done occasional consulting and frequent Sisyphean shlepping. Kafka and Munch have been my therapists and allies. Occasionally I’ve strived to descend from the mists to attain the mythic orientation known as having one’s feet upon the Earth. An ailurophile and a cerebrotonic ectomorph, I write for beings which do not, and never will, exist — writings for no one. I’ve been awarded an M.A. degree, mirabile dictu, in the humanities/philosophy, and U.S. patent for a board game of possible interest to extraterrestrials. I’m a member of the Mega Society, the Omega Society and formerly of Mensa. I’m the founder of the Exa Society, the transfinite Aleph-3 Society and of the renowned Laputans Manqué. I’m a biographee in Who’s Who in the Brane World. My interests include the realization of the idea of humans as incomplete beings with the capacity to complete their own evolution by effecting a change in their being and consciousness. In a moment of presence to myself in inner silence, when I see Richard May’s non-being, ‘I’ am. You can meet me if you go to an empty room.” Some other resources include Stains Upon the Silence: something for no one, McGinnis Genealogy of Crown Point, New York: Hiram Porter McGinnis, Swines List, Solipsist Soliloquies, Board Game, Lulu blog, Memoir of a Non-Irish Non-Jew, and May-Tzu’s posterous. He discusses: “Picking One’s Own Pocket”; “Did Gurdjieff understand his own teaching?”; “What is the work?”; “Truth”; the meaning of truth in “Truth”; “Good and Evil”; so few being awake; “Is this what the work has become?”; the work, and play; identification with the work; identification with the work considered sleeping rather than waking; and Gurdjieff and Wittgenstein. 

Keywords: Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Ouspenky, Richard May, the work, Wittgenstein.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “Picking One’s Own Pocket” describes a context in which the truth, to an individual, gets posed as forever-incomplete, while the truth, itself, can be complete. How is this playing off the poly-agnosticism regarding different levels of knowledge in other braindroppings in Something for No One?

Richard May: To me picking one’s own pocket meant simply that one cannot abrogate one’s own authority in choosing what or whom to believe, if anyone. It’s your judgement.

Jacobsen: “Did Gurdjieff understand his own teaching?” posits, based on Blavatsky’s and Gurdjieff’s overlap in writings, Gurdjieff taking from other sourcing without full knowledge of the implications of the knowledge or parts of the systems lifted from other sources. Who was Gurdjieff? Why was he important? Is he well-regarded in general or more as a fringe loon, or a excommunicated enlightened figure found, more or less, in obscurity? Same questions on Blavatsky, too, please. (These are not Zen koans.)

May: There are hundreds of books on the topic of who Gurdjieff was. No one knows who Gurdjieff was.

Gurdjieff was important only to his pupils.

He is generally regarded as a obscure fringe loon, as you suggest, except by his pupils, and Blavatsky could only aspire to be regarded as a fringe loon.

Jacobsen: “What is the work?” describes a stick with two ends, but inverts North American Judeo-Christian theological foundations. How does the devil lead to paradise and God to hell?

May: The devil may lead to paradise and God lead to hell? I do not know that there is a devil or a God. This is something Gurdjieff seemed to claim. But Gurdjieff said can lead to paradise, not does lead with certainty.

Jacobsen: “Truth” describes the where the lies of truth lie. Side questions, what was the importance of Ouspensky? What is the importance of Blavatsky? What was the importance of Gurdjieff? Because… they seem neither well-known nor well-understood.

May: Ouspensky is generally regarded as Gurdjieff’s most important pupil. Otherwise Ouspensky had no importance. Ouspensky wrote coherent English. Blavatsky and Gurdjieff had no importance except to their pupils. Blavatsky and Gurdjieff were neither well-known nor well-understood.

Jacobsen: What is “truth,” in that sense,” as stated in “Truth”? What is truth and falsehood in that sense? What does this state about human nature with defilement of truth as necessary for truth to come forth and be heard properly?

May: Gurdjieff seemed to be saying that humans as they were could not understand truth. Truth could only be understood by most humans if presented as a lie.

Jacobsen: “Good and Evil” explains the nature of good and evil as first requiring a realization of them. How do good and evil only exist for a few?

May: That good and evil only exist for a few was a claim made by Gurdjieff. I don’t know how this is true, or if the claim even has any meaning.

Jacobsen: Why are so few awake? What is “awake” in this sense? Is it akin to enlightenment in some philosophies of Buddhism?

May: Why are so few awake? What is the biological utility in an evolutionary context of awakening? Maybe awakening has no biological utility. I think awake may be equivalent to enlightenment in some Buddhist philosophical schools. But I may be incorrect.

Jacobsen: “Is this what the work has become?” talks about the work. First, what is the work?

May: The work is Gurdjieff’s system for awakening humans from the condition of being what he called sleeping machines or unconscious automata.

Jacobsen: Second, why does it have to be work? Why not play?

May: Referring to Gurdjieff’s system as work rather than play suggests that it may be difficult to awaken. But I did not choose the terminology of work or play. Supposedly the sheep in the folk tale of the magician illustrate the illusions of hypnotic sleep.

Jacobsen: The magician sounds sadistic and cruel. What is the identification with the work?

May: Supposedly the sheep in the folk tale of the magician illustrate the illusions of hypnotic sleep.

Jacobsen: How is this identification with the work considered sleeping rather than waking?

May: Identification in any form is considered to be sleep.

Jacobsen: Is the act of identifying the work akin to the universe seeing its own back, so as to mess with the still waters of the awakened — so to speak? By act of observation, the work is broken. One is no longer awake but asleep with an even deeper illusion.

May: I don’t understand your question regarding “the universe seeing its own back.”

Gurdjieff may have taught that one could sometimes awaken if only for a moment.

Ludwig Wittgenstein also noted this changing quality of human attention. He wrote that we may occasionally awaken for a moment sufficiently to realize that we have been asleep and dreaming.

Jacobsen: “Identification: to Wake Perchance to Dream” is a woeful story, sort of. What is “satori”? 

May: I speak with no official authority about the Gurdjieff work, you should know. None …

I’m not sure that I’ve ever experienced satori. Maybe … But if I have, then I cannot describe it in any case.

But off the top of my head it is an altered state of consciousness (the term satori comes from Zen Buddhism, of course) in which everything is directly seen to be just the way it is in the present moment  — When running by the Charles River in Boston once or twice after long 40-minute runs everything looked like it was just the way it should be! The chattering mind had stopped. I just saw … it was somewhat ineffable … “Suchness,” tathata in Sanskrit. The Buddha is called tathagata, “one who has thus gone.”

People in the online chat groups would kvetch endlessly that they were “identified.” In any spiritual practice the goal is the practice, period.

Jacobsen: What exactly is meant by an “attachment” in this non-philosophy philosophy?

May: Oh, I was talking about online chats in the Gurdjieff work. After 10 or 15 years of being in “the work,” intelligent people did not have a clue as to the meaning of “self-remembering,” a very important fundamental concept of G.I. Gurdjieff’s teaching. Gurdjieff had an injunction that recognized that everyone was going to die, so people must be helped along the way, “The Fifth Being Obligation.” But after 10 or 15 years “in the work” intelligent chat participants often did not have a clue what self-remembering meant!

Gurdjieff’s pupil, J.G. Bennet was recognized as brilliant and he knew both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, his foremost pupil. He travelled to Gurdjieff’s home and even met Gurdjieff’s father. Bennet read All and Everything, Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson 11 times and did not understand it! Where does that leave a person lacking Bennett’s advantages?

In addition after many years the pupils in my chat group were told that the teacher’s teacher had said to his pupils “in the work” that we have a “life time of errors in Beelzebub’s Tales to correct.” How could one understand this writing, All and Everything, the Gurdjieffian Bible, without knowing what the innumerable errors are? This tome was translated and written by committee, not by one person, not directly by Gurdjieff, himself. Belatedly you are told that it is riddled with errors. But Gurdjieff himself had what he called the Fifth Being Obligation. Everyone is going to perish and we don’t know when, so there is an obligation to not waste people’s time.

I was satirically contrasting attachments in Buddhism with identification in the Gurdjieff work. There is a saying in Buddhism that “Original realization is marvelous practice.” The meaning is that the practice is the goal. There is no Buddha, no path, no enlightenment. Just meditate. Follow the path.

Jacobsen: The distinction between a small “i” and a big “I” is implicit in the test with the smaller “i” in the identification and identity. Is this distinction purposeful, or am I seeing a ‘there’ that’s not there?

May: Test? Did you mean text?

We are all always seeing ‘a there that’s not there’! Was that a wave or a particle that just walked by? Often small i refers to the individual fictional ego-identity and big I to the ground of being, itself, the individual wave in the ocean and the ocean, itself.

Jacobsen: Why does intellectual analysis interrupt the potential attainment of satori or enlightenment? 

May: Intellectual analysis is fine during cognition, but not so much during a meditation practice. (Often people have random thoughts, but do not actually think in any case.) Having thoughts is fine, just let them pass. Patanjali defines Yoga as the “Cessation of the modifications of the mind-stuff.” No or less internal mind-chatter is Yoga.

Jacobsen: What is meant by “But I Hunger and Thirst…for the taste of Vagueness”?

May: Gurdjieff wrote of individuals who “hunger and thirst after truth.” In the Gurdjieff chats there was a plethora of vague talk. Vague talk is not truth. I was mocking what generally occurred in the online chats.

And there seemed to be no evidence-based research on the practices of attempted self-remembering (i.e., being present to oneself in the body, emotions and intellectual mind simultaneously) or on “sitting,” one of the Gurdjieffian meditation practices. But the work was claimed to be scientific.

Jacobsen: There is a circularity, sort of, to the path from analysis to not really analyzing to more analysis. Is this reflective of our constant intellectual meanderings away – and away and away, again – from satori experiences?

May: Yes, more or less. I was satirizing the attempted use of analysis to understand why there was endless analyzing. —  Just watch your mindstream of thoughts, your bodily sensations and emotions. The practice is the goal. There is no Buddha, no Dharma (law), no Sangha (community)!

Gautama Buddha was not a Buddhist, Abraham’s mother was not Jewish, hence Abraham wasn’t a born Jew, Jesus wasn’t a Christian and Gurdjieff was not a Gurdjieffian.

Jacobsen: The final quote from “Dogen Practice” states, “Original realization is marvelous practice.” Why is there no definitive distinction between realization of awakening and its cultivation?

May: To have such a distinction would get in the way of realization, create an expectation, make awakening less likely!

Jacobsen: “Roast Pigeon” continues, a bit, with some of the same ideas from “Identification: to Wake Perchance to Dream” “taste” and “vagueness.” What is the association between the vague and the gustatory in these two publications?

May: Gurdjieff said something to the effect that one cannot expect a roast pigeon to fly into one’s mouth in the Gurdjieff work. By this he meant that one must make an effort, constant effort. Work takes effort. It’s not a sinecure.

Jacobsen: Why must the vagueness be stolen?

May: Nothing can be given; Nothing will be given, by the teacher or by Gurdjieff. In Yoga, the Yoga is the effort, not some position. One must steal the truth.

Jacobsen: There’s the circularity in this one, too, with “being in question of being in question” or “pondering pondering.” Are most of our thoughts circuitous-ish? 

May: I was again just mocking the endless vague talk in chat groups about “pondering and being in question.” Must we ponder pondering? Can we question being in question? And ponder being in question? … staining the fragments of silence … “You are the space between your thoughts,” Jean Klein.

Jacobsen: At one point, the amorphous is juxtaposed with the precise in the phrase “certain vague talk.” A certainty in the vagueness, this seems paradoxical, so… traditionally May-Tzu – looking at the other side of the partition to apprehend the whole as with the silence between sounds, background & foreground. The fragments of silence are some of the “Stains Upon The Silence.” Glenn Gould talked about the silence between notes or the gaps in notes – and higher harmonics – as rites of passage in a way. He, so it seems with you, see ‘both sides’ if this can be conceptualized, as such. What do you see as “stains” in the silence?

