You already know not to take any tickets offered. But also, apparently, don’t put on the medallion:
And note, that was before his recent arrest on drug and gun charges. Your weaknesses will be exploited, which is why I am always on my guard against slender, pretty, blonde Norwegian women who are inexplicably interested in economics, epic fantasy, and the intrinsic flaws in the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Obviously, Nick isn’t a Douglas Adams reader. It’s a hot potato… don’t pick it up!
It’s really quite easy if you know what to do. From Sigma Game:
I’ll be honest. Given my talent for unorthodox thinking and my ability to write more or less coherently, I assumed from a fairly young age that I would leave some intellectual legacy behind. Nothing particularly major on the scale of an Aristotle, a Thomas Aquinas, or an Adam Smith, but something more on the level of a Hermann Hesse, a Samuel Huntington, or a John Bagot Glubb.
Umberto Eco, I felt, probably represented my potential ceiling, although my inability to execute Summa Elvetica as I’d envisioned it made it pretty clear that even the Eco strata was beyond me. C’est la vie. It’s better to aim high and fall short than content oneself with mediocrity.
And while my small contributions to gaming, literature, science, and theology are likely to survive in some anonymous capacity to be expanded upon by future intellectuals, it’s been a real surprise to discover that the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy, and the concept of the Sigma Male in particular, have gone viral to the point that they are being adopted and applied, however erroneously, to a wide variety of cultural applications. Well and good, even if Sigma is literally the least important of the various behavioral profiles to understand for practical purposes.
But it’s more than a little bizarre to see the way AI systems have ingested and processed the concept, to the point that it has now even incorporated my personal clothing preferences…
My intellectual ambition circa 2005 to 2015 was to one day write the Summa Economica, doing for economics what Thomas Aquinas did for theology. Now my ambitions are considerably more curtailed, as I’m just hoping to be able to publish Steve Keen’s magnum opus, finish Arts of Dark and Light, and wrap up the definitive work on the SSH before my ability to string words together goes the way of Mr. Martin and other washed-up writers.
I pointed out a few obvious observations about tattoos at Sigma Game. I know you’ll find this very hard to believe, but one reader shared a personal anecdote that proved those observations are completely unfounded.
READER: Huh, my partner has tattoos and also a very good job at an old company with renowned retirement benefits. As in, an extremely conventional employer. He’s doubled his income in the past three years and recently got his annual salary in shares as a bonus.
VD: Well, your unverifiable personal anecdote is obviously conclusive and clearly obviates every other bit of statistical and observational data on the subject. We now understand that tattoos are sexy, high-class, and will only help one’s career progress. You must be exceptionally nice and pretty to have locked down such an exceptional partner. You should probably tattoo FUKC on your forehead; I’m sure it will do wonders for your future prospects, which we will follow with interest.
Every rock star began as a long-haired freak in a garage with a dream of a record deal and groupies. Every best-selling author began as a would-be writer being told that no one buys books. Every successful entrepreneur began by faking it until he made it. Every revolutionary began as a nobody. None of them had the odds on their side. Victory wasn’t assured; it wasn’t even plausible; it was so unlikely as to seem impossible! It was all a LARP… until it wasn’t.¹
The reason so many successful actors, musicians, and politicians are narcissists is that in order to become a highly successful actor, musician, or politician, you have to take long shots against long odds. Often the only people who take long shots against long odds are the people who are self-deluded enough to think they’re better than all the others who tried and failed.
People like Lenin.
Lenin was a self-deluded nobody. He was a loser. He had accomplished virtually nothing with his life except a stint in the gulag. He was nowhere near as influential as the well-established figures who currently are prominent among the dissident right. He wasn’t even… Nick Fuentes.
But Lenin he changed the world. Sure, he changed it for the worse — but he changed it. And so could we.
The advantage we have as Christian Nationalists presently subject to the wicked madness of Clown World is that we know, as Bob Marley said, Babylon is going to fall. Its fall is absolutely 100-percent guaranteed, because Clown World is a rebellion against God, God’s Law, and God’s Creation. It is a rebellion against morality, mathematics, Nature, and physics, and as such, it cannot possibly be sustained.
It is our job to be the hard place upon which Clown World shatters. Because Clown World is caught between a rock and a hard place, and the rock, being Jesus Christ, isn’t going to break.
