Born to do Math

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 September 28, 2016)

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.

License and Copyright

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-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2019. 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 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Sunday, 15 December 2019

Born to do Math 149 - Predictive Power and the Power to Choose

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 149 - Predictive Power and the Power to Choose

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

December 15, 2019

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How can predictive power increase freedom, potentially?

Rosner: I wonder about increased freedom, if any, if our actions are based on more and more predictive information. There are plenty of time travel books, movies, and T.V. shows, where people are can travel into the past to try and fix things that they want to change. That did not go the way that they wanted. So, the question is, "Does it change the experience of time to be able to run multiple parallel simulations of the next few moments and even further into the future than the next few moments and then choose among those moments?" We already do that.

It doesn't feel like we are choosing among future moments. It feels like we are moment-to-moment taking the best actions based on what we think will happen. We don't really think of ourselves, generally, as predicting what will happen moment-to-moment, but we are doing it.

We stop at a stoplight that is red because we predict that there is traffic. Or, also, because we see cars are coming, we predict that if we step into traffic that the cars will keep coming and hit us. We are predicting and making the best possible choices based on those predictions.

But we don't see those as predictions. We see ourselves as reacting to circumstances. In only some of our choices do we see ourselves as predicting and acting according to our best predictions, if you come up to a girl, a woman, I'm from the 70s and the 80s, and the 90s, where you went up to women in bars and said stuff to get the woman to like you.

In doing that, you are trying to figure out what the best thing to say would be. My default was to ask the woman to dance because I did not know how to talk to women. After 3 songs, it would get sweaty and weird.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: All I had to do was say, "Enough of that dancing shit, let's get you a drink." I was bad at it. I was a little clueless. But my best-predicted action was to ask a girl to dance. That seemed, at least, to get me to the next moment of dancing based on the prediction that, sometimes, the girl would say, "Yes."

But it doesn't seem like a prediction when you take a step predicting the floor will still be the floor and gravity will still be like gravity in the next few subsequent moments. So, I am saying that there is a possibility that future powerful entities with more global information and a much more powerful ability to predict will experience the world.

There's a famous book or series of books from the 70s called Dune. It is getting made into a T.V. series again. It was made into a movie nobody liked, maybe a T.V. series a while ago. In the book, that one character can see the future exactly as it will play out. He is blind. He can see the future so well that he just knows where to go and what to do because he can so exactly predict the future.

I am saying that time won't be experienced as moment-to-moment. But we don't experience time as moment-to-moment now. We accumulate a history. But our perception of each moment, our awareness of each moment, is smeared out across moments and out consciousness and sub-conscious smooths everything out.

So, it feels as if we are experiencing time in a moment-to-moment fashion. Even though, the information that we get about the world does not perfectly fill out each moment at that moment and our processing of each moment does not happen at each moment.

We accumulate knowledge about changes in the world across a span of, a short span of, time, but still a span of time. We don't experience a bunch of instantaneous moments. We experience, vaguely, a bunch of smeared out moments.

Again, it raises the question as to what a vastly more powerful moment to moment massive amount of predictive information would look like or would feel like within a vastly knowledgeable and powerful consciousness.

The default point of view would be that we would still experience things linearly. In that, we would take action. That action would be locked into the moment. We would take another set of actions that would be locked into subsequent moments. We would still experience things linearly even as we were working through a much wider range of possible futures.

Because generally, we don't see the possible futures in any kind of fully fleshed out way. When I went up to a girl in a bar and asked her to dance, I didn't picture ten different versions of the next few days based on how the girl might react. She says, "Yes."

We get along. We have a one-night stand. We still like each other in the morning. Or if she says, "Fuck off," then I get embarrassed and leave the bar or go to another bar, or go home. You don't picture fully-fleshed out futures.

You experience the possible reactions the woman could have. I don't know whether the more powerful consciousnesses of the future will perceive more fleshed out possible futures. That's probably a dumb supposition in a lot of ways. But I am not even sure of the ways.

[End of recorded material]

Authors [1]

American Television Writer

(Updated July 25, 2019)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing

Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com

(Updated September 28, 2016)

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

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-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.