May: By “certain vague talk” I mean a particular, characteristic vague talk in the online chats, not anything to do with probabilistic certainty.

Jacobsen: Also, what is the pigeon, and why roast it?

May: According to a Google search: “Roasted pigeons have been a well-known delicacy in France since the 16th century.” I didn’t know this, but it makes sense as a context for Gurdjieff’s saying. Truth and moksha (liberation) are not going to fly into your mouth effortlessly.

After decades “in the work” there are individuals who cannot cease smoking or lose weight. Yet unification of one’s being is supposed to be a fruit of the Gurdjieff work. Gurdjieff himself was an obese cigarette smoker with chronic bronchitis for thirty years, according to sources.

Gurdjieff’s most excellent pupil, P.D. Ouspensky at the end of his life was an alcoholic, or nearly so, and completely disillusioned with the system of the Gurdjieff work. He said that nothing can be achieved without the “higher emotional center” and we don’t know how to use the higher emotional center. The title of Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous was originally intended by Ouspensky to be Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. Fragments … Unknown … The publisher, however, chose the former title. Perhaps that tells us something. My teacher didn’t mention the fate of poor Ouspensky, for some peculiar reason.

Now some people remain “in the work” for more than fifty (50) years, which Gurdjieff would never have allowed. Some individuals today make a career out of “being in the work,” exactly as Ouspensky made a career out of the work, finally lecturing in London.

In The Fourth Way Ouspensky states that there are “no institutions associated with the Fourth Way,” Gurdjieff’s path. What then is the Gurdjieff Foundation, if not an institution? Ironically Gurdjieff’s own system predicts that this would happen. In the relative world everything turns into its opposite, a loose paraphrase of the relevant ideas.

By contrast Alfred Richard Orage left Gurdjieff and the work. After Orage died, Gurdjieff called Orage his friend, a epithet he rarely used, and implied that Orage had “created a ‘soul’” by saying that he hoped he went straight to ‘paradise’.

As someone said to me in a chat group, “The work doesn’t work, but I don’t know anything better.” He also said, “Human beings f*ck up everything they do and Gurdjieff did too.” I asked him what he meant by that and he replied, “You’ll have to figure that out yourself.” I already had.

Gurdjieff said “Believe nothing, not even yourself.”  — The Harmonious Circle by James Webb is an excellent book on the Gurdjieff work. Webb suicided.

Yet I think that there is much of value to be extracted from the traditional wisdom and psychological teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, e.g., that humans are unconscious automata most of the time, rather than conscious unified beings with free will. We are incubators or wombs for the creation of a ‘soul’, which can survive bodily death. But the precious diamonds are often found lying deep in dung.

And “Most people can’t hear gray.” — May-Tzu

“To know means to know all. Not to know all means not to know. In order to know all, it is only necessary to know a little. But, in order to know this little, it is first necessary to know pretty much.” — G.I. Gurdjieff

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Bob Williams & Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/03 (Issue #209)

Abstract

Bob Williams is a Member of the Triple Nine Society, Mensa International, and the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. He discusses: the more evidenced theories of creativity similar to g or general intelligence as the majority position of researchers in the field of general intelligence; theories of genius; the main figures in these areas of creativity and genius connected to the research on g; personality differences between scientists and artists; conscientiousness; the ability to think; the expected probability of genius at higher and higher cognitive rarities; Howard Gardner; Robert Sternberg; the works of Arthur Jensen building on Charles Spearman; and the questions remaining about genius.

Keywords: Arthur Jensen, Bob Williams, Charles Spearman, creativity, Davide Piffer, Francis Galton, g, general intelligence, genius, Hans Eysenck, Howard Gardner, Rex Jung, Ricard Haier, Robert Sternberg.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Now, I want to touch on another orbiting topic to intelligence research, which comes from this notion of genius. What are some of the more evidenced theories of creativity similar to g or general intelligence as the majority position of researchers in the field of general intelligence?

Bob Williams: The evidence lies primarily in neurology. Creativity measurements are not as informative as intelligence measures. We understand g well and have a massive amount of research to support the structure of intelligence, g, the underlying neurology, and finally the genetics picture is coming together. Even in personality, there is a general factor, but if a general factor has emerged from studies of creativity, I have not seen it. Davide Piffer wrote a paper that specifically addressed the question of a general factor of creativity. He made a convincing argument that aspects of creativity were distinct at the descriptive and neurological levels and would, therefore, be unlikely to yield a general factor. Piffer also presented good criticisms of various past studies, particularly with regard to the construct validity of various creativity tests.

Part of the problem is that much of the literature relating creativity and intelligence preceded latent variable analysis. Another part is that creativity is inherently more difficult to measure than intelligence. In intelligence research, we can easily test for the g loading of a category of test items and see if the loading is high enough to justify its use in a battery of test items, such as an IQ test. In creativity measures, the things being measured are sometimes quite removed from the thing we implicitly understand as creativity. 

The other aspect of creativity measures is that people do not have the same degree of agreement as to how a creative response should be graded. For example, one common test of creativity is the alternate uses test, in which a person is asked to list as many alternate uses for a common object (brick, paperclip, etc.) as possible in a short period of time. This is essentially a test of fluency (for example, list words beginning with the letter H). Even when used directly (without grading of individual responses) there is a claimed connection between fluency and creativity.  When the responses are graded by judges, according to the level of creativity, the results are claimed to be better. It is obvious that this sort of test is not a close match with the things we expect are happening when a person is exhibiting creative output.

The neurology of creativity is where I see real explanatory results. For example, creative brains should show these:

• The inhibitory function is low or can be made low by the executive function. When the brain has a low inhibitory function, it rejects fewer stimuli, creating opportunities for remote associations. While this is good for creative output, it is opposite of the best function for problem solving.
• Some brains presumably have direct connectivity between parts that are usually combined only by passing through multiple nodes. This also increases the opportunity for unrelated ideas or knowledge to become associated.
• The brain is able to enter the default mode network (DMN) and generate ideas there. This is the network most associated with creativity.
• Leaky attention (the opposite of maintaining focus) relates to the inhibitory function.
• The ability to create remote associations relates to all of the creativity factors.

These brain characteristics tell us that, like intelligence, creativity depends on special properties of the brain. Curiously, these properties seem to sometimes be opposite to those we associate with high intelligence. While we do not have a parallel between intelligence and creativity, in the general factor sense, we do have a set of brain features that have a direct impact on creative output.

Jacobsen: Similarly, creative achievement at the highest levels seems to more often than not earn the title of “genius,” wherein minor creative acts and high intelligence do not. In that, a true act of genius appears to require extremes of creativity and of general intelligence. Both of these rare alone, even rarer together at the same levels. What theories of genius appear the most substantiated now?

Williams: Yes. The enigma is how these traits can sometimes all happen in one brain. The various models of genius that I have seen seem to be relatively unchanged over time, suggesting to me that we have not found measurements that lead us to any one over the others. The various models, however, are not that different and are qualitatively in agreement with the things that are seen in Genius. We have good descriptions of geniuses from the distant past that seem consistent with more recent observations, but we do not have much, if anything, in the way of brain studies because the technology to image brains has only been available for a few decades.

Sir Francis Galton listed intelligence, zeal, and persistence. Another component is probably creativity.

Hans Eysenck believed that both traits Neurosis and Psychoticism had to be elevated in true genius. Obviously if either trait is overly expressed, the individual will be destroyed and not achieve enormous feats of creative genius. When N and P are somewhat elevated they positively impact the individual–at least if he is really a genius. For example, P may cause a person to be seen as aggressive, cold, egocentric, impersonal, impulsive, antisocial, unempathic, tough-minded, and creative… not a pretty picture in terms of attractive personality. This, however, is precisely what we read in the descriptions of the great geniuses of all time.

Arthur Jensen believed that genius is the product of high ability x high productivity x high creativity.

ability = g = efficiency of information processing

productivity = endogenous cortical stimulation

creativity = trait psychoticism

Jacobsen: Who are the main figures in these areas of creativity and genius connected to the research on g?

Williams: The three above (Galton, Eysenck, and Jensen) wrote a good bit about genius and some about creativity. Dean Keith Simonton edited the Handbook of Genius and Scientific genius: A psychology of science. I would classify him as more of an author than researcher.

Much of what we have in the literature on genius is descriptive, due to the scarcity of people to study and their distribution over hundreds of years. In Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences 800 B.C. to 1950, Charles Murray identified 4002 people as having extraordinary eminence. This is a very reasonable list of genius over the long time range

he covered. We are left with a better understanding of what they accomplished than of how they did it. Needless to say, we have no neurological studies of these people.

Today we have researchers who study both intelligence and creativity. The two at the top of my list are neurologists Richard Haier and Rex Jung. Their work resulted in the P-FIT model (described in my second set of questions) and has expanded into a wide range of intelligence and creativity topics. It is my belief that neurological research is most likely to shed additional light on the understanding of what rare conditions produce genius. In the more distant future, geneticists may find ways to understand the underlying genetic traits in true genius.

The neurological characteristics that have been associated with high creativity (see previous answer) include a lowered inhibitory function and long mean path length (networks). Both of these are opposite to the desirable traits for high intelligence. The inhibitory function can be dulled by alcohol or other drugs, precisely not what you want to do before taking a calculus test.  Long mean path length is associated with poor network connectivity, possibly related to low tissue integrity (measured by fractional anisotropy) or with lower numbers of connections to hubs. I have not seen anything that attempts to explain how genius incorporates both high intelligence and high creativity. There is, however, the possibility that these rare people have an ability to achieve divergent thinking and remote associations, without the biological factors just mentioned. Piffer has also argued that the focus on divergent thinking may be overemphasized and the association of creativity with intelligence underappreciated. 

Jacobsen: What explains some of these personality differences between scientists and artists mentioned in (1)?

Williams: There seems to be numerous domain specific traits, including personality, at work. I doubt that anyone would confuse an artist with an engineer when first meeting them. One personality trait that relates to creativity is Conscientiousness–low for artists and higher for scientists. Trait Openness is the only Big Five trait that relates to intelligence, but this trait also correlates positively with creativity. This suggests that intelligence is not the minor factor claimed by some researchers.

One aspect of creative professions is that they show elevated levels of alcoholism, impacting from 20% to 60% of each. The highest is for actors.

Openness is positively correlated with creative achievement in the arts, but curiously does not predict working memory capacity. Among scientists, intellect is predictive of WMC and achievement (as I would expect). In the long and detailed book The Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity (2018) Rex E. Jung (Editor), Oshin Vartanian (Editor), there is a discussion of how openness and intellect relate to brain regions. As with the many studies of intelligence factors in the brain structure (and properties), neuroscience has produced similar findings for creativity. There are large numbers of structures and measures to consider, but the thing that is impressive is the frequency with which the results are opposite for creativity and intelligence; tissue integrity is one example (high integrity for intelligence, low integrity for creativity). [Tissue integrity is measured by fractional anisotropy. A high FA indicates less radial diffusivity (loss).]

Jacobsen: Does conscientiousness, whether artists or scientists, remain one of the most important traits for the achievement of a true act of genius – to follow-through despite seemingly impossible odds in the moment?

Williams: There is a big story hidden in follow-through and it seems to me to be a flaw in some of the more traditional discussions about creativity. When researchers administer a test, such as a divergent thinking exercise, they are often measuring fluency and then arguing that fluency is related to creativity. The problem is that this measure is about quantity and is completely disconnected from achievement, production, and end result. We see Michelangelo as a genius, not because he imagined the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but because it imagined AND produced it and not that he imagined the David, but because he sculpted the statue. This illustrates the difficulty of dealing with discussions and measures of creativity… the definitions are messy and can be misleading and the measures are often distant from the construct we want to measure.

