I just woke up and feel refreshed enough to compose this note. My health is improving. I sleep well. I wake up refreshed, which is a significant improvement over the chronic insomnia of the past years. I can exercise consistently without crashing. I can eat high carb foods such as corn chips and spaghetti, which during the worst of my chronic illness would make me ill. Note though, I do try to maintain my approximation of a Warrior diet combined with reduced carbs to stimulate ketogenic autophagic metabolism. I no longer regularly exhibit the signs of egregious systemic inflammation such as painful welts and pimples on my torso, and especially face, neck, and tongue (although I still get an occasional tiny one but not nearly as frequently nor as significant). And I do still occasionally experience the dreaded inflammation attack on my entire skull, which kicked in last night when I tried to work past midnight.
Introspection is the self-examination of one’s conscious thoughts and feelings.
I still have some symptoms of (the MRI diagnosed) cysts on my liver and spleen: the main being that my sustained intense level of cognition is limited to several hours a day. I really need to sleep immediately when I start to observe my energy level dropping; yet I tend to push on because I have so many tasks on my todo list. If I try to push beyond that point where my energy is dropping, it’s trending sloppy and delirious.
Which is what happened to me yesterday when in the early evening, I was trying to analyze the math IQ questions Keith F. Lynch provided for me. Initially I felt energized to answer his email and then I dove into the first question about computing the number of trailing zeros in the result for 1000!. My thought process was well energized and I quickly visualized what I think was close to the correct conceptualization and answer (although my energy started to tail off before I could double-check my thought process and then it all became too sloppy and discombobulated to push on). Then I was getting so hungry and I needed to take dinner; which I often delay in order to sustain my energy level for as long as possible. Because it’s usually right after eating (even in the morning) that my energy level starts dropping. Something about digestion and the health of my gut. So I tried to push on to answer one other math & programming IQ question, and my thought process was becoming labored, discombobulated, and sloppy. So I just had to punt.
My entire life I seem to have a lower IQ (~85 – 88% percentile) w.r.t. output of human language, but not the case for abstract and mathematical visualization1. I must noticeably concentrate when I write (even more so than when I speak), otherwise I’m liable to drop words and have various typos and suboptimal sentence construction. It has been this way since as far back as I can remember. I would try my damnedest to concentrate on what I’m writing and still have so many silly errors upon proof reading. And if I’m tired and overworking, I don’t have the energy to proof read. And my prose is atrocious if I’m fatigued as has often been the case since I became chronically ill. Yet I know that my reading comprehension is 98 – 99% percentile, from standardized tests and SRA self-study reading comprehension competitions I completed in grade school. When I say I was moved around to many inner city schools, there was at least one elementary school I attended in Baton Rouge which was sufficiently white middle class, where I had excelled. That was the one I mentioned about walking to school one day after missing the bus.
The composition of written documents would be best delegated to someone who is more skilled than myself. I can contribute peer review of such documents given my high-level of reading comprehension.
I enjoy and value most about my intellect is my ability to conceptualize with ingenuity. I don’t claim to be one-in-a-million or even one-in-a-thousand, but rather one-of-a-kind. I think I have the ability to sometimes devise novel solutions and ideas. Every human is unique so each of us has the potential for unique production. I live my life to see what I can produce and to collaborate and support the production of others. I try my best to acknowledge and encourage the merits of others. And not to distort my own accomplishments, merits, failures, and flaws. Meritorious competition is associated with increased degrees-of-freedom and potential energy of a system.
I often lose my composure when there’s discord or inability to achieve mutual understanding or respectfully agree to disagree. Especially so when I feel I’m in an intractable situation, because it seems that has been a frequent condition for much of my life with a lot of accumulated psychological trauma. Admittedly significantly due to my own decisions and choices, which created vulnerable circumstances. And if I’m exhausted and have an intractable or difficult situation, I may often lack the energy and lucid holistic thought process to make sound decisions. I need to work on letting (go of and allowing) incongruities slide off my back, and always stay focused and move forward on positive production and collaboration. Feeling refreshed helps.
The past years have been so incredibly frustrating: which I could express with an exasperated scream and dragging my fingernails on the chalkboard. It’s time to go succeed. I’m done with being mired in a backwater morass.
And as I complete my proof reading of this document, my hunger pains for this day have started at 3pm and I start to get that hum in my head where I can’t concentrate with full clarity, so it shows I only get so many hours a day to be lucid and I have to allocate them judiciously. This will mean having to respectfully ignore or refuse to acknowledge in some instances. Undesirable as that may be.
1 Which was confirmed by my significantly lower SAT verbal as compared to my high math score. My SAT and ACT test results seem to indicate that my IQ is in the range of 128 for verbal only up to 137 for my composite test results, placing me within the top 1% of the human population, with a higher range than that perhaps in math visualization than in language. Perhaps equating my math visualization skills to someone with up to 140 – 145 IQ if speed of analysis is not equated. That may not be a correct psychometric interpretation though. Perhaps my intellect is (to some limited extent) analogous to the posited intellectual asymmetry of the renown physicist Richard Feynman who claimed he only had a 125 IQ yet scored very high on math tests, although my math IQ skills aren’t nearly as high as his.
I had discussed with @dinofelis that IQ metrics are “abused on the other side of the mean” and don’t perfectly correlate with genius nor exceptional achievement. Overemphasis on arrogant IQ metrics is extremely demoralizing because it would imply that only a small smidgen of the population could perpetually and universally dominate the rest. That’s nonsense because it would be a very low entropy outcome, seemingly in violation of the fundamental law of thermodynamics which states that entropy trends to maximum. Thus the 160 IQ “genius” is overreaching where he doesn’t acknowledge that lack of predictable correlation of other factors is absolutely necessary for our existence. I know of at least two or three individuals in the 160 IQ range who destroyed themselves dragging others down along with them. They seem quite capable of weaving their own destruction in the same fashion over and over and never learning from their error as follows…
IQ, and also for example ethnotribalism, being only two facets of the diversity the inexorable trend of entropy that nature and our unscripted existence requires, can be both optimally Gaussian distributed and deceptively masquerading as negentropic from a non-relativistic perspective. The “genius” weaves himself a folly of worship of some desire for absolute “truth” of science to support an idealism confirmation bias that would only be valid in a non-relativistic universe. This is yet another case where the “elitists” refuse to accept that they—and any incarnation of man—aren’t omniscient nor superior to impredictivity of nature. By corollary none of us should presume we can deny accepting responsibility for the mess we made and simply latch back onto the tribe that survives after effectively promulgating ideological suicide in any guise of idealistic lust for terminating nature. A color-blind society will come when it naturally evolves and not because of the high-browed, brow-beating, overly-inflated self-importance of intellectuals. There’s “a calm space at the top" where 180 IQ apparently is sufficiently humble to see the folly of those two standard deviations below them.
We’re programmers, not freaking politicians.