December 8, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: No, I’m starting now. So, what do you think of a high range testing in so far as it measures intelligence?
Rick Rosner: Well, you just told me that a guy with a gripe against high range testing revealed the answers to like two dozen tests, or his answers at least. Two dozen or so high range tests as a protest to what he considers IQ inflation.
It’s just that in itself seems like an asshole move that developing a high range test and then sending it out into the world, and scoring it, and norming it, taking the scores of dozens of people and comparing that to their scores on other tests.
So, you get a good idea of what your test is. All that can take hundreds of hours and this guy just scuttles all that work. So, just because he doesn’t agree with this, he thinks – this guy you told me about – that the scores people get on high range tests or he thinks they’re too easy for the scores they give.
But if you take one of these tests, do well, and you score 170, this guy says, “Well, that’s not really a 170, maybe, you’re at 160 or 150. Therefore, I’m going to fuck up all these dozens of tests. Thousands of hours and people’s work.” That guy just seems like a fucking dick.
People might be more eccentric, but I don’t know if that would be the case. But you could also argue that in Aspergery people, they don’t follow norms or have many social graces. Maybe, this is an expression of social gracelessness.
But I don’t know. I don’t know if I buy that either. I don’t think that high IQ people are necessarily, on average, more dickish than not super high IQ people. But this guy is certainly a fucking dick about this issue.
These high range tests of which I’ve taken. I have three dozen give you inflated scores. I’d say that in general not. With regard to the practice effect, maybe, if you go in cold taking one of these high range tests, I don’t think it’s going to give you an inflated score because you really don’t know what you’re stepping into if you’ve never taken one of these tests before.
They’re hard. Now if you’ve taken a bunch of them, as I have, what it takes in terms of effort, a lot of people will take a look at the high range test that might have 30 problems. Say that I’ve done pretty well on a regular range IQ test, you’re pretty decent, maybe score a 140 on it, on a test you were given as a kid.
You might be good at puzzles. So, you see one of these thirty item high range IQ tests, let’s say, measures, or claims to measure, from 140 to 170.
So, you go through it once. Right off the bat, you think the answers to three of the early problems, because most of these tests are arranged from easier problems to the hardest problems. So, you get three off the bat. It takes like ten minutes and then you’re like, “Okay, maybe, I should try this test.”
You sit down for half an hour, 40 minutes, maybe get five others. You’re pretty confident about the answers to five other problems. Then, maybe, that encourages you to spend another two hours and, maybe, get the answers to four other problems.
Now, you’re up to, maybe, 12 items correct, or you think you have the answers to 12 items, I assume. You spend another three or four hours across a couple of days, a couple evenings. Maybe, you work out what you think are plausible, what you think are plausible answers, to, maybe, two or three more problems and then just the rest of it.
It’s just you. You’re like, “Well, I’ve spent almost 10 hours on this test so far.” You spend another couple hours taking wild guesses, so you get half an idea what the problem is about. And if it’s multiple choice, you’re just going to go ahead and take a wild guess at the other 16 problems that you haven’t figured out the answer to, for sure.
If it’s not multiple choice, you’re still going to get sick of it. After a dozen hours, you are going to take wild guesses. You’re going to be confident in your answers to maybe a dozen problems. You’re going to take educated guesses on another few problems, maybe wild guesses on the field.
After spending 14, 15 hours at the most on it, you turn it in and you get your score back. You get like eleven problems correct. That gets you a high score at 151, 152. It’s not unreasonable. What you don’t know as a one time pretty smart test taker is what it would take to get instead of eleven out of thirty to get twenty-four out of thirty, which would be another fucking sixty hours, at least, of sitting there trying different angles on these problems, maybe, it’s a reference heavy book.
A heavy IQ test looking up obscure definitions of some of the words and trying to match up the most obscure definitions. It would take a lot of work.
Let’s say, you’ve got a decent job, where you’ve got a good job. You make $3,000 a week. You take home in the low six figures. Maybe, you’re a lawyer. Maybe, you’re an engineer. You make like $140,000 a year.
