The Know-It-All

by A. J. Jacobs

  “Come on.”

  “A one-dollar fine.”

  “These facts were relevant,” I say.

  Julie thinks for a second.

  “Okay, a one-dollar fine for any irrelevant fact, and a one-dollar fine for a relevant fact that interrupts a movie.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “I’ve got to do something.”

  opossums

  Opossums have thirteen nipples. Good to know. Also, the notion that the opossum gives birth through its nose probably comes from the female’s habit of putting her face into the pouch to clean it just before giving birth. I had never heard of this notion. I was simultaneously illuminated and disillusioned.

  opposites

  I’m dyin’ here. That’s my fellow editor Andy’s favorite phrase to express general anxiety, one he uses several times a week at the start of exasperated e-mails, and it seems applicable right now. I’m dyin’ here. To be more specific, I’m still having a hell of a time processing all this information, figuring out what it means. I can’t see the forest for the trees, and in this case the forest is the information equivalent of the Siberian boreal forest, which makes up about one fifth of the world’s forested area, so that’s a lot of goddamn trees.

  I’m looking for answers—and there are answers. That’s not the problem. The problem is there are too many answers, thousands of answers, and they all seem to conflict with one another. I’ll come up with a thesis, and pat myself on the back for my incisiveness, and then a couple of hours later I’ll decide my thesis is absurd, and that the exact opposite thesis is correct. Then I’ll switch back to the first.

  I’ll give you an example. I’ll decide that the Britannica provides evidence to back up the old saw that patience is a virtue. For instance, ticks wait on twigs for weeks, months, sometimes years, for a mammal to pass underneath. And then they drop onto the fur and suck happily away on the blood. So be like the tick. Good things come to those who wait.

  But then I’ll read something that supports the opposite side, the importance of being impulsive, making quick decisions, of following that other old saw, “Just do it.” For instance, Napoleon. He lost at Waterloo because he waited too long to attack. He waited till the afternoon, when the sun had dried the mud from the overnight rains, but by that time the Brits had received reinforcement. Historians agree: he should have just done it.

  So what the hell should I do? Should I be patient? Or impulsive? I want a guide, someone to tell me this is right, this is wrong. I watched a little of Dr. Phil the other day, the blunt-talking TV host. Maybe I need a Dr. Phil for the Britannica.

  orgasm

  They can be experienced from infancy. What? Did I have orgasms when I was an infant? Did I smoke a tiny cigarette afterward?

  oyster

  Oysters can change sex according to the temperature of the water. I always knew there was something emasculating about warm baths.

  Ozma, Project

  Project Ozma was an attempt by some American astronomers to find intelligent life in the universe. It took place in the sixties, was named for the princess in The Wizard of Oz—and was a spectacular failure. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been conducting my own search for intelligent life here on earth. Since I’ve announced to the world that my goal is to become the smartest man in the world, I figure I should suss out the competition. Which is why I called a man named Ron Hoeflin.

  Ron is the founder of four high-IQ societies—HiQ, if you really want to sound cool. HiQ societies are clubs for those brainiacs who make the average Mensa member look like a knuckle-dragging, drooling Australopithecus. Mensans must score in the top 2 percent on the IQ test. That’s nothing. Kids’ stuff. Ron started the Top One Percent Society, which is for, naturally, the top 1 percent. His One-in-a-Thousand Society is for the top 0.1 percent. The Prometheus Society is for the top 0.003 percent. And the mighty Mega Society is for the top 0.0001 percent. Ron’s IQ varies depending on which test he’s taking, but he clocks in at 190 on a good day.

  I found Ron because he was profiled in Esquire a few years ago. Ron later wrote a letter to the editor listing the various egregious mistakes the writer made in the article—Ron uses Wite-Out, not Liquid Paper; his father was a ballroom dance instructor, not a ballroom dancer, and so on. I’m already nervous about meeting him. I vow to myself to take meticulous notes.

