Academic Gossip posts: Ron and Steve are both very smart but I see no particular indication that Unz is smarter, let alone in a different league. Steve writes better and has a broader range of analytical pursuits. Ron has more of the high-IQ-but-autistic “systematizing” tendency, which leads him to some hits (English!), some half-baked stuff (Asian admission analysis, Hispanic crime) and now off the rails. Steve has it too, but to a lesser degree and with other strengths to balance it and keep his observations reality-compatible. Ron will follow chains of reasoning and intuition past the point of plausibility without checking against other information.
You can see the difference particularly clearly in their respective analyses of things Jewish. Steve has built up an insightful synthesis of many different threads, ending up with a pretty accurate and useful mental model of the Jewish Angle of our world, while Ron does thought-experiments to show the Holocaust is propaganda.
My academic background is similar to Ron’s (similar achievements at similar age) and I have spent plenty of time around fellow STEM prodigies. So I have a pretty large database against which to evaluate these things. Trust me that he is very typical of how a Jewish kid with the “boy genius” identity can develop over time. Chomsky is a good example of the same processes.
FYI, having no furniture in the house (as described in that article someone just posted) is not that unusual for this set, and ascetic traits more generally are very familiar.
* Ron was in a selective gifted-students program, won the Westinghouse competition back in the old days (minimum 140, very variable, some winners are a lot higher) and did well as a Harvard physics undergrad (guess 140-145 is required). He dropped out of his PhD program, receiving some sort of courtesy master’s degree, leaving no research trail to evaluate. So he did a bunch of things that reliably signal 14o+, but Steve must also be in that range.
Ron’s math skills as demonstrated in the Hispanic crime, Asian admission, and Holocaust analyses, are far below what usually is left over after a youth full of upper tier physics training. Winging it based on a quantitative “feeling” or suspicion is totally in line with theoretical physicist culture, but his actual math ability has rusted more so than I would expect from people who had huge ability in the first place. On the other hand he does show undiminished tendencies, that he would call Jewish, toward hyper-verbalization, ambition, financial enterprise, ownership of media, political activism, argumentation, and “value transference” (he made his money on software to enable the mortgage bubble, cashing in just before the bubble popped). His academic history is also that of the stereotypical Jewish whiz kid, with the early accomplishment and Ivy League degree followed by graduate study in the most speculative and experiment-free part of theoretical physics (quantum gravity). I wonder if Ron recognizes the number of Jewish stereotypes that he embodies even as he argues that the true blood libel was against Gentiles. I say that as someone grateful that he has established a site for heterodox material even if some of it is completely insane.
It seems to me that Ron and Steve have similar levels of underlying ability, with Ron better at math (in a striving ambitious Jewish verbal-derived way, as he might put it) while Steve is better at some hard to measure things like “noticing” but in the end actually posts sharper quantitative/statistical analysis, in addition to his other strengths.
* One of the odd things about Holocaust revisionism is that it never bothers to account for the perfect consistency in all the thousands of camp prisoners’ memories of “selection at the ramp”. If something other than immediate guaranteed death were the destination of the un-selected, then in some percentage of the stories a prisoner would be separated from a family member (or someone they know) who was sent toward the presumed gas chamber, but later on meet them again or discover that they were alive. Unfortunately in the actual stories that never happens, the non-selected just disappear.
* Germany’s disastrous December 6 to 11, 1941 led Hitler to tell his insiders on December 12, 1941 that they were going ahead with the final stage of the final solution, in which they would murder Jews not just in hot blood on the front lines of the war but would hunt down all Jews behind the lines (e.g., in Italy) and murder them in cold blood too.