I have to admit, while I was confident that all the true believers in the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection were going to do their level best to avoid every doing any of the simple math required by MITTENS (Mathematical Impossibility of The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection), I didn’t realize they were going to go so far as to literally deny the applicability of mathematics to what can now only be described as “the magic of evolution”.
Whitelightning777:Humans and chimps only differ genetically by 1% or so. That’s hardly revolutionary. When zoos have to do surgery on primates, the vets often consult human surgeons for expert advice. Go to a zoo. Look at the hands of chimps. A common ancestor is obvious. There is no way that’s a coincidence!! Just the fact that chimps can learn sign language ought to show a recent divergence. The fact that they can use human metallic tools shows that the brain also works in a similar fashion, just that chimps still aren’t quite as smart as humans, about what a 3 to 5 year old child can do. Look at the difference between wild carp and goldfish. Living things can be pressured to change structure rapidly when circumstances create the pressure to do so.
Spacebunny: You have no idea what you’re talking about. You can’t do math, nor do you understand the significance of the numbers given. No, they could not have done any such thing “a few million years ago”. It is literally mathematically impossible.
Whitelightning777:Both a 1% to a 10% difference or maybe even more could be accomplished over a period of 2 to 4 million years. The main issues are what factors exactly drove this natural selection and how much pressure was exerted upon humans by nature, animal predators and other human species attacking each other. By the way, neanderthals weren’t necessarily as nice as we all seem to think.
James Dixon: The math says no.
VD: 1.23 percent of the human genome means 37,500,000 unique base pairs specific to humans. Now, tell us how long it would take to mutate and fixate that degree of genetic disparity…
Whitelightning777:First of all, the majority of your DNA is essentially junk. The exact percentage is disputed but can be as high as 90%. Small genetic changes can quickly lead to huge differences. Over a few million years you don’t have to change very much from one generation to the next. The ABILITY to evolve, genetic flexibility itself is something that nature selects for. Creatures that can’t evolve are usually extinct. The multiple numbers of human races attest to our genetic flexibility. The modern races are only a few hundred thousand years old & have meaningful differences in health and IQ, although the extent is disputed. If our species lost it’s ability to evolve, it wouldn’t be able to split off into races either. Chimps themselves also have different races and species. Bonobos behave very differently from other chimps, even though they can all interbreed.
Dirk Gently: So, in other words, you don’t even comprehend what Vox is saying
Whitelightning777:Vox is setting a “math trap”. This is a device used by creationists. What Vox fails to realize is that 90% of that DNA is junk and that there is no upper limit to how fast evolution and generic change which can occur so long as the offspring survives and is able to reproduce. What Vox fails to realize is that a creature that can only evolve slowly will go extinct, falling behind and losing out to those with more generic flexibility.
VD: A “math trap” is a simply a basic calculation used by people who are numerate. It’s not witchcraft, no matter how opaque it may be to you. There absolutely is an upper limit to how fast mutated genes can fixate. Evolution by natural selection, biased mutation, genetic drift, and gene flow is utterly impossible by the very fastest rates of fixation ever observed in the wild or in laboratories. I will put the problem in two very simple analogies so you might be able to understand the problem.
If someone tells you the score of a professional baseball game is 562,987 to 3, you know the score is incorrect. If someone tells you he walked from New York City to Los Angeles in 34 minutes, you know he is lying. And when someone tells you that the 37.5 million human-specific base-pairs in the human genome were mutated and fixated by natural selection in less than 10 million years, you know they are absolutely wrong. Your junior high logic will never bridge that gap. It cannot. Because it is based on incorrect and impossible premises.
Whitelightning777:MATH DOESN’T APPLY to evolution.
VD: Of all the absurdly retarded statements I’ve ever seen on every form of social media dating back to the bulletin boards of the 1990s, this is, without any doubt whatsoever, the most retarded. Congratulations. Even the kid who thought bacon came from rocks was simply ignorant. But this assertion actually required enough brainpower to contemplate the concept, think it through, and then reject the idea that mathematics necessarily applies to a process that is conceived to take place over a quantifiable period of time.
Whitelightning777:Let’s keep this simple. The only math that matters with evolution is that the birth rate of a particular lifeform exceeds the death rate or barring that is at an equilibrium. Creatures for whom the death rate exceeds their birth rate are dysgenic. Creationist trick boxes are neither required nor desired.
