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.

Awful Article

What is this article even doing on Wikipedia? It was clearing written by the guy himself and is mostly irrelevant. No-one cares about his life history, and it doesn't really describe what he has "achieved" except in vague ways. Has he achieved anything? 129.67.50.212 20:25, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

His only "achievement" is a theory deleted from Wikipedia for being a load of rubbish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Cognitive-Theoretic_Model_of_the_Universe Surely this article should be deleted too. We don't need a detailed biography of someone whos work doesn't even deserve an article. 88.109.98.50 21:46, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Does anyone have any justifiable objections to deleting this? 129.67.50.205 16:52, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

If you feel it should be deleted, you can list it at WP:AFD - I suspect it'll be kept, given the sourcing, but I haven't looked in detail. WilyD 17:04, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Where is the proof for his I.Q. score? It says "see Sager 1999" etc. but what does this mean? Taking an I.Q. test out of a magazine and self-scoring doesn't prove anything at all. 70.54.126.154 (talk) 21:49, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Purported BLP violations

User DGG has deleted a few sentences from this article on the grounds that they violate WP:BLP. I do not understand how this is the case, since the sentences simply describe something of the early life of the subject. Could this user please explain their reasoning for the deletion? In my opinion the sentences are relevant to the notability of the subject insofar as they go some way toward explaining the unusual life-path followed by the subject (please excuse the low-grade turn of phrase, "life-path"). The peculiar career of the subject is an essential part of his notability. Thanks. BCST2001 04:21, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

North American High Society IQ League

Why is the following unsourced sentence full of redlinks inserted?

Langan served as President of the North American High Society IQ League from April, 1998 until September, 2007. He was replaced as President by his good friend John W. Morgan, Mayor of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality in Nova Scotia, Canada.

— Arthur Rubin | (talk) 16:55, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Strange presentation

Isn't it strange to present a person as an "autodidact" with a certain IQ? I don't know this person but I wonder if he really famous just for being autodidact and having an high IQ...--Pokipsy76 (talk) 17:25, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

The answer to your question is that it is strange. And the reason they present it this way, is that this man is not famous at all. 131.111.220.6 (talk) 10:56, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Sources and lack thereof

The references provided in the article list as sources Sager 1999, Fowler 2000, Wigmore 2000, Brabham 2001, and O'Connell 2001. While one or two of these supposed sources are verifiable via weblinks provided in the article, most are not. Since someone above alleges self-promotion here, I suggest verification of these sources and those that have lack valid weblinks be removed. 64.237.4.140 (talk) 22:40, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I have a technical problem with his IQ being 195

I have no problem with his IQ. However, his 3-part documentary from 20/20 is available on youtube here, here and here.

The margin of error is such that there should only be 2 significant figures. refresher course on sig figs brought to you by MIT

The problem with this page is that vandalism is on two fronts--the direct front and the indirect front. The indirect front attacks the article through QEA and makes anyone who reads this article agree that the article is very unintelligent.

Cite1 = whose IQ was reported by 20/20 and other media sources to have been measured at around 195

This comes across to intelligent people the same as

whose IQ was reported by 20/20 and other media sources to have been measured at around 195.472

can we please just say "around 190" or as high as 195

Cite2 =

Asked about creationism, Langan has said:

"I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible."

This is the worst "selectively taken" part of the discussion. This again reads like he is unintelligent. Can I have permission to review who put in this quote? He has several very intelligent quotes on creationism. This is his worst, and I haven't checked the source yet, but i'm 99.9% sure he said it. Without getting too technical, one of his best "Langan said about creationism : " a theory about entropy and that if the isolated system is defined to be the entire universe, than by the law of syntropy, energy(mass) cannot leave or enter the system, therefore if there was a "big bang" that arose out of nothingness, than it would violate the second law of thermodynamics. This was his best proof. I'm agnostic, but I'm a huge fan of this guy, so I want to help defend this article from other people with high IQ who are trying to make this article "conform to wikipedia's expectations" while slipping in their own agenda by making these two minor editorial decisions.

