November 27, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If someone was to look out into the world, there appears to be objects. There appears to be subjects. You ask the question, “What is that object, or who is that to point out a subject?” How do those get slotted in thinking in an actual perception?
Rick Rosner: You’re talking about two different questions. One is how stuff is identified, and the second is how stuff is classified. You were pointing at this last night when talking about essentials.
I would argue with the essentials or at least things that you don’t know well or the things/the identifiers in your mind. I don’t know when you see a new person or when you see a car. For you to be able to remember that person or perceive the car, you have to do some classification work.
That’s largely a combination of conscious and less conscious. If the person’s got a broken nose, you’ll explicitly notice that. But there will be a bunch of other stuff about their face that you will note, but less consciously.
So, you’ll be able to identify him if you see him again in a half an hour. That means that for faces and for cars, we’ve got classification systems that we’re only like half aware of. We have a mental model and a subconscious or unconscious mental model of the different configurations the faces can take.
Then we see a new face, we map that person into that face in the face database. I don’t know if the face classification is as simple as all that, but probably so that you’ve got a number of different dimensions.
You find that person’s face along all these different dimensions, which is the same thing as finding a point in multidimensional face space. Except it’s not quite that easy because faces might have 30 or 50 potential dimensional characteristics, your average face won’t register along most of those dimensions.
You only plot that. You pick the dimensions that are appropriate for each face you classify. The broken nose might be an optional dimension of its own. It’s broken noses. There are interesting things like Brian Williams, the newscaster, has a nose that goes to one side, but he’s unconsciously learned to tilt it, to turn his head, just enough that his nose presents as less to the side than it would if he were perfectly squared up to the camera.
So, the broken nose is less noticeable. But anyway, you pick the dimensions, the face is distinctive along it, then you plot that in some face space. You do that with a lot of stuff. That you pick your dimensions.
And along with picking the dimensions, you pick along those dimensions the distinguishing characteristic, and then you contextualize the distinguishing characteristics; and that’s it. It’s not necessarily a dimension like somebody just mentioned, though.
We were watching a movie with Emma Stone from 10 years ago, where a character is described as six on the Kinsey sexuality scale, which is almost as gay as you can be. That’s a linear scale. I think it goes from one to seven or something.
We don’t necessarily rank like an eyebrow or a an ear along a bunch of dimensions. We contextualize the ear or the eyebrow or the busted nose with a comparison to other ones that we found notable.
Maybe, that does break down into classification along a bunch of linear dimensions. I don’t know. Maybe, that’s the most efficient way to classify information. But in any case, you can find the distinguishing characteristics and you contextualize, among other things, that have the same distinguishing characteristic, that aren’t the same tags. For that being a characteristic that’s notable, that’s it.
[End of recorded material]
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
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal (ISSN 2369-6885). Jacobsen works for science and human rights, especially women’s and children’s rights. He considers the modern scientific and technological world the foundation for the provision of the basics of human life throughout the world and the advancement of human rights as the universal movement among peoples everywhere.
Footnotes
[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 2012-2020. 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.
Rick Rosner 