The Relationship Between Genius and Crankery

Anatoly Wasserman is one of the most famous public intellectuals in Russia today. He is essentially a genius with some astronomical IQ who largely taught himself entire fields of knowledge. He first came to fame in 1989 for being an unbeatable contestant on Soviet game shows, going on to achive Russia-wide fame in more quiz shows in the 90s. He is now a journalist and political commentator. He is also the subject of a Russian internet meme, with one-liners composed about how smart he is, modelled on the English-speaking world’s Chuck Norris one-liners. A translation of a few examples:

• When the internet breaks, you can connect to Wasserman’s brain and get it cached
• Wasserman’s hamster has just received his second tertiary degree
• Wasserman has the Mandelbrot fractal set as his fingerprints
• Wasserman turned down the offer to be president of the earth, he has no time for the small stuff
• Wasserman keeps his personal diary in assembly code

You get the picture. Anyway, it’s a fine line between a genius and a crank and unfortunately Wasserman straddles the line. I thought it would be interesting to have a look at a few of these idiosyncracies as an example of some of the potential pitfalls of astronomical IQs.

Wasserman has been voluntarily celibate throughout his life. According to interviews with him, this is how it happened. As a teenager, Wasserman was telling his friend about his considered philosophical position: that people should have complete, unfettered freedom in their sexual lives. His friend, who took the opposing position accused him of making this argument for self-serving reasons. Annoyed, Wasserman wanted to prove this was his principled opinion — and in order to do this took an oath in front of his friend to live a life of celibacy. And since breaking an oath would be allegedly irrational, he has remained celibate.

Wasserman’s political opinions are squarely with the current Russian government and he is (in my opinion) essentially the intellectual arm of their propaganda channels. He is also a Marxist and squarely pro-Stalin, belonging to one of the many people who think everything bad that’s said about Stalin is imperialist capitalist historical revisionism concocted in a grand conspiracy to stain the memory of the Leader and that the Leader did nothing but work tirelessly for the brotherhood of all peoples, won WWII, lifted the USSR out of the dregs and so on and so on.

He believes that the Katyn massacre was committed by Nazis and not the Soviet NKVD (KGB’s precursor). He believes Ukraine should reunite with Russia and considers Ukrainian a dialect of Russian. He is also a denialist about the mass rape of German women by the Red Army as they advanced on Berlin — considered by some as the greatest mass rape in history with estimates going up to 2M victims. Here’s my summary of Wasserman’s particularly hair-raising post

• At the time abortion was forbidden in the USSR and hence in Soviet-occupied Germany. And yet this was a particularly bad time for German women to have children given the devastation of the war and uncertainty about Germany’s future. There was a rape exception clause to the abortion prohibition which every German woman who wanted an abortion was forced to cite — whether she was raped or not.
• German women gave themselves “easily” enough to the US soldiers, sometimes for a packet of cigarettes, a can of meat or nothing, perhaps in the hope of protection, as compensation for the actions of their husbands and brothers or to temper the conquerers. (I’m not making this up.) Why should Soviet soldiers have been different?
• US soldiers got condoms in their equipment kits, Soviets didn’t. This explains the much higher pregnancy rates due to Soviet soldiers.
• Some of the surge in abortion rates can be attributed to German men who weren’t yet mobilised.
• All of this did not preclude certain “excesses” but they would have been swiftly punished — not out of a sense of justice but for the sake of soldierly discipline.

But perhaps one of the most curious bits of crankery is his stated reason for being an atheist. Here’s my summary of his explanation in this Russian video: Basically he believes a god is impossible because of Godel’s incompleteness theorems, which state that a mathematical system rich enough to describe arithmetic must either be inconsistent (there is at least one statement where you can prove both it and its contradiction) or incomplete (there is at least one statement which is true but that can’t be proved from within the mathematical system). Since our universe does not show inconsistency, any system of laws describing the world must be incomplete. This is why science must always continue and go through revolutions — but it’s also why there’s no god. Because if there was a god, any statement could be proved or disproved by asking god (or at least within the mind of god) which would violate the incompleteness fork of Godel’s theorems. Therefore, since the universe exists, there is no god.

I’ll leave the ocean of problems with that statement — as well as the general relationship between Wasserman’s genius and his crankery — as an exercise for the reader.