Can an admin please respond to my concern? (on this page--not my talk page) thank you 76.4.128.40 (talk) 10:38, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

OMG - in the middle of the edit, I got sucked into watching the 3 videos. At exactly the 8'16" mark I had to hit pause and run away laughing. I thought for the first 16 minutes that he is just "taping for television" and then when he threw in the clincher "we need to replace academia with an ultra high-iq society" I went ballistic! Oh my god, that guy is insanely surprising. I thought I had him all figured out. Ok, now I guess I can settle for pr-society and let him and his co-equals take up the 300 spots reserved for M. Oh well, I wouldn't have blogged this out, except I came over here and realized I forgot to his "save page". Unbelievable that I have to do a capcha to save a discussion page, but serendipitous at the same time. PS I was sober during the first 75% of this post, but decided to drink heavily before watching those 3 videos I cited, so that I wouldn't feel bad about myself. Thank god my ip-address isn't as invasive as my phone number or soc sec. 76.4.128.40 (talk) 11:16, 16 August 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.4.128.40 (talk)

Ridiculous article should be deleted

Hahah, lol at the Brabham article:

Langan is already finding some approval among the scientific community. Theoretical physicist and former NASA executive Robert N. Seitz recently corresponded with Langan and is impressed with his theory.

"If I've ever met anyone brighter than Chris, I don't know who it would be,” Seitz says. "Every physicist is inundated with amateurs' ‘Theories of Everything,' but Chris' CTMU is very, very different.”

Since when does "CTMU is very, very different" constitute "some approval among the scientific community"? Since Brabham ran out of stuff to write about, got bored and chased up some kook from the mires of the "high-iq community" which basically constitutes sites like this hub of intellectual fecundity: [1] and the five hundred or so equivalent "no, WE'RE the smartest" pathetic groups of whiners floating around the Internet with absolutely no useful achievements other than the alleged ability to do IQ tests. At least Marilyn Vos Savant has DONE stuff. This guy has done nothing noteworthy ever. As a cursory look at the introductory paragraph of CTMU reveals, it's no wonder he never made it through any higher education that would have demanded some sort of intellectually rigorous discussion instead of

Among the most exciting recent developments in science are Complexity Theory, the theory of self-organizing systems, and the modern incarnation of Intelligent Design Theory...

Intelligent Design Theory is "among the most exciting recent developments in science"??? Only if you redefine "science" as "useless wank". Then it works, Intelligent Design is indeed an exciting recent development in useless wank.

Part of constructing a useful wiki is knowing what to include and what is useless pap in order to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio. It detracts from the usefulness of Wikipedia to have this article here. As a previous poster said, surely if CTMU itself does not deserve an article, why make an article about the guy who came up with it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.106.100.249 (talk) 09:57, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Rubbish

Human intelligence doesn't appear in a vacuum¹ and while (as discussed in detail on the Form § of my POV page) I do believe it does have a density function according to which the 195/210 figure would be significant (but only to 1 fuzzy digit, in this case a purported fuzzy 6), the bottom line as it were of intellect (rather than raw intelligence) is manifest in the expression of opinions and statements about states of affairs in the world that betray the individuals true intellectual stature. As with Marilyn Vos Savant statements about i the imaginary unit, Langans statements about the conflation of Intelligent Design and Evolution, God, etc. betray his true intellectual stature. Whatever advantage he may have been born with to think, it has clearly not resulted in a uniformly superior thinker. Lycurgus (talk) 20:33, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

¹ The point being that it is a continuum, so that a person who is a 6 will be recognized as such by the 4s and 5s. Or recognized as not being. Lycurgus (talk) 20:43, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

But I oppose deletion of the article, it certainly reaches the level of notability of many of the other 2.6 million current articles. 72.228.150.44 (talk) 00:17, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Also read the CTMU description at the authors site. It appeared at first[2] to be a vacuous melange based on a recapitulation of a host of topics at a pretty superficial level with no apparent original thesis distinct from model theory and a number of other currents in math, philosophy, etc. Subsequently, it became clear it was much worse than that [3]. 72.228.150.44 (talk) 12:04, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Also to be clear, I'm not equating Marilyn with this individual. 72.228.150.44 (talk) 12:29, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

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>