Yes, Conscientiousness measured as a trait applies to acts of creativity, but in opposite directions for intelligence and creativity. We can see this without measuring creativity directly by simply measuring personality for artists and scientists. Despite the finding that it is low for artists. [I take the finding to be correct from Jung and Vartanian previously cited.]

Jacobsen: Between Mensa International, Intertel, the Triple Nine Society, the Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society, or between the escalating claimed cognitive rarities, what should one expect in regards to the ability to think of the cognitive floor of the membership?

Williams: Since these groups are self-selected, they tend to be atypical of the entry thresholds they represent. One big difference between membership in these is that people who have not been successful in education, profession, and personal relationships seem to be more attracted to them, possibly as a means of signaling their worth, despite failures. My observation from my in-person participation in the groups is that the majority of members are about what you would expect from a random sampling of people above the admission levels, but there remains a disproportionate

number of people who have not shown life success and developed appropriate interpersonal skills. In Mensa, and only that group, I noticed a significant number of morbidly obese members. 

Jensen wrote:

I received a letter from someone I had never met, though I knew he was an eminent professor of biophysics. He had read something I wrote concerning IQ as a predictor of achievement, but he was totally unaware of the present work. The coincidence is that my correspondent posed the very question that is central to my theme. He wrote:

I have felt for a long time that IQ , however defined, is only loosely related to mental achievement. Over the years I have bumped into a fair number of MENSA people. As a group, they seem to be dilettantes seeking titillation but seem unable to think critically or deeply. They have a lot of motivation for intellectual play but little for doing anything worthwhile. One gets the feeling that brains were wasted on them. So, what is it that makes an intelligently productive person?

This is not an uncommon observation, and I have even heard it expressed by members of MENSA. It is one of their self-perceived problems, one for which some have offered theories or rationalizations. The most typical is that they are so gifted that too many subjects attract their intellectual interest and they can never commit themselves to any particular interest. It could also be that individuals drawn toward membership in MENSA are a selective subset of the gifted population, individuals lacking in focus. After all, most highly gifted individuals do not join MENSA. [Intellectual Talent : Psychometric and Social Issues (1997), edited by Camilla Persson Benbow & David Lubinski] {My underline added.}

I only belonged to Intertel for 3-4 years, but I went to their annual gatherings every year until I gave up on them (simply due to inactivity in the journal, which lost contributions of new material). I did notice that when I was with the group, in person, there was a much greater maturity of discussion and sobriety than found in Mensa.

As the entrance requirement increases, I have found that there are more people who are interesting, competent in technical fields, and who have become long term friends.

Unfortunately, that increase is accompanied by the subset of obnoxious members setting new records for repulsiveness. I have not seen this same distribution of personalities in my work. As I explained in my first questions, my career was spent with mostly technical people (physics, engineering, and a few miscellaneous science fields). It may happen that the demands of both education and work in the nuclear reactor business acts as a personality filter, producing a different mix of people from those found in high IQ clubs. 

Jensen responded to a few text interviews from high IQ groups. His comments are worth reading, not only because of his prominence, but also for his style-choice of words:

Discussions on Genius and Intelligence Interview with Dr. Arthur Jensen. Mega Press, Eastport, New York

Arthur Jensen: Its hard to imagine how a group of high-IQ people with little else in common besides their IQ and probably differing in many other ways perhaps even more than a random sample of the population can do much to effect social change or carry out and large project with a unified aim.

An interview with Dr. Arthur Jensen by Steve Coy

Dr. Arthur Jensen: The interaction of ability level with interests and lifestyle confounds selection. I daresay you will find few Mensa or Mega members with few or no intellectual interests, for example, although there may be people out there in the population who are very bright but have few such interests. There is also self-selection at the top end. How many Nobel Prize winners, or members of the National Academy of Sciences are in any of the high IQ societies? I was struck by the fact that the Berkeley chapter of Mensa, with its many members, had only one member who was on the faculty of UC Berkeley, although I’m sure some large percentage of them could qualify if they wished to join. And I know a Nobel Prize winner who was invited to join Mensa, but he had no interest in it and declined the invitation. It has been my (untested) impression that if IQ and achievement could be correlated in the whole population, members of HI-IQ societies would be among those who tend to lower the correlation, falling below the regression line (of achievement regressed on IQ). Most conventional IQ tests have a general knowledge-achievement component which makes the test an amalgam of both ability and achievement and particularly skews the high end of the IQ distribution. 

Jacobsen: Have there been efforts to calculate the expected probability of genius at higher and higher cognitive rarities?

Williams: In the numerous articles I have read about genius, I have not encountered an estimate of the probability of a person being born with the rare combination of genes that lead to genius. There are some obvious problems. One is defining where to draw the line between genius and not genius. As long as you are dealing with the most distinguished individuals (at the level of Einstein, Bach, and Picasso) there is no problem. But when you want to count, who do you count and who do you skip? Perhaps the 4002 listed in Human Accomplishment is about as good as one can do, largely because they were identified by an objective and quantifiable method. [The worldwide number comes out to fewer than 1.5 per year.] Then things become quite muddy… we might argue that the production of genius has been a variable over time. There is reason to believe that mean intelligence (at least in developed nations) has been a variable. Dutton and Woodley discussed this in At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent. They also

speculated that we are producing fewer and fewer geniuses, due mostly to the decline in mean intelligence, and that this will have a profound impact on the progression of mankind as it relates to innovation. My personal feeling is that this analysis may be overstated because we have entered a new paradigm, based on powerful computer resources and artificial intelligence that will undoubtedly change how people innovate and carry out cognitive tasks.

In the distant future, geneticists may be able to calculate the probability of a rare set of genetic variants appearing in a population. As of today, they have finally found 1,200 single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with intelligence, but these account for only about a 10% effect size.  It may be even more difficult to find the variants necessary for the other traits, making the problem overwhelming until a powerful new approach becomes available.

Jacobsen: Now, the next triplet tie to ideas proposed about intelligence (covered a bit in the previous two sessions) and genius as laid out above, how do the works of Howard Gardner attempt to address genius? How do these efforts succeed? How do they fail?

Williams: Gardner was interested in creativity and occasionally mentioned creativity in connection with genius. He may have produced significant works relating to genius, but they have not come to my attention. He did discuss the aspects of personality that are often associated with genius and which are well known to relate to the typical non-social and sometimes abrasive behaviors of the people we all know for their monumental works. He also wrote Creating Minds (1993) in which he did a detailed description of seven geniuses, each selected to exemplify one of his multiple intelligences. The irony of this is that his model is based on individual examples of what he claimed were each a different kind of intelligence, but he based his model on people well outside of the range of “normal,” while appealing to those normal people to accept his abnormal model. [The seven people selected: T. S. Eliot, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Martha Graham, Mahatma Gandhi, and Sigmund Freud.]

Gardner is in a category that is highly regarded by the general public and not by many serious intelligence researchers. The multiple intelligences model is apparently loved by those who see it as “fair.” Researchers know that there is nothing fair about Mother Nature.

Jacobsen: How do the works of Robert Sternberg attempt to address genius? How do these efforts succeed? How do they fail?

Williams: Unlike Gardner, Sternberg was more involved in matters relating to genius. He was, for example, the editor of the Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge), which included some discussion of genius. The problem is that, like Gardner, Sternberg had a personal invention on the line and was inclined to make that (the Triarchic Theory) the centerpiece of whatever he wrote. The theory was not sound, as demonstrated by Linda Gottfredson, so that carries over to how I see his comments. Per my prior comments, the net observations of genius from all sources remain descriptive and do not tell us much about the underlying genetics and neurology of genius. It’s a case of we know it when we see it, but we can’t explain it from the biological perspective.

Jacobsen: How do the works of Arthur Jensen building on Charles Spearman attempt to address genius? How do these efforts succeed? How do they fail?

Williams: Jensen’s comments on genius strike me as being as good as any that can be found. He believed that the necessary, but not sufficient traits combine in genius at maximum values and that they have a multiplicative effect. I bought the book Intellectual Talent : Psychometric and Social Issues (1997), edited by Camilla Persson Benbow & David Lubinski, just to read the last chapter by Jensen. He described genius as ability at the upper end of a J-curve, which can be thought of as a logarithmic increase. In Human Accomplishment, Murray also addressed the extreme nature of genius but called it the Lotka Curve. Both signify that almost all points relating to high achievement group together, while a few are so far from the rest that they exist in a stratospheric space.

Jacobsen: What are the questions remaining about genius? In particular, what are the unknown, though potentially somewhat known, relations between intelligence, personality, and creativity, and genius?

Williams:  We cannot describe or even effectively study the genius brain or genome. There simply are not enough such brains to find and explore. There also seems to be a lack of interest in this among neurologists who have the technology to probe a brain. The only person I know who has imaged various atypical high achievers is Roberto Colom. But the instances I am aware of relate to sports figures and some creative artists. I would most like to see someone do a comprehensive study of David Lynch, as an example of the most creative level of the arts (cinema). There are various Nobel laureates (physics and chemistry) who would seem to me to be examples of the top minds in science, but I don’t think they are being studied. One thing that concerns me about such a project is the age of the person being studied. I would think the best age would be in the 25 to 35 year old range because the brain is typically functioning at its best then. Would Lynch be too old? Most likely the effort that would be required for such a project would be unattractive to many researchers.

The limited information that we have about Einstein’s brain at least tells us that his brain was highly atypical, as compared to the brains that have been studied in modern times. It would be interesting to see if any of his special properties (brain width, elevated glial cell fraction, and a few Brodmann Area size anomalies) can be found in other people and whether they show special cognitive abilities.

The other thing that I consider to be not fully resolved is the relationship between intelligence and creativity. The measurements that produce small correlations were done by correlating such things as the alternate uses test against IQ. Related to the appropriateness of the measures is whether there is a difference between artistic creativity and scientific creativity. Both allow for exploration (try this, then that) but I think that scientific creativity has to be significantly related to knowledge and understanding of the thing being studied.

Jacobsen: After a hiatus, round four, what would make a general test of creativity valid? Has David Piffer proposed anything? 

Williams: Piffer has done a good bit of work related to creativity and published several papers on it. To avoid congestion with my answer, I will append references to some of these papers. One of his particularly interesting observations: “There is some evidence that schizotypal triats and temperament are associated with creativity. Schizotypal traits as measured by the O-LIFE questionnaire were related to creative thinking styles and a subscale (but not the other three scales) ImpNon (Impulsive Noncomformity) was positively correlated to Divergent Thinking tasks in a sample of British students.“ 

Among the things he mentions in his papers are that Openness and low Conscientiousness are predictors of creativity. This has high face value and indirectly links creativity to intelligence (via Openness). He found a correlation of 0.54 between scientific and artistic creativity that was 70% genetic. Piffer suggested that the best measure of creativity is the impact of a work on its creative field. I like that definition more than the usual one of something novel and useful. 

From my perspective, measuring creativity is difficult. It is not like intelligence in that we don’t have a positive manifold and we don’t have good ways to check the measurement instruments. One of the problems I see is the lack of importance in creativity below the level that we see in great composers, directors, writers, etc. If a person has a very low level of creativity, or even no realistically detectable level, he will not suffer in the way that the same low standing would cause problems relative to intelligence. Piffer referred to two kinds of creativity: Big-C (as in true genius) and Pro-C (someone at a level where he can work professionally in a creative discipline). If we add one more category, Little C, we have a group where there is a range of creativity, but where it has little impact. 

