Talk:Christopher Langan

Notice: Asmodeus and DrL are banned from editing this article.

The users specified have been indefinitely banned by the Arbitration committee from editing this article. The users are not prevented from discussing or proposing changes on this talk page. Posted by Srikeit 17:22, 8 December 2006 (UTC) for the Arbitration committee. See Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/ScienceApologist.

CTMU website comprimised

Google doesn't even allow you to enter to CTMU website. This is because each of the CTMU pages have been hacked to include malicious HTML at the bottom of every page. I'm not sure what wikipedia's policy is on linking to compromised pages with malicious HTML. In case anyone is curious, the HTML is disguising itself as a "yahoo counter" and looks like this:

<script language=javascript><!-- Yahoo! Counter starts
...
<!-- counter end --></script>

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Krappie (talk • contribs) 15:49, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Some of Chris Langan's essays may be found here: http://www.scribd.com/isotelesis —Preceding unsigned comment added by Isotelesis (talk • contribs) 20:38, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Concerns

I just today heard Malcom Gladwell reference Christopher Langan so I want to look what his story was and first landed on this wikipedia page. I wanted to learn more so followed the link. After extensive googling I am under the strong impression that much here is questionable. First on the wikipedia article itself. The sourcing is poor and at times out of context. There is no source for the 210 IQ number but himself. He claims that number in an interview. That is the Morris interview shows him, and no external source at being at that IQ. This is not independent verification and is in conflict with the current phrasing of "whose IQ was reported by 20/20 and other media sources to have been measured at between 195 and 210". Even the 195 number is suspect. While 20/20 per transcript did solicit a test, no IQ number is reported, but instead the transcript states In the past, his IQ has been measured at 195 indicating that this too may have been self-reported and is actually not compounded by the 20/20 report. All other sources simply refer back to this report. There are sources calling this his certified IQ without much of a tangible proof or show of sound methodology. It seems likely that the IQ number springs from an Omni magazine test (original research warning) which is discussed here: http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/ where Langan is reported to score high on a second attempt. Given that this was an off-line un-peer-reviewed test it is questionable if the IQ numbers "estimated" here actually hold up.

The current wikipedia article is also questionable on other grounds. It gives the impression of false respectability. Let me make plain what I mean by that. This source [1] claims that the inventor of the Omni test mention above was the original founder of the Mega Society in 1982 and that Langan tried to make it his own later. The source mentions that Langan lost litigation over the name of the society (more original research). Finally, the article gives the impression of the society that he publishes at is respectable, quoting the AAAS. But if one follows the link it actually is about AAAS adopting a resolution that states about intelligent design that "makes it improper to include as a part of science education" and the linked article notes the conflict on interest in the supposed peer review of the society. I quote "He is also a Fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID), which promotes intelligent design, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Baraminology Study Group, a creation science group. Given these associations, Dr. Sternberg would appear to be, at very least, an advocate for "intelligent design" and critical of standard peer review processes as they bear on the scientific assessment of the "intelligent design" hypothesis.". Hence rather than the link to the AAAS affirming the status of professional society on ISCID it draws the quality of the organisation into question. I don't see how links like that can be assumed proper sourcing. Overall I feel that this is one of the poorer wikipedia articles I have read on a person with clearly poorly sources even misleading citations. If there was a vote to delete, I would advocate for that. In lieu of that there clearly is serious need for clarifying the citations and putting the text in proper light (remove self-claims or mark them as such, make clear what citations actually say rather than use them to give impressions, etc) 99.150.131.106 (talk) 06:26, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Agree with the above. This is complete quackery. And if you listen to this fellow here he's downright scary, advocates eugenics, and much other bizarreness.38.98.85.130 (talk) 17:02, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure who these commenters are, but I have some personal knowledge about these controversies. Langan was the highest scorer on the Hoeflin Mega test, the hardest IQ test ever devised, which was the qualifying exam for the Mega Society. The accuracy of this test is much lower than most IQ tests because of the fundamental statistical difficulties of high-range testing. I believe this is where the lower number (195) comes from. The higher number (210) comes from combining several partially correlated tests, which is a valid procedure, however the details of his particular calculation have not been made public so far as I know. IQ is a rarity measure rather than a direct measure of intelligence and it is somewhere between difficult-to-interpret and meaningless at such high levels. At any rate Langan is very intelligent.

