Born to do Math: March 2018

Thursday 22 March 2018

Born to do Math 79 - 128+ IQs Lead to Worse Leadership

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 79 - 128+ IQs Lead to Worse Leadership

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 22, 2018

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking off-tape on IQ and a World Economic Forum article on the diminishing returns of intelligence on leadership. It seems interesting, where beyond 128 the leadership can be worse. Can you expound on our points a bit?

Interviewee: Yes, for one, you have to preface anything that involves IQ by saying IQ is a sucky measure of intelligence. Though, there isn’t a better one. Using reasonable assumptions, 111 is in the neighborhood of the average high school graduate. It is not that high.

Also, the average IQ for people walking around is also about 100, 105, 106, because people with IQs at the low end are not walking around. They are in institutions, riding short buses. However, anyway, it is hard to tell exactly how they set up their 100.

There are points of comparison. In other words, what’s the phenomena, e.g. leadership? It is crazy how low that is. 128 isn’t even high enough to get into MENSA, and MENSA is the sluttiest, one of the sluttiest IQ groups.

Almost anybody, if they try can get into MENSA, the average leader who has risen to 128 and, thus, become less effective because leadership peaked at 120. The one who has already gone over the hill and down the other side still cannot get into MENSA.

However, I’ll start with saying my wife worked at a bunch of companies that were mid-level companies. She worked for some big ass companies too. Until she had her current job at a school; she never had a job she liked, largely because a large percentage of the people around her were a-holes.

In fact, when you look at the stereotypical mid-level manager as presented in movies and sitcoms, there is always at least one jerk to propel the strife and the comedy. The Michael Scott character in The Office.

Everybody else in The Office was a sap in one way or other. That may reflect a certain reality that mid-levels of leadership, the people who end up in those positions maybe suck, maybe the organizations that they are leading suck.

Because they are made up of people who are them, then when you get to higher levels, where leadership skills are even worse at IQs at 128, it may be because people with IQs at 128 suck even more than people with IQs at 120.

Because I mean one they might be Aspergery or they might be conceited dickheads or over confident, pricks. Because you also said that these were mostly guys, too, right? Alright, so did this study do comparisons across gender?

They were on IQ is what you are saying. I have seen other studies that show that happiness and success and leadership, all that stuff does reach a peak, and then start declining before IQ reaches a limit.

The studies I have seen, it is more around 140. Or maybe I assumed that. There are plenty of reasons for that. The reasons we’ve mentioned—dickishness and overconfidence. However, there are also, as you get up above 140 and stuff, the smart people can be, or people who are good at IQ tests, which isn’t necessarily the same thing, can be distracted by the butterflies of weird intellectual pursuits.

It is easier for super smart people to chase off after their curiosity about the world, which may overwhelm or their ability to figure out stuff may overwhelm their ability to stay on track. That could be the one way that society.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

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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License

In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 2012-2017. 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, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Thursday 15 March 2018

Born to do Math 78 - Born Not to do Math

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 78 - Born Not to do Math

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 15, 2018

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: So, this is more like born to not do math in the case of our president who talks about how he went off to Wharton which makes you think if you're an American that he got an MBA from Wharton. He actually doesn't have an MBA; he doesn't have an advanced degree in business, he went to Wharton as an undergrad.

Wharton is a branch of the University of Pennsylvania and unless you're trying to be deceptive you just say you went to UPenn, but he wants people to kind of think he's an MBA. So, he says he went to Wharton, so the bullshit starts right there.

And then his lack of business understanding doesn't begin with this tariffs thing that we’re right in the middle of, it probably begins with him bankrupting three casinos. It's really hard to bankrupt a business where people just come and they give you their money but he did it three times though he is clever enough to have sucked out a bunch of money for himself before the casinos went bankrupt and lost 99% of investor’s money.

Anyway, this tariff thing is a huge move that is going to according to anybody who's knowledgeable about business and economics will harm us and possibly the rest of the world by setting up all sorts of trade barriers and possible trade wars. Gary Cohn who’s his economics adviser had threatened to quit months ago because Gary's Jewish and Trump was kind of supporting white supremacists and Nazis but he was persuaded to stay.

