Open source weirdos and intelligence arguments ;-) was RE: [SunRescue] Anyone need some computing time or shell?

[Christopher Byrne]

Reagan

RI grew up hanging around MIT (friday nights in the scisnce halls baby) and
I have met RMS on several occaisons. While I agree that he is an odd duck
(so am I), and that he takes things more than a little seriously (often
himself) I found he had a very dry, sarcastic and interesting sense of
humor. Of course much of what we spoke was involving local politics, and
some of the new weirdness in the freee software movement nationally, and so
we spent quite a bit of time making fun of politicians and self appointed
freedom fighters etc... etc...

I have also had the chance to correspond with ESR, and found him to have a
similar, if slightly more biting sense of humor. We mostly wrote about the
geeks with guns movement (I'm a firearms enthusiast myself) and we quickly
warmed to the skewering of prominent political figures, and members of both
sides of the gun/anti-gun issue (sarah brady and wayne lapierre are both nut
cases AFAIC, though I'm an NRA member since I want to keep my guns)

Basically boht of these guys are pretty tightly focused individuals on their
"main thing" in life, and so when it comes to that they have little or no
sense of humor, but if you find the right topic they can be very engaging
people. I have found this to be the case among many etremely successful
people, as well as among the hyper intelligent* , and the extremely
passionately involved activists  for a cause.

Chris Byrne


*the top 1/100th of 1 percent of intelligence in humans, according to most
"intelligence experts", are the "hyper-intelligent". Assuming a word
population of 6 billion, the hyper intelligent number something on the order
of 600,000. Essentialy that means people with an I.Q. (or whatever other
means of intelligence testing you wish to use) of over 160 on the lower end
scale, or over 180 on the higher end scale (there are two primary I.Q.
scales setting the relative level of "genius" at around 120 and above and
around 140 and above repectivley. Each is supposedly the top 1% of
intelligence,for a total of something like 60 million.)

I'm going to guess that many of the members of this list certainly fall into
the conventional definition of "genius" and some into the hyper-intelligent
categories. In fact most of the groups of people I associate with do. Since
so many people I know fall int that range, it brings into doubt the
assumption that there are so few of us on the planet.

ALso the more intelligent a person is, the more likely they are to
manipulate the testers or the test scores thus producing skewed results.

In my particular case my most recent series of I.Q. tests were conducted
while I was in high school. I was actually given severn seperate batterys of
tests, and I was severely irritated by them and by the testers so I would do
weird things like acing all the completely difficult things in no time flat
but completely flopping on the easist things, or for a multiple choice test
answer all of the questions correctly, if they were in revers order.

Also the more intelligent a person is the less likely they are to trust the
"easy answer" and will look for more depth in a question than there actually
may be literally thinking "no that's far too easy they must be trying to
trick me" sothey come up with what would be the correct answer to the far
more complicated qustion they formulated in their own minds, but that would
have registered as wrong by the test reviewer.

Oh and my results on the last test? They declined to provide us with a
number, but the two independant reviewers had two different estimates. One
was "well over 180 but impossible to really determine" and the other was
"well over 200 but impossible to really determine"

That would put me into the 1/1000th of 1 percent range, or perhaps one of
60,000 people. Statistically  I find that somewhat unlikely.

Please direct responses to this WAY OT rant to the geeks list. I ccd them on
it.

Chris Byrne




-----Original Message-----
From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
Behalf Of Reagen Ward
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2001 08:42
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Anyone need some computing time or shell?



RMS is a strange duck.  He and I exchanged email back in 91/92, but once
I suggested that I write a front end to emacs to make it work like vi,
he quit responding.  No sense of humor.  Actually, I'd say that he lacks
any sense of humor whatsoever, not just when it comes to emacs.