  Ron greets me at the door of his Hell’s Kitchen apartment. It’s tiny, even by New York standards, but his rent is lower than his IQ: $150 a month. Ron lives there with his two cats, Big Boy and Wild Thing, and a radiator that clanks louder than the bassist at your average Metallica concert. On the walls are a series of futuristic drawings of women with pronounced biceps, wearing G-strings and wielding swords.

  “They’re from a fantasy calendar,” says Ron. “I got tired of seeing all my narcissistic diplomas up on the wall.”

  Ron’s fifty-nine years old, a bear of a man with graying hair and smudged glasses. He’s legally blind, but he can see things up close, which forces him to read with a magnifying glass. He grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, memorized pi to two hundred decimal places as a kid (he still remembers the first fifty digits) and eventually got a Ph.D. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research. He makes his modest living putting together newsletters for HiQ societies. As he’ll tell you himself, he’s shy and awkward, not exactly a social butterfly, barely even a social caterpillar; he reminds me of Dustin Hoffman’s idiot savant in Rain Man, but without the idiot part. I like him immediately.

  He seems interested in my encyclopedia project. Turns out he’s an obsessive reader too. Every day, without fail, Ron reads philosophy at the Wendy’s on Eighth Avenue on Fifty-sixth Street over an iced tea, a Caesar salad, and a chicken sandwich. Why Wendy’s? “It’s got good lighting, and it’s more social. Even though I don’t talk to people, there are people around me, which I like.” It was there that he read the entire Encyclopedia of Philosophy in 420 days, about ten pages a day. “Some articles on logic,” he tells me, “were just so technical, I couldn’t finish them.”

  Sweet Jesus! This is wonderful news. Even a verifiable megagenius like Ron has trouble finishing entries. Next time I’m mired in text about vector bundles and Möbius strips, I’ve got Ron’s confession to comfort me.

  Ron has been working on a book called To Unscrew the Inscrutable: A Theory of the Structure of Philosophy. At one point it was nearly four thousand pages but now he’s shaved it down to a fifth of that, about 748 pages. He shows me some of it. The idea—as far as I can figure, and I’m probably wrong about this—is that all philosophical systems can be categorized by a number. So his Chapter 2 covers two-part systems like the yin and the yang and the wave particle duality in quantum physics. His Chapter 3 covers the Christian Trinity and Freud’s tripartite system (ego, id, and superego). And so on. It sounds smart. He’s talking quickly, scribbling diagrams of squares inside circles, shooting off on tangents, dropping phrases like “anticipatory goal object” and “root metaphor” and “superstring theory,” and I’m saying, “Right, right, right,” because I don’t want to look like a moron, but the truth is, I have no idea what he’s talking about and no way to judge whether it’s a good theory.

  Ron tells me that, after ten years of work, he’s just recently finished writing the book, and is ready to print it out, but his printer is broken, and he can’t afford a new one. This makes me so sad that I want to hug him, which he’d probably hate.

  He asks me what I’ve learned in the encyclopedia. I figure I should give him a philosophy fact. “Did you know that René Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes?” I say.

  “Well, my mother died on exactly the same date that Descartes did. February eleventh.”

  I nod. We listen to the Chopin in the background. Several seconds tick by. “So how would you define intelligence?” I ask him.

  “That’s a very difficult question,” Ron says. If he has to be pinned down, he tells me, it probably has to
do with trial and error, learning from mistakes, moderating our thoughts and actions like a thermostat, like the painter who dabs paint and, if it doesn’t look good, dabs in a new place.

  “Do you think I can become smarter by reading the encyclopedia?”

  “Depends what you mean by smarter. You could say a computer can get smarter by feeding it more information. But in terms of hardware, there’s not much hope for humans. You’re stuck with the brain you were given.”

  It’s not quite what I was hoping for, but it’s not a terrible answer. I’ve always preferred software to hardware. At least I can improve the programs in my brain.

  I ask him about geniuses. Is there anything to the stereotype that geniuses have psychological problems?

  “Well, yeah,” he says. Ron clicks on his computer to show me exactly what problems he suffers from. On the screen pop up the results of his personality test, with a bar graph showing the different aspects of his character.

  “See? I zoomed all the way to the top on the sensitivity scale. I’m too sensitive.”