It would seem weird to you to spend 60 hours or 70 hours, almost two full weeks of work on this test. If you spend two full weeks of work, at work, you earn $5,500, and here you are doing all this work for free, so, a lot of competent people are going to not know it takes that effort.
It is really minimizing the effort it takes on some of these tests. The test I’m working on currently I’ve been a little lazy with it, but I’d say that I’ve got pushing a hundred hours on it. Really, to do the very best job, which should be, at least, another twenty hours more, I don’t know if I’ll do that because it has got a deadline.
But given the situation with these tests, for most people, it’s going to give a pretty reasonable IQ score to the extent that you believe in IQ at all for people like me who know what it takes. On some of these tests, I’ve probably spent close to two hundred hours, which is crazy.
But knowing that that’s what you have to do, to do really well, and having the confidence that if you think of these problems long enough, you might get the answers to some of these things that; you could argue that by virtue of spending so much time on these tests that I’m outperforming my natural, what you might think would be my natural, I.Q.
It is just by sheer waste, just force of spending time and coming up with 100 different angles on a problem, until you find one that works, you can make the argument. Yes, there’s a practice effect like that.
I’ve learned that it takes a huge amount of effort. I’ve learned the tropes, the areas that plague some of these tests go into. It’s not uncommon to find items on these tests that do something with Pi because Pi is an endless succession of digits.
To some extent you can argue that they’re random, so, you can do something with a set of random digits. That’s also a famous number. So, Pi shows up not rarely on these tests. I know that from having taken a bunch of these tests.
Also, by figuring how the people who write the tests are thinking, you think, “Well, all right, Pi is a famous irrational number. What are some other famous irrational numbers? Square root of 2. 1/Pi. Pi divided by four. What else?”
If you look around, you can probably find sequences on a lot of these tests that fit the bill that way. I know that. So, I have some background in this where I have some things I can try if there’s a sequence problem on a test.
And to that extent, I’ve got knowledge that, maybe, lets me play above my ability level to some extent. Does that mean because there are eight guys in the world who might get a 190 on a test, will they only deserve a 179? That this fucker should wreck everybody’s work?
It’s a harmless thing. I mean, what’s the harm? The societal harm in me saying that I’ve got an IQ in the 190s based on scores I’ve been given on these tests, but that, maybe, I only have a score in the 180s. Why does this fucking V for Vendetta vigilante guy get to wreck everybody’s work?
He’s addressing a societal ill that just doesn’t exist. Even if there were a bunch of people going around and there, might be a few hundred people going around saying their IQ is such and such on based on some high range test they took, there’s no societal ill, except for, maybe, the people who took the tests and are bragging about their scores because they’re not going to get laid out of this, which is what some of them want.
They’re just going to creep a bunch of people out. But they have this credential that they’re compelled to share with people in the hopes that somebody will be impressed and nobody’s going to be impressed. They’ll just think they’re a fucking creepy weirdo.
So, the harm is in the creepy. It’s the creepy weirdos who are being harmed, not society. So, with that, I think we can wrap this up. I mean, not everybody is a creepy weirdo. A lot of people might be sad weirdos, lonely weirdos.
Some people might be like super gifted, like non-weirdos who are just grew up in the Appalachians and weren’t exposed enough to normal society. Maybe, they grew up in a Hillbilly Elegy situation.
They happened to be super smart. They don’t realize that it’s creepy to be interested in IQ. They just like taking the test because they like solving puzzles. So, it’s possible to just be a naive bragger about one’s own IQ without being a weirdo about it just because you haven’t learned any better. Fucking Good Will Hunting, growing up in South Boston, getting in fights, picking up Harvard girls, doesn’t know any better, he’s a janitor at Harvard.
He solves the problem, slept on the blackboards at night in between cleaning toilets. Not a real character by the way. It’s fucking a bad thing. But he won an Oscar along with a fucking Affleck for writing a screenplay. So, good job for everybody.
[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.
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Rick Rosner 