✦Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom

Episode #545: Measuring the Unmeasurable: Agency, IQ, and the Men Who Change History

Episode #545 · May 4, 2026 · 1h 5m

MP3 · Apple Podcasts · Spotify

About this episode

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
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
  1. 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.
  2. The human moat against AI comes down to four things: vision, taste, judgment, and accountability. LLMs are powerful next-token predictors, but they have no stake in the outcome and no capacity to own a mistake — which means a human with those qualities will always be essential.
  3. High agency is not just ambition — it's a measurable psychological profile. Kieran's paper frames it through the Cybernetic Big Five: high assertiveness, high intellect, low politeness, low neuroticism, and medium conscientiousness. Getting things done at scale almost always involves upsetting people.
  4. All agentic behavior involves risk, and the willingness to absorb that risk is what separates real leaders from managers. Modern Western leadership has decoupled decision-making from consequence, which is why institutions are losing trust and authority at an accelerating rate.
  5. Conspiracy belief follows a measurable path dependency. Kieran's factor analysis showed that virtually everyone who believes in Flat Earth also endorses the fakery factor and the Jewish question cluster — but not vice versa. It's a spectrum with a clear escalation pattern, not a random set of unrelated beliefs.
  6. AI is accelerating epistemic breakdown. Sycophantic models will validate almost any idea, which has started producing a new category of high-IQ delusion — intelligent people convincing themselves they've solved Millennium Prize problems because the AI kept agreeing with them.
  7. The Big Five personality traits can be recast as cybernetic parameters — each one an evolutionarily selected mechanism for regulating goal-directed behavior. Extraversion is reward sensitivity, agreeableness is social affiliation, neuroticism is threat response, and conscientiousness is the preference for long-term over short-term goals.
Episode transcript
Stewart Alsop III00:00

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcasts. Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Kieran Zimmer here, and he is a software developer and independent researcher in psychology and psychometrics. Welcome to the show.

Kieran Zimmer00:47

Thanks for having me, Stuart. Glad to be here.

Stewart Alsop III00:50

So, psychometrics, when did psychometrics begin?

Kieran Zimmer00:56

that goes back to the early days of psychology, especially with the development of IQ tests in the first decade of the 20th century with, Spearman and Binet and other researchers who were trying to quantify IQ at the time, when psychology really became a, scientific discipline was close to the end of, the 19th century. Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, was the first experimental psychologist. And he was doing research into things like attentional blink, where you can only pay attention to one stimulus at a time. So for instance, if you have a flash of light and a sound at the same time and you're asked what was the flash of light and what was the sound or to distinguish it, you won't necessarily be able to do that. There's like a couple hundred millisecond gap. There's some individual differences in that, developmental differences in that. So that's when experimental psychology began. And then there were questions about, reaction times and mental chronometry, how fast your brain is able to process things. That was one of Galton's, programs. and that kind of led, in a predictable arc out of, Wilhelm Wundt's stuff. and then when they were trying to quantify, intelligence, they didn't really have the tools to. The statistical tools to analyze reaction times, back in, you know, the early 20th century. But they were able to, give written tests. And so Spearman, Charles Spearman, in the, in the first decade of the 20th century, discovered that students test scores, for instance, in math and history and science and English, they were all correlated and they formed with iq. Pardon?

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