Summary of my activitiesPaul Cooijmans
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In the mid-1990s I started designing tests to find out to what extend it is possible to measure intelligence beyond the valid ceilings of the tests used in regular psychology. Over the years I began to study other aspects of (high) intelligence as well, and also founded several I.Q. societies. My intelligence tests and related activities are the most successful endeavour in my life so far in that they are appreciated by thousands around the world.
From 1980 on I have been playing guitar, and from about 1981 I have been composing. I first played rock (in a self-founded band called Catweazle), then jazz, then classical music, and studied guitar and composition at a conservatory from 1986 to 1993. Since the mid-1990s I have performed and composed very little because it turned out impossible to connect to the outer world through music; making a living with it, getting compositions played and/or published and getting concerts as a guitarist were not feasible. My fairly large oeuvre always remains available for musicians who wish to play it though. From about 2009 on, I have been publishing recordings of my music in the form of short films on "YouTube".
My work in music theory of 1992 is one of my first original ideas.
Since about 1981 I have been writing, mainly short stories in Netherlandic. In the 1990s I have also lectured from those and won a literature prize. Publishing and selling these works in paper form have not succeeded on a significant scale. Almost all of it can be read online now, and I am still available for lectures.
Topics in my philosophical work are sense of good and bad, justice, truth, objective ethics, treatment of crime, human quality and awareness. In short my insights are that truth and good and bad are objective and the opposite of relative (I avoid the word "absolute" here as I know some mistake that for "divine").
An important idea of mine is that only what can be verified by aware beings exists.
The main concept I study in psychology is that of genius, which I see as a synergy of conscientiousness, intelligence and associative horizon. Other fields of interest are personality, early memories and Asperger Syndrome. Also I observe the mistaken notion of "emotional intelligence" (previously called "social intelligence" and who knows what names for the same will come next) being used to downplay real qualities like conscientiousness and intelligence. There is no scientific basis for this, and psychology is serving an ideological and political goal (to wit, the feminization of society) by providing instruments like "EQ tests" and stressing the importance of the supposedly measured qualities therein.
I have been thinking of intelligent, rational ways to rule a country. Vote weighting based on intelligence in elections is an example. I am hard on crime, advocate freedom of speech, choose safety over security, fight overpopulation and advise eugenic measures. I am a warm defendant of capital punishment and recommend with emphasis that violent criminals be kept from procreating.
My main concerns in this field are to achieve a fair distribution of income and wealth that reflects the natural differences between people in ability and achievement, and to eliminate inflation. Both problems - inflation and too large (inflated!) income differences - are, at the root, caused by the existence of ways to "make money with money", and those ways must therefore be abolished. Examples of these ways are interest, dividend, insurance, and the myriad covert ways of lending against interest that go by as many euphemisms. Another way of phrasing the solution is to say "money itself must never be subject of trade". Yet another way: People must only buy what they can afford; that is, pay for without borrowing.
In 2001 I started using a modern computer and making my web site, and therefore learning about web design and the many markup, scripting, and programming languages. I have taken several courses in that field and started working in programming in 2005. Being a late newcomer on the Internet, I have a fresh view and see right away the things that are so horribly wrong in most "professionally" "designed" web sites.
The importance of studying human evolution lies in understanding how humans came to be and how the current individual and group differences between humans came to be.
Over the years, ideas have occurred to me that appear to be original and/or important; each of these is probably good for at least one doctorate, and some are beyond doubt worth a Nobel prize. Please read the below with care; this unprecedented concentration of novel insights may carry the unsuspecting reader uncomfortably far beyond one's present frame of thinking.
I found a way to quantify the important yet hitherto intangible phenomenon of discordance, not to be confused with mere dissonance (which I have also quantified). As such, I believe to have formalized a human psychological response to music.
I formulated a possible explanation for an apparent influence of the sun on human behaviour.
I propose a solution to the paradox that homosexuality, despite being hereditary according to some evidence and despite its obvious reproductive disadvantage, remains in the gene pool.
I argue that autism impairs spatial ability in males but raises spatial ability in females.
I advise vote weighting based on intelligence in elections.
Since 1994, I have been occupied now and then with the topic of early (first-year) memories, which defy the conventional notion of "infantile amnesia", and eventually formulated a causal hypothesis as to the occurrence of early memories in some.
I have developed a view on creativity (and genius, its high end) as a synergy of intelligence, conscientiousness, and associative horizon. I also equate this concept of creativity to awareness, connecting it to my idea that only what can be verified by aware beings exist. Thus, I see creativity/awareness as the causal, creating force behind existence itself.
Decades-long direct observation impels me to deny the existence of non-verbal communication in humans, including body language.
My work with high-range I.Q. tests has led me to the insight that Marxist ideology, invented by intellectuals, is rooted in the high-I.Q. person's inclination to project one's own potential on others, as revealed in utterances like "I really consider myself of only average intelligence" and "I am sure everyone of about average intelligence could achieve the same as I, if they set themselves to it and did the same effort as I". Such utterances tend to come from the very highest scorers, who attribute their success to hard work and persistence rather than to talent. Like evil people assume that everyone is evil and therefore are on guard, and good people assume everyone is good and are therefore naive, the pervasively intelligent can not help assuming their own innate potential in others, even when Tom, Dick, and Harry can plainly see the untruth of that. In fact, I naturally made this mistake myself, until my studies of intelligence and psychometrics opened my eyes to the brutal truth of inborn inequality. I see this form of projection as the biggest, perhaps only, danger of high intelligence, and as a limiting factor in evolution that causes the fall of civilizations.
Through observation, I have come to suspect that when a population is declining genetically, this is expressed in its male members first. In such a period, it may appear as if women are "finally catching up" with men, eventually leading to their by and large running everything while the men are lazing around and up to mischief.
If a population's average intelligence level is causally related to its civilizational level, then the intelligence levels thus linked to their respective civilizational levels form an absolute scale of intelligence, not just a relative scale as I.Q. is.
If parents of well below-average intelligence produce a highly intelligent child, which is possible given the high but imperfect heredity of intelligence, this progeny's potential tends to go with psychiatric or neurological disorder and extraordinary amounts of suffering.
In January 2006, by accident I discovered a hidden message in the Rider-Waite tarot that apparently no one had seen before in 95 years. Although this is not at all my normal line of work, it is remarkable.
Analogous to the phenomenon that advanced (more intelligent) species have smaller sex differences than primitive species, there may be a within-species tendency for (human) sex differences to be smaller in more advanced groups.
