I’m Getting Mystic Here
For some reason, I started thinking about the smartest guy in the world, so I Googled him yesterday.
Is he really the smartest guy in the world? No. As far as I know, the smartest known person is an Asian mathematician, and the mathematician, whatever his name is, has the record to back up the claim. But the guy I Googled is often referred to as the smartest person in the world. He promotes himself before the public.
I find the super-brilliant interesting. I am not the smartest guy in the world, but I am usually the smartest person in the room, so being around someone I know to be smarter is a treat. I wish I could be improved and be more like them. I wanted to find out about the guy I Googled.
Instead of convincing me he deserved the title, this experience made me think about fraud and the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. As you surely know, this syndrome is found in people who are not very smart and/or competent, yet who can’t be convinced they’re not the best of the best.
My understanding is that the research that gave rise to the naming of the syndrome also showed that the smartest and/or most competent people had the opposite problem. They tend to feel they are much less smart or competent than they are. They fail to come forward when they should and tell everyone else what to do. When you’re smart, you are better at perceiving your limitations and the problems you may run into. See Idiocracy for more information.
The man’s name is Chris Langan. He’s a rancher. He has no college degree. He has never held a job that required much in the way of brains or knowledge. He worked as a bouncer, for example. For 20 years. He says he blows out the top of intelligence tests, and he is said to have an IQ of 195-200.
Einstein is said to have had an IQ of only 160. I kind of doubt that. I am at least close to that figure, and I haven’t revolutionized the field or physics or any other field. There are supposedly several million people in that general range, and we don’t see a lot of Einsteins.
Langan has a theory of life, the universe, and everything. I have not tried to read it. There are doubters, to say the least. He calls it CMTU or something.
Reading up on him led me to call BS on his claims. I will explain.
1. He says he got a perfect score on the SAT and had time to take a nap. Assuming the SAT took three hours back in his day, as it does now, he didn’t have time to take a nap. Not a real nap.
I took the verbal GRE, checked my answers over and over because I had nothing else to do, decided to quit, and walked to a convenience store to get something to drink. I got a perfect score, which is unusual. I would guess I killed 20 minutes with the beverage excursion. Taking a nap would have been out of the question.
Too bad I didn’t get perfect scores on the other parts, but let’s not talk about that.
Anyway, what happens when you get a perfect score on the SAT?
The College Board tells universities how you did, whether you apply or not. If you break a certain figure, they send you letters. Carl Hovde, the chairman of Columbia University’s English department, sent me a letter asking me to apply, even though I did not get a 1600. The University of South Carolina flat-out told me I was admitted. I got letters from other universities and colleges, asking me to apply.
I didn’t get any scholarships, but I was pursued. Maybe I would have gotten some if I had replied.
Langan says he was offered two full scholarships, as one of a tiny handful of perfect-scorers in the entire world. They came from the University of Chicago and a place called Reed College. I can’t buy this. I believe a pre-1995 perfect scorer, who took the old, harder version of the test, would have been chased all over the place.
Langan says he chose Reed College, which, he says, was a mistake. How can the smartest person on Earth turn down the University of Chigago for Reed College? Chicago is one of America’s great schools, up there with the Ivy League. Can’t swallow it.
My dad turned down a scholarship from Harvard Law School and went to the University of Kentucky, but then his IQ was only 142. I know this because he was furious when my mom took a test and scored 144. She loved telling that story. She laughed and laughed.
Langan says his family was extremely poor, but he lost his scholarship because his mother failed to send in the required financial information. How could that happen? Was she in a coma? He would have been a big, strapping adult. The smartest adult in the world. Why didn’t he do it for her? Not credible.
He says he got a scholarship from Montana State University but lost it when they refused to move a class to a later time for him. His car was not working, so he couldn’t get to class on time.
What?
This reminds me of a delusional girl I knew in law school. She came from one of the Virgins. She said people there loved her, and they were building a million-dollar house for her, free of charge. Then she said she didn’t plan to live in the house because there was too much dust.
