Category: Epistemology and Method

EINSTIEN’S INTELLIGENCE AS A VEHICLE FOR UNDERSTANDING
(controversial truth warning)
If you don’t understand the following please do not assume I err but ask for additional information or clarification.

Despite his revolutionary achievement, Einstein’s IQ wasn’t particularly exceptional (say as Chomsky’s). You can see this outside of his behavior in physics. And you can see his limitations in how he ‘failed’ so to speak by relying on imagery and thought experiments instead of models – and replatonizing math and physics despite Descartes restoration(rescue) of mathematics via geometry(~measurements) over algebra(~language).

We are all as much victims of circumstances, where it requires three generations of thinkers to produce a revolutionary innovation in thought, whether it be philosophers, classical music, the other arts, mathematics, or the other sciences. (In my own work I am conscoius that it took us three or four generations to produce an operational logic of social science.)

What you probably dont know is the sex differences in representation and mathematics, and almost certainly don’t know that his gene pool favors the feminine verbal instead of the masculine systemizing – which should be obvious not only from test results, but from einstein, cantor, and bohr (mathematical platonists), or freud, boaz, marx, gould (pseudoscientists), or the frankfurt school (fictionalism(mythicists)), and the french postmoderns (sophists), or god forbid Rez, Kelsen and Dworkin in law (again, justificationary sophists) all of whom relied on verbal presuasion by the use of fictionalisms, rather than testifiable evidence constructed from first causes, and all of whom were carrying on a logical tradition like all of us do that generally formed sometime just before or after the bronze age collapse, the formation of religion as the first organized instiitution that permitted cross cultural scale.

This isn’t to dismiss the achievements of the great man, even if he rushed to publish because after meeting with Hilbert (who with a masculine mind, was not so captured by the feminine pictoral). Though Hilbert who did not correct Einstein, while acknowledging Einstein’s invention of the frame, and Hayek who did not correct Keynes, both demonstrated a rather odd behavior of ‘leaving to the responsibilty to the intellectual commons’, rather than distracting from their work. (Something europeans really need to get over.) 😉

The same can’t be said of Brouwer(math) and Bridgman(physics) nor Popper(empiricism), the intuitionists and the various movements that attempted the same restoration of the european tradition of realism, naturalism, empiricism, operationalism, and testimony across the fields of the four sciences.

Von Neumann is … scary. Euler is unnerving. Ramanujan is humiliating. I can follow Terrance Tao only so much as to be overwhelmed by his depth, insight, speed, and ability to articlate himself. Today, I’m truly humbled by Ed Witten, who, while I can approximately intuit what he’s doing once he manages to utter a complete sentence, cannot imagine doing it myself or how he did so as such speed. Chomsky, whose cognitive process I feel I can intuit and understand – but his working memory, ability to maintain coherent arcs of verbal density for an hour if necessary, while contextually leaping back and forth between details and narritives with extraordinary recall, appears to me superhuman. I’ve spent some time with David Gordon who has a nearly perfect visual memory of the written word, and when asked niche questions can usually cite book, author, page numbers, and position on the page. And of course, at a cost – he has far more visible aspiness than I do, and compensates with the use of his vault of memory for storing rather off colour jokes, that can keep you entertained on the two hour drive to the airport with ease – as long as your female companion (my executive assistant in this case) can tolerate the continuous blushing.

Time and place matter. Just as we are saturated with Language models today and their promise, which is putting more R&D IQ points on a problem than I have seen in my now rather extensive lifetime. Einstein had to come up with the frame and put the pieces together – a non trival exercise – but he’d been thinking about the light-and-mirror problem since he was a child – which leads to relativity. Many of us do. As well as the earily problem of volumes and geometry, or concentric wheels on toys, which leads to calculus. (For me it was the frustration that I was certain Induction was impossible, and simply couldnt accept the teacher’s justifications.)

There is a bit of an Einstein industry that in terms of intellectual history appears a bit silly, because the flowering we saw frothing out of the german capture of educational excellence from the english, creating the second industrial and scientific revolution was producing genius in every field. When, in general, the work from 1830 to 1930 in all the sciences (though clearly not in philosophy) was extraordinary – they had learned to think aobut and measure systems at scale beyond human experience both large and small. Einstein differs from say, Darwin, Menger, Hilbert et al, in that it created a new opportunity for wonder (and no small dose of academic snake oil). And so this new opportunity for wonder soothed the modern mind that Darwin, Mathus, Spencer, Nietzche and the pre-war progressive eugenicists had stressed with far too much uncertainty. Meaning, imposing too much self responsibility among those majorities seeking to avoid it.

Unfortunately, it was not science that prevailed as the new religion for those masses, but the marxist, neo-marxist, postmodern, feminist, woke sequence that gave promise of freedom not only from responsiblity, but of the effort to adapt to that burden of responsiblity: adulthood, truth before face, reciprocity, defense of the commons, and citizenship.

One thing I notice is our tendency to perceive intelligence that is similar to ours as less profound than it is, and to admire and judge profound, intelligence that is dissimilar (again on the sex difference axis). I probably should be more astonished by some people in the sciences than I am, because I percieve what they do as merely working harder in a different niche. While I percieve people with the opposite sexual frame as unimaginably more complex. Even in my work I just recognized that outside of the academy I could work on my research as long as was necessary since no one in their right mind would form a dissertation committe for it – but I felt I just worked longer at the problem from my vantage point in time, than anyone had before.

We can observe this sex difference in cognitoin, or at least men can, in any marriage of any depth with any women of feminine disposition and extraordinary intelligence. Just the one-box, vs lotsa-boxes, and passive firegazing vs verbal recitation, or who remembers what about what, and the way women approach problems resulting in female exceptional production in empirical work (my favorite being Elinor Ostrom’s work on the self regulation of commons as extending the work of hayek’s explanation of informal commons as extraordinarily expensive capital. (What is the price of the loss of ten percent of western high trust normative commons? It would scare you.) Or my favorite example – which lost a century and so few of us know about it – Babbage’s wife’s work documenting his computation, while his obsession with construction prohibited his production of a general theory of computation the consequence of which some PhD candidate will calculate in the next few generations, that while significant will be trivial compared with the postwar production of behavioral pseudoscience thanks to the aforementioned fictionalists. Conversely the male production of systematizing with innovated models transformed by space and time, produce all the expansions of our capture of energy control and understanding of the univers large, human scale, and small.

This interesting difference in behavior plays out at the margins. And well, you know, you can’t say this bit of truth in public without, like Sommers, getting canceled for it. Despite that the resolution of our differences by their comingling in econmics and politics, in the abence of a separate house for the sexes, would improve dramatically if we educated one another in them, activly sought trades between them, rather than pretended they don’t exist, ending up with this massive moral crisis that divides us because we haven’t.

Cheers
Hope you got a useful nugget out of it.
-Curt