Born to do Math 153 - The Heart of Intelligence
Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner
January 15, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is - and I am kind of embarrassed as I don't think I have ever asked this to you directly - the heart of intelligence, ignoring tests and such?
Rosner: The first answer is, "How do you even know there is a heart of intelligence?" There is something in the realm of IQ testing and intelligence testing. There is a concept called g, which stands for "general intelligence." You could and people do debate whether g even exists.
We infer general intelligence from people's performances on specific tasks. There's no such thing as general intelligence tasks. Everything is a specific thing: the eloquence of speech, skill at math, social skills, all the little tasks measured by or tested by an IQ test like how fast you can circle all the stars on a sheet of paper where 1/5th of the symbols are stars.
What is missing in this picture taking blocks and making shapes out of them? Taking all those tasks, we are supposed to get an idea of someone's general intelligence. You could argue there is no such thing as general intelligence because our brains are adapted for doing the things that we need to do in our specific environments in this specific world.
That's a pretty extreme argument to make because of 2+2=4, regardless of which galaxy you live in. There should be some really basic forms of thought. You should be able to figure out some kind of criteria for general intelligence.
Jacobsen: Ron Hoeflin has a theory on that. The Categories of Thought, his encyclopedia of philosophy.
Rosner: Ron has spent more than 40 years cataloguing philosophies. I didn't know it was a catalogue of ways of thought. That's pretty interesting as it's thousands of pages long.
To get at what intelligence might be, one of the primary tasks of thought is to form associations, to define things in our experience by what characteristics they have, which is a form of linking. That we know a dog is a dog because we've defined in our heads what characteristics are associated with dogs, say versus cats.
Size, fur, shape of ears, I like to say the brain is an association engine.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by that?
Rosner: Intelligence, you could argue, is involved in the accuracy and profundity of the associations formed. Are you able to get to the heart of things or analyze what is going on and get to the/find the essentials?
[End of recorded material]Rosner: The first answer is, "How do you even know there is a heart of intelligence?" There is something in the realm of IQ testing and intelligence testing. There is a concept called g, which stands for "general intelligence." You could and people do debate whether g even exists.
We infer general intelligence from people's performances on specific tasks. There's no such thing as general intelligence tasks. Everything is a specific thing: the eloquence of speech, skill at math, social skills, all the little tasks measured by or tested by an IQ test like how fast you can circle all the stars on a sheet of paper where 1/5th of the symbols are stars.
What is missing in this picture taking blocks and making shapes out of them? Taking all those tasks, we are supposed to get an idea of someone's general intelligence. You could argue there is no such thing as general intelligence because our brains are adapted for doing the things that we need to do in our specific environments in this specific world.
That's a pretty extreme argument to make because of 2+2=4, regardless of which galaxy you live in. There should be some really basic forms of thought. You should be able to figure out some kind of criteria for general intelligence.
Jacobsen: Ron Hoeflin has a theory on that. The Categories of Thought, his encyclopedia of philosophy.
Rosner: Ron has spent more than 40 years cataloguing philosophies. I didn't know it was a catalogue of ways of thought. That's pretty interesting as it's thousands of pages long.
To get at what intelligence might be, one of the primary tasks of thought is to form associations, to define things in our experience by what characteristics they have, which is a form of linking. That we know a dog is a dog because we've defined in our heads what characteristics are associated with dogs, say versus cats.
Size, fur, shape of ears, I like to say the brain is an association engine.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by that?
Rosner: Intelligence, you could argue, is involved in the accuracy and profundity of the associations formed. Are you able to get to the heart of things or analyze what is going on and get to the/find the essentials?
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America's, North America's, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main "Genius" listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the "World’s Smartest Man." The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named "Best Bouncer" in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
(Updated January 1, 2020)
Scott Douglas Jacobsen founded In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing. He authored/co-authored some e-books, free or low-cost. If you want to contact Scott: Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.com.
Endnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
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