She was a nice girl. I liked her. But she was delusional.
A university dumped a 1600-SAT student because he couldn’t make it to one class? The smartest undergrad on Earth couldn’t fix his car or figure out a way to get transportation? And who tells universities when to schedule classes? This can be done? I was not aware of this. I would have scheduled all my classes for 8 p.m.
He couldn’t take a semester off and return when his car was fixed?
2. He says that at 15, he was able to pick up a guitar and copy Jimi Hendrix perfectly. Okay, so he worked at a nightclub as a bouncer, and he made nearly no money, doing an unpleasant job in the rain and snow. Inside, there were guitarists who could never hope to equal Jimi Hendrix, and they made great money doing very little. But he settled for working the door?
He has this wonderful musical talent, but there are no videos or recordings of him on the web. He publicizes his other gifts, but being able to match a professional guitarist in the top 0.1% of his kind doesn’t seem to be important enough to showcase. But airing his claim that he COULD play like Jimi Hendrix is important.
So much dust.
3. He says that when he was young, he used to get high grades on tests in foreign languages he didn’t know. He flipped through textbooks briefly, and that was enough.
This is not possible, unless he means he took first-semester midterms. “J’ai un chat gris.” “Ou se trouve le W.C.?”
Who let him take the tests? “Excuse me, Miss Crabtree, but can I barge into your 11th-grade German II class and take the final?” That doesn’t happen. Why would they let him do it?
Languages don’t just require memorization and understanding. They require practice, and you have to learn the inconsistencies and variations. I suppose there are people who could pick up a lot in a day, especially if they already knew related languages, but not enough to pass a difficult test.
I found out he was on Twitter, so I took a look. The man is a raving antisemite! I mean, out there! Past the eccentric orbit of Candace Owens in the Nick Fuentes belt!
He thinks Jews control the world! Right! That’s how they got a cruddy little piece of oilless desert, their worst enemies got all the oil, and Gentiles got Europe and North America! It’s all part of their master plan! Letting Hitler kill a third of them was a tactical move! Four-D chess! The brilliance will be apparent any day now. If you were the smartest guy in the world, you would already see it.
He has a problem with blacks! And he said something really stupid about them.
Forbes published an article saying black women were going to lead us into a new age or something. This is ridiculous, but anyway, his response was on the same level. He said:
Question 1: Into what kind of future can a group A (White men) be led by another avowedly exceptional group B (Black women) with mean IQ up to 2 standard deviations below that of group A?
I have no idea what “up to” means here, since we all know the average IQ’s of these groups. The average IQ of white males in the US is about 101, and for black women, it’s about 88. A difference of 13 points. The standard deviation for all groups is about 15. Let’s subtract two times 15 from 101. I get 71.
So your IQ is ~200, and you think 88 is two standard deviations away from 101.
He also said this, in response to a tweet:
Obviously, Hitler was beside himself after reading Praktischer Idealismus (1925) and other Ziobankster-funded (specifically, Warburg/Rothschild-funded) works of RN Coudenhove-Kalergi, which declared Jews the “Master Race” and proposed that non-aristocratic European non-Jews be mongrelized to total extinction by forced miscegenation with imported nonwhites to form the “Eurasian-negroid race of the future”. (Note that it was not Hitler who came up with the term “Master Race”, but those who had scared the living hell out of Hitler and every other sane non-Jewish White person in Europe.)
Where to begin?
“Ziobankster”? What?
Praktischer Idealismus is the German title of Practical Idealism, a book written by a strange man named Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi. All I know about him is what I just read on Wikipedia. He appears to have been an eccentric who came up with a ridiculous plan for ordering the world’s nations and races, as though that were possible. It looks like he was very influential, but he was a nothing compared to what he wanted to be. His version of the world never came to be.
Hitler hated Coudenhove-Kalergi. But why would anyone call Hitler “sane”? Hitler was a paranoid dictator who practiced genocide so successfully he’s in history’s top 10. He killed more gentiles than Jews, many of them fellow antisemites. He was sane in the sense that he wasn’t psychotic, but Langan doesn’t use the word “sane” to mean “not psychotic.” He uses it to mean “rational.” So Hitler was rational?
