Is there any merit to the ideas of apparent mega-genius Christopher Langan?

Factual Questions
1

I was watching a TV interview series recently called “First Person.” Each episode highlights an interesting individual. The show aired circa 2000. One of the episodes showcased a guy named Christopher Langan. According to him, he’s been verified as a super-genius, with an IQ of around 200 or more.

Here is a link to the show on YouTube.

He has developed a philosophical theory called the “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe.” When I looked for more information, most of what I found was self-published material on his own website. Langan seemed a bit crank-like in the TV documentary, and the interviewer did not press him hard on his beliefs. So, I’ve been wondering:

  1. Is there anyone out there who takes Langan’s ideas seriously?
  2. Have they been studied, reviewed or critiqued by any mainstream figure in mathematics or philosophy?
2

Previous thread.

Relevant linked article in previous thread.

3

Yeah, I’m not impressed. Spinoza did it in latin!

4

To take a random quote:

[QUOTE=The smartest person ever!]
Hology is a logico-cybernetic form of self-similarity in which the global structure of a self-contained, self-interactive system doubles as its distributed self-transductive syntax; it is justified by the obvious fact that in a self-contained system, no other structure is available for that purpose.

[/QUOTE]

Lots of vaguely-scientific jargon without any equations? Check.

Lots of definitions without any elaboration or motivation? Check.

Obsession with precise terminology and notation, but jumping from newly-coined term to newly-coined term without any coherent discussion? Check.

References to math and physics (here, set theory and…general relativity, maybe? string theory? It’s honestly hard to tell) in a way that make absolutely no sense? Check.

Presenting long-settled, mundane results as unsolved paradoxes (here, the idea in set theory that there is no largest set): Check.

Jumping from scientific statements (well, pseudoscientific, in this case) to make sweeping declarative statements about religion and philosophy. Check.

Self-publishing on a random website, vixra, etc. because the establishment can’t handle your truth: Check.

So yeah, it’s complete bullshit. Most of the text is incoherent nonsense, and the small bit that remains is utterly trivial. It reads like the rambling of someone going through a manic episode. I don’t mean that flippantly; the passage literally reads like someone had a weird dream about a philosophy book they read half of ten years ago, then decided that it was a Theory of Everything. Seriously, what part of the article Inner Stickler linked to do you find even remotely compelling?

(Also, Inner Stickler, thank you for that link, because it is crackpot comedy gold.)

5

Langan’s obviously slacking off with his 200 IQ. Heck, Walter O’Brien got a TV deal and his IQ is only 197.

6

Mere intelligence does not equal insight.

7

This has to be pointed out every time someone quotes some ridiculous number for an I.Q.: An I.Q. of 195 would be so rare that approximately one person in the world today could have such an I.Q. An I.Q. of 200 would be so rare that approximately one person in the entire history of mankind could have such an I.Q. Don’t trust any claimed I.Q. higher than 160 (which is about 1 person in 31,000). No reliable test can measure a higher I.Q. than that.

8

Is there a scientific source for that information?

9

According to Marilyn vos Savant, the dude is a moran.

10

FXMastermind, the I.Q. score is, by definition, calculated by where your intelligence would place you on a normal curve. An I.Q. score of 100 is, by definition, given to someone who is of average intelligence. One standard deviation is, by definition, 15 points of I.Q. So someone who has an I.Q. of 200 has an I.Q. that’s 6 and 2/3 standard deviations above the mean. Someone who has an I.Q. of 195 has an I.Q. that’s 6 and 1/3 standard deviations above the mean. Someone who has an I.Q. of 160 has an I.Q. that’s 4 standard deviations above the mean. 6 and 2/3 standard deviations is about 1 in 100,000,000,000, which is about the total number of people who ever lived. 6 and 1/3 standard deviations is about 1 in 7,000,000,000, which is about the number of people presently alive today. 4 standard deviations is about 1 in 31,000.