VD: You’re literally retarded.
You don’t have to be retarded to… well, yes, at this point, it is abundantly clear that you do have to be literally retarded to believe in evolution by natural selection. As you can see, the challenge posed to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis by MITTENS is so overwhelmingly devastating that the evolutionists have to abandon not only science, but math itself, in order to cling to their outmoded, outdated, and disproven explanation for the observable diversity of life.
Your MITTENS Theorem is of course valid, and more precise and detailed than was possible for the physicists in 1966. You have also independently proposed the correct, and only possible alternative to Neo-Darwinism, what you termed IGM in your October 14, 2012 blog post. You should repost this mechanism, together with more discussion. This mechanism has been repeatedly rediscovered since the famous 19th century Harvard biologist Asa Gray first proposed it, correctly identifying God, not intelligent aliens, as the agent. Charles Darwin himself denounced Gray’s version of your theory, which is less precise than your version. – Dr. Frank Tipler, Professor of Mathematics and Physics, Tulane University
I had no idea what he was talking about until I looked up the post. It turns out that IGM stands for Intelligent Genetic Manipulation, which is a mechanism I developed in response to four points put forth to me by one of the more reasonable Neo-Darwinians.
Let us take as evidentially established the fact that species which existed in the past now exist no longer and are extinct.
Let us take as evidentially established the fact that not all species now extant existed at all times throughout the history of organic life.
Therefore, it must be possible for species which did not exist to come into existence by some mechanism, just as species which do exist can go extinct by any variety of mechanisms.
If it is a fact that new species can come into existence while others go extinct, by what mechanism other than evolution through natural selection are these species proposed to arise, and does that proposed mechanism explain more of the observed evidence than TeNS?
I more or less concurred with the first three points, and in response to the fourth, proposed Intelligent Genetic Manipulation as a mechanism that not only explains more of the observed evidence than TeNS, but unlike TeNS, remains potentially valid because it has not been mathematically ruled out by MITTENS. Please keep in mind that this was written 12 years ago, long before some of the significant advances in the various genome projects which are far more consistent with intelligent genetic manipulation than with the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow, or TE(p)NSBMGDaGF, as it is properly identified in its full epicycular form.
Intelligent Genetic Manipulation is the mechanism that I propose. And yes, I believe that explains more of the observed evidence than TENS, since IGM is a scientific proposition, a readily observed action, and a successful predictive model, whereas TENS is a philosophical proposition, an unobserved process, and an unsuccessful predictive model.
Now, this does not provide any basis for assuming the existence of a Creator God, or even declaring that TENS did not actually take place. The logical fact of the matter is that even if TENS can be conclusively demonstrated to have taken place in various species, which has not happened despite more than 150 years of trying, that doesn’t necessarily mean the process was sufficient to produce Man. If one contemplates the biological differences between ape and man, the vast leap in cognitive capacity taking place in a relatively small sum of generational cycles from the proposed common ancestor in comparison with the timelines supposedly required for other, less complicated evolutionary changes, the logic suggests – though it does not prove – that some degree of purposeful genetic manipulation has likely taken place at various points in the origin of the species and the development of homo sapiens sapiens.
I’m not talking about Intelligent Design, but rather intelligent editing. And the interesting thing is that IGM should be an increasingly falsifiable concept as genetic science continues to improve. Only recently have we learned that junk DNA serves a purpose; even though we have sequenced various genomes, we haven’t yet understood how the code works or fully comprehended the various ways it can be manipulated. As our understanding grows, we should be able to develop an ability to recognize patterns that indicate purposeful alterations in the code have been made.
An Alternative Mechanism, 12 October 2012
Twelve years later, it is now clear that IGM is superior to the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow in every single way. It is not only not mathematically impossible, we know for certain it is possible because we already engage in purposeful genetic manipulation ourselves. IGM is not a philosophical tautology, it is an eminently falsifiable scientific hypothesis, as we are already developing mechanisms that provide the retroactive ability to see that a gene has been edited, and IGM already provides a better, more credible explanation for genetic anomalies such as human chromosome 2 (HSA2) that scientists presently imagine to have been caused by a single freak mutation that happened to fuse two primate chromosomes at the precise moment of a population bottleneck 740,000 years ago, a mutation that was so amazingly beneficial that it somehow managed to fixate through the entire human species at a rate much faster than Genghis Khan’s genetic lineage has been observed to propagate.