He mentions the Rothschilds and Warburgs. The whole business about wealthy Jewish families running the world is absurd, for the reasons mentioned above. If Jews run the world, why are Iran, Lebanon, and Syria not occupied right now? How did Obama get elected?
What a crummy job they’re doing. Maybe the Elders of Zion are demented, like Joe Biden. Maybe they need to be eased into retirement homes and replaced by Ben Shapiro and, let’s say, Jerry Seinfeld. “J’ever notice how gentiles…”
My take on this guy is that he’s like the con man Frank Abagnale. A self-promoter who makes bogus claims he hopes no one will check.
I was laughing about this last night with my wife. I told her, “NEVER believe anyone’s resume.”
It’s true. You know how many CEO’s America has now? Go to Facebook or Linkedin and count them. Every third black male teenager on Tiktok is a CEO. The CEO of his mom’s basement. I guess technically I’m a CEO. I have a business entity.
If someone says, “I was involved in the founding of Starlink,” it means he was the guy they called when the guy who walked Elon Musk’s dog called in sick. If he says he’s a web-based entrepreneur, it means he links to Amazon from Youtube videos no one watches.
I know a guy who said he had a big company that bought and restored old Navy ships so they could be put on display as museums. He had a corporation with an impressive name.
He found a destroyer in Mexico, and he got the Mexicans to agree to sell it. Then, according to sources on the web, he told a Texas company he wanted to move it. The company later sued him, saying they spent something like $800,000 preparing for the move. They said he ghosted them and never paid them. They got a default judgment because he didn’t show up in court.
According to web sources, his company’s total income for one year was below $25,000. But to talk to him, you would have thought he was running Maersk. We’re doing this, and we’re doing that, and we’re in negotiations with this bunch to form a partnership, and this important person in the NSA is telling me that, and it’s all very hush-hush, there will be an announcement soon…
He claimed he had designed a practical atom bomb when he was in high school, and that a state university had admitted him as a physics major based on his design. No application required.
When leftists were lying, saying Iraq never had any uranium ore, I wrote about it. It turned out they had hundreds of tons. I am a real physics major. I figured out how much bomb-grade uranium the ore contained, and I figured out how many critical masses–bomb cores–could be made from it. It’s sixth-grade math.
My acquaintance called and let me know I was pretty close to correct. Like he knew. He brazenly told this to a person who had studied physics for 5 years.
Eventually, I asked him why he didn’t graduate from college and become a physicist. He told me it was because there was too much math. He couldn’t do math.
I told my wife this was like saying, “I was going to be a bestselling author, but I couldn’t write words.” Even at the high school level, physics is all math.
Know what? He didn’t design a bomb. He has no idea how a fission reaction works. He has no idea how to make a critical mass in a short enough time to create a successful explosion. He would not understand this paragraph.
He was not accepted by a major university and put into its physics program. He didn’t do physics in high school, and he never got past algebra. They don’t put freshmen in physics programs, anyway. Students choose their own majors. Colleges just admit them.
He was a likeable guy, but a lot of things he said were totally unrelated to reality. He lied constantly.
He said he was building a big compound for some reason or other. He would have a concrete house impervious to storms. He would have a big workshop with a huge array of tools. None of that exists.
He offered people jobs. If he liked you, he offered you a position. He said I should be the organization’s attorney. A friend of mine is married to a mechanic. He was going to be the in-house mechanic. Never happened.
Never believe a person’s resume.
This got me thinking about Dunning-Kruger, which is a little different from fraud but has a similar smell to it.
I belong to a forum, and it has a section where you can discuss religion and politics. Stupidly, I visited after Trump won. Leftist laymen were saying really stupid things. One said Trump’s Supreme Court would find a way to put Biden in prison.
