Ep545_Measuring the Unmeasurable: Agency, IQ, and the Men Who Change History

In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop sits down with Kieran Zimmer — a software developer and independent researcher in psychology and psychometrics — to explore the science behind intelligence and personality. They trace the origins of psychometrics from Wilhelm Wundt's early experimental psychology through Charles Spearman's discovery of the g factor, breaking down what IQ actually measures, how verbal, mathematical, and spatial intelligence relate to one another, and why training specific cognitive tasks doesn't translate into a broader boost in general intelligence. The conversation moves into the Big Five personality traits reframed through a cybernetic lens — looking at extraversion as reward sensitivity, agreeableness as social affiliation, and conscientiousness as long-term goal prioritization — before landing on Kieran's original research into the psychology of agency: what personality profile best predicts agentic behavior, and why the environment shapes whether agency is even adaptive in the first place. Show notes: Substack: Liminal Revolutions Twitter/X: @LiminalRev YouTube: @TheKieranZimmer (to listen to Kieran's conference talk on the agency paper) Timestamps 00:00 — Stewart and Kieran trace the origins of psychometrics back to Spearman, Binet, and Wilhelm Wundt's early experimental psychology. 05:00 — The conversation unpacks the g factor , fluid vs. crystallized intelligence, and why IQ is fundamentally a physical trait tied to nerve conduction velocity. 10:00 — A tangent into AI and LLMs : why they lack vision, taste, judgment, and accountability — the human moat that remains for now. 15:00 — Stewart's Claude Code failure sparks a discussion on AI accountability , surveillance, and the rise of dystopian technocracy. 20:00 — Parallel structures as a form of exit from failing institutions, and the high-agency people required to build them. 25:00 — Agency, risk-taking, and accountability through Napoleon, the Inuit, and why modern Western leaders are managers, not leaders. 30:00 — Elites vs. peasants, cost externalization, and Kirk Doolittle's natural law as the physics of cooperation. 35:00 — Ressentiment , Nietzsche's under-utilization in psychology, and how secularism replaced the church. 40:00 — Kieran's quantitative conspiracy theory study : factor analysis of 85 questions across 273 respondents. 45:00 — Two branches of conspiracy belief: the aliens-and-Satanism cluster vs. the fakery factor pathway to Flat Earth. 50:00 — AI psychosis , Gnosticism, and the collapse of sense-making institutions in an age of information overload. 55:00 — Michael Levin's embodied cognition and cybernetic agency: thermostats, humans, and homeostatic set points. 1:00:00 — The Cybernetic Big Five broken down: extraversion as reward sensitivity, agreeableness, neuroticism, and the optimal personality profile for agency. Key Insights IQ is a physical trait, not just an abstract score. It's rooted in nerve conduction velocity, brain connectivity, and processing speed — and while you can improve crystallized intelligence through learning, the underlying g factor doesn't budge no matter how many brain training apps you use. The human moat against AI comes down to four things: vision, taste, judgment, and accountab