But now, Gary Cohn; one of the few people who knows what he's doing in the White House is now quitting because he thinks the tariffs are so stupid as does just about everybody else and some numbers.

Trump wants to impose a 10% tariff on foreign aluminum, 25% on foreign steel; he thinks this will revitalize domestic aluminum and steel industries. Everybody's saying no but those industries changed forever especially in the way of going away 30 years ago and you're not going to bring back industries that went away 30 years ago.

Currently, there are three hundred and one thousand steel and aluminum workers in America but the tariffs could raise prices for hundreds of millions of Americans and could lead to reduced sales, increased prices, and reduced business.

The last time in 2002 that we try to tariffs on I believe steel under George W Bush, it cost the U.S two hundred thousand jobs before people realized it was a terrible idea and rescinded the tariffs. This latest round of tariffs, if they go through, it's estimated that they’ll cost America maybe around a hundred and eighty thousand jobs.

So, there you go; born to not be able to really do math but to be able to demagogue in the case of our president.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

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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Thursday 8 March 2018

Born to do Math 77 - Renormalization in Quantum Theory and Infinities

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 77 - Renormalization in Quantum Theory and Infinities

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 8, 2018

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was watching a short Business Insider clip with Brian Greene from Columbia University and in it he was talking about renormalization.

Rick Rosner: Physics professor?

Jacobsen: A physics professor, specializes in string theory and some fundamental work alongside Witten and Kaku, who are some of the founders in string theory. Witten is known for being something akin to Einstein within that field, where he really blazes new trails to use that cliché.

And one of the points in that Business Insider clip that I was noting is his discussion of infinities. When he was talking about those infinities, he was looking into renormalization in quantum field theory.

I see there are a few types of infinities that are different than that. So, let's cover two types of things first: one on how renormalization in quantum field theory deals with one type infinity, but how I see the other type infinities having different types and forms and consequences.

Rosner: I haven't looked at the math of renormalization theory in a while, but basically the equations generate infinities at some points. You need to do tricks that aren't precisely allowed by the rules of math to cancel out infinities.

And once you do that, you end up with numbers that really accurately predict the values, the things that are being described by the equations in the real world. The equations, once you've done these forbidden tricks to them, accurately describe real physics, but you don't have to assume that this means that the universe itself is cancelling out infinities.

It's a better way of thinking to think that it doesn’t quite have the right math; it's good math, but it doesn't quite encompass all the actual processes that are happening in the world down to the nth degree.

There are all sorts of things that have hidden infinities, but not the world itself. When we've talked one of the principles, we talk about that we live in a world that has vast numbers in it, but none of those numbers reach infinity.

And the world is approximated by things that include infinity, for instance, when an object goes from point A to point B in our geometric model, our mental model of traveling from point A to point B has it hitting every single infinite point.

We've been taught in school that a number line has an infinity of points along it and not just a countable infinity, but the trans-countable infinity; not just the rational numbers on a number line, but also the irrational numbers, which are uncountable.

There's so many of them. You can't even count them using the lowest level of infinity and so you think of things moving along a line and you think they’re hitting an infinite number of points. But we live in a quantum world where position in space isn't precisely defined.

Things that are happening in a physical framework that's established by quantum rules; you can't pin down an object with such precision that you can say that it travels through an infinity of points to get from one point to another. Space isn't defined that precisely.

There is another set of hidden infinities with counting numbers. The counting numbers seem as finite as you can get; 1, 2, 22, 104… those are finite numbers. But every one of those numbers has an infinite number of digits beyond the decimal place. 223.00000… and the zeros go out to infinity.

One is precisely one to an infinite degree; it's precisely defined. We just deal with objects in the world as if they are infinitely precise in their unit-ness. If you have two eggs, you have two eggs. 2.000… all the way out to infinity and there are other hidden infinities just in counting numbers, where their infinite precision is actually defined by an infinite series of relationships among each other.

That the prime numbers are distributed along the number line in such a way that they determine the infinite precision of counting numbers. But the deal is those infinities in numbers don't necessarily reflect actual infinities in the world.

You have one apple. You have 12 eggs. But the oneness of the apple and the twelve-ness of your dozen eggs don’t reflect an infinite precision in the number of things that you have. The world itself is defined by the relationships among the less than infinite particles in the world.