The Supreme Court does not indict or try criminals. I think they tell people this in high school. I explained this, and I started getting the usual stupid blowback lawyers get when they try to talk sense to ignorant people.
I lost patience and told these people law doesn’t require much intelligence, but it does require education. I told one he could not understand anything I said until he became educated enough to comprehend it.
That made him really mad. He said I was appealing to authority.
“Appeal to authority” is, as you surely know, a type of logical fallacy. I’ll give an example. “Over 90% of scientists agree that climate change is caused by human beings.”
A person who says that is saying, “Everything you say is invalid because people who are smarter than you disagree, and even though I, personally, have no idea what’s right or wrong, I win the argument. No tags back. Infinity.”
I told him he didn’t understand what “appeal to authority” meant. I would have been appealing to authority had I said, “Over 90% of legal scholars say you can’t understand discussions of law without some education.” I was just telling him, from my personal knowledge, gained from an accredited law school and years of practice, why he wasn’t competent to discuss law.
Incidentally, most scientists are not qualified to make judgments about climate. A lot of scientists spend their careers doing things like collecting bear poop and examining it under microscopes.
I had a wonderful professor at Columbia. His name was Walter Bock. He taught vertebrate anatomy and evolution, among other things. Basically, 19th-century science. He was an accomplished birdwatcher. Sometimes he appeared in class in his birdwatching boots. He was a fantastic speaker. His lectures were interesting. He was a bona fide Ivy League scientist.
He didn’t know squat about the climate. Most scientists don’t.
I was appealing to my own authority, as a person who, compared to the lay people on the forum, was an accredited expert. I have been a layman, and I am now a lawyer. I know why laymen do not understand discussions about law. I could have begun to explain why, but I would have had to write a whole lot of blog posts, I would have had to have an audience who was open to correction, and they would have had to be smart enough to understand the explanations. The first requirement was not going to happen, for the same reason you don’t debate your cranky toddler about using the potty or the floor, and the other two were not fulfilled.
Well, that’s probably wrong. I’m sure the forum people were smart enough to understand, because understanding didn’t require great intelligence. But pride and stubbornness negate intelligence.
Richard Feynman, the great physicist, once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” That quotation may be wrong. I read his books, and I think he said something about explaining to a young child. Anyway, that’s the gist of it, and he was totally wrong. Changing the world of physics, which I will never do, does not mean you’re automatically right about everything.
You can’t explain everything simply. Many things are hard to understand. Feynman was a real smartass, and he liked saying things that sounded cleverer than they were.
Explain differential geometry simply. No. Fricking. Way. Explain the Rule Against Perpetuities to a really smart 5-year-old. Good luck.
Am I claiming to be smarter than Feynman? No, but he said something stupid, and it was easy to refute.
Incidentally, and I don’t care what anyone says, appealing to authority is a perfectly valid way to argue. It all depends on how you do it. If I say obesity is bad for you, and I support my argument by saying virtually every authority who has studied it agrees, and I’m telling the truth, I have a pretty good argument.
If we argue about the meaning of a word, and I open the dictionary, am I putting forth a fallacy? Referring to authorities is crucial to the progress of knowledge. Lawyers use the word “authorities” to describe the, well, authorities they refer to when arguing before judges. Judges refer to authorities when issuing decisions. A case is authority. A treatise or hornbook is authority.
I told a forum guy what he was doing was the ESSENCE of Dunning-Kruger, but he was too busy coming back with Pee-Wee-Herman-level replies, so I let it go. “Lulzers u really burned him good.”
Okay. The floor, then.
Humility is really important. I would never try to tell an expert about his field. I defer to uneducated people who repair cars and install air conditioners because they know more than I do. It’s amazing how nearly everyone will argue with a lawyer who went to school for 6 semesters and passed difficult bar exams.
In any case, the Supreme Court is not going to indict anyone.
The worst DK sufferer I ever knew was a guy named Jim Robinson. He was a friend of my dad’s law partner, Norton.