People actually try to measure creativity over a full range. I’m not sure why or whether they have paid much attention to how the Little-C people are affected by their level of creativity. 

Tests have a construct validity and an external validity. The construct (internal) validity is simply an indication that the test is measuring the thing it is supposed to measure–in this case, creativity. The treatment of construct validity is less rigorous than a test of external (predictive) validity. One way it 

is done is by comparison to tests or other means of making the measurement. If it matches conventional expectations, it is showing internal validity. In the case of intelligence, the usual method is to factor analyze the test and compare the resulting factors to those found in other tests that are believed to show construct validity. 

If we consider validity to mean accuracy, the question is one of how well the test predicts creative output. If we have people at two significantly different levels of creativity, can we use their output to validate the measure, as we do in intelligence testing? I don’t know the answer; I see the whole approach to creativity measurement as fuzzy, even when compared to other life sciences. 

The more important validity is external or predictive validity, which tells us that the test is measuring things that can be predicted and verified. If the test shows that someone is in the 90th percentile of creativity, we expect that the person will display high levels of creativity in his job and life. For example, he may be a successful screenwriter or composer. Predictive validity is central to the whole

notion of being able to meaningfully test for creativity. If we are measuring things that actually predict real world outcomes, the test is useful. If it fails this, the test is of questionable value. 

Jacobsen: Why is the reliance on latent variable analysis important for the study of creativity? 

Williams: Latent traits are found in multifaceted constructs, including creativity. The use of latent traits allows the researcher to show how multiple variables interact and form a structure. Remote association tests are used in creativity research with good results. The difficulty level of making specific connections (item level in the test) can be determined using latent trait models. This is similar to Item Response Theory as used in intelligence tests. 

Jacobsen: Why is the reliance on latent variable analysis important for the study of intelligence? 

Williams: The often displayed hierarchical structure of intelligence is a representation of latent tra its. These identify narrow and broad abilities and g. All of these are latent traits and are essential to the understanding of intelligence. It is difficult to overstate the importance of g in the study of intelligence. It translates directly to the study of the brain, is remarkably stable over lifespan, and explains life outcomes better than any other single parameter. 

Jacobsen: What five items or tasks in formal intelligence tests have the highest correlation with the g factor? 

Williams: The g loadings of various factors are test dependent. For example, vocabulary is a well known factor that usually shows a very high g loading. But its specific loading depends on the structure of the test and the number of test items that correspond to each factor. If you add more test items, it tends to skew the loadings upwards. Some tests are designed to use only a single category of test items. The best known of these is the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. It can be factor analyzed to show that it has factors other than g, but those factors are usually ignored because they are not the traditional ones seen in comprehensive tests, such as the WAIS. 

The WISC-IV has only 5 Stratum II factors. Here are the g loadings for those: 

 Comprehension-Knowledge (Gc) __ .80 

 Fluid reasoning (Gf) __________ .95 

 Short-Term Memory (Gsm) _______ .62 

 Visual Processing (Gv) ________ .67 

 Processing Speed (Gs) _________ .27  

Timothy Salthouse created a factor structure from 33 of his studies (about 7,000 people, ages 18 through 95) and also found 5 Stratum II factors. The g loadings he found: 

Reasoning _____________________ .95 

Spatial ability _______________ .91 

Memory _______________________ .66 

Processing speed ______________ .60 

Vocabulary ____________________ .73 

Johnson and Bouchard found a natural structure of intelligence by using the 15 test Hawaii Battery, the

Comprehensive Ability Battery, and the The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. They eliminated some subtests to avoid duplication. When they factor analyzed the massive test, a four stratum structure emerged. I consider this to be the best fully analyzed study of the structure of intelligence. The top 5 g loadings: 

Verbal ________________________ .96 Stratum III factor Perceptual ____________________ .99 Stratum III factor Image rotation ________________ .97 Stratum III factor Scholastic ____________________ .88 Stratum II factor 

Fluency _______________________ .83 Stratum II factor 

The point of presenting these different results is to show how different tests cause different factors and different loadings. The very high loadings, in the last set, are the result of the large number of diverse test items used. This causes most non-g factors to cancel out. 

Jacobsen: What do these five tasks or sub-tests tell us about the structure of general intelligence and the human brain? 

Williams: If you look at the three sets of factors, you see that they are similar. Tests are generally designed to either fit the three stratum Cattell-Horn-Carroll model, or are forced to produce another three stratum structure. All tests show one general factor, that may appear at stratum II, III, or IV. Ergo, we have accepted and repeatedly confirmed Spearman’s early findings. I am always amazed by how much he reported over a century ago and how dead-on accurate his findings were. 

Richard Haier formulated the Efficiency Hypothesis based on positron emission tomography studies he did, starting in 1988. These showed high glucose uptake in low IQ cohorts and lower glucose uptake in high IQ testees. It meant that, when trying to resolve the same mental task, the low IQ group required high mental effort, while the bright group required less mental effort. Some MRI work was available with Jensen wrote The g Factor (1998), but it has only been in the 21st century that we have had large MRI based studies. It has only been possible to look for g in the brain by using advanced imaging technologies. Among the most important are structural MRI, functional MRI, and diffusion tensor imaging. The latter two have provided the ability to study white matter and brain networks. 

The above comments are a necessary introduction to what has been learned about the general factor within the brain. We already knew that g was unitary at the psychometric level. Now we know that it is not unitary at the neurological level. Richard Haier and Rex Jung found 14 Brodmann Areas that are strongly related to intelligence and problem solving. They created a model known as P-FIT (parieto-frontal integration theory) [described in detail in Haier, R. J. (2017); The Neuroscience of Intelligence, Cambridge University Press]. The model involves a sequential transfer of information between the cognitive centers, ending in the frontal lobes where the integrated information is evaluated. 

The distributed nature of g within the brain has been confirmed by various studies, including focal lesion studies (using the Vietnam Head Injury Study). An important finding from this and other studies of networks is that damage to critical white matter areas causes lowered g. These areas are concentrated networks that link the P-FIT regions. Since the important cognitive centers work by information exchange, we have to think of g in the brain as the areas that are being linked as well as the efficiency of the connecting networks. 

Most of the P-FIT Brodmann Areas (BA) share their associations with g and other non-g traits. BA-10,

however, is only associated with g. This area appears to function as a control mechanism that is critical to the distributed processing nature of g. 

Jacobsen: What do current tests of general intelligence miss? 

Williams: As you would expect, different tests miss different things. While researchers today recommend comprehensive tests (WAIS and Woodcock-Johnson, etc.) other tests that are not diverse still work well for most purposes. This is because of Spearman’s indifference of the indicator. We are ultimately trying to measure g and can do that by a variety of seemingly unrelated tests. Each of the different tests (consider vocabulary and block design) is g loaded and is measuring the same g. 

But, we know from the structure of intelligence that there are factors, particularly at the broad abilities level (Stratum II) that are particularly important to some tasks. Arguably the most important of these is spatial ability. In this paper: [Spatial Ability for STEM Domains: Aligning Over 50 Years of Cumulative Psychological Knowledge; Jonathan Wai, David Lubinski, and Camilla P. Benbow; 2009, Journal of Educational Psychology Vol. 101, No. 4, 817–835.] the authors show that spatial ability is high in people who pursue engineering and sciences and its magnitude increases as the degrees held go from Bachelors, to Masters, to PhD. These fields are heavily dominated by males. At least part of the reason is that there is a sex difference in spatial ability favoring males. Some tests do not have any spatial ability test items, so they would certainly miss this ability. We know that various test designers try to force their tests to show invariance by sex, which may be why they do not include spatial ability test items. 

Jacobsen: How much can an individual train and change the degree of executive function in adult life? Is it a trainable skill or something more innate as with the g factor? 

Williams: I haven’t seen any research showing that the executive function can be enhanced by training. It seems, however, that some people can increase things such as Attention and the inhibitory function (both are components of the executive function) when needed and decrease them when that is appropriate. When we see people focused to a degree that blocks out virtually everything around them, they are using the executive function in conjunction with the inhibitory function to stay on task and to block external stimuli. All of this is strongly related to working memory. High WMC enhances the executive function and other factors such as rate of learning, the formation of long term memories, and fluid intelligence. 

Jacobsen: With someone like Leonardo Da Vinci, what would the structure of such a creative genius mind look like in real-time at peak performance? 

Williams: I don’t think we have any data that relates directly to brain imaging of true genius. If we did have it, I would expect that those in different fields (art versus science) would show behaviors that are similar to their colleagues and quite different from those in other disciplines.  

The issue of artistic and scientific creativity is interesting to me; I see it as unresolved. I once asked Rex Jung if the two forms were the same and he said that they were. Jensen, on the other hand, expressed a belief that intelligence was a larger factor in scientific creativity as compared to artistic creativity. To me, this has more face value. I think that Jung was considering how tests of creativity work over a wide range of ability and was not focused on the rare true genius brains.

Neurologists have done measurements of some people while doing a creative task, such as music improvisation. Their findings are certainly related to real-time creativity, but I do not see this as relating to the brains of Leonardo or Beethoven. The task of learning what is going on in their brains is so difficult that I think it will not be resolved for a long time. The starting problem is to find people who are actually at that level of creativity. Then we have to be able to make meaningful measurements at the moment they are inspired to create. I think that director David Lynch is at that level of creative genius, but I doubt that we can monitor him constantly and figure out when and how his brain comes up with the huge number of elements that go into the finished film. My guess is that it is a series of creative flashes, spaced by tasks that require either different kinds of thought or those that do not demand creativity. 

I would also expect that if we were lucky enough to be able to examine several creative geniuses, we would find different approaches. Some would probably go into long, deep, creative sessions and some would have multiple sudden insights that they combine to produce their works. And we might find some who do both over the course of a project. 

In the specific case of Leonardo we have the most extreme example of a polymath I can imagine. His brain would be a neurological treasure today, now that we finally have the technology to really study it. In such extreme cases of genius it is difficult to imagine what biological factors were combined to 

produce the end results that were so profound. One would have to assume that his brain was an extreme case of factors that simply do not exist together in others. From the little we were able to learn about Einstein’s brain, we know that his too was bizarrely different. 

Jacobsen: What is the DMN, default mode network? 

Williams: The DMN is the network that we use during mind-wandering, spontaneous cognition, imagination and divergent thinking. It is detectable by the presence of increased alpha-power. As is always true, things are messy. While the DMN is clearly linked to these things, the production of novel ideas seems to arise from the interaction of the DMN and various other networks. When the brain stops mind-wandering and focuses on a specific task, the DMN disengages and switches to other networks. We now know that the brain doesn’t lock in on a specific network for a prolonged period; it switches between networks. One of the things that emerged from the focal brain injury studies was the identification of the regulatory role of Brodmann Area 10 as I previously mentioned. I am unsure if this includes network switching, but I think it is likely. 

I once asked Richard Haier if it was known whether solutions to problems (the kind that happen after study and then hit us unexpectedly as we are doing something unrelated) are actually made in real-time while we are in the DMN or if the answers were made subconsciously and then revealed using the DMN as a vehicle. He said we don’t know yet. 

Jacobsen: Odd question, incoming: How would a universal definition of genius expand into other species? So, we see certain traits consistent across species with some conscious cognitive capacity, so as to consider them – exceptional minds in individual species – geniuses. This would seem an enlarged consideration, biologically, of genius with potential insight into the nature of human genius, so the quality of genius itself. 

