
Nassim Taleb on why IQ is baloney - l33tbro
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1076845397795065856
======
whoisnnamdi
Think it should be kept in mind that what Taleb is arguing here is the limited
usefulness of IQ in predicting success above a certain IQ level, let’s say the
mean. He 100% acknowledges its usefulness for predicting success of lower IQ
persons.

He mainly just wants to point out that any other measure that was as bad at
predicting higher levels of performance as IQ is would not be held in nearly
as high regard. IQ therefore is in a vulnerable position as a hallowed metric,
which he detects and proceeds to attack, hence the Twitter thread.

Think he could have done it with less bluster and fluster, but that’s all he’s
saying at the end of the day. Not nearly as controversial as some are making
it out to be

~~~
traderjane
In my view the interesting part of IQ is not merely in its ability to predict
human performance in areas where we expect intelligence to matter, but also in
its underlying claim that there is even such a thing as a general intelligence
( _g_ ), as opposed to bundles of domain-specific abilities.

~~~
whoisnnamdi
As another poster mentioned, don’t think that g is necessarily in opposition
to bundles of domain-specific abilities.

I see g as an attempt at dimensionalality reduction - can the essence of what
is admittedly a complex phenomenon be boiled down to a single metric which,
while clearly not complete, is at least directionally correct / helpful.

g in some sense could simply be a low dimensional projection of these more
complex bundles.

Just theorizing here, not an expert

~~~
iguy
It is exactly that: think of it as the first principal component, of some
group of tests.

Obviously this always exists. The argument is really about how big the 2nd
component is -- if it were comparable, then talking about the 1st alone would
be very misleading. And for a typical bundle of school-like topics (like
math/english/biology exams) it's quite a long way down: IIRC a factor of 3 or
4?

If the bundle of subjects is different, then the size and meaning of the
components will vary. In the tests the army does to slot recruits into all
sorts of roles, I think manual dexterity is one of the things they care about
which is almost uncorrelated with g. Eyesight is I think one of the only
things negatively correlated with g (and it's thought to be nurture: bookish
kids spend too little time outdoors).

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yawaworhtttt
...wasn't that known for years outside the tiny bubble of psychometricians?
They like to go on about how it's the "best predictor" for whatever,
forgetting that the absolute prediction itself is pretty lousy even when at
its "best" and most of it comes from obvious tail-end cases (people with IQ
below 80). There's also evidence from _neuroscience_ [1] that's what's being
measured is an higher order artifact from multiple other measurements. That's
the thing: as soon as you go from the abstract, cognition-as-a-black-box
mental model to an actual physical one with a model of actual brain regions,
IQ falls short.

Which shouldn't be surprising given how futile it should sound to try and
encompass the entirety of human abstract thinking (without even being able to
give a satisfying, consensus making definition of intelligence) into a single
number. Imagine if people came up with a Health Quotient built on very basic
medical exams and went on about how that number is the best "predictor" of
your lifespan... doesn't mean the number isn't damn useless.

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23259956/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23259956/)

~~~
microcolonel
> _most of it comes from obvious tail-end cases (people with IQ below 80)_

That is not a tail-end case, it is a _huge_ number of people, about 28 million
in the U.S. alone.

Wishful thinking is not a substitute for science, and IQ is (as far as we can
tell) a good predictor of general cognitive ability, which is in turn a good
predictor of a great number of things. If you think you have something better,
we're all ears.

~~~
yawaworhtttt
I'm not sure how what you're saying contradicts my point (apart from vague
accusations of 'wishful thinking'). What Taleb is arguing, what I'm arguing,
what the original designer of IQ was arguing and what seems to be common
knowledge among everyone I know in neuroscience or medicine is that IQ is a
very good predictor of life outcomes _if you are mentally impaired_ to begin
with. When you venture into the realm of >100 IQ, it loses a lot of its
predictive power, which is why (where I live at least) it is mostly
administered to people, mostly children, suspected of needing 'special
requirements'. In that sense, it is a very good 'unintelligence quotient' but
not much beyond that. It is disingenuous to argue for its general predictive
power when what most people have in mind is definitely _not disadvantaged
children_ when arguing about it.