Norton was utterly absorbed in making life good for Norton, the way a lamprey thinks about making life good for a lamprey without worrying too much about the bass. I guess Norton is still at it somewhere unless he’s dead.
Wow. The web says he died on June 16. I don’t feel any grief, because he was an annoyance from whom I distanced myself. When my dad and mother got divorced, and my mother’s life was hell, Norton told my dad he would swear lies for him. And he and his wife voted my dad out of the firm, after he let Norton become a partner very early.
I found myself right next to him at a grocery store before I left Miami, and on another occasion, I found myself a few feet away from him, his wife, and his son at a Winn-Dixie. I mean like 5 feet. We were all aware of each other. I never opened my mouth. They didn’t acknowledge me, either. We treated each other as though we were invisible. It was like the theater of the absurd.
His wife is basically a nice person.
Norton got my dad started in yachting. He got him to go in with him and Jim on a 38-foot Bertram, and they eventually got a 46-foot Hatteras.
Jim was not gifted, and that’s fine. We are not all brilliant. We are not all tall or good-looking or talented. We should try not to ridicule people over their shortcomings, although I guess I have done that as much as anyone alive.
Jim’s problem was that he thought he was really smart. He could not be reasoned with. He also hated me, because his son did something dumb, and when Jim tried to blame me, it backfired.
I recall a story my dad told me about Norton. He wanted my dad to approve some expensive change to the boat, and my dad gave in. He said, “What about Jim?” Norton said, “I’ll handle Jim. He’ll do whatever I say. He’s stupid.”
Wonderful friend. My dad should have seen his future then.
The Hatteras had a small Boston Whaler on the bow, on a davit. To use the Whaler, you removed some cables that held it to the deck chocks. Then you rotated the davit so the Whaler was over the water, and you lowered it.
When they bought the boat, I lived in Kentucky. I had no idea how to operate anything on it. My dad invited me on a trip, and we went to the Bahamas.
The seas were rough, and the Whaler came off the chocks and ran back into the boat’s windshield, which sealed off the saloon, which is what you call the living room.
I looked at it later, and I saw that someone had replaced a steel cable with a bungee cord. I also found a turnbuckle nut someone had lost on the deck. Without the nut, it was not possible to tighten the cable. I didn’t know what it was at first, but I figured it out.
Hmm. Wonder who lost the nut and put a rubber band in its place to avoid getting in trouble.
I didn’t know how to put the Whaler in the water or run it. I was seeing the Hatteras for the first time in my life. Jim.
Jim had a teenaged son who, according to my mother (appeal to authority), profited from selling a popular herb. Jim’s son was familiar with the boat.
When Jim found out about the cable, he was very angry with me. He accused me of causing the Whaler to go through the windshield, as well as lying about it. Clearly, I was a) too dishonest to admit I lost a nut, and b) too stupid to realize a rubber bungee cord would not hold a 400-pound boat in place in 6-foot seas.
Mind you, I was the one who told my dad and Norton about the nut and cord. So I was too dumb to hide the evidence?
I was an adult, and Jim’s son was a kid. I wouldn’t have cared if they had found out I broke the boat. I was not afraid of my parents or Jim. Why would I lie?
It had to be the son. Norton had no children at the time.
Jim didn’t know me from Adam’s housecat, and I didn’t know him, either, but this is the way he chose for our relationship to begin. He knew his son, so he must have known he was capable of putting a bungee cord where a cable should have been and lying about it.
So Jim’s plan to blame me for what his son did failed, and henceforth, I was on his list. He loved to criticize me, and he was never right about anything. He was always proven wrong because he didn’t think. Being proven wrong just made him madder, as if it were my fault.
The sad thing is that I tried to get off on the right foot with Jim the first time we met, but there was no dealing with him. I always try to get along with people. I never stood a chance with this guy. It was like he was possessed.
He argued with me about everything. A bunch of us were on a dock in Harbour Island, and I mentioned misty grouper, a popular bottom fish. Jim looked at me with scorn and said, “mystic grouper.” One for Jim!