Williams: The only definitions I believe are appropriate to true human genius are those that relate to a constellation of traits, expressed at a high level. In the case of animal studies, it is difficult to measure as many behavioral traits as we see in humans. For example, researchers have found a general factor of intelligence in some animals, but that factor is based on a rather small group of different categories of problem solving. It may be possible to measure factors such as zeal and persistence in animals, but we have to see that these things are actually productive. For example, I recall a study of wolves and dogs in which there was a barrier between them and food. The wolves continued to repeat the same efforts to go directly to the food. The dogs figured out that they needed help and tried to get it from humans. The point here is that, while persistence tends to be a genius trait, it is so because the genius does not repeat the same failed effort endlessly. We have seen a lot more animal studies in recent years and they are becoming more sophisticated. It is likely that they will eventually have a wider spectrum of tests and measures of animal behavior and that may lead us to identify exceptional individuals. Related to this, much of the animal kingdom is organized around male physical strength and fighting over mates, which creates a situation where the things we see as genius in humans may not show up at all. 

Jacobsen: Why do creative people tend to drink so much? 

Williams: In the book The Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity (2018) Rex E. Jung (Editor), Oshin Vartanian (Editor), there is a mention of creative professions showing twice the rate of alcoholism as found in the general population. Some of the people in these professions have creativity expectations associated with the use of alcohol. In general they seem to be right, at least for the insight stage of creativity, but as the amount of alcohol they consume increases, their creative output declines. As we know, at least from modern history, creative people tend to use other drugs as well. 

Jacobsen: Why are actors the biggest drinkers? 

Williams: The book cited above confirms that actors (60%) use alcohol at a level beyond the norm for the general public. It mentions writers as being particularly likely to have serious problems with booze. This makes sense in that writers have to constantly create new material and their “writers’ block” is often mentioned in various media. 

Jacobsen: Could those without high levels of executive function, but latent creativity, help themselves with exogenous agents such as alcohol to perform creative functions? However, this leads to the deleterious lives exhibited in high-performing creatives who have to rely on alcohol and other substances to accomplish incredible creative feats. 

Williams: I haven’t seen studies that directly address this situation. It falls into a category of research that is likely to be regarded as too dangerous unless conducted from natural data. I believe that it is a case of “a little helps, but too much hurts.” It follows the distribution that is sometimes called the inverted U curve. We see this in psychosis and neurosis, both contributing positively to genius results, but only when the level is “elevated” and not substantial. Various substances, that are used to enhance creativity, appear to work this way. The problem is that the use of the substances can become a drive and cause the user to not moderate his intake. 

Jacobsen: Is there a correlation between sex drive/promiscuity and genius? 

Williams: I can only guess, as I haven’t seen a specific study relating to it. What we often see in true genius is isolation and often no children. But I expect we can find rather extreme cases of sexual behavior, depending on the specific personalities and possibly on the category of work they do. One discussion

that relates to this: Who are the “Clever Sillies”? The intelligence, personality, and motives of clever silly originators and those who follow them; Edward Dutton, Dimitri van der Linden; Intelligence 49 (2015) 57–65. The title of the paper is somewhat misleading. From the paper: “… creative, original, uncooperative, and impulsive risk-takers. These kinds of characteristics permit them, like artists, to conceive of an original idea, thus showcasing their intelligence and creativity, and take the risks 

necessary – short term ostracism – to achieve their long term goal of high socioeconomic status. The fact that some of those whom we have assessed achieved high social status but not high economic status can thus be seen as the risks only partially paying off. In addition, the lack of sexual success among some of these figures is congruous with many geniuses not having children. But their actions can be interpreted as advantageous at the group level.” 

Jacobsen: If taking one moral perspective on it, is there a correlation between perversion or various forms and genius? 

Williams: That one falls outside of my knowledge base. I can imagine that there may be various forms of perversion, but I haven’t seen anything that explores the relationship. 

Jacobsen: When does conscientiousness become a negative trait? What contexts? I do not mean simply statements on specific professions. 

Williams: Low conscientiousness is found in artistic people and high conscientiousness is characteristic of people more likely to be found in STEM. Conscientiousness is less likely among people who use drugs (per our discussion) and who have random life patterns, consisting of no schedule or traditional jobs. The extent of problems relating to low conscientiousness is probably related to specific professions. There are lots of stories of actors who were difficult to work with, inclined to walk out, or get drunk. The most extreme cases of near-zero conscientiousness are those from the world of rock music, where performers have written the book on bad behavior and short lifespans. The “27 Club” was the subject of a documentary [27: Gone Too Soon] of at least 6 high level performers, but the total toll for young deaths is much larger. Low conscientiousness was one of many things that are obvious in the world of idol worshiped musicians. 

Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, when does conscientiousness become a positive trait? What contexts? 

Williams: In most employment situations, where a person has responsibilities that relate to an entire group, conscientiousness is valuable. You want to have the person who, when given a job, can be counted on to get it done, even if there is a tight deadline. The performers we discussed would not be a good choice for this kind of business. 

Jacobsen: How much is productivity a measure of genius? 

Williams: The magnitude of output of true geniuses is high. We see massive quantities of output from composers, painters, and writers, even from those who died very young. Part of this may be related to the speed with which some art is created. I once watched a documentary of Picasso, showing him painting. He was fast and changed the painting frequently by painting over parts of the painting repeatedly. I seriously doubt that a sculptor could chisel his way through a piece of marble quickly. The task is at least partly related to productivity, in the sense of output rate.

Jacobsen: Are there any substances that temporarily or artificially increase tissue functionality? Or, more generally, what about substances going in either direction of high FA and low FA temporarily due to their intake? What would be the expected effects and productive outputs from such intake, when heading into artificial high FA and artificial low FA? Perhaps, the wording isn’t sufficiently precise in the questions, but, I think, the curiosity for the idea is there. 

Williams: That is a thought provoking question. For the benefit of readers who are not familiar with FA, in this context, it means fractional anisotropy. This is a measure of diffusivity. If FA is zero, the medium is isotropic; if it is at the other extreme, 1, it means that the diffusion is along one axis and there is no loss to radial diffusion. In brain imaging, we see high FA as desirable; this means high tissue integrity. 

In the cases I have seen reported, FA is discussed as a tissue property that does not fluctuate. If it goes down, it stays down. But there may be studies showing that there are agents that can reduce FA temporarily and that it would return to normal when the agent is no longer present. Alcohol or drugs associated with hallucination might have some impact on FA (guessing). During the past week, we had the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. One factor that was discussed during an open session was the impact of anesthesia on the brain. I was unaware that it is believed to be damaging to intelligence. Unfortunately, the discussion was in the context of a one-way trip down. 

The reason this could relate to creativity (assuming that it happens) is that low FA can result in the brain following longer paths to join information. This presumably causes brain regions that are not related to the task at hand to be activated and may result in the formation of remote associations of the type associated with creativity. This would happen if a network has broken connections, thereby causing the brain to follow longer paths to complete tasks that recruit information from different parts of the brain. 

Jacobsen: For Mensa International, Intertel, the Triple Nine Society, the Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society, you observed a trend or pattern – non-absolute – of individuals who may not succeed in “education, profession, and personal relationships.” They seem more prone to becoming a part of them. Jensen mentioned in the Mega Press interview the dilettantish nature of the interactions and a void in deep, critical evaluation. Yet, the qualifications of the societies ground themselves in higher, sometimes abnormally, higher than normal IQs. Which leads to an associated, but somewhat distant, question, what is IQ missing regarding critical intelligence if that’s the case? The stereotype with some truth to it: A genius level IQ without a sense of the mechanics of the social and professional world, or the right question to probe an intellectual problem appropriately. 

Williams: It is certainly true and easily observable that these groups are statistically more attractive to people who have failed to establish meaningful careers, despite having high intelligence. Jensen mentioned that he was personally able to form satisfying relationships with his work colleagues and that, while all were bright, none belonged to Mensa (the only example he mentioned). Part of the answer may lie in the nature of personality. Of the Big Five, only Openness is significantly correlated with intelligence. That leaves a lot of room for other factors, as well as those that only appear in other personality test batteries, to cause problems. In fact, if you look at the four other traits, all of them can be expressed in a direction that could be poisonous to careers. I would expect that two traits would be particularly damaging: low conscientiousness and high neuroticism. 

Jacobsen: Does Charles Murray account for global population growth with the 1.5 times per year number in genius emergence? In short, is this number larger in more recent history with vastly more people living at the same time compared to the past, e.g. 0.75 times per year at some point in the past and 3 times per year at a time closer to the present? This is taking into account the speculation of a decline in mean national intelligence. 

Williams: No. Murray simply identified 4,002 people of extreme eminence over the period 800 B.C. to 1950 and limited his study to arts and sciences. The problem of computing the rate of genius birth is complicated because of the decline in real intelligence that is largely driven by the negative correlation between intelligence and fertility rate. [See At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future, by E. A. Dutton & M. A. Woodley of Menie. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic.]  Dutton and Woodley express concern that the births of geniuses will become increasingly rare, despite many births among low intelligence groups. They fear that this will or already has led to a reduction in innovation and discovery rates. 

Jacobsen: What are the difficulties in estimation of mean national intelligence? 

Williams: We approach the study of national intelligence (the comparison of mean IQs by nation) by gathering as many datasets as possible for the nation in question, then converting them to a single standard. The conversion is parallel in principle to what we would do in a national economic comparison. In the latter case, we would convert all currencies to a single reference, such as the dollar or Euro. The standard we use for intelligence is white British. This standard is sometimes called the Greenwich IQ Standard. The details of conversion are discussed in Richard Lynn & David Becker (2019). The Intelligence of Nations. Ulster Institute for Social Research, London GB ISBN 9780993000157. 

For the most part, the difficulties are simply that it takes a large amount of work to deal with the full set of nations for which we have IQ data. There are lots of studies available for developed nations and most emerging nations, but some poorly developed nations have limited data available. When The Bell Curve was written, there were only a few reports of intelligence for sub-Saharan Africa. But since 1994, we have had data pouring in from around the world. Today we have so much data for many nations that we can map intelligence within the nation by states or provinces. These data have resulted in within-nation studies that have shown patterns that seem to largely reflect migration and economic factors. A rather large number of nations exhibit a higher mean IQ in the northern regions and a decrease at lower latitudes. The opposite is seen in Britain, where the brightest region is in the south and the dullest in the north. Researchers have explained this as the result of the decline in the coal mining industry and its impact on migration. In India, Intelligence is higher in the South and in states with a coastline (indicating economic factors relating to trade). When Richard Lynn first reported the intelligence gradient for Italy (higher in the North) he explained it by noting that mean local intelligence reflects the fraction of the population that immigrated from the Near East and North Africa. In that study regional IQs predict income at r = 0.937. This resulted in papers objecting to his findings and that resulted in an exchange of published papers. It appears that Lynn was (as I would have guessed) right. [The title of the initial paper is a good summary of what was found. In Italy, north–south differences in IQ predict differences in income, education, infant mortality, stature, and literacy; Richard Lynn; Intelligence 38 (2010) 93–100.] 

Jacobsen: What is the validity of the measurements done globally now? Some areas must be more reliable than others because of the finances and expertise to do it properly. 

Williams: I haven’t seen any reports of reliability for the IQ scores used in the national level studies. When IQ and the Wealth of Nations appeared, two things were triggered. The first was that researchers began to try different curve fits and concluded that a log scale works best and that nations with IQs below 90 were either in poverty or had valuable natural resources (usually oil). Some researchers attacked Lynn as usual. They claimed that his numbers were wrong; that they were based on too few data; that the nations were he used neighboring scores to estimate means could not be true; and that his entire study was politically incorrect and could not be trusted. But, the data, as mentioned above, kept coming in from sources around the world. Now we can say that Lynn was right on every point and that even the estimated mean scores were very close to measured scores that are now available. The validity of this work is shown in the many things that national mean IQ predicts: At the national level, mean national IQ correlates positively with per capita GDP, economic growth, economic freedom, rule of law, democratization, adult literacy, savings, national test scores on science and math, enrollment in higher education, life expectancy, and negatively with HIV infection, employment, violent crime, poverty, % agricultural economy, corruption, fertility rate, polygyny, and religiosity. These are the kinds of things used to establish the predictive validity of IQ tests. Naturally, there are confounds, such as the presence of natural resources in some low IQ nations, but the statistical predictions remain powerful. 