~~~
microcolonel
> _When you venture into the realm of >100 IQ, it loses a lot of its
> predictive power, which is why (where I live at least) it is mostly
> administered to people, mostly children, suspected of needing 'special
> requirements'. In that sense, it is a very good 'unintelligence quotient'
> but not much beyond that._

According to whom exactly? There is a very large body of work predicting chess
outcomes, productivity in maths, etc. in the upper range of the scale. Maybe
it is not as proportionally meaningful (i.e. in most cases people are not
running up against a limitation in general cognitive ability), but that
doesn't mean it's meaningless, it means you're trying to predict the wrong
thing with it.

I think a lot of this rhetoric stems from insecurity. I don't know my IQ, I
don't personally care, but if somebody produces a study with me included then
IQ (or similar measures) could yield good results.

It is not _useful for all questions_ , nor is it _useless for all questions_ ;
it is a simple measure of a specific stable characteristic of the mind, which
is correlated to other characteristics which are harder to measure or predict
any other way. IQ is not intended to judge your overall worth as a human
being, it is just there to estimate your general cognitive ability. The fact
that general cognitive ability is not sufficient on its own for you to succeed
is immaterial to its utility as a measure.

~~~
yawaworhtttt
You know, your arguments wouldn't sound so much in bad faith if you stopped
implying IQ detractors were insecure or guilty of wishful thinking, as opposed
to simply skeptical of the science behind it, especially in a field that's not
exactly well known for the solidity, reproducibility and falsifiability of
most of its findings.

All that said, what you said still doesn't contradict Taleb. Being able to
(badly) predict a narrow range of outcomes like chess makes IQ a lousy
indicator with respect to the ambition of psychometricians to elevate it as
the best representative of general intelligence. Or to put it into other
terms, if the best you can come up with is _that_ , better drop the whole
thing and move on to what actual hard sciences can show us (see the GGGP
paper).

------
Knufen
Disclaimer: Former Mensa member

From personal experience it appears that high IQ is a horrible measure of
success. On the other hand when you combine high IQ with discipline you can
come very far.

With all that being said I wish Nassim would provide some actual data instead
of anecdotes.

~~~
wmil
The problem with discussing IQ is that people like to focus on the performance
of very high IQ individuals where it's predictive power is weakest.

But it's very strong in other areas.

For instance say you have two groups of woodworkers, one group has an average
IQ of 90 and another group has an average IQ of 100.

It's a smart bet that the 100 group has more (total) fingers.

"What can we do to help people with 90 IQs live dignified lives?" is a very
important question that isn't discussed enough.

~~~
heptathorp
> For instance say you have two groups of woodworkers, one group has an
> average IQ of 90 and another group has an average IQ of 100.

> It's a smart bet that the 100 group has more (total) fingers.

Not without knowing the size of each group.

More fingers per capita, sure.