Copyright

Friday, 22 November 2019

Born to do Math 146 - Tentative Conclusions and Open Questions

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 146 - Tentative Conclusions and Open Questions

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

November 22, 2019

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One tentative conclusion for hard or soft sciences is a naturalistic worldview. The world as a natural rather than a supernatural place.

Rosner: Yes, though, you could make the argument that we come to the natural view via science invalidating a lot of supernatural things. My kid, as you know, has been working on a paper about frogs as embroidered objects in the 17th century.

She ran into an issue in discussing why people would be at home wearing embroidered frogs when frogs during that time were associated with witchery. The deal is that frogs were thought to be useful, naturally, in a naturalistic sense.

But they had spooky uses under witchery. There were natural uses. People who weren't, who used frogs for good purposes - and witchy and possibly evil purposes. Given the level of scientific knowledge in the 17th-century, it is very hard for a modern analyst of frog uses to distinguish between witchy uses and natural uses.

She mentioned one use. You take a frog and burn it, and mix it with some honey and stuff. Then you feed it to a cat, and then kill the cat. At some point, whatever you have done with the frog mixture will make foxes come out.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: She mentioned that as a non-witchy use of frogs. She mentioned this as a non-witchy use of frogs in a non-witchy way. To us, it sounds like a use of frogs in a witchy way, pure witchery. It is because people didn't know shit back then. They couldn't tell the difference between the natural and the supernatural based on the stuff they did.

They had no good idea of whether the stuff would work or not. They weren't or things were not tested scientifically and recipes were passed on. It is only via 3 or 4 centuries of using the scientific method, where we have a pretty good idea of what is supernatural, what's likely bullshit, and what's natural.

To the point, we have some laws that we understand pretty well.

Jacobsen: Based on the stuff discussed in the Born to do Math series, when we think of chakras, ghosts, and efficacy of prayer, in the way fundamentally, espoused...

Rosner: Let's take a detour since you mentioned the efficacy of prayer. Until recently, I have been willing to let religious people have their religious beliefs. I have even, from time to time, had some semi-religious beliefs myself.

But now, given the state of religion in America, I and I think lots of people find ourselves oppressed by crazy levels of hypocrisy. I find myself less willing to let certain religious hypocrisies stand. For instance, the idea that what we need to do after a gun massacre is praying.

You got to say, "Fuck you," to that because making that the main thing that you can do. You can't pass laws, can't do studies. That's just bullshit and lining up to do the NRA's bullshit for them. American politics is being scuttled by a religious demographic that support Trump.

Even though, he is not just non-religious, but a really huge breaker of most of the 10 Commandments. He is a terrible con man and bullshit artists. He is terrible for the country and supported by a majority of Evangelical Christians.

Jacobsen: May I interject?

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: If we take the main thrust of the question while sustained in the detour, do the negative, the social, impacts and ease of the political manipulation of a sector of the United States, in some ways, relate closely to a lack of acknowledgement of there being this separation what we consider science and non-science now?

Rosner: I would argue a lack of acknowledgement. Most people who are engaged, mostly evangelicals, in this religious hypocrisy have an inkling of doubt that what they are doing is legitimate. The people who support Trump because he supports their values. Even though, he doesn't follow any of those values.

Others who support Trump and Israel because, maybe, he is hastening the End Times, the apocalyptic war between good and evil, which will wipe out most of humanity on the planet with only the good people going on to salvation.

I have a feeling that most of those peoples. If you really put it to them, they would admit some doubt with this really bullshitty system that they are supporting. There's a new report. It came out on Jerry Falwell, Jr. He runs Liberty University, I think.

It is called a real estate scam in the article. He is not godly at all. He brags about the size of his dick and sends salacious pictures of his wife to people. He might have a weird, creepy relationship with his exercise trainer.

He is an all-around terrible guy and a one in a long line of scamming preachers, televangelists.

Jacobsen: This comes out of a very strong movement of the WWII Healing Revival Movement.

Rosner: Yes. In the 60s, there was another revival as hippies rejected the materialism of their parents. A lot of them tried to embrace religion. Some Christianity, some eastern religion, religion used to reinforce decent behaviour. I can get behind that.

But that's not the way it is being used in America right now. So, anyway, back to demarcation, I think after 400 years of science. We're pretty clear as to what science is and isn't. Although, there are a not-insignificant number of people who are in the business of obscuring the border between science and not science to scam money out of people.