Jacobsen: Who else, other than Gardner, are individuals qualifying as individuals who are “in a category that is highly regarded by the general public and not by many serious intelligence researchers”? 

Williams: The first who comes to mind is Robert Sternberg. His triarchic theory was shredded by Linda Gottfredson and is not something other researchers have accepted. He has been criticized for grossly over citing his own work. In general, the public has embraced such things as emotional intelligence, grit, mindset, and other tabloid worthy inventions. In his book, In the Know: 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, Russell Warne goes through his list of things that the public loves to love but which are not science. I think the single most disliked person (from the perspective of researchers) is the late Stephen Jay Gould. His book, The Mismeasure of Man was an intentional distortion of facts and is loved by the public because politically left people wanted to hear his false message. He attacked g and other factors, such as brain size, using outrageous comparisons to what researchers were doing in the distant past. It was almost as extreme as claiming that chemistry is worthless because alchemists were unsuccessful. 

Jacobsen: Who are the most serious researchers and commentators on genius, on IQ, and on the g factor? I take those as three related, but separate, questions in one. 

Williams: Genius – Jensen wrote a good piece on genius in the last chapter of Intellectual Talent: Psychometric and Social Issues by Camilla Persson Benbow & David Lubinski; The Johns Hopkins University Press (January 22, 1997). Dean Keith Simonton has written numerous articles on genius. His work impresses me as biased and inaccurate. Eysenck wrote about genius and the personalities of genius. Some of this can be found in H. Nyborg, Editor, The Scientific Study of Human Nature: a Tribute to Hans J. Eysenck at Eighty, Pergamon, Oxford (1997). Eysenck believed that true genius required elevated neuroticism and psychoticism. Overall, the material we have about genius is based on observations of various eminent historical figures. Statistical studies are not seen because there is no satisfactory way to find and test a statistically meaningful group of such rare people. 

IQ – The most prolific and brilliant commentator on intelligence was Arthur Jensen. His lifetime output of 7 books and over 400 papers is huge and remains influential. I think that Richard Haier is probably the most important living commentator. With only 1 book and one DVD lecture set, he is nonetheless a major factor in our understanding of IQ from the neurological perspective. While

Charles Murray is accurately described as an author, he is one of the most knowledgeable intelligence scholars alive. Like Jensen, he has been willing to take the heat from the left and calmly discuss the realities of IQ. Ian Deary has been a high profile researcher and department head. Two young researchers have shown themselves to be bright, competent, and broadly focused. Michael Woodley has authored or co-authored half a dozen books, covering a wide range of topics. His work has been at the forefront of new understandings of such topics as the Flynn Effect and the decline of intelligence. Like Woodley, Stuart Ritchie has rapidly become a serious contributor to the understanding of intelligence. I have read his books and find that his writing style is particularly appealing. His most recent book, Science Fictions, is a detailed account of abuses of the scientific process of doing research and reporting it. 

Psychometric g – Jensen almost single-handedly convinced researchers worldwide that intelligence is about g and that their work should be focused on g. His book The g factor: The science of mental ability is the most cited in all of intelligence research. Linda Gottfredson has been a prolific writer of g related papers and articles. She has devoted much of her energy to explaining g and its consequences to non-experts and has made her entire output available to the public on her web site. Today, intelligence research is g research, so it is fair to say that we have lots of people writing about g and studying how it relates to the neurology of the brain. 

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Chris Cole, Richard May, Rick Rosner, & Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/03 (Issue #209)

Chris Cole is a longstanding member of the Mega Society. Richard May is a longstanding member of the Mega Society and Co-Editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society. Rick Rosner is a longstanding member of the Mega Society and a former editor of Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society.

They discuss: I.Q.; fake I.Q. and real I.Q.; more reliable and valid I.Q. ranges; robust, legitimate tests; and the status of measuring I.Q. scores above 4-sigma.

Keywords: Chris Cole, debunking, I.Q., intelligence, Mega Society, Richard May, Rick Rosner.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, as this is a group discussion with three longstanding members of the Mega Society, the focus is Intelligence Quotient or I.Q., particularly debunking claims. What is I.Q. truly a measure of, at this point?

Chris Cole: I.Q. is an attempt to measure general intelligence, which is analogous to the power of a computer. There is an enormous literature on this subject. I’m going to take it as a given. It will be embarrassing if when we understand more about how the mind works it turns out to be a chimera.

Richard May:‘g’, the general factor of intelligence, i.e., cognitive ability.

Rick Rosner: IQ as measured by a high-end test is somewhat different from IQ as measured by a regular range usually group-administered test. Regular range tests measure intelligence, the ability to focus for 45 minutes, and cultural literacy.

High-end tests can measure obsessiveness and attention to detail, a love of puzzle-solving, and in some cases desperation for validation.

Intelligence has changed over the past 20 years to include skill at using tech to get answers.

Jacobsen: What differentiates a fake I.Q. score claim from a real one, e.g., signals of a fraud or claims far above the norms of a test, etc.?

Cole: Since it is difficult to define, it is difficult to measure. There is a desire to claim intelligence which creates a motivation for “vanity” tests. In science we try to overcome such tendencies using experiments to disprove theories. It is a sign of trouble if a test is not carefully normed.

May: You can perhaps find examples on Facebook and the social media generally.

Rosner: Concerted efforts to lie are fairly rare – claiming a high IQ is not very helpful in life and may even hurt – there’s Stephen Hawking’s quote that “People who brag about their IQ are losers.” There are casual claims – BSers at parties, movie stars trying to seem smart. Geena Davis’s PR team used to mention that she’s Mensa. Sharon Stone is said to have a 150 IQ. James Woods 180. And these might be legit. But that’s to address a specific issue of not being considered a bimbo.

One big tell for IQ fraud is people claiming to have completed and gotten a high score on the Mega or Titan in 10 or 12 hours. Back in 1985, I spent more than 100 hours on the Mega. Now with the internet (and coding skills which I don’t have), I could’ve cut that time by 80%. But the internet has also invalidated the Mega – not only with all of the answers floating around out there but also with instantly solving the verbal analogies just by plugging them into Google.

Jacobsen: What ranges for I.Q. scores have the highest reliability and validity, typically?

Cole: The Langdon and Hoeflin tests are on the cutting edge of reliability and validity. The Mega Test, for example, has been normed several different ways. A group of us are working on a new test that is cheat resistant.

May: Scores with the highest reliability and validity are those closest to the mean on standard IQ tests. Hoeflin and Langdon’s tests are untimed power tests more suitable for measuring above average intelligence.

Jacobsen: What tests are considered the most robust, legitimate?

Cole: We have a problem now that several of the most carefully normed, such as the Langdon Adult Intelligence Test, the Mega Test, the Titan Test, the Ultra Test, and the Power Test have been spoiled.

May: Those of Hoeflin, Langdon and Wechsler.

Rosner: Hoeflin’s tests have been the most thoroughly revised and normed. His Mega Test was normed on more than 4,000 test takers. His test items are excellent. But his tests have been voided by the internet – too many easily found answers. The Mega was published in Omni magazine in 1985, I think, a decade before most people had the internet. You had to use actual physical dictionaries.

Today, I think Paul Cooijmans’ tests are the most legit high-end tests. Paul takes pleasure in bursting the bubbles of people who claim high IQs by offering stringent scoring and norming. Doing well on his tests takes much time and what he calls “associative horizon” – being able to come up with dozens of ideas to crack a tough item.

Jacobsen: What is the status of measuring I.Q. scores above 4-sigma – experimental high-range testing, in other words?

Cole: The Adaptive Test, which is a work in progress, is the cutting edge. Contact me if you want to work on it. [Ed. chris@questrel.com.]

May: Apparently measurement at the far-right tail of intelligence has improved astronomically. I mistakenly thought that determining and measuring IQ was quite difficult even at the 4 sigma level. The Mega Society used to have a statement either at the beginning of Noesis or on our website or both, I think, indicating that we attempted to select members at the 4.75 sigma level, but selecting this rarity was experimental and quite difficult for many reasons. (Not exact wording.) 

Today there is an IQ group which has apparently identified the 3 most intelligent individuals on planet Earth! This is quite an achievement in my view.

Since it is well known that the actual distribution of IQ-scores at the far-right tail does not conform to a Gaussian distribution, one has to assume that even if the ceiling of the IQ tests employed was sufficient (not exceeding that intended by the test developers) and the intercorrelation of the various tests at the highest levels was known and that the correct Kuder-Richardson (?) formulas were applied to concatenate the valid IQ scores, that the entire population of planet Earth was actually tested by or on behalf of this group. Since various planetary subgroups of different sizes could have differing means, standard deviations and distribution shapes, a weighted average would need to be taken in order to determine the statistical properties of the global IQ distribution for planet Earth.

This is an unparalleled achievement in psychometric history. I personally don’t know anyone tested for this project in order to determine the actual shape of the global distribution of IQ-scores at the far-right tail, but I assume this is just a minor sampling error. Presumably you and your friends and neighbors have all been tested. Since the three most intelligent individuals on planet Earth have now been identified in fact, the correct protocols were undoubtedly used. If only Lewis Terman were alive now! — LINK here.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): James Flynn & Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/09 (Issue #208)

ABSTRACT

Two-part comprehensive interview with Emeritus Professor of Political Studies and Psychology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand on the main subjects of his research: intelligence and subsequent controversies; graduate students continuing the debate; Eysenck and Richard Lynn; incoming work for the year; environmental influence on intelligence; considerations on climate change; moral imperatives outsides of survival for solving climate change; family background and influence on development; influence of Catholicism; duties and responsibilities of being Emeritus Professor of Political Studies and Psychology at University of Otago, New Zealand; differences between intelligence and IQ; definitions of intelligence and IQ; the late Dr. Arthur Jensen and the 1969 journal article entitled How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?; Dr. Charles Murray and The Bell Curve.

Keywords: Catholicism, climate change, Dr. Arthur Jensen, Dr. Charles Murray, Dr. James Flynn, Emeritus Professor, environmental influence, Eysenck, Intelligence, IQ, moral imperatives, New Zealand, Political Studies, Psychology, Richard Lynn, University of Otago.

Your most famous research area is intelligence. Of those studying intelligence, you are among those on the top of the list. Many researchers worked in this area and caused many, many controversies, but more importantly sparked debate.

Of the old timers, I guess there’s just Richard Lynn and me around.  I mean among those people who really duelled over race and IQ.

Jensen died of a very bad case of Parkinson’s or something like that.  Very sad really, I wrote an obituary for him that was published in Intelligence.  Rushton died of something different, I’m not sure what his complaint was. Eysenck is dead.

You must have some ex-graduate students around that continue the debate.

Yes, there are people who will, though remember, it is a very politically sensitive topic.  Jensen’s fingers were burned, though he always showed great courage.  Rushton, I think, sort of enjoyed controversy, so I do not know how much his fingers were burned over the outrage his views caused.  Eysenck was such a great man and had so many interests, that the race issue was not really too much associated with him.  Richard Lynn, though he has made his views on race known, has been more interested in global matters.

Did he not attempt to make intelligence a unifying concept in psychology in a recent book?

He may have.  Was this on using the ‘g’ factor?  I have a piece on the ‘g’ factor coming out with a Dutch psychologist, who is a whiz at statistics, an article in Intelligence, which may be on the web now, that puts ‘g’ in perspective.  It shows that the exaggerated claims made for it have to be trimmed back very radically.