And if IGM does not address the question of the origin of life, well, neither does TE(p)NSBMGDaGF. And unlike TE(p)NSBMGDaGF, it even “predicts” the utility and significance of what was once erroneously labled “junk DNA” whereas all that TE(p)NSBMGDaGF ever “predicted” was the possibility of the existence of a rodent that had already been known to Man for centuries.
Biologists should not be the least bit reluctant to leave the useless theories of Neo-Darwinism behind or to abandon evolution by natural selection. To the contrary, we now have a growing body of scientific evidence that humanity is not, and never was, alone in the universe. And whoever, or whatever, the parties responsible may be, we know that they have at least a modicum of what appears to be beneficial interest in us, or they would not have manipulated our genes to enhance our cognition and self-awareness as they appear to have done.
On a philosophical note, I very much doubt it is a question of God or aliens. Because the answer, in all probability, will somehow involve both. We know that God works through men, even through the most unlikely of men. Logic therefore suggests that if aliens of any kind exist, God will work through them too.
The fundamental problem in dealing with scientists in general and biologists in particular is that they literally do not know how stupid they are. Very, very few, if any, of them are even National Merit-level intelligence, which is to say they are not only sub-geniuses, they are relatively low-level midwits. And this was true of them sixty years ago; imagine how much dumber today’s diversity scientists are, especially given their decidedly-inferior modern educations:
The report of the exchange is fascinating, not just because of the substance of the mathematical challenge, but even more because of the logic of the Darwinist response. For example, the mathematician D.S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small mutations, because the number of mutations would have to be so large and the time available was not nearly long enough for them to appear. Sir Peter Medawar and C.H. Waddington responded that Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must only be apparent. Ernst Mayer observed that Ulam’s calculations were based on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded that ‘Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred.’
“The Darwinists were trying to be reasonable, but it was as if Ulam had presented equations proving that gravity is too weak a force to prevent us all from floating off into space. Darwinism to them was not a theory open to refutation but a fact to be accounted for, at least until the mathematicians could produce an acceptable alternative. The discussion became particularly heated after a French mathematician named Schützenberger concluded that ‘there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology.’ C.H. Waddington thought he saw where this reasoning was headed, and retorted that ‘Your argument is simply that life must have come about by special creation.’ Schützenberger (and anonymous voices from the audience) shouted ‘No!,’ but in fact the mathematicians did not present an alternative.”
Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 1991
Now, if it’s not immediately apparent how fundamentally retarded this scientific illogic is, imagine that instead of debating the validity of a scientific theory, these gentlemen were in a court of law, and that Waddington was the prosecutor, Schützenberger the defense attorney, and Sir Peter Medawar the judge.
Schützenberger: Your honor, my client could not have committed the attack on the late victim, which the surveillance cameras confirm took place in Philadelphia at 10 PM on April 15th. We have here an airline ticket from Philadelphia to Miami on April 15th that left Philadelphia at 7 PM and landed in Miami at 9 PM, affadavits from fellow passengers and airline stewardesses testifying to my client’s presence on the flight to Miami, and security camera footage from the Miami Hilton at 10 PM, all of which clearly proves my client is not guilty because he was not in Philadelphia at the time the murder took place.
C.H. Waddington: So your argument is simply that the victim was killed for his money!
Schützenberger: No, that’s not my argument. I am not making any argument about the motivations for the murder and I don’t know who was responsible for it. My argument is that my client did not kill the victim. My client could not have killed the victim. It’s not possible for my client to have killed the victim, because the murder took place in Philadelphia at a time when it has been conclusively demonstrated that he was in Miami!
C.H. Waddington: But if the accused didn’t kill the victim, who did? Who is the culprit? What’s the alternative?
Schützenberger: I have no idea. I don’t have an alternative.
C.H. Waddington: Your honor will note that I’ve asked for an alternative theory and the defense refuses to provide one.
Sir Peter: Noted. Is that the best you can do, counselor? Do you have any alternative to the active theory, any alternative at all? I will remind you that the active theory is a consensus that is widely supported by the scientific community, a consensus based on the assumption that your client did, in fact, kill the victim.
