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 RevolutionsTwitter/X: @LiminalRevYouTube: @TheKieranZimmer (to listen to Kieran's conference talk on the agency paper)Timestamps00:00 — 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 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.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.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.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.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.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.
