
Nassim Taleb on IQ - ptbello
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1076845397795065856.html
======
ellius
I like Taleb's work. It's always good food for thought and frequently
insightful. That said, his posture towards academia of late seems a bit
juvenile and not a little annoying. Which isn't to say that he doesn't have a
point, but it gets pretty frustrating when I pay good money for a book
(Antifragile) and every other page is taking potshots at "fragilistas" and
talking about how those dumb intellectuals don't actually know anything. In my
book you win arguments by winning arguments, not by reframing the discussion
so as to portray all of your opponents as hopelessly deluded cowards and
fools.

~~~
rfrey
The most salient anecdote Taleb tells about himself is the one where he's
going onstage to debate an opponent. He asks his publisher if punching the
other guy in the face would be against his contract, and his publisher notes
that it would be very good for book sales.

All Taleb does is punch people in the face nowadays. It's probably very good
for book sales. He notes elsewhere, rightly I think, that the goal of anybody
seeking PR should be to get the attention of somebody more famous then them:
since it's much easier to pick fights than make friendships, and either will
do, he picks fights with anybody he thinks has prominence. I believe it's a
persona, and he's a very good method actor.

It's also really annoying if you think some of his ideas are very good, as I
do.

~~~
sytelus
These days if you get in to NYT or Amazon top list, you are talking about
windfall in range of $10M. For books like Fifty Shades of Grey this was at
$100M for the author. So writing books these days is not poor author trying to
getting by but a very very serious business. It's as serious as Series C
startup with actual office, roadmap, business plan, marketing plan and even
full time employees who would do research, citation collection, word smithing,
editing etc for you. People like Tim Ferris and Malcolm Gladwell have made
this to an art form and are some of the most successful founders for this type
of business. The way they work is by taking couple of known data points in
academia and expand it on to 400 page book dishing it out as fundamental
insights that everyone is missing out on. Such books are rife with
repetitions, personal stories, cherry picked anecdotes, raising underdogs and
putting down others that evoke emotions but at the same time tuck away the
other side of the story that would have made them more balanced and boring.

I wouldn't be surprised if Taleb has made more money from his books then his
hedge fund career and accordingly he might be more aggressive to protect his
image as dispenser of great counter-intuitive insights. His assertions in
these sets of tweets are obviously overblown. IQ testing is known to be very
faulty measure for intelligence but at the same time lot of rebellious
personalities including Einstein, Bill Gates, Lady Gaga etc have had high (>
150) IQ. No one would call them people yearning to be obedient salaried
drones.

------
woodruffw
Is there a coherent train of thought in these tweets, other than Taleb's
disdain for IQ[1]? I'm struggling to understand why a measurement that appears
to have _no_ value "measures best the ability to be a good slave," or why
_any_ of this entails the belief that "the only robust measure of
"rationality" & "intelligence" is survival."

[1]: A position that, as far as I know, is neither controversial nor
contentious in academia.

~~~
barry-cotter
IQ is the most replicated finding in psychology, and almost certainly the most
used. It is very far from being of no value.

[http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatte...](http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatters.pdf)

Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life

LINDA S. GOTTFREDSON University of Delaware Personnel selection research
provides much evidence that intelligence (g) is an important predictor of
performance in training and on the job, especially in higher level work. This
article provides evidence that g has pervasive utility in work settings
because it is essen- tially the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, in
particular, with complex information processing. The more complex a work task,
the greater the advantages that higher g confers in performing it well.
Everyday tasks, like job duties, also differ in their level of complexity. The
importance of intelligence therefore differs systematically across differ- ent
arenas of social life as well as economic endeavor. Data from the National
Adult Literacy Survey are used to show how higher levels of cognitive ability
systematically improve individuals’ odds of dealing successfully with the
ordinary demands of modem life (such as banking, using maps and transportation
schedules, reading and understanding forms, interpreting news articles). These
and other data are summarized to illustrate how the advantages of higher g,
even when they are small, cumulate to affect the overall life chances of
individuals at different ranges of the IQ bell curve. The article concludes by
suggesting ways to reduce the risks for low-IQ individuals of being left
behind by an increasingly complex postindustrial economy.

[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0963-7214.200...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01301001.x)

Intelligence Predicts Health and Longevity, but Why?

Large epidemiological studies of almost an entire population in Scotland have
found that intelligence (as measured by an IQ-type test) in childhood predicts
substantial differences in adult morbidity and mortality, including deaths
from cancers and cardiovascular diseases. These relations remain significant
after controlling for socioeconomic variables. One possible, partial
explanation of these results is that intelligence enhances individuals' care
of their own health because it represents learning, reasoning, and problem-
solving skills useful in preventing chronic disease and accidental injury and
in adhering to complex treatment regimens.

~~~
freyir
The point was that _Talib_ argues it has no value (above ~85), and then says
it’s a good predictor of one’s value as a “slave” (very high IQ makes a good
slave).

In any case, he comes off as childish and bitter. It’s all filtered through
the idea that success means being a multimillionaire, and everyone else is a
failure. His perspective seems limited to finance and academics in that
sphere.

------
DecayingOrganic
_If many millionaires have IQs around 100, & 58 y.o. back office clercs at
Goldman Sachs or elsewhere an IQ of 155 (true example), clearly the
measurement is less informative than claimed._

it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view.

From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori
probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one.

On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the
probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success
is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately
gifted people are much more numerous and, with the help of luck, have -
globally - a statistical advantage to reach a great success, in spite of their
lower individual a priori probability.