Schützenberger: Finding the actual killer is not my job, your honor. I’m a defense attorney, not a detective.
Sir Peter: The counselor will answer the question.
Schützenberger: No, your honor, I do not have an alternative theory.
Sir Peter: Very well. Since no alternative theories have been presented, I have no choice but to pronounce the accused guilty. Bailiff, take him away!
That would be totally absurd, doesn’t it? An absolute parody of justice, truth, and reason. No prosecutor would even attempt to advance such an obviously stupid argument in front of any judge. And yet, that is absolutely, 100-percent confirmed to have been the actual state of what passes for scientific thinking on the subject of evolution for the last sixty years. Don’t ever give scientists even a modicum of intellectual respect on the basis of their profession. Not only have they not earned it, they have repeatedly and reliably demonstrated that their level of philosophical analysis and their ability to discern truth is considerably below that of trial lawyers and public defenders.
Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the attempt of one true Darwinian believer to defend the science on the basis of criticizing my math, which apparently pains him, even though he admits there is no mathematical error.
I’m no biologist, and I do enjoy math. It pains me to see bad math, which is the only reason I keep on poking at this. Ultimately, it’s not even a math error, the error is in the priors. Asserting that 1600 fixations per generation is the highest possible fixation rate is the root.
The reader will, I hope, note that the actual number concerned is not “1600 fixations per generation” but rather “Generations per fixed mutation: 1600”.
BACTERIA Years: 3,800,000,000 Years per generation: 0.000071347 (37.5 mins per generation) Generations per fixed mutation: 1600 Years per fixed mutation: 0.114 Maximum fixed mutations: 33,288,000,916
Source: Sequencing of 19 whole genomes detected 25 mutations that were fixed in the 40,000 generations of the experiment. NATURE, 2009
Maximal Mutations, Vox Day, February 7, 2019
I’ll admit that I probably use the description “reprehensibly stupid” too liberally, but this sort of multi-level stupidity really is reprehensible.
You can’t make yourself smarter, but you can make yourself more prepared than everyone else. One of the ways I was able to break into the game industry was because I knew more about all of the people involved than anyone except a few of the deepest and most experienced insiders.
How did I do that despite being just out of college, with zero contacts in the industry, and never having attended a single industry event? I studied every single issue of Computer Gaming World like a seminary student performing exegesis on a single Bible verse, putting every single name I could find into a database with their position, company, and associated titles. So, when I finally attended CGDC for the first time, I knew most of the guys there and could speak intelligently with them about their past and present projects.
Not only that, but when they would recognize someone they knew, I’d be able to say something like “Carter… is that the Carter from SSI?” Which, almost inevitably, would lead to a friendly introduction from a trusted source. By my second conference, I was already acquainted with two-thirds of the devs there; by the third one, I was speaking at the conference, regarded by most as one of the old school, and was openly recognized a member of the CGW team, being the only active dev who was permitted to write reviews for the magazine.
I truly loved those days. Epic, Blizzard, Activision… the corporate monsters of today were just guys like everyone else. I’ve never felt a sense of unlimited possibility like that before or since.
Paul Pierce, the NBA champion, clearly knew the power of researching people. He was the Celtics’ longtime play-by-play announcer’s favorite, but there was more to their close relationship than mere mutual affection:
People used to say, ‘Boy, it’s great the relationship you have with Paul Pierce,’ because every time, second time through the layup line, Paul would come and give me a hug no matter where I was. People said that’s great. Well, what was happening was Paul would give me the hug and say, ‘Who we got tonight [officiating the game]?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s Chris, Danny’s the Black guy, and Joe is the white guy. He’s kind of bald.’ And then Paul would go through around the layup line, I’d see him go, ‘Hey, Danny, how are you tonight, Paul? What’s happening over there?’ And I swear it used to buy him one or two whistles every game at least.”
There is really no excuse for not bothering to put in the effort of truly knowing the field you’re in. It takes nothing but persistence and a little time. And yet, not one man in a thousand ever bothers to make even minimal efforts in this direction, despite the fact that it reliably pays off no matter what the industry or field.
JF Gariepy demonstrates, yet again, that he is literally retarded. It’s not that I have no idea what I’m getting into when I flat-out deny evolution and state, unequivocally, that it is mathematically impossible given the genetic evidence, it’s that he is both innumerate and incapable of grasping the fundamental logical problem that the smarter evolution advocates are now beginning to realize has destroyed their entire field of pseudoscience.