  Ron is shockingly open. I’ve been a journalist for almost fifteen years, and this is the first time someone’s whipped out a personality test to show me exactly where all his flaws lie. If only the celebrities I interviewed at Entertainment Weekly had done this. I would have loved for talk show host Bill Maher to quantify for me exactly why he’s such a huge jackass. Again, I want to hug Ron, but instead I go with an attempt to bond: “I’m very antisocial as well.”

  “At least you’re married. I never got married.”

  “There’s still time,” I say. Ron hasn’t had a girlfriend in a some time, though at one point he dated professional genius and Parade columnist Marilyn vos Savant. I make a mental note to have Julie fix him up with an attractive woman with an IQ bordering 200.

  It’s about 4 P.M., time for Ron to go to Wendy’s to do his daily philosophy reading. He’s dabbling in feminist tracts, but he’s not too impressed. On the walk to Wendy’s, he tells me that he heard you can raise your IQ by six points if you take a sauna right before your test. Perhaps that’s the secret. I should abandon this encyclopedia and just take a sauna. So much more efficient! Ron smiles weakly. I shake his hand good-bye.

  I’m a big fan of Ron’s. He seems sweeter and more humble than those Mensans I met at the Staten Island convention. He also breaks my heart. On the subway home, as I flip through a copy of the Mega IQ test written by Ron (three xeroxed pages of absurdly difficult analogies and spatial problems), I make a note in my Palm Pilot to buy an advance copy of Ron’s book to help him pay for a new printer. And I come to the ingenious conclusion that maybe it’s not such a good thing to be the smartest man in the world—something I knew back when I thought I was the smartest boy in the world. Maybe it’s better to be dumb and happy.

  P

  pachycephalosaurus

  IN MY PERIODIC check on how I’m faring, I stack the Britannicas up on the office floor. Look at how that pile has grown, I chuckle to myself, shaking my head proudly. It’s really getting up there. Seems like yesterday when that cute little stack was barely up to my ankle. And look at it now! As I dive into the P’s, it’s shot to above my belly button, like I’ve been rubbing the covers with somatotropin growth hormone.

  So I’m getting there. I’m not Ron Hoeflin, but I’m no pachycephalosaurus (a dinosaur with a thick mass of solid bone grown over its tiny brain, also known as the “bone-headed dinosaur”).

  Paige, Satchel

  Here was the hardest-working man in baseball. Before his major league career—which began when he was surprisingly old, in his late forties—Paige barnstormed the country, traveling as many as thirty thousand miles a year, pitching for any team willing to meet his price. Any team at all. He played for various teams in the Negro League, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, and “wearing a false red beard, he also played for the bearded House of David team.” That was a baffling sentence. This was one of those rare times I felt compelled to do some additional detective work. Bearded House of David team? An Internet search revealed that the House of David baseball team was made up of the members of a Michigan-based apocalyptic cult who all wore long beards. A baseball-loving cult with excessive facial hair. My journalist’s mind is trained to find trends, put things in folders with other facts. But after much thought, I can honestly say that a bearded baseball-playing apocalyptic cult does not belong to a category. It is a trend of one.

  Paine, Thomas

  When Thomas Paine died, most American papers reprinted an obituary from the New York Citizen that said: “He had lived long, did some good and much harm.” Today he’s a beloved Revolutionary War hero; back then, the majority thought him a scoundrel.

  His life had more ups and downs than the upper Ural mountain range. He failed at an impressive number of jobs—he once tried to invent a smokeless candle, which sounds like a pretty good idea, but it didn’t take off. His marriages ended badly.

  On the other hand, the man could write a pamphlet. His Common Sense series was a huge hit—the first sold 500,000 copies; a later one was read by George Washington at Valley Forge and launched the phrase “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine refused to take profits on it so that cheap editions could be sold.

  Things went sour after the war when Paine wrote a defense of the French Revolution. His ideas were solid—relief for the poor, pensions for the aged, public works for the unemployed, a progressive income tax. But in England, where he was living at the time, it got him charged with treason. Things worsened when he wrote another pamphlet attacking organized religion. Though he made clear in the pamphlet that he was a deist and believed in the Supreme Being, he still got charged with being an atheist.

