The Genius Myth

Being two degrees of separation away from Stanford University's Professor Lewis Terman.

A. I am two degrees of separation away from Stanford University’s educational psychologist Professor Lewis Terman, who co-developed and popularised the Stanford-Binet IQ Test. The late Professor Terman’s legacy including his Genetic Studies of Genius longitudinal study remains controversial (notably for his advocacy of positive eugenics and assortative mating / Darwinian sexual selection). Helen Lewis has a chapter on Professor Terman in his new book The Genius Myth (New York: Jonathan Cape, 2025) which I saw today. The New Yorker has a profile. Here are three interviews and presentations with Lewis:

B. Kathryn Bigelow’s new film A House of Dynamite is in theatres now, and will be on Netflix from 24th October. Vanity Fair coverage is here. The film is about a nuclear attack on the United States. Here is a trailer:

This is also portrayed in journalist Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario (New York: Torva, 2024). My childhood fears of nuclear war attack (such as during NATO’s Able Archer exercise in 1983 which impacted the United States, the United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Australia) were discussed in my OCIS 2023 talk on Russia’s nuclear blackmail (6th July 2023) which you can hear here, as well as the Q&A (parts 1 and 2) with the Australian National University’s discussant Professor John Blaxland (thank you, again: very much appreciated).

Here is a talk on NATO’s Able Archer exercise:

Also a useful and informative documentary:

C. Ken Burns and colleagues have a new documentary called The American Revolution. Here is a trailer:

D. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Negotiation and Conflict Management.

E. The underclass was a fear in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and in conservative and biosocial criminology informed circles in the United States in the early to mid 1990s. The New Yorker poses if AI will make us a permanent underclass (the disposable / expendable people hypothesis). This is an ideological narrative which has been present since the early days of AI (founder Professor John McCarthy who I had a brief email exchange with in 1997 for the former 21C Magazine) and cybernetics (Norbert Wiener’s God & Golem, Inc: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion and The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, from 1964 and 1950 / 1954 respectively).