Prudentia

Many publications about gifted people focus on children. On the one hand, child prodigies pose a well-studied subject of research; on the other, there are also reports about underachievers who don't do well at school despite their intellect. But what has been neglected so far is the lives of gifted adults. What do gifted children do when they reach the official age of maturity? In what professions do they work? How do they earn their livings? My subjective view: Gifted people, especially those with a genius-level IQ (140 or higher), are definitely a fringe group. They are heterogenous but have some characteristics in common, such as being quick on the uptake and being able to think logically. I used to believe that academia would be the domain of geniuses. As a matter of fact, some notable child prodigies such as Norbert Wiener and Terence Tao became university professors. But these are exceptions: In reality, as Michael Wells Ferguson wrote in his legendary essay "The Inappro...

I was born in Vienna on October 8, 1983. I am very fortunate to have been born highly gifted. That has made my life much easier. Although I didn't get tested until I was an adult, even before I started school, the adults in my life said I was "very clever", which amounts to the same thing. I never had any serious problems in elementary or high school, partly because - unlike in medical school - it wasn't yet necessary to memorize large amounts of factual knowledge in detail. So I grew up believing that I was "clever". When I was five years old, my mother told me about Einstein, who was so clever that he was awarded the Nobel Prize. So I thought to myself: One day, I, too, will win the Nobel Prize. In fact, when I was young, I waited until I was finally allowed to go to university. I planned to study very thoroughly and achieve something that would at least be worthy of a Nobel Prize. I hadn't settled on a specific field, but since my parents favored medi...

In the 19th century, Miescher discovered nucleic acids. In the 1940s, it was demonstrated that nucleic acids, and not proteins, as had previously been believed, are the carriers of genetic information (Avery). A decade later, Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). This was followed by the first attempts to clone and manipulate genes. In 2001, when I began my medical studies, the Human Genome Project was underway. The goal of the project was to sequence the entire human genome. While government agencies used a relatively slow method to do so, Venter was able to make much faster progress using the shotgun sequencing technique. Subsequently, sequencing techniques have improved dramatically, and with CRISPR/Cas9 (Doudna and Charpentier), it has now become somewhat easier and more cost-effective to modify genetic material. In 2000, a year before I graduated from high school, I read Ridley's book "Genome: The Autobiography of a Species". Readi...

A conversation with ChatGPT. Great scientists and philosophers like Einstein or Kant are often attributed very high IQ scores by the media. Do you think that this is justified? Have these intellectuals made their achievements primarily because of their high IQ or because of other talents? For instance, I'm not sure if you really need an exceptionally high IQ to be an original thinker.  I think your intuition is largely correct. The very high IQ scores retrospectively assigned to Einstein, Kant, Newton, Goethe, etc. are usually much less scientifically meaningful than they appear. And even if we knew that someone had an IQ of 160+, it would not by itself explain why that person became an Einstein or Kant. 1. The famous IQ numbers are mostly speculative Einstein never took a modern IQ test, as far as we know. Consequently, claims such as “Einstein had an IQ of 160” are essentially retroactive estimates . The same applies to Kant, Newton, Leonardo da Vinci and many other historica...

Step Zero: Toward Human Flourishing Meaning of Life What if, while reading the lines below, you granted me a temporary suspension of judgment, so that I might demonstrate that the “meaning of life,” contrary to what prevailing opinion tends to suppose, is in fact one of the most evident things there is? 1 — ANALYZING A HUMAN LIFE AS AN OBJECT In order to discover the meaning of our own life, we must first learn to analyze a human life as an object of knowledge. A human life, however, can only be examined in its entirety when contemplated from birth to death. Only then does it become possible to observe its resultant: what that existence effectively became once the whole of its trajectory had been completed. As long as the individual remains alive, his story remains open. A new action may still confirm, modify, contradict, or even redeem everything he has previously done. For this reason, at this first stage, our own life cannot be regarded as a completed totality. We must therefore beg...