  And that’s how he died—broke, drunk, and seen as an infidel. Oh, and his skeleton was later lost en route to England. It took decades for his approval rating to climb. Point is, you just can’t predict your reputation in history. I guess you just have to write your pamphlets and hope you eventually get understood.

  parallelism

  My aunt Carol is visiting from Connecticut. She’s got a lot of competition, but I had to choose, I’d probably say Carol is the single smartest person to share my DNA. And she’s not just smart—she’s a bona fide intellectual. She’s like those characters in Woody Allen movies who wear turtlenecks and talk about Rilke—except she doesn’t wear turtlenecks and she’s completely unpretentious. Carol studied with Paul de Man and currently holds a job as professor of German literature at Yale. She’s published books on major thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Claude Lévi-Strauss. I haven’t read all her books (sorry Carol) but I do love having them on my bookshelf, since, just like the Britannica, they add much-needed gravitas to my room.

  This trip, Carol has given me another serious book: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, which she says is very appropriate to my current life. I’m flattered she thought of me. When I get home, I open it up to the page where Aunt Carol has left a pink Post-it. I begin to read: Sartre’s narrator is at the Paris library. He’s observing a character called the Self-Taught Man, who spends a lot of time in the stacks.

  [The Self-Taught Man] has just taken another book from the same shelf, I can make out the title upside-down: The Arrow of Caudebec, A Norman Chronicle by Mlle Julie Lavergne. The Self-Taught Man’s choice of reading always disconcerts me.

  Suddenly the names of the authors he last read came back to my mind: Lambert, Langlois, Larbaletrier, Lastex, Lavergne. It is a revelation; I have understood the Self-Taught Man’s method; he teaches himself alphabetically.

  It is a revelation to me as well. A fellow adventurer through the alphabet. This is wonderful news! Sartre goes on: “He has passed brutally from the study of coleopterae to the quantum theory, from the work of Tamberlaine to a Catholic pamphlet against Darwinism, he has never been disconcerted for an instant. There is a universe behind and before him.”

  Couldn’t have said it better myself.

  I flip f
orward, skimming. The Self-Taught Man seems like a good guy. He’s for universal love, he admires youth, he’s a humanist. I like him. I wish I could dive into the book and have a conversation with him over some unpasteurized cheese at the café.

  I skip to the end of the book. Ah, here’s the Self-Taught Man again, back in the library, where he belongs, with his beloved books. He seems to be having a conversation with two young boys in the library. Huh, what’s this about? Now the Self-Taught Man is putting his hairy hand on the smooth palm of a little brown-haired boy. Uh-oh. Now, writes Sartre, the Self-Taught Man “timidly began to stroke” the boy’s hand.

  Jesus H. Christ! The Self-Taught Man is a child molester. This is unbelievable. There’s more.

  The Self-Taught Man’s “finger passed slowly, humbly, over the inert flesh … he had closed his eyes, he was smiling. His other hand had disappeared under the table. The boys were not laughing any more, they were both afraid.”

  Dammit!

  First I read about Bouvard and Pécuchet, two doofuses who blow up their own house. Now comes the Self-Taught Man, who spends his afternoons timidly stroking little boys under the table. I can’t believe the hostility my quest—or similar ventures—engenders from major thinkers. I’m just trying to read the encyclopedia here, people. Just trying to make myself a little smarter. Does that make me a card-carrying member of NAMBLA? What’s next? Is someone going to accuse me of having body parts in my freezer or of selling plutonium to Syria?

  I went on the Web. Turns out Sartre used the Self-Taught Man to represent rational humanism, a philosophy he considers bankrupt. What a mean-spirited jackass. Just because he disagrees with a point of view, he links it to pedophilia. Plus, I happen to prefer rational humanism to his absurd Marxist-inflected existentialism.

  I called up my aunt to ask if she was implying anything about my sexuality. She said, no, she had read Nausea decades ago and had forgotten about all about the Self-Taught Man’s boy-fondling behavior. Which makes me feel a little better.