People who sell health and beauty products want their shit to sound scientific. There's a product that I've heard a lot of ads for, 'Man Pills.' They supposedly raise your testosterone, over the counter 'Man Pills. You put in a mail-order, then they keep arriving each month. They say that they have been clinically tested in the ads.

They do not say any results: "Clinically tested," and then no results. Probably, because the results were shit, they sell boner pills over the counter too. A lot of bodegas have these tiger pill packs, which are supposed to increase your virility. These are ridiculous because a) they don't work and b) there are pills that work that can do the things that these B.S. pills claim to do.

Science is science. We know what it is for the most part. People who are trying to smudge the borders are, usually, trying to take your money.

Jacobsen: So, could we say that we live in an amazing place but not a magical one?

Rosner: Yes! But there are people working in fringey areas because science doesn't cover everything. Even the stuff covered by science is subject to being hugely revised with new discoveries, as with our discussions before, our main theory of the universe is not even a century old. This very complete cosmology before us is subject to vast and radical revision as we discover more about the universe.

Jacobsen: You and I differ in some ways, in terms of what is presented in a digital physics view of the world. You look at the universe as very probably as having a mind or the characteristics of a mind based on large-scale information processing. I agree with a fundamentally information-based view of the world. I need more premises to have that supported.

It is a basic agreement. The question is to what degree is that conclusion supported in terms of some of the derivatives.

Rosner: You could look at what we with our minds and their characteristics. We have minds in order to predict the future and prepare for it, which is a popular view of minds and brains right now. In that, every action that we take is in anticipation and prediction of the future.

It feels like we're dealing with present realities. But really, we're dealing with a prediction of what the world is, even if it is a world of a micro-second from now. We've built a vision or version of the world in our minds. That allows us to, we hope, live safely and productively in the world.

Every action that we take is, if you want to get really technical according to this theory, based on a prediction. This couch is solid, gravity works. It will work a second from now, 10 seconds from now, next week. Everything that we do is, as we move into the future and thus our brains help us move into the future, building a model of the future world for us.

Even if it is a fraction of a second from becoming now, as a world, that's one thing. Our brains help us survive in the world. That they are predictive. That they simulate a world. We could probably come up with about 20 different things that our minds and brains do.

You could probably go down the list and, for each of those 20 things, discuss whether a self-consistent or a vast self-consistent information-processing system or set of subsystems would necessarily have to fulfill each of these 20 characteristics of our minds.

For example, each of our minds is assigned to a single organism, helping one organism doing its shit. That's not a requirement for other minds like a mega-mind, some universe-sized mind. It could be the information-processing, predictive, conscious arm of a group of organisms. Our mind is located on our bodies. Our brain is located in our bodies. There is this locality characteristic.

That doesn't have to be so. The information processing can be done remotely for something operating a gazillion miles away. It becomes impractical. If you are talking about huge distances where the speed of light becomes a problem, it doesn't become a problem if you have this little robotic soldier or bomb defuser, or a little spider assassin that needs to crawl inside somebody's ear, but is too small to have a sophisticated brain.

This could be directed from a sophisticated brain 2 miles away. The locality isn't necessarily a thing. You can go down a list of things and pick whether this would be a characteristic of an information processing system. Then everything is up for question if the universe or whether other things are information system, and whether the information pertains to something outside of our universe.

The way our mind pertains to a world. If we think the mind is a world with its own existence, the mind is doing its work is predicting things in a world beyond it or mathematically distinct/separate from the information that it contains. That's open to question.

Whether you need hardware to support the software, whether the universe is a thing made of information the way our minds are made of the information and needs a hardware structure, an actual existing structure to support the information that it contains. We have assumed because it makes sense to be made of information; that there needs to be an armature to support the information as a framework.

That physically supports the information that cannot exist on its own because our minds cannot exist on their own. They need brains to be the physical structures where the interactions of the neurons and dendrites, and everything, encode the information. That's open to questions. Everything is open to being questioned.

[End of recorded material]

Authors [1]

American Television Writer

(Updated July 25, 2019)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing

Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com

(Updated September 28, 2016)

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

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-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.