This is the definition of I.Q. If you don’t know what a normal curve is, look it up. If you don’t know what a standard deviation is, look it up.

11

So there’s probably a person somewhere in history who had a negative IQ.

12

You also said

Nothing you wrote addresses that part.

13

“No reliable test can measure a higher I.Q. than that.”

Still waiting for a valid scientific source

14

Unless I misunderstand statistics and sampling sizes it’s because it’s a function of the bell curve and the population. There simply aren’t enough people taking the test to norm it at that level.

15

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it seems almost obvious to me. How could a test measure IQ’s that high if there aren’t enough people with IQ’s that high to test?

Also, isn’t there quite a bit of debate in the scientific community on whether IQ tests work at all in determining intelligence?

16

There is a lot of debate, hence my asking for a source

17

Feels tautological.

18

I think it’s fair to say that whatever human capability IQ tests actually measure, *most *of the extant tests are designed to measure folks in and near the fat part of the normal curve. So there’s a lot of statistical validity to an extant professionally normed test’s measurement of 95 vs. 100 vs. 105.

There are probably decent special-purpose tests for folks between WAG 1 and 2 sigma. Certainly a test designed for measuring folks near 2 sigma above 100 would be a very different test vs. one designed for measuring folks near 2 sigma below 100.

It’s darn hard to prove a negative, but if IQ 160 is 1 in 31000, then there are about 10,000 such people in the US. Factoring out the elderly and the children, we’re got a potential test-taking population of about 5000 people. Of whom not all will have a reason or the desire to take such a test.

So if such a test does exist, we have to posit some psychologist or team of psychologists who had the motivation to create such a test then norm it by running it against a darn large percentage of the available relevant population. And having gone to the effort to create such a test, who is left to use it on? The WAG 50% of folks they didn’t expose the test to while creating it? The WAG 150 people who come of age each year who are within the test’s target range?

Certainly it isn’t an impossible quest to create such a test. But it does smell a lot like a fool’s errand. Aiming for a lower level, say 2-3 sigma would VASTLY increase the target market for your test.

All this assumes the concept of whatever IQ actually measures even scales that way. I could imagine a situation where the concept becomes meaningless well before we get to the sigma outliers where statistically no human will ever be in the lifetime of the species.

19

To validate the use of an I.Q. test, you have to norm it. That means that you have to give it to a large group of people who you have some reason to think are a random sample (random relative to intelligence, that is) of the total population that you want the test to be valid over. If you gave it to just 10,000 people, that wouldn’t be a large enough sample to validate the test for I.Q. scores up to 160 (or down to 40). It wouldn’t be valid for measuring an I.Q. of 160 or higher because there probably wouldn’t be anyone with that I.Q. in your sample of 10,000 people. Should you consider the person who gets the highest score to have an I.Q. of 160 or 155 or what? And it’s even worse for a sample of 1000 people or 100 people or whatever.

On the other hand, if you gave it to a random sample of 100,000 people, you can expect there to be perhaps three people with I.Q. scores of 160 or more in that sample (and for there to be perhaps three people with I.Q. scores of 40 or less). I would consider that to be sufficient to norm the test. You then consider the sample to be distributed on a normal curve and distribute the I.Q. scores to the people in the sample using an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. 100,000 people is a lot for a random sample just to norm a I.Q. test. How could you conceivable norm an I.Q. test that claims to measure scores up to 200? You would have to have given the test to everyone who ever lived.

20

Really? Did she actually say that? Do you have a link for that?

I really don’t think vos Savant is in a position to be taking shots herself. If so inclined, people could also accuse her of misrepresenting her IQ (by repeatedly stating the outdated ratio score of 228 in her books and columns instead of her more modern and realistic adult IQ results (around 180 or so)) for self promotion.

Both she and Chris are essentially famous simply for having high IQs, though she has played the game a heck of a lot better than he has. Perhaps he should learn from her.