In fairness, he’s not quite as retarded as Curt Doolittle. But then, few people demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger Effect more beautifully than Doolittle does with his relentless Gamma posturing.
You have to be pretty stupid to still cling to any belief in Neo-Darwinian evolution these days. I tried THREE TIMES to explain to JFG what the necessary and unavoidable implication of an average IQ among one subset of a population had for the remainder of the set, and he was still not able to understand it. Which is why he cannot grasp the fact that there is absolutely no way for evolution by natural selection to account for the observed delta of fixated mutations between one species and another.
To all the evolution deniers: you have no idea what you’re getting into when you say “maybe small adaptations but not changes of kind.”
Once you acknowledge adaptations, you acknowledge evolution. If you think a bird’s beak can change over a few generations then you’ll have to explain to me how billions of years of such changes does not lead to vastly different species.
Either you prove to me that the Earth is not billions of years old or I’ll consider you’ve accepted evolution. Even the creationist nuts of the 80s understood that, which is why they had to argue that the Earth was 7000 years old. Darwin understood that too.
Checkmate motherfuckers.
You don’t have to be stupid to still believe in evolution by natural selection in the light of genetic science, but it helps. Darwinian selection survived – barely – Mendelian genetics by virtue of what is now known as the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, but only because Mendelian genetics were insufficiently quantifiable to expose the obvious flaws in the Darwinian logic.
I’ve already pointed out the numbers before, so I’ll try to keep this very simple in the hopes that at least a few midwits might be able to grasp the logic.
There is zero evidence of a mutation being fixated across a population in an amount of time that would permit the transition from one species to another species given the known genetic differences between the two. Zero. Not in the lab, not in the wild, not between one mammal and another mammal, not between one fish and another fish.
Even the range of genetic differences between a single superspecies, such as homo sapiens, are too wide to be accounted for by the fastest-ever mutational fixation rate.
If mutations were being fixated fast enough to fit within the time scales observed, we would be able to observe them fixating in real time as well as within recent archeological time.
For example, the oldest sequenced human DNA is 400,000 years old, which represents 20,000 human generations, or 4.44 percent of the temporal distance from the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor. Given the estimated 15 million mutations that separate the CHLCA from modern humans, we would be able to observe 660,000 or so fixed mutations distinguishing that old DNA from all modern humans if the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection were correct.
Watching evolutionists trying to criticize my disproof of evolution is rather like watching a chimpanzee trying to work an abacus. They make a lot of noise, but they never actually manage to work out any of the necessary math.
But we don’t. So, obviously, it isn’t. The numbers don’t add up, the logic doesn’t hold, so theory of evolution by natural selection has been conclusively and comprehensibly falsified. If you still can’t see, accept, and understand that, you’re observably stupid.
They can produce all the epicycles and temporal extensions they want, and it will avail them nothing. They are so far off mathematically, by sufficient orders of magnitude, to render all of their efforts not so much quixotic as perverse.
A writer at Unz attempts to describe what he calls the “seven tribes of intellect” but fails to get either side of the Bell Curve right. And fair warning: I’m going to annoy some of you here by failing to hide how I actually think about these things. But it appears I’ve officially reached the age where I see no point in bothering to veil these things anymore.
Eminent (or Scary Bright) the top 0.01% (1 in 10,000) There would be one such person in our town. The town’s progress might depend on whether they are able to contribute their ideas and see them implemented. More likely, they will leave town and search out other eminent people just for the fun of exchanging ideas. Their vocabularies will be above 40,000 words. They are unlikely to believe in gods or superstitions, and can calculate coincidences. (Dick Feynman used to begin his lectures by saying: “As I parked my car today I noticed that the licence plate of the car in front of me was 79346229. What’s the chance of that?”). They may be seen as unconventional, and can be difficult to understand. In IQ terms they are 155. Call them the Three Sigmas.
When such eminent intellects leave town, they soon learn that they are not that bright. After all, even the United Kingdom has 6,500 of them, and they soon work out which the really bright ones are. So, for really interesting minds, we are looking at those who, in open competition, tested on very hard subjects, can show other scary bright people that they are closer to 1 in a million. In IQ terms this would be 160, but it would be simpler to say that they are well above conventional testing limits. Call them the Four Sigmas.