The dispute over the Mega Society was with Kevin Langdon, a member of several other high IQ societies (his qualification for those societies is unclear), an extremely difficult and argumentative person. (I could use harsher words here - he is perhaps the most infuriating person I have ever dealt with.) Langdon won control of the Mega Society with a baseless lawsuit which Langan did not have the money to travel from New York to California to defend - the case was not litigated, a default judgment was entered for the plaintiff and Kevin Langdon assumed control of the Mega Society. Chris Langan founded the Mega Foundation in response. A great deal of work was done on the Mega Foundation's website and its associated mid-tier (160 IQ) Ultranet society flourished for a couple of years (, but it seems to have died out over the last few years. Facts not in dispute are that Chris Langan qualified for and joined the preexisting Mega Society, became its president, was forced out by Kevin Langdon, then founded a competing organization, the Mega Foundation.

Langan did publish in some Intelligent Design journals, but his theory was never in any way connected to biblical religion. His theory is that the universe is a self-creating math/linguistic phenomenon, a self-processing language, which is itself intelligent and the totality of reality generated by this may be identified with God. (This is as I understand it - his language is very dense and uses many coined words.) His choice of venue to publish his ideas was politically poor, but it shouldn't affect evaluating the merits of his thoughts. I have never had any direct communication with Langan, nor am I a partisan of his, but I think he has an interesting story and thoughts which I believe meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines. Enon (talk) 23:32, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Spinoza's god

I think you can only get there if you misunderstand the CTMU, which I have read. Langan is not talking about Spinoza's god. He is talking about divine intervention (telic influence). Spinoza's god has no power over the world. Physics is set. Langan is far more flexible in his approach.

Intelligence Citations Bibliography for Articles Related to IQ Testing

You may find it helpful while reading or editing articles to look at a bibliography of Intelligence Citations, posted for the use of all Wikipedians who have occasion to edit articles on human intelligence and related issues. I happen to have circulating access to a huge academic research library at a university with an active research program in these issues (and to another library that is one of the ten largest public library systems in the United States) and have been researching these issues since 1989. You are welcome to use these citations for your own research. You can help other Wikipedians by suggesting new sources through comments on that page. It will be extremely helpful for articles on human intelligence to edit them according to the Wikipedia standards for reliable sources for medicine-related articles, as it is important to get these issues as well verified as possible. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 19:54, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Internationalise

The article says "Board-certified". What board?

—DIV (138.194.12.32 (talk) 08:30, 6 August 2010 (UTC))

I'm curious about that, myself. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:13, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Following the "neuropsychology" wikilink and scrolling down to the external links section I find: "The American Board of Clinical Neuropsychology - Board certifying body for practicing Clinical Neuropsychologists. ABCN is a member of the American Board of Professional Psychology". I don't think this point really merits inclusion in the article. 71.23.13.63 (talk) 23:42, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Just wondering

Hi. I'm the subject of this article, and I find myself wondering about certain recent modifications.

First, I see the epithet "crank" in the References section (source #29), and wonder whether this is really appropriate in a Wikipedia bio article (I'm not an expert on WP:BLP, but as I understand it, such insults have been specifically prohibited). Granted, it's in the references, but those are on the page in plain English along with the body of the article. It seems to me that not only was this title chosen for its insulting character, but that any page bearing such a title is ad hominem in nature, which suggests that its scholarly value may leave something to be desired.

These misgivings were confirmed when I visited the site and ascertained that its author, a blogger of no particular notoriety, is seriously confused regarding certain distinctions basic to the essay he is criticizing. For example, he erroneously denies the distinction between the mathematical object "set" and the formal language "set theory", taking exception to certain widely accepted definitions of these concepts which appear in Wikipedia. This is not the only critical error he makes. (While he claims to have a degree in computer science, the target of his criticism is not computer code.) In short, he exhibits no understanding of that which he claims to be criticizing.

Much the same applies to another blogger whose attacks are linked in the references (sources #30 and #31). As nearly as I can tell, the blogger in question is merely an opinionated college student with no appreciable knowledge of metaphysics or of my work in that field. Unsurprisingly given his apparent lack of technical knowledge, he too relies primarily on ad hominem rhetorical techniques.

Lastly, my work and I have been extensively discussed (pro and con) over the last decade, often by people claiming to be qualified professionals but strangely reluctant to attach their full identities and bona fides to their criticisms. This casts doubt on the sentence "Few have sought to either publicly support or refute Langan's ideas." Such sweeping statements are generally hard if not impossible to verify, and may therefore be inappropriate in an encyclopedia article.

That should do it for now. As I say, I don’t claim to be an expert in these matters. But just in case, perhaps someone more knowledgeable might want to have a look. Christopher Langan (talk) 17:31, 19 September 2011 (UTC)