Episode Details

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.

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