Think of Bertrand Russell going up to Cambridge University and finding very few intelligent people there, but later observing that every conversation with John Maynard Keynes was exhausting, and noting he always came away feeling defeated. Or consider John Von Neumann, (from Steve Hsu’s very good account) who made fundamental contributions in mathematics, physics, nuclear weapons research, computer architecture, game theory and automata, and also had formidable powers of mental calculation and a photographic memory. Laureate Eugene Wigner who knew Planck, Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Albert Einstein ranked von Neumann the highest in intellect, and the aforementioned luminaries did not question this judgement. A little uncharitably, Enrico Fermi said to Herb Anderson, with whom he ran the first ever nuclear reaction: “You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me”. Laureate Hans Bethe, whom I revere, went so far as to say: “I always thought von Neumann’s brain indicated that he was from another species, an evolution beyond man”.
Now, my literal spatial relations retardery leaves me just short of these proposed general limits. However, both VHIQs and UHIQs tend to immediately recognize each other, which is why I’m accepted as a peer despite my obvious limitations by fellow Eminent intellects like Steve Keen and Martin van Creveld, and why I get along instinctively well with musical prodigies like Paul Sebastien and CCK despite my near-complete absence of musical talent. Light recognizes light.
If you are capable of recognizing the pattern, you will recall that despite there being several VHIQ and UHIQ readers here, you never see them dismissing my conclusions out of hand. If you think about it, you can probably figure out why. A fellow 150-IQ friend once observed that he was frightened to think what my functional IQ is if the spatial relations element was left out of the equation; I figure it would probably work out to around 183 depending upon how bad the spatial relations were and how heavily they were weighted, which strikes me as a reasonable approximation in light of how I always felt our friend, who had a confirmed 175 IQ, was a little on the slow side.
Also, to be clear, I do not believe genius is a quantifiable measurement. Genius can only be measured in terms of genuine accomplishment, not in terms of fame, reputation, awards, or a number. Many, if not most, of the reported “genuises” of intellectual history, such as Darwin, Ricardo, Edison, or Einstein, are nothing more than useful frauds who benefitted from marketing campaigns.
I haven’t gotten my hands on the records yet, but I was part of a Harvard IQ study when I was very young and reportedly tested absurdly high in one particular area, which area I would now assume to have been pattern recognition, or at the very least, something that encompassed pattern recognition. Not to go all grandiose and Miles Mathis on you, but the simple and observable fact is that there are very few minds in history capable of developing two conclusive mathematical disproofs of theories that have survived for nearly 300 years or a predictive model of human behavior such as the socio-sexual hierarchy, never mind all three.
Note that no one has yet managed to put so much as a dent in either the Labor Mobility critique of Comparative Advantage or the Mutation Fixation critique of Evolution by Natural Selection. And while scientistry studiously ignores them, neither history nor reality will.
The account of Fermi’s behavior rings absolutely true, because just as the midwit can see that he is more intelligent than the sub-average individual, UHIQs and VHIQs tend to have a very good idea of where they stand vis-a-vis each other. Fermi wasn’t being arrogant or dismissive of Anderson, he was actually being humble and attempting to communicate to Anderson how superior von Neumann’s mind was because he knew Anderson was not capable of grasping the difference between Fermi and von Neumann.
And the fact that the author is not himself a member of the Eminent community can be seen in his erroneous belief that Scary Bright people “are unlikely to believe in gods”. To the contrary, most of us not only believe in gods in one form or another, but our thoughts on the subject are considerably more esoteric, and exotic, than most of us would ever share in public. The conventional dogmatic models simply do not suffice to explain the available evidence; there is a reason I repeatedly tell you that the world is not only weirder than we believe, it is considerably stranger than most of us are even capable of imagining.
Frankly, I’m dubious that anyone beyond high midwit level can manage to genuinely cling to atheistic materialism any longer in light of the clear evidence of supernatural evil at work everywhere in the world around us. And the idea that “nothing instills dread in a smart person like knowing that they are not the smartest” is an intrinsically midwit proposition; every VHIQ and UHIQ not only knows he is not the smartest, but can usually rattle off a list of people that he knows is smarter than he is, and whom he admires.