------
saagarjha
Stripping the article of the author (whom I don’t actually know much about
other than he seems to have showed up next to Nate Silver at some point), I
found this “thread” to be a bunch of personal anecdotes and “intelligent
looking formulas and stuff” taken out of context to support the general
conclusion that IQ is a bad metric for intelligence, as Taleb would know
because he clearly has a very high IQ (note: this is something that he
actually brings up as someone else saying about him, to give him
credibility?). While I am not opposed to the position he takes, I did not
understand the argument he is making the slightest. Could someone explain to
me why this is actually legit, rather than what to me looks dangerously close
to pseudoscientific rambling?

~~~
TEJOOS
It's not pseudoscientific buddy completely legitimate

~~~
TEJOOS
BTW r u a grad student at Cornell ?

------
thinkingkong
Part of the challenge with measuring stuff is we usually stop when we have a
single measurement. IQ is a repeatable thing but the problem - to my naive
self - is that its _called_ intelligence quotient and the idea of giving it a
single measurement is ridiculous as there are more factors than one.

Intelligence is probably going to be a maximum within the system youre
measuring against. Maybe high IQ is great for researchers and professors, but
not for investors, or business folks.

~~~
closed
This is a classic discussion in the intelligence literature. For example, the
cattell-horn-carroll theory[1]. Usually meauring general intelligence involves
measures along a bunch of different problem domains.

[1]:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell–Horn–Carroll_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell–Horn–Carroll_theory)

~~~
thinkingkong
Oh neat! Id never heard of that before.

------
simonebrunozzi
Taleb. Love him, hate him. Always a lot of controversy.

I like him quite a lot somehow, and there's clearly a good amount of genius in
him, although sometimes there are certain positions and affirmations that feel
less so (to me at least).

For example, his critique of the growing inequality in the world [0] [1]
amounts to pointing at dynamic inequality, not static one. This one never
convinced me so far.

To be clear: I fully understand his point; I simply disagree, especially while
living in San Francisco and witnessing homeless people every day, walking next
to VC multimillionaires.

Anyone able to convince me?

[0]:
[https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892351059615789057?lang=e...](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892351059615789057?lang=en)

[1]: [https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-
game-d...](https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-
game-d8f00bc0cb46)

~~~
petermcneeley
Piketty argues for a wealth tax. Taking skin in the game seriously we see that
for Taleb, a %1 er and his circle, such a tax would threaten a great deal of
skin indeed. Such essays by Taleb are just an auto defense mechanism driven by
self interest.

------
the_other_guy
I like Taleb's philosophy that he unlike most successful people, downplays the
role of hard work and rationality for success and attributes most things to
what we call luck and chance. Being a wall street trader, short seller, etc...
may require this kind of mentality since all rules and conventions are broken
every day and having a 160-IQ in this arena will be even more harmful than
useful if you use logic and science for every decision. However, I don't
really understand his disdain for academia and theoretical knowledge, his
philosophy won't get him anywhere where strict and disciplined logic is
needed, the kind of logic that actually advanced the civilization not the one
he used to make money off his bets from pointless stock charts

------
ronilan
When someone asks me a question in real life I don’t focus on “Why”. I focus
on “How” (can I help them).

Most arguments down the thread seem just as moot to me, but then again, I’m
probably not smart enough for a Twitter IQ thread.

~~~
bachmeier
Nobody's smart enough for a Taleb thread on any topic.

~~~
naravara
It's weird. Even though I agree with probably 80% of what Taleb is trying to
say, he's just such a condescending prick about it that I STILL want to throw
rocks at him to make him shut up.

I'm not saying I agree with burning Galileo at the stake, but reading Taleb
and knowing how Galileo conducted himself. . . I understand.

~~~
thanatropism
That's his schtick. It's how he remains part of the conversation. If he had
more than three ideas ("Mandelbrotness", barbell strategy, skin in the game)
to bring to the table, he wouldn't be hammering screwdrivers through walls.

------
gmuslera
I got two ideas from that writing: \- Is not a good idea to take a single
dimensional indicator for a multidimensional capability. I suppose that know
about IQs can discuss about that. \- That having a high IQ is not a so great
predictor on how well you will solve a real world problem. If we define "real
world problems" the ones with feedback loops, plenty of noise, and known and
unknown unknowns (his field of work) then he may have a point. But that is a
subset of the real world problems, and anyway you may have to solve ideal
world problems too.

------
techbio
The fact that some people _can’t_ survive in the market, and other people
_don’t_ [even participate], meshes well with his “simple verbal test”: it only
works if your subject is playing along. Street smarts are earned, granted. But
IQ is not a measure of how many toys you die with. If the test is market
survival, anyone who retires is a genius.

------
cheez
I enjoyed reading this thread this morning. Makes some salient points, that IQ
is correlated with success in a specific area (physics/academia).

------
fromthestart
This reads like a desperate rant by someone who scored poorly on an IQ test
and took it personally.

------
microcolonel
Of course, if you submit a piece supporting any other take on these matters,
it may not make it on HN.

------
fredch
FOR THE RECORD,

Financial crashes are not "black swan" events. I've never seen a black swan in
my life, but I've seen two or three financial crashes. As far as I can tell,
Taleb is just a memer.

His degeneration of late is hopefully cluing people in, though the compulsion
to substitute memes for thought will continue. Hey, maybe that's what IQ is, a
person's likeliness to think instead of resorting to memes? Maybe that's why
Taleb hates it?