So, objects in the world are highly precisely defined, but not infinitely precisely defined and the oneness of one apple of the dozen-ness of a dozen eggs are abstract characteristics with hidden infinities assigned to the objects that are not infinitely precisely defined because they're real and they're in a finite world.

You mentioned off tape of the infinity the ratio of the circumference of a circle, or a wheel, or a tire to its diameter because pi just keeps going for an infinite number of random feeling digits. Its pie is infinitely precise, but when dealing with real objects you can't infinitely precisely measure or define that ratio.

That ratio is an abstract thing you are assigning to this wheel or tire you're dealing with; and the wheel or tire is made of atoms and molecules that are held together by Van der Waal’s forces and other electromagnetic intermolecular forces, plus their atoms are held together with nuclear forces and the more electromagnetic forces between the atom, the electrons, and the protons.

But all those particles are imprecisely defined in space. There are probability waves and because they're imprecisely defined, your tire and the ratios that you’re assigning to it, the ratios can be infinitely precise, but they don't reflect an infinite precision in the position in space and the shape of the tire and the relationships among its constituent particles.

Everything's a little fuzzy and the fuzziness reflects a lack of infinity and a lack of infinite precision.

Jacobsen: And then I see that resolves the distinctions of some infinities. In the description of both, renormalizations in quantum field theory as well as infinities of things around infinite digit spans in numbers as well, but in the end that resolves an issue to deal with…

Rosner: We use the tools we have and our tools are symbols. Our mathematical systems are abstract. They contain all sorts of hidden infinities and they work really well when describing a world that is very well defined, but not infinitely precisely defined.

Our tools are not perfectly accurate, if you wanted to perfectly accurately define a tire in space you could do it using quantum mechanical description. For instance, there's a well-known principle from the beginning physics of the De Broglie matter wave as a wavelength that is inversely proportional to its math.

So, an electron is not weighing much at all. It’s very fuzzy in space. You can't really pin down an electron very well.

You can pin it down, but only to a limit and the usual example that I've seen in physics textbooks is that you compare the matter wave of a baseball and the uncertainty in the space of a baseball to the uncertainty in space of an electron since a baseball weighs like 10 to the 28^th or 29^th, 10 to the 30^th times more than electron. A baseball is 10 to the 30^th times more well-defined in space.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

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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Thursday 1 March 2018

Born to do Math 76 – 180 Million Years

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 76 – 180 Million Years

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

March 1, 2018

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There has been recent experimental evidence showing the earliest discovered stars formed as early as 180 million years after the Big Bang.

Rick Rosner: There is early light from 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Any earlier and the universe was opaque because there was too much stuff going on. There were various phases in the early universe.

You enough electrons and protons to be with each other for light to get through, enough electrons orbiting protons when you have a hot soup of that not happening - which is an Ionization Era. There is no way for light to get through.

The deal is, the matter in the universe went through certain phase changes as a whole. The modern universe is inhomogeneous in a lot of ways. You have huge expanses of almost nothing, a vacuum, and then you have blips of matter and stars.

But in the universe, as it is conceived as the Big Bang in the early universe, everything was a soup. This soup went through phase changes as a whole. One of them was going from ionized matter, which is separated electrons and protons, to electrons and protons combining into hydrogen atoms.

Until that phase change happened, you can't get light escaping from the soup because it is scattered by free electrons. You get hydrogen atoms forming at a little after 400,000 years the Big Bang. That is the earliest light that we can see.

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, we detect that in the form of radio waves. There is a lot of it. There might be more of the ancient free photons than from later on, There are still a lot of them. They do not affect us so much because they are so redshifted, so weak, from being so old.

But in terms of absolute numbers, there are a bunch of them. You do not get certain amounts of light until lights start forming and shining. They found using some sophisticated radiometric techniques dips in background radiation that indicates this is the part at which you start getting stars.

This was 180 million years after the Big Bang. I do not know if that is sooner than they expected it to be. But they are talking about it being the earliest that you could possibly expect stars to form after the Big Bang.

According to IC, we do not believe in one big bang. Though the universe looks very Big Bangy, if there have been any big bangs at all, it has been through a series of Big Bang-like events or just the universe rolling along in not necessarily a Big Bang way with the Big Bang appearance being a characteristic of information.