Well, not really. “Mystic grouper” was something the other casual boaters were saying because it was a corruption that was going around. I, on the other hand, enjoyed reading McClane’s Fishing Encyclopedia, so I knew better. I corrected him back. Made him even madder.
He could have just kept his mouth shut. He thought he finally had me, so he jumped off the cliff without thinking. Not my fault at all.
Why would you call a grouper “mystic”? Are they down there flipping tarot cards? It makes no sense. “Misty” works because the bars on the side of the fish look faded.
Jim was very handy with tools because he ran an excavation business his dad left him. He made my dad a prop-puller for his boat. This was two big aluminum plates with a U-shaped recess for the prop shaft to go through, and four holes for bolts to go through. It may be hard to picture, but the idea was to put one plate behind the prop, over the shaft, put the other behind the prop, thread the bolts between the plates, and tighten them until the front plate pushed the prop back off the shaft. Or pulled, depending on how you look at it.
Well, it only works if the bolts fit between the blades. Jim had made us a 4-bolt puller, and my dad had picked up some spare screws with three blades.
On one trip, my dad guided the boat onto Mama Rhoda Rock in the Bahamas, and we tore up our props. We needed to get them off.
I had a buddy who was a graduate engineer from Columbia, and I wasn’t entirely stupid. We went under the boat and found there was no way to make a four-blade puller pull a three-blade prop. We hired a guy who had a 13-pound sledge, and he took care of it.
Back in Miami, my dad told me to take the puller to Jim and tell him what was wrong. My friend and I took it to him, and he insisted it would work with a three-blade prop. Politely, because I didn’t want to trigger Jim, we assured him there was no way. It was obvious. I said it needed another pair of bolt holes. Because I had said it, Jim had to prove otherwise.
He sweated in the sun, grunting and getting angrier and angrier. He should have just listened. We stood there, captives. He was doing my dad a favor. We couldn’t just tell him what to do.
When he got tired, he gave up. He took the puller with him and said, “I’ll monkey around with it.”
Oh, boy. I will not touch that, but my mother thought it was very funny.
When he returned the puller, it had two more holes in it.
My dad and Norton owned a building full of old people on Section 8. They had a crooked Cuban guy managing it, and they asked me to take over. I was all over it. I moved to Miami. I did all the work to prepare. I started a corporation. Then my dad and Norton did nothing at all. This went on for maybe a year. I could not get them to budge. I decided to get a real estate license.
Jim and his wife Carol, who was never anything but sweet, decided to give it a try. We had a meeting in my dad’s office, with my dad present. I told them everything I knew, hoping to be helpful. Jim sat on the couch making snotty, uninformed remarks. I should have been grateful for an opportunity like this. My dad was doing this great thing for me, and here I was, wasting it.
I think Carol could see I wanted to pummel him. She kept interjecting, speaking in soothing tones, trying to put a nice coat of drywall mud over Jim’s rudeness. She must have a hard life. The web says they’re alive. I thought Jim was older than my dad, but he’s younger. Some people don’t have the genes to age slowly. Look at Trump and Biden.
I could have saved them a lot of trouble. Well, no I could not have. If I had told Jim he and Carol were never going to get the job, there would have been more nasty, baseless, unnecessary comments that would age poorly, and Jim would have dedicated his existence to proving me wrong.
Of course, they wasted their time. The Cuban guy went nowhere, because no one but me tried to dislodge him. I don’t know why my dad didn’t stand up for me. He was not shy at all about getting in people’s faces and cursing them out, and here was this character, sniping at his son at every opportunity.
Jim is the worst DK case I have ever known, and unfortunately, I am one of the people he tried to use as a prop to make himself look smart, and he did it with wild hostility that came from nowhere and did not need to exist.
Anyway, I do not think Chris Langan is quite what he says he is. I believe the Asian guy, because he has proven his brilliance. The guy with the ship business really needs to come clean and not ruin his old age. And Carol has my sympathy. I guess I’ll pray for the Robinsons tonight.
