I am your hero!
I am your master!
Learn my arts,
Seek my way.
Learn as I learned,
Seek as I sought.
Envy me!
Aim at me!
Rival me!
Transcend me!
Look back,
Smile,
And then—
Eyes front!
I was never your city,
Just a stretch of your road.
Part of the Politics Is the Mind-Killer subsequence of How To Actually Change Your Mind
Next post: "Politics and Awful Art"
Previous post: "Rationality and the English Language"
"Von Neumann was probably brighter than I am;"
That one made me chuckle ... Good for you Eliezer! I do enjoy your posts. But that comment cracked me up. So I can only presume it was in jest, of course. It would be a somewhat ironic attempt at modesty to compair yourself to one of the greatest minds in history.
Carl asked for someone with superior Spearman's g, which is more widely known as g-factor. Not "least upper bound", just "superior".
Spearman's g is tricky. It's easy for me to see that Jaynes is better at Bayesian calculus than I am, but that doesn't mean I can infer that Jaynes was doing it through superior g-factor (nor that he wasn't).
Traditional IQ tests sensibly and reliably measure a range of around 60-140. Richard Feynman's measured IQ was 137, but you have to translate that as "outside the range of the IQ test", not "80 IQ points dumber than Marilyn vos Savant".
There have been attempts to devise measures of "genius IQ" but I'm not impressed with any of their validation measures, and in any case, I haven't taken any.
Von Neumann was famous as a genius who scared other geniuses. I still added the qualifier "probably" because I don't actually know that von Neumann did his stuff via g-factor per se, rather than, say, by working so hard that he scared other hardworking mathematicians. It does seem likely that von Neumann had one of the highest Spearman's-g of the 20th century, but it's not certain. Anyone above a certain range tends to specialize in modes of cognition, and they do what they do by choosing tasks that fit their peculiar genius, not necessarily by being generally "better" than other geniuses in any directly comparable sense. Was Einstein smarter than Newton? I don't know; they applied different kinds of genius. So I picked von Neumann as the archetype - his genius wasn't necessarily the most effectively applied of the twentieth century, but he comes to mind as having a damned high g-factor.
If you just say "smart", or something like that, then you're really asking after a sort of generalized status ranking, in which case merely to compare oneself to von Neumann would be an act of great social audacity. Perhaps this is what made you laugh? But Carl didn't ask about life accomplishment or social status, he asked about Spearman's g, which is a very specific request about a characteristic that's very hard to infer above the IQ 140 range.
Are you talking to yourself, or is there something wrong with the name on this post?