~~~
sonofgod
Even if intelligence doesn't correlate with not chopping your fingers off with
a chisel, it's well established that IQ is a bell curve with an average of
approximately 100, so there'll be more IQ 100 people than IQ 90.

~~~
iguy
By _definition_ it's a bell curve centered at 100, width 15.

But what was clearly meant was that IQ 90 woodworkers would be more accident-
prone than IQ 100 ones (on the same tasks etc). And while I'm sure nobody has
done the exact study of counting carpenters' fingers, it would be extremely
surprising if this were not true. Armies, especially conscript armies, have
mountains of excellent data on pretty similar things, and it's good data in
that they assign people to tasks, and get detailed reports of every subsequent
screw-up.

------
jowdones
I have a strong hunch that for reasonably smart people, IQ tests are gameable
the same way academic tests are. I mean, if you test someone "out of the blue"
you get some measure on how much they know. If they prepare, the more they do
that the higher the score.

First time I competed for admission at one of the best universities in my
country, I failed. For the next year I kept preparing myself, 8 hours per day
math and physics. Next year I got admitted first.

Am I smart or am I stupid? Depends how and what you measure.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I took an IQ test once, when I was 17. It was a sunny day in February, I was
well rested, had nice breakfast and even managed to get a sneaky toke while my
mother was in the shower. I prepared by singing to the radio in the car. It
took a few hours and I got the results on another day, so it was a "real IQ
test", though I'd have to look up the exact type. But it doesn't matter
anyway. I scored 142 that day, and there is no way I'll ever take an
intelligence test again. It made me kind of an asshole for a while, too, I
found it hilarious to respond to stuff like "it's cold outside, don't you want
to take a jacket" with "I have an IQ of 142, don't you think I'd _know_ when I
need to take a jacket?". But even then I knew I was feeling really good that
day, and answered quickly, and what I didn't know I maybe sometimes guessed
correctly. I didn't take it _serious_ serious.

But it also wasn't just a joke to me, either. When I as a little kid, I was
reading a comic with the neighbour's kid who was 2 years older, and I remember
coming to the end of a page and waiting for him to turn to the next one any
moment, and being surprised at how long it took for him to do that. I was
excited for a second becuse I thought "I read faster than this guy and I only
just learned it!", then I scolded myself and thought "no, he's probably just
taking time to actually look at the images in detail". Knowing that there's at
least some fuzzy objective-ish substantation for actually being above average
in some areas offered some closure to that kind of stuff, and from then on out
allowed me to not have to prove myself when someone who I felt wasn't that
bright insulted my intelligence. But it's good I didn't take a test with such
a result at age 12, that would have been a social disaster I'm sure.

Ultimately, I didn't make myself, nobody made themselves, so at best
intelligence still only gift, and even more importantly a responsibility.
Honesty and kindness are much more valuable in a person than any amount of
intelligence, IMO. Intelligence often just allows us to deceive ourselves and
others better, and I think many of the major problems in the world we ascribe
to stupidity are in large part so big due to intelligent people either not
pulling their weight, or actively exploiting and molding people more simple
than them.

> _Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more
> violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the
> opposite direction._

\-- Albert Einstein, who had a very high IQ, so.

Screw intelligence, let's strive to be wise and kind. Intelligence is just a
bonus, a nice to have, like being a bit more agile, or like a computer having
more RAM, less latency etc. -- but it doesn't make a bad application something
entirely different.

~~~
late2part
most sources suggest that Schumacher said this quote, not Einstein.

[http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2007/03/quote-
verification.htm...](http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2007/03/quote-
verification.html)

~~~
PavlovsCat
[https://books.google.de/books?id=oA0IAQAAIAAJ&q="more+violen...](https://books.google.de/books?id=oA0IAQAAIAAJ&q="more+violent")

Thanks, and from that snippet I can tell he probably also said many other
things that are true and still unheeded.

We will perish sooner than those things will stop being true.

------
hackeraccount
I've always thought the right analogy for intelligence is beauty. Could you
come up with a test to measure beauty? Sure. Is beauty heritable? Sure. Is it
a product of environment? Sure.

But the real deal with beauty is that you can look at any measurement of it
and poke holes in it. There's never going to be some objective measurement of
beauty. If you find someone saying person A. is 112 on my beauty scale and
person B. is a 94 then the best response is a good laugh.

And this despite the fact that we would all agree that George Cloony is more
beautiful that I am but quantifying that?

~~~
sonnyblarney
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but some things are crudely objective.

Symmetry for one thing.

Visible signs of bad health are fairly universally negative.

A little stronger/fitter/taller than the norm (but not too much) as well.

Nice, bright, white, straight teeth.

And these things exist in tech as well, just not quite as much as in banking
or consulting.

------
aplummer
Man there are some nasty replies in this thread.

Not that I don’t agree with the high level premise, but I hate when people
dismiss a hundred years of peer reviewed research generally without doing the
peer reviewed legwork to back themselves up.

~~~
yawaworhtttt
Examples of fields with hundreds of years of 'peer-reviewed research':

-Alchemy

-Phrenology

-Humor theory

-Spontaneous generation theory

-Astronomical geocentrism

-Ether theory

-Graphology

-Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis

-Astrology

all of them were once respected fields, complete with papers, journals,
professorships, exams, etc.

By the way, speaking as someone in academia, you'd be surprised at how little
'peer-reviewed' means in terms of scientific validity. There's plenty of crap
in _Nature_ and _Science_ and everyone knows about it.