For example, I have been reading the Wechsler manuals, and I have noticed something interesting.  The g-men say IQ gains are significant only if they are on the ‘g’ factor because they identify that with general intelligence.  I am not saying ‘g’ does not have any significance.  I think it has significance in a number of areas, but you cannot really dismiss IQ differences because they are not ‘g’.  They take the Wechsler subtests and rank them for the degree of ‘g’ loading, and then they rank them for something else.  In this case, IQ gains over time.  You find the largest IQ gains do not match the ‘g’ loadings.  They say, “You see.  IQ gains are not real intelligence gains.  They are specific factors that make you good at various subtests.”

But the data show that when you do subtests ranking of normal subjects against people who have had brain trauma, fetal alcohol syndrome, and so on, and when you compare these people with normal subjects, you find that the differences that separate them are not on the ‘g’ factor.  You would have to be pretty peculiar to say that a person with brain trauma or fetal alcohol syndrome does not have a lower intelligence from a normal person.  As I have said, I have been a sceptic about ‘g’ for years, but only when I came across this data could put an end to all this business.  IQ gains are very significant whether they correlate with ‘g’ or not.  To say they are not significant, you would have to say, “Well, there is no significant intelligence difference between you and someone who has suffered brain trauma.”

What other work will you bring out in the coming year?

I am doing some work on the effects of family on IQ as people age.  The twin studies, of course, show that eventually genes take over.  But they do this through elaborate kinship studies.  However, I have managed to find printed data in the manuals that allows me to actually chart how much family influences a person for ages going through school until adulthood.  I can do this subtest by subtest.

For example, I found that family effects for vocabulary are much more persistent than, for instance, arithmetic.  At the beginning, your family almost totally dominates, before you go to school they either teach you to count or they do not.  Of course, you are surrounded by their vocabulary.  With arithmetic, very quickly, the school swamps family.  It matches kids for their genetic promise fairly quickly.  Apparently, by being continually exposed to your parent’s vocabulary – after all, chatting with them, listening to them – vocabulary becomes a more persistent influence even up to the college boards at age 17.

This allows me for the first time to say, “Yes, genes do dominate in terms of IQ variance, but there are significant handicaps having to do with certain subtests like vocabulary that effect your ability to do well on the SAT verbal.”  I have written this up, preliminary study, not a final study, in a book I published with Elsevier.  It is called Intelligence and Human Progress: The Story of What Was Hidden in Our Genes.  It really is fundamentally a book on how we have made cognitive progress, stressing the theme that there is a spinoff of this for moral progress.  That one of the reasons for us having a more elevated sense of morality is because of our cognitive advance.  Moral reasoning has improved.

There is also a chapter, which shows how family affects vocabulary and it points out the way this handicaps young people.  The lingering effect of vocabulary at the time they are trying to match themselves for the university.  So it is not true that the genetic dominance of IQ variance means that your family background is a null factor.  It weakens, but it has sufficient kick that it can give you some disadvantages in later life.

This sets more nuance to the ways family history burdens or benefits you.

Yes, if you come from a family where the vocabulary is less than adequate, your vocabulary will be less than adequate.  Now, going to school and encountering the wider world will slowly replace that family effect with your current environment, but the vocabulary handicap can still be quite significant by the age of 17, when you graduate from high school.

I am also doing some other work with climate change.

Why don’t we veer into that a bit?

I have finished a book on climate change, but I have not placed it for publication at this time.  I am primarily a moral philosopher.  Psychology is a sideline for me.  I thought, “My heavens, I might at least confront probably the chief moral issue of our time.”  So I have written a little book looking into the science of climate change. Our climate will change.  What we are doing is no going to stop it.  There was a book called Gaia written by James Lovelock.  It describes the Earth being like a total system.  He has now become very pessimistic.  He figures we are going to go past the point of no return.

I wanted to see if there were alternatives that we could imagine.  There is another way.  If we were rational enough, we could probably limit climate change over the next generation until alternative, clean sources of energy come online.  I wanted to investigate the science and at least propose something a little less gloomy than the climate scientists.  They are all about ready to throw in the towel.   James Hansen, in Britain, he’s one of the heroes in the environmentalist movement, is pessimistic.  Of course, the environmentalists have all turned against him.

That’s what I am doing currently.  I am trying to publish my book on climate change, exploring whether you can identify intelligence with ‘g’, looking into the influence of cognitive ability on morality, and I am interested in finding a new way of partitioning IQ variance.  Those are the main things.  I hope by another month or two to have that cleaned up. After that point, I hope to begin an important book, which is on teaching political philosophy.  It would be how to teach it without boring students.  As I said, my main work is moral and political philosophy, but morals in particular.

Besides survival, what moral imperative do we have to protect the environment?

I think that comes down to a fundamental question, “Is there any objectivity to our moral ideals?”  The answer to that is, “No.  Either you empathize with humanity or you do not.  If you empathize with humanity, you feel an imperative.”  Now, that does not mean you cannot use reason against your opponents. Most of them are, or would at least claim, that they share this bond with humanity and would try and make a case that what we are doing makes no difference.

That leads directly from ethics to science. If what we are doing makes no difference, then there is no moral choice, is there? However, if science shows there are important choices that could be made, then you have to take a stand.  Either you possess humane ideals and think all human beings are worthy of moral concern.  Or you think this will not happen for 20 years.  I am 80 now, so I do not think I will live to see the consequences, and assume I have no grandchildren – so to hell with everyone.  Moral imperatives arise out of moral commitments.  If you have no commitment that gives you a bond with humanity, I cannot open your mouth and thrust one down your throat.

I wrote about this in a book called Fate and Philosophy that came out about three years ago.  It is on three problems: ‘what is good?’, ‘what is possible?’, and ‘what exists?’  To me, that book is the most important book that I have ever written: Fate and Philosophy. It is my stand on fundamental philosophical problems, but it is written for the general public.  I published a more specialized book, but more for a philosophical audience.  It is entitled How to Defend Humane Ideals.  It came out with Nebraska Press.  It is a specialized look at this question of objectivity and ethics.  However, Fate and Philosophy describes everything in more popular language.

I published a book in 2010 called the Torchlight List, and it is to encourage students to read widely, which most of them do not.  Compared to my generation, even our best graduates do not read widely in literature and history.  In the first chapter, I give some personal background.

In terms of geography, culture, and language, where does your family background reside? How do you find this influencing your development?

I was raised as an American-Irish Catholic.  For my father like so many Irish Catholicism was a badge of patriotism.  In terms of his beliefs, he only believed in the fundamentals, which means whatever he found convenient. (Laughs)  He was a good man, but he did not care much about the infallibility of the pope.  As I studied, I, lost my faith.  I began to realize I only believed in God because everyone around me believed in God.

But my background was in Washington, D.C., I was born there.  My father settled there as a newspaper man about the time of World War I.  My mother came from upstate New York.  She had been a school teacher.  I was raised there with my brother and first cousins.  At that time, the Irish extended family was still important, and my first cousins were really like brothers and sisters.

It influenced me in the sense that having been deeply committed to Catholicism’s version of humane ideals, once I lost my faith, I began to wonder what sort of rational justification I could give for my ideals.  That became a large part of my scholarly life.  Note my book:  How to defend humane ideals: substitutes for objectivity?

As for Psychology, I got onto that through moral philosophy.  I was writing what later became How to Defend Humane Ideals.  I worked on it for many years.  When I was writing a chapter on how to argue with racists, I stumbled on Arthur Jensen – who obviously was not a racist, but thought he had scientific evidence that blacks, on average, were genetically inferior.  And then, of course, I thought, “Well, I have certainly got to look into that.” I wrote a book called Race, IQ, and Jensen, which came out in 1980, in which I put the contrary view.

In researching that book, I was looking at publishers’ manuals and stumbled upon IQ gains over time.  That, of course, became an avocation for me (laughs), for the next 30 years.  You had to do more than acknowledge that the gains were there.  You had to alter the theory of intelligence to accommodate them.  I did that in my book What is Intelligence?, which came out in 2007 with Cambridge.  And I have published other books on this topic.  It was all an accident. I had no idea I would be interested in the theory of intelligence. I came to it through moral philosophy.

Even with that background, and the deep influence of Catholicism, what do you consider a pivotal moment?

It was a pivotal moment for me leaving Catholicism. I won an essay contest at the age of 11.  As an award, they gave me the World  Book Encyclopedia.  In reading it, I found there was a more scientific explanation of the world.  The other thing was going to the University of Chicago, which gave me the ‘Great Books’ curriculum.  It encouraged you to believe that if you are interested in fundamental problems, they were usually cross-disciplinary, and that if you were incisive enough, you could read across disciplines and get a good amateur competence.  Of course, I needed that when I went into psychology because I had never taught a psychology course or read a psychology text.  However, I was good at math.  I saw no reason why I could not chart IQ gains over time, and make the changes in the theory of intelligence that were necessary.

I would say three things: strong moral commitments, the break with Catholicism, and the University of Chicago.

At present, you hold the position of Emeritus Professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. What responsibilities and duties does this imply to you?

Yes, although I will be 80 in April, I will teach two courses this coming semester.  Of course, I will have the rest of the year to do my writing.

Emeritus professor here means that you are still active.  So even though I am retired, I am employed by the University of Otago.   You can employed at many levels.  Two courses is about a 4/5^ths load.  They like my research.  So I am Emeritus Professor jointly with political studies and psychology.  I was head of the Political Studies Department for 30 years.  We emphasized moral and political philosophy among other things.  I teach one course in political studies entitled The Good Society and the Market.  I teach another in psychology entitled Justice, Race, and Class.

With regards to your main area of research in psychology, intelligence and IQ mean different things. Intelligence stands for a general attribute. IQ stands for scores given based on tests designed to penetrate this attribute through inference of performance. 

Yes, it may be either a better or worse measurement, of course.  I mean, there is no measure that cannot be abused, and Arthur Jensen was well aware of that.

With that, how would you define intelligence? How would you differentiate it from IQ?

You have that more formally in my book What is Intelligence?  I do not think it needs too careful a definition.  It is essentially a matter that one person is more intelligent than another in a certain cultural setting.  In the sense that when they confront important problems in that culture, they either learn to solve quicker or better.  Arthur Jensen wrote a good article on this using Robinson Crusoe, who was on his island.  Unless he had another person, he could not estimate his own intelligence.  He could make statements about memory.  For example, he either forgot things or he did not; he could learn things like manual dexterity.  But only when Friday arrived did he say, “My heavens, Friday is learning everything I learned faster than I did, and he is better at it.” (Laughs)  That is a first step to saying who is more intelligent.

When cognitive problems are terribly important, if you can learn what you need to learn to solve those problems quicker, or in the same amount of time you solve them better, that, I think, is a good working definition of intelligence.  Now, that still leaves it culturally relative.  If you were in the Australian outback, the problem that would interest you is finding water when it is scarce.  That would mean, your mapping ability is terribly important.  Today, if you are not a London cab driver, you do not much care about mapping ability.

You have mentioned the late Dr. Arthur Jensen a few times. He published a well-cited and famous, or – by many individual’s account – infamous, paper published in 1969 by the late entitled How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?, which sparked a controversy around the topic of race and IQ.

It created a storm of controversy.  Rather than assembling evidence to attack the position, they attacked the man.  That’s why I wrote my book Race, IQ, and Jensen, which you will find saying, “This is ridiculous.  There is no reason to think Arthur Jensen is a racist.  Let’s look at the evidence.  We can either show he is wrong evidentially or he is not.”  I feel the evidence shows that it is more probable that blacks have genes roughly equivalent to whites for what we call ‘intelligence’.  If you want to see my most recent updating of that thesis, you would want to read, not only the old book Race, IQ, and Jensen, but also Where Have All the Liberals Gone?.  It came out with Cambridge in 2008, and it has four chapters on black Americans.