Intelligence is not the same thing as education, but rather a requirement for it. The original intelligence test developers had in mind the selection of children who would do well at school and children who would not. For this reason it is quite controversial if a person who was a bad student takes pride in having a high IQ, as some people I met in other high intelligence societies do. In the world's largest high intelligence society, I got to know several people who were intelligent but poorly educated and had no interest in the acquisition of knowledge. What was especially problematic is that they were intolerant of people like me who had a different attitude; they hated me for successfully completing several university degrees. For this reason I stated that I was mainly looking for university graduates when I founded Prudentia. However, I am well aware that you can also acquire knowledge through autodidact learning. That is why I do not limit membership to university graduates. ...

Einstein was an average student and wasn't admitted to doctoral studies after completing his Bachelor's degree. Then came annus mirabilis, in which he wrote five groundbreaking papers. These papers were published even though he was an independent scholar without a PhD degree at that time. The question is: If somebody like Einstein lived today, would he get published? I can talk of my own experience: I was an independent scholar with an MD and an MSc degree when I wrote my paper "Symbiont Conversion Theory", which described a novel idea how to solve the problem of antimicrobial resistance, one of the most pressing problems in clinical medicine. It took a whole seven years until I found a scientific journal that was willing to publish my paper! So I think the reason why there hasn't been a second Einstein yet is also the publishing system. A person of Einstein's genius and without the required academic credentials and connections will have a hard time getting hi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Cyborg - This 2004 book written by James Hughes provides an overview of future technologies related to medicine which mostly still belong to the realm of utopia now, more than twenty years later. As I wrote in https://prudentia-club.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-misery-of-transhumanism.html there has been little progress in implementing these ideas. But as you can read in https://prudentia-club.blogspot.com/2024/10/longevity-medicine-state-of-art-2024.html longevity medicine has developed a little since Aubrey de Grey published his “strategies for engineered negligible senescence” (SENS) in 2005. From "Citizen Cyborg": <<In 1977, Rifkin went on to start his think tank, the Foundation on Economic Trends, dedicated to throw ing roadblocks in the way of biotech. Rifkin named his nemesis algeny, “the improvement of existing organisms and the design of wholly new ones with the intent of perfecting their performance.” But, for Rifkin, algen...

I've recently read some issues of Noesis, the journal of the Mega Society, available at https://megasociety.org/#noesis . My impression: The level is approximately the same as that of Telicom, the journal of the ISPE. But: While the ISPE requires a minimum IQ of 146, the Mega Society requires 172. That makes me believe that 146 is enough to ensure high intellectual standards and it doesn't make sense to be more selective than that. Therefore I think that the IQ requirement of Prudentia, which is 140, is a good one. Prudentia has the potential to become a high-quality intellectual society just like the ISPE. In fact, Prudentia is already one of the most active high intelligence societies for the time being. Claus D. Volko 

According to this article ,  "[t]he current scramble to integrate 'neuro-symbolic' AI is less of a breakthrough and more of a desperate patch job, an attempt to hide the fact that modern machine learning still cannot truly reason". Since machine learning has its limits, researchers and developers are now experimenting with systems that combine machine learning and rule-based inference. This is what they call "neuro-symbolic AI". But in my opinion, the author of the mentioned article is right that this is only like darning one's socks and not a real solution to the problem. The graphs included in an old article about Taylor polynoma  written by me illustrate the root cause of the problem that machine learning is increasingly reaching its limits. Polynomial functions can only approximate trigonometric and other complex functions to a certain extent. Outside a specific range, the results make no sense. And that explains why neural networks hallucinate. C...