~~~
iguy
I agree that "peer-reviewed" is a pretty low bar, although a better example
would be more modern fields like those recently dubbed "Grievance Studies" \--
formal peer review was not common even in hard sciences until maybe 50 years
ago, quite a bit later than geocentrism.

But GP is correct that this is not junk science. The basic ideas of
psychometrics were pretty clear 100 years ago. They've been widely attacked
since then, both casual mud-slinging (Alchemy, Astrology...) and also people
who drilled into the details and tried to prove things wrong. Arguably the
former strategy has had more effect than the latter.

------
otabdeveloper1
Next up: IQ on why Nassim Taleb is baloney.

------
briga
>13- _For a measure to be a measure it needs to be: + UNIQUE + MONOTONIC or,
at least + TRANSITIVE_

I'm not sure I buy this one. Intelligence is something that is inherently
constructive in nature. Your knowledge and problem solving abilities build on
themselves as you grow, so I don't think it makes any sense that IQ would stay
the same throughout a lifetime.

Not to mention, I can think of many measures that don't fit these criteria.
Height, weight, etc.

~~~
mike00632
I didn't understand this either. What would it mean for a human measurement to
be transitive or monotonic? Maybe there is a good definition for these but
it's not obvious to me.

~~~
pizza
I think he's using a measure-theoretic meaning of a measure. Suppose I asked
you what the difference in intelligence is between person A and person B. The
problems with that would start pretty rapidly.

~~~
mike00632
So by "transitive" he means "countably additive"? Monotonic and transitive
aren't in the definition of measure and it's still not obvious what those
definitions mean in terms of measuring people.

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fallingfrog
Here’s a little corollary too: assume the population is divided into two
groups, one who is healthy, and the other which has suffered at least minor
brain trauma or lead poisoning or something. If the average iq of the two
groups is 100, then that means the healthy group has an iq above 100 (in my
anecdotal experience about 115).

------
msiyer
Human brain is a technological marvel. We know too little about it to measure
its properties accurately. IQ tests do measure "something", but it does not
give us a useful picture.

Analogy: We can use an electron as a wave or as a particle, but have very
little understanding of what they truly are.

------
fallingfrog
He’s right, I’m afraid. The kinds of things that iq tests measure are whether
you have the patience and training and whether or not you care about the kinds
of problems that show up on iq tests. I’ve worked with computer programmers,
and forklift operators, and I have to tell you that the forklift operators are
just as smart as the computer programmers. Taleb is also correct that there
are a few people who have suffered some sort of brain injury for whom iq might
be a useful test; but you can tell who those people are with a casual
conversation. All the rest is just training and personality.

------
chewz
IQ + EQ = Constant

------
hsudheh
Well, as long as we have _some_ way for me to make myself feel superior to
others and deny them jobs or university entries - I think we’re good.

------
JoeAltmaier
Lots of hating on IQ. I have nagging thoughts: if IQ doesn't mean anything,
they why is it so very, very hard for a perso to score higher on an IQ test in
subsequent tests? Its at least measuring 'test achievement'?

~~~
roman_g
Taleb doesn't mean IQ doesn't test something real. He says this "something
real" is irrelevant.

~~~
tyingq
I was in the US military, and they used something called an ASVAB test to
check your suitability for various jobs. It's one of the few skills tests I've
encountered that seemed both reasonably accurate and useful.

I'd much rather see the results of that for a potential job hire than I would
want to see their SAT scores, IQ, etc.

~~~
wmil
The ASVAB effectively is an IQ test. There's more of a breakdown than other
tests, but you can calculate IQ from it.

The SAT isn't considered a proper IQ test.

~~~
patrickg_zill
Surely I am dating myself, but pre 1994 SAT tests were said to be better.

Total SAT (math and verbal scores), divided by 10,were supposed to be close to
the measured iq.

FWIW my SAT divided by 10 was within two points of my mother's IQ testing from
decades before.