Copyright

Friday, 15 November 2019

Born to do Math 144 - Nice-to-Haves

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 144 - Nice-to-Haves

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

November 15, 2019

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would be something that would be nice to have as an evolved mental function that is not evolved into us?

Rosner: You can look at the stuff that we have evolved for ourselves via apps. An infallible sense of direction would be good. I am always arguing everyone should be forced to take statistics. So, maybe, a more developed understanding of and ability to apply risks.

An ability to find more subtle patterns in big data. This is coming. We won't need this in our brains because we will get it in our apps. You can always say various apps built into your head would be helpful.

Jacobsen: What about perceptual functions?

Rosner: People can always use more power to get social clues and interpersonal clues. Some people are really good at reading other people. That's a good skill to have. It's a good skill. It means that some people will have more partners than other people.

I call it anti-Asperger's. Some schmoozy people, especially where I live in L.A., are at home with asking for more from people and then getting it, because they are able to judge what people are willing to give.

Although, I may be overestimating people's social skills. When I first had this thought, it was before MeToo. What looked liked increased social skill, ten years ago, to me, I've hit on a lot fewer women than people I know.

Some of this I attribute to shyness or fear. Some of this I attributed to being less charming. Now, in the light of MeToo, maybe, I was wrong about that because, maybe, the people who I admired or envied for getting with a bunch of women.

Maybe, they were bigger assholes. Maybe, they were not getting away with anything and the women were thinking the guys were assholes. Maybe, they weren't getting away with as much as I'd thought. But it would be nice - all that aside - to be able to perceive more of what people are thinking.

Jacobsen: H.L. Mencken described many men as having elephantine emotions [Laughing].

Rosner: Do you mean huge and plodding?

Jacobsen: Huge, plodding, blatant, cloddy, just uncouth generally.

Rosner: Yes, I've heard this described in Women's Studies as men having less impulse control.

Jacobsen: What does this mean in a mental context? Why is this happening way more? Are we talking about more sociological reasons or more innate reasons leading to those sociological/sociocultural consequences?

Rosner: Emotions, in the context we're talking about, are judged by action. If someone is like Emily Dickinson shut up in her house, we don't know what emotions she's having compared to somebody who is getting in bar fights, or road rage incidents.

So, we can make an argument that guys are more action-oriented. You can trace this to the frontal lobe dementia. You lose your Superego and act on pure ID to put it in obsolete terms. Guys have a lower threshold to act on what they're feeling.

Jacobsen: Men do develop slower. We know that.

Rosner: You can argue men are generally crappier. Men have less quality to control in a lot of areas.

Jacobsen: You mean this not as a moral judgment, but as a biological descriptor.

Rosner: Men are, you can argue, more disposable. My wife hikes with a bunch of people her age and little older. Like half of their husbands are fucking dead!

Jacobsen: What from, for them?

Rosner: One had a sclerosing disease. He was in a parking garage and had just walked out from pitching a T.V. show and dropped dead that was hardening parts of his body. I take super good control of my body. I just had cancer.

It is a small sample size. When you talk about sex or gender differences, you always run the risk of over-generalizing or making conclusions that are too big on a small sample size, or culturally limited sample sizes. I don't know in general.

Would there be a geometry of lower impulse control? Yes, you could do it, even without a geometry of consciousness of that.

Jacobsen: It would be less integrated geometry. It would be shorter pathways and less integrated.

Rosner: Yes, some people like to argue a thicker corpus callosum in women leads to a more integrated consciousness and a more even-keeled personality. But that's probably over-concluding.

Jacobsen: Will this imply with greater self-control and greater awareness of a situation that women would be better able to conceal emotions better in terms of propriety and social dynamics?

Rosner: In our world, it is harder to determine. Women are smaller and weaker than men. A smaller and weaker person will be more prudent. If the average woman was 6'1" and weighed 185lbs, would women be as asshole-ish as men? There's too much going on there.

There's too much cultural loading to reach any super-definitive conclusions. There's, at least, one member or former member of the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team who has been dinged more than once for spousal abuse.

She's a big, strong, angry, at times, person. So, is that a brain thing or a hierarchy thing? Too many variables.

[End of recorded material]

Authors [1]

American Television Writer

(Updated July 25, 2019)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing

Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com