In addition, and following that controversy, those arguing for heredity more than environment provided further momentum for the opposing side with works by Dr. Charles Murray…

Yes, I know Charles Murray.  Murray has never stated any definite position on the genetic comparisons of the two racial groups.  He has been much more cautious than Jensen.  What he wrote, in the minds of many, influenced them to believe that he agreed with Jensen, but he has never stated that.  He did bring forward many of Jensen’s arguments saying, “We have to acknowledge there is a powerful case here.”

The Bell Curve was not fundamentally about race, genes, and IQ.  It was saying, “Let’s look at the present situation and see how IQ effects your life prospects.”  There’s no doubt that even if black and whites have the same genes for IQ, blacks are doing worse academically.  And he was exploring the consequences of an IQ test in predicting academic performance.

I had two debates with Murray.  You can find them on the internet.  One was in New York.  Another was in Washington, D.C.  Washington, D.C. hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.  The one in New York was Cognos I think, but you can find them on the internet – if you type in ‘Flynn, Murray, race, and IQ’.  The second debate was better because we had rehearsed our arguments better.

Why are IQ gains not g gains, that is, general intelligence gains?

Simply because IQ gains over time have occurred on all IQ subtests and have not been greater on those subtests that are of the greatest cognitive complexity. However, I do not think that the fact that IQ gains fail to particularly load on g (or cognitive complexity) is a reason to discount their significance. IQ gains on subtests like vocabulary (among adults), matrices, block design, classification, should be very important even if gains are equivalent on other less demanding subtests like digit span, which mainly tests rote memory.

G has an appeal as a concept of intelligence. It shows that individuals who do well on IQ tests beat the average person more and more as problems become more cognitively complex. If you and I were to sit down and say, “What would be one of the characteristics of intelligence?”, we would probably reply, “The person who is intelligent can beat the average person more on complex problems than easy problems,” wouldn’t we?

This mistakenly leads to the conclusion that IQ gains are not really “intelligence” gains and must lack significance. I am not going to get into defining intelligence, but certainly gains on vocabulary are highly socially significant no matter what has happened to other cognitive skills. If you really want to see why IQ gains have not been as significant as they might be, you would do better to focus on the fact that universities are doing such a bad job of educating.

I have a book coming out this year, in September, called In Defence of Free Speech: The University as Censor. At present, universities spend as much time censoring as teaching. Anyone who has unpopular views on race or gender or practically anything is banned: they can’t speak on campus, they are not read, they are derided ignorantly.

In my book, I detail all the things I learned, precisely because I read Jensen, and Murray, and Lynn, and Eysenck. It is wonderful when you encounter a highly intelligent, highly educated opponent, who takes a point of view contrary to your own. You must reassess your arguments. You often find that you have been simplistic, and that arguing with these opponents teaches you ten times as much as you knew when you were naive.

Let us go back to our friend, g. The is overwhelming evidence that cognitive abilities, even when taken individually, are significant. This is true of individual skill in all areas. If we studied drivers in New York, or in Boston, some would be better drivers and some worse drivers. We could rank driving tasks in terms of complexity. We would probably find a “g pattern: that the better drivers bested the average person the more as the complexity of skills rose. I am sure that the better and the worst drivers would not differ much on the simple task of turning on the ignition. But note that the presence or absence of the g pattern would tell us nothing about the causes at work, not even as often thought whether the causes were environmental or genetic

For ordinary city driving, the better drivers would start to forge ahead of the worse ones. This would become more pronounced if you looked at driving around the cities on beltways: that is one of the first things elderly people give up. There are so many cars coming in so many directions and changing lanes. Many elderly people who still drive will not do beltway driving. The better group would be much better at it. Finally, there is the question of parallel parking, which is the part of the driving test most people fear. The better group might better the average person most of all on that.

When we look at these two groups, how useful would it be to derive a g factor? It would be disastrous to assume that since g is influenced by genes the better drivers were somehow a genetic elite. G would tell you nothing about causes. For example, you may discover that the people who are the worst drivers are new arrivals in New York City who have had no experience in beltway driving. You also find that in their town, you just drove into a parking space and didn’t have to know how to come in on a parallel park.

On the other hand, we might find that none of this is true. We might find that they were equally experienced, and then we would say to ourselves, “I bet there is a genetic factor. Perhaps some of these people are better at spatial visualization. Perhaps some of them are better at information processing. Perhaps some of them are better at manual dexterity.” Our minds would go in the direction of skill influence by genes. But it would depend on the case. You must approach each case with fresh eyes, and not be hypnotized by g.

I am quite sure that any two groups can be differentiated by genetic factors, and that this would affect performance. For example, if one group was a lot taller than another, it would affect their basketball performance. But you must take these cases one by one.

I looked at black/white IQ differences in Germany. Blacks in America fall further behind whites the more cognitively complex the task, which leads some to infer that they are lower on g and are genetically inferior. But then you study Eyferth’s children in Germany. These were half-black and all-white children left behind by black and white Ameican servicemen in post-war Germany. The g pattern had disappeared. There was no tendency whatsoever for the half-black kids to fall behind more and more as you go up the complexity ladder.

That seems to imply that this group difference has something to do with culture. The first thing that comes to your mind is that these half-black kids were raised by white German women. There was no real black subculture in Germany after World War II. The black subculture element is totally absent. Then you go to someone like Elsie Moore.

She did a wonderful study in the 1980s. No-one, of course, will repeat it again because of political correctness. She had, as I recall, it was something like 40 kids – or maybe it was 48, that sounds more like it – all of who were black. Half of them were adopted by black parents of high SES and half of whom were adopted by white parents of high SES. At the age of eight and a half, the black kids adopted by white parents of high SES were 13 points ahead of the black kids adopted by black parents.

Elsie Moore called the mothers and kids in. She found that white mothers were universally positive. “That is a good idea. Why don’t we try this?” The black children came in with their black foster mothers. The mother was negative. “You are not that stupid. You know better than that.”

It became quite clear that even though both sets of families had elite SES, there was something in black subculture that found it unwelcome to confront complex cognitive problems. Once again, by the age of eight and a half, the black children adopted by whites of high education and SES were 13 points above the blacks adopted by blacks

You can say, “Is that evidence enough?” It is not enough, of course, but it does tie in with the German data. There, black subculture was absent, and the g effect was absent. In America, black subculture is thriving. Even the black children being raised by white parents, as they grew up, would tend to merge into the black teenage subculture, the “shopping mall” subculture.

My main point is that we must approach all this with an open mind. I am not saying that Jensen’s concept of g does not pose interesting questions. It does, but it cannot be taken as an automatic piece of litmus paper as to when one group is genetically privileged over another. Both options must be open.

I think that a genetically influenced g effect occurs between individuals. I think that when you have sexual reproduction, the higher cognitive abilities are more at risk of “damage” than the lower ones. You can imagine that would be true. You have two siblings. If one had bad luck, he will have more deleterious recessive genes paired. This may damage complex cognitive skills more than less complex ones. The bad luck twin will probably be below his brother more on Raven’s than on rote memory. I published this opinion recently and Woodley took notice of it. Do you know who Woodley is?

I have heard that name before, but that is about all.

Flynn: He’s a very prolific British researcher, very good indeed. I supplemented my remarks by saying that it was interesting that the higher cognitive abilities were the ones that would have come along latest in the human evolutionary history and, therefore, they might be more fragile in the genome. Woodley is now pursuing this possibility

The concept of g shouldn’t be dismissed. Whenever anything describes a phenomenon in intelligence, we must probe for its causes. It is terribly sad that it is gotten side-tracked: into a debate over whether the fact one group falls further behind another as cognitive complexity increases is an indication that they’ve got to be genetically defective.

As you know, I have done research with Bill Dickens that showed that blacks gained on whites about 5 points in the generation between 1972 and 2002. This correlated with evidence from educational tests, as well. What are we going to say if they gain another 5 points? Are we going to conclude that the g pattern is not as pronounced as we once thought it was? That would fly in the face of evidence in its favour. So, g, to me, is an interesting concept for research but it is not the be all and end all of what we do when we do intelligence research.

Racial differences also lead to some questions around definitions. For instance, is it a scientific category, race? In other words, is it proper to even talk, in a modern scientific context, about the category “race” when talking about intelligence?

I do not have much patience with that. I see that as an evasion of real issues. Imagine that a group of Irish came to America in about 1900. Of course, the Irish have not been a pure race through all of history, but they have much more in common in terms of heredity than they do with Slovaks.

These Irishmen in America settle in a community down by the Mississippi. You will find that when the children send them to school, some Irish kids will do better than others; and the ones who do better will, on average, will grow up to buy more affluent homes.

Thus they divide into two groups. Below the railway tracks near the Mississippi, where it is not so nice, you will have what we used to call “shanty Irish”. Above the railway tracks, where things are much nicer, you will have what we used to call “lace curtain Irish”. If you compare these two groups, you will find an IQ gap between them that has a genetic component.

You can try to dismiss this by repeating the mantra “They are not pure races.” Of course, they are not pure races. They are sociological constructs that have a different sociology because of somewhat different histories. But it still makes perfectly good sense to ask whether there would be a genetic difference in IQ between the shanty Irish and the lace curtain Irish.

When individuals within a group compete, genetically influenced cognitive skills are involved. Some people, as I have said, will do better at school and, on average, they will have a better genetic endowment. It will not be a huge gulf. American children from parents in the top and bottom third of SES tend to have an IQ gap of 10 points; and perhaps 5 of these may be genetic rather than environmental.

I hope this cuts through all of this nonsense. Also, the “irrelevance” of race seems to be special pleading. If we cannot talk about blacks as a “pure race”, and that disqualifies grouping them together, how can we have anything like affirmative action? The answer will be, “Well of course they are not a pure race. But they identify themselves as black, and whites identify them as black, and despite the fact that they are a social construct, they get the short end of the stick.”

If you can compare blacks and whites as to who gets the short end of the stick, you can also give them IQ tests, and you can also ask yourself as to whether in the histories of these two peoples, there has not been sufficient genetic diversity that one has built up an advantage over the other.

The causes of the black-white IQ gap are an empirical question. It has nothing to do with the stuff about pure races. There are groups that are socially identified as different, groups that identify themselves as socially different, groups that have histories that could conceivably lead to a genetic gap between them. You have got to look at the evidence.

It is an evasion. You ignore the fact that there are no pure races when you say, “more blacks live in poverty.” Why drag it in when you compare races for genetic differences?

What about the shift in the conversation in terms of talking more about species rather than races, and then looking at different ethnic groupings? So, it is doing it within what probably are more accurate depictions than terminology such as “race”.

In terms of reframing it within a more modern scientific context, in terms of having species, and then having different groupings, as you noted, it is with ethnic groupings with different histories, rather than talking about races.

That is fine. I have no objection to that, but it is not going to make anything go away, is it?

No.

There are still going to be 10% of Americans who self-identify as “black” and virtually all whites will identify blacks as “black”, and then we will still have to ask the question, “Do black and white at this point in time differ for cognitive abilities entirely environmentally?” I do not see how any verbal device will change this

There used to be academics who said that since humans share 99% of their genes with bonobos, you could dismiss the notion that genes have something to do with intelligence. The significance of this was exactly the opposite. If one percent difference made a huge difference in intelligence, then if racial groups differed by 1/100 of a percent, it might create the IQ gap difference that we see today.

I haven’t found any argument yet for sweeping the race and IQ debate under the carpet which is anything but special pleading. I do not think these arguments would be used in any other context whatsoever. They are used in this context so that we can all say, “We do not have to investigate these matters. We can pat ourselves on the back.” When actually, we should feel scholarly remiss.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.