it portrays my mediocrity to assess him as less than genius. that is probably the only thing he said that i am impressed by. he said "stupid people do not know how stupid their assessments are" (or equivalent), and i assess him as a clever person but not a person who possesses rare talents.
when i am told that i am going to witness the "smartest being on earth", then i will immediately look for flaws, because it is more efficient to find reasons to discount a claim than it is to adopt a claim only to be disillusioned later. if i can find no reasons to discount a claim, then i will adopt that claim with the assurance that i am correct in crediting it.
when i watched the first clip, i was struck by a few aspects of his monologue which did not fit my sense of reality.
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example: he claimed his father chained him to a horse (with padlocks on the horse end as well as his end) because blah blah, and then he says the horse "bolted" (as it were) and dragged him up the street before the chain broke.
i would have thought that either he or the horse would break before the chain broke were i not told otherwise.
if the chain broke from the tension, then how could that occur in the instance that the 2 ends of the chain were attached to mere flesh and bone? i would have thought that he would predict that that obvious question should be addressed during his spiel.
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he said some bully said "i bet you know how many million miles away the sun is", and then assaulted him because he knew the answer.
the bully must have known that the sun was more than 1 million miles away otherwise he would not have framed the question as he did. if the bully knew it was more than 1 million miles away, then he would have previously learned that fact, and therefore the likely hood that he does not have a reasonable idea of how many millions of miles away it is is tenuous
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he said head size = IQ (basically). he made no exceptions for hydrocephaly or korsakoff's syndrome (once known as "walnut brain") or any other condition like megalencephaly (if the brain fits into the increased volume of the skull)
he then goes on to say that he could determine the volume of his head by its displacement of water when submerged and thus infer brain size, but that obviously fails to take into account the thickness of his skull.
so many questions are raised for me in every sentence he says.
the third clip is mainly political philosophy and i was disenchanted enough to glance over it and consign it to future speculation (if ever i am bored)
08 Jul 2012, 7:16 am