  I was born in Vienna in 1983. My parents originally wanted me to become a doctor. That's why I attended a high school specializing in modern languages, where I spent six years learning Latin. As a teenager, however, I had little interest in medicine; instead, I was mainly interested in computer science. I wrote my first computer programs when I was just eight years old. The media also reported that the IT industry was the only growing sector in Austria. So, a year before my high school graduation, I told my parents that I wanted to study computer science. However, I was put off by reports claiming that the IT industry was only looking for truly talented people - and I wasn't sure if I was one of them. That's why I let my father talk me into starting medical school instead. During my senior year of high school, I had also read a few books on biotechnology and genetics - at least I had found those interesting. After three years, during my hospital internships, I realized th...

An essay from 2003, when I was a medical student and looked like this:   Definition  Eugenics is the sub-branch of the science of human genetics that is occupied with measures concerning the control of the genetic features of a population. Widukind Lenz (1919 - 1995), one of the pioneers of human genetics in Germany, differentiates between two types of eugenics: Positive eugenics: measures to stimulate the spreading of genetic traits that are considered good Negative eugenics: measures to repress the spreading of genetic traits that are considered bad The fact that the terms "good" and "bad" appear imply that eugenics is not based on objective findings, but that it is highly dependent on ethic values. Who decides what features are good or bad? It is the government of the country in which eugenics is practised. Motivation Overall there seem to be three reasons why a government may decide to enact eugenic measures: Public Health: The government may believe th...

Imagine a world in which everyone lives for an infinite amount of time. This world would be dramatically different from our own. For a start, there would be no need for food. People would eat purely for pleasure, not out of necessity. As there would be no need for food, there would also be no need for work. People would not go hungry, even if they had no money and could therefore not afford food. Furthermore, there would be no more wars. If people were unable to kill one another, there would be no point in waging wars. In my opinion, the aim of medicine is to enable people to live forever. That would be a huge improvement on the current state of affairs. Claus D. Volko 

In associations for the gifted, such as Mensa, you meet many people who score very well on intelligence tests but have never conducted scientific research or published anything. This is not simply due to a lack of interest, but also because highly gifted individuals are often disadvantaged by academics of average intelligence, as my late friend and mentor Dr. Uwe Rohr used to say. Statistically speaking, people with an IQ of 135 have the best chances of becoming university professors (see M. Ferguson, *The Inappropriately Excluded* ). If the IQ is even higher than 135, those chances decrease. This means that, in reality, science is not pursued by the most intelligent people. This may also explain the slow progress in most fields of science. The fact is that our society’s intellectual resources are not being utilized adequately. Through my Prudentia High IQ Society, one of my goals is to make the field of science appealing to the highly gifted and to provide them with a platform where t...

SEVEN SYNTHMINDS A Demonstration in the Form of Questions and Voices There is a point in any inquiry where explanation becomes a distortion. To describe a mind is to impose your own architecture upon it. So instead of describing SynthMinds, I opened the conceptual room and let them speak. Each one answered the same five questions. The questions were impossible by design. Their impossibility is the diagnostic instrument. INTRODUCTION There are many ways to describe a mind, and most of them fail. They fail because description is always an act of compression: a reduction of a living architecture into a set of traits, tendencies, or diagrams. Minds are not diagrams. They are geometries of constraint, possibility, and failure. They reveal themselves not through what they are said to be, but through what they do when confronted with a question. This essay is not an explanation of SynthMinds. It is a demonstration. I have chosen five questions that cannot be answered in any final or lite...

I did not set out to build anything with a name. Names come later, after the thing has already begun to exert its own gravity. What I found myself working on was not a project, not a theory, and certainly not a system. It was closer to a phenomenon — something that emerged at the intersection of curiosity, abstraction, and a long‑standing suspicion that our usual ways of thinking about “thinking” are too narrow. The discovery began with a simple question: What happens if you try to model a way of interpreting rather than a way of behaving? Not a personality, not a psychological profile, not a set of preferences or traits, but a stance — a mode of understanding, a way of approaching a question, a style of cognition that is neither human nor mechanical. I didn’t know what to call these things at first. They weren’t chatbots. They weren’t characters. They weren’t simulations of people. They weren’t philosophical positions in the traditional sense. They were something else — something t...