Under IC, the CMB would be noise that hasn't been filtered out because the universe isn't sufficiently defined. It doesn't have an infinity of matter or an infinity of information. So, you will have noise that isn't filtered out.

If information is arranged in a Bang Bangy way, the amount of information in the universe is proportional to the apparent age of the universe and the amount of matter in the universe and the scale of the universe - that is, the scale of a proton diameter to the diameter of the entire universe, then all of those things are consequences of the information the universe contains the apparent age of the universe being proportionate to information; you would expect the information to be arranged in a way that is temporal and causal as an apparent history with some of that history being actual history.

Some of it, though, as you get farther and farther away from the active center of the universe what looks like redshifted and younger galaxies and stuff has more and more to do with incomplete information.

The parts of the 'beginning' of the universe are where there is a lot of incompletely defined information relative to us and also relative to the other parts of what looks like the early universe. You could view the absence of complete information as at least allowing the existence of noise.

In that, if you had a universe with infinite information, it would appear to be infinitely old and any information from the apparent beginning of the universe - any light from the apparent beginning - would be redshifted down to zero information and the noise level would be zero.

We are still confused about things. We think in IC the universe is a lot older than it appears to be with the apparent age being the amount of information it contains, but one of the areas of confusion is "Does this very, very old universe have Big Bang-like events?" The answer is "probably yeah."

"What is the scale of those?" When a part of the universe becomes informationally active when it wasn't before if you're retrieving old frozen information and making it active, does that make a Big Bang looking event?

The answer is “probably yeah, but it would be incorporated into something like the apparent Big Bang, which is the way the universe appears.” One of these little bangs that meld into this apparent Big Bang.

“How big of an event is that?” Does it cover the entire visible universe? The deal is, under IC, we still need a framework that accounts for all of the apparent manifestations of a single Big Bang 14 billion years ago.

If IC is an actual thing, an information-based universe that functions a little bit like thought does, you have to have mechanisms that account for information processing over a super long period of time and also informationally do not contradict the observational evidence of the apparent Big Bang.

Every time that you get an experimental result like somebody found the light from the earliest possible stars 180 million years after the Big Bang. You have to figure out what is happening.

Somebody has to figure it out, how it works informationally. If it is not a Big Bang, then informationally, what is the deal with the first light from the first star – apparent first light from the apparent first star – showing up as some dip in radiometric observations showing up 180 million years after the Big Bang?

Based on how information is in our brains, we know there is a lot of stuff that information processing apps, modules, or modes are pretty much on whenever we are awake like spatial information processing, there is never a time unless you do LSD.

That the parts of your brain that process spatial information into a sense of 3D space around you. There is never a time when that is turned off and space is scrambled. Do not take LSD.

But if you happen to be exposed to LSD, you can really hamper a lot of those modules. When you are awake, there is never a time that those modules are not processing faces, so that a face looks like a face.

That it is readable as a human face with expressions and recognizable features, but if you happen to be on LSD then those modules get screwed up. You see incompletely processed faces, which look like CG effects.

That the faces haven’t been smoothed into rounded faces. You get these lizardy badly processed faces that look like wireframe faces. The kind of faces you may see in early video games. That haven’t to manage human-looking faces.

I supposed with enough LSD that you could turn off your spatial processing modules and have a really hard time navigating and figuring out where walls, routes, and doors are and their relationship to each other because the modules have been turned off.

Also, you dream in 3D and in faces. Even when you aren’t working, those modules are always on. Others are only turned on as needed, whatever modules you need to be a ski racer.

I assume there is a skill set and a set of perceptions that mostly you turn on when you are racing or practicing racing. In an IC universe, you would have some parts always on and processing information.

Then you would have modules that you could turn on. An IC universe needs to have always on stuff and stuff that gets turned on and then turned off as it gets used and is no longer useful.

It falls away to the cold and frozen outskirts that look like close to T=0 and has to fit into a structure that looks Big Bangy. So, that is what we are trying to resolve or would be trying to resolve if I weren’t so lazy.

The end.

[End of recorded material]

Authors[1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner
scott-jacobsen

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

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.

License and Copyright