Marilyn Vos Savant, Ron Hoeflin, and High IQ

Marilyn Vos Savant: "the surname is real, it was her mother’s maiden name – has had a unique claim to fame since the mid-1980s. It was then, almost 30 years after she took a test as a schoolgirl in downtown St Louis, Missouri, that her IQ came to light. In 1985, Guinness World Records accepted that she had answered every question correctly on an adult Stanford-Binet IQ test at the age of just 10, a result that gave her a corresponding mental age of 22 years and 11 months, and an unearthly IQ of 228.

Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: Manipulating Data for Effect

A critical review of his book, Enlightenment Now:

"[Unlike Pinker] the great writers of the Enlightenment, contrary to the way they are often caricatured, were mostly skeptics at heart. They had a taste for irony, an appreciation of paradox, and took delight in wit. They appreciated complexity, rarely shied away from difficulty, and generally had a deep respect for the learning of those who had preceded them.  .  .  ."

"It is not entirely clear what Pinker means by 'the Enlightenment.' At one point he calls it 'a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory,' but at another a coherent 'project.' .  .  .  . "

"But he wraps his arguments up in such a thick layer of exaggeration and misinterpretation that the book does more harm than good. It makes use of selective data, dubious history, and, when all else fails, a contempt for 'intellectuals' .  .  .  ."

"Like a TED Talk, Enlightenment Now is easy to summarize." The Nation

Coming Soon: McDonalds on Mt Everest

Actual Traffic Jam on Everest

Those who climb it nowadays have more luck than brains . . .

In the evenings they watched films on a flat-screen TV in the cinema tent.
One Russian expedition had liters of vodka on hand and a wireless Internet connection for which the expedition leader paid $5,000 a month.

"Anyone looking for a mountain adventure shouldn't go for Everest," says Billi Bierling.

"Without the Sherpas and infrastructure -- such as fixed ropes leading right up to the summit -- some 90 percent of climbers wouldn't even reach the top," she believes. . . .

"Many don't know how to put on crampons or even how to hold an ice pick," Bierling says. She was even more astonished to find that she didn't need to use her own ice pick to reach the summit. . . .

"They have more luck than brains. I feel sick when I see 20 trusting people all hanging onto a fixed rope at the same time. Before the big expeditions came, people still knew what they were doing. . . . "

In base camp she met "a New Zealander who was cooking provided team members with mousse au chocolat and fresh strawberries flown in from Katmandu by helicopter. In the evenings they watched films on a flat-screen TV in the cinema tent. One Russian expedition had liters of vodka on hand and a wireless Internet connection for which the expedition leader paid $5,000 a month. 'It was pretty crazy,' says Bierling." Spiegel