
IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019) - primroot
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
======
crazygringo
This article is written so polemically it's hard to take it seriously. Also
Taleb seems to be constructing so many straw men I wouldn't even know where to
start.

IQ isn't a swindle, it's a very real thing. However, it is only one factor
among _many_ in determining most practical real-world outcomes, and it is
well-known to be affected by environmental variables at population levels.

But IQ isn't a "fraud" or "immoral". These are bizarre claims Taleb makes,
with zero evidence or even definition of what he means.

What a strange article.

------
danharaj
There are a lot of posts complaining about Taleb's tone. I find it refreshing.
Too often are statistics and stupid measurements applied to give a veneer of
quantitative rigor to stupid ideas or ineffective systems.

If a manager ranked you based on a statistic of your lines of code produced
per day, you would rightly be derisive. It turns out that such stupid
quantification infects a great deal of society, especially the sciences.

There are many examples of statistical phenomena that starkly illustrate how
subtle and counterintuitive probability can be: by no means a transparent and
straightforward subject. Think of Monty Hall or Simpson's paradox. Taleb is
just pointing out more sophisticated traps of probability that plague
amateurs, and most of us who apply statistics are amateurs.

Why is he so mad? He hates it when stupid ideas are granted importance because
of nonsense statistics, especially when they have consequences for people and
society as a whole. I hope Taleb never stops being mad.

~~~
theamk
> If a manager ranked you based on a statistic of your lines of code produced
> per day, you would rightly be derisive

Yes, but this wouldn't make "lines of code" metric "pseudoscience" or
"swindle". The metric is real, even if its applications are not correct.

------
omarhaneef
There is a part I really like about this and a part I don’t.

The part I like: the linearity in IQ vs ability is driven by the low end.
People who have cognitive challenges cannot complete the test and cannot
perform the task. At the high end the correlation disappears.

This is — you can argue with it — an interesting observation.

The part I don’t like is the attack on “nerds.” Come on! I don’t even have to
explain why it’s okay to wear socks with sandals. (Am I defending my own
sloppy sense of style? You’ll probably never know.)

~~~
JamesBarney
> The part I like: the linearity in IQ vs ability is driven by the low end.
> People who have cognitive challenges cannot complete the test and cannot
> perform the task. At the high end the correlation disappears.

If this were true you would expect the average IQ of really accomplished
individuals to be 110. But this isn't the case, if you look at Supreme Court
Justices, scientists, CEO's they all have average IQs higher than what would
be expected if IQ only correlated at the low end.

~~~
omarhaneef
I don't know the average IQ of a CEO or a supreme court justice. Do you know
what it is?

Why 110? 1 sd is 115, 2sd would be 130.

Anyway for supreme court justices we have a straightforward explanation: the
schools they are selected from (Yale and Harvard, primarily) themselves use a
proxy IQ test (the SATs, or LSATs or whatever) to select for.

~~~
JamesBarney
I saw numbers for supreme court justices a couple years ago but I can't find
it.

[https://pumpkinperson.com/2015/07/26/anne-roes-study-of-
extr...](https://pumpkinperson.com/2015/07/26/anne-roes-study-of-extremely-
eminent-scientists/)

Says Nobel prize winners had an average IQ of 155, which is a 1 in 4000 score
that couldn't be driven by just sub 100 effects.

Hard to find IQ scores on really high performers, I guess it's hard to
convince a CEO or a supreme court justice to take an IQ test.

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mgn01
Place some skin in the game and hire a bunch of 87 IQ people as financial
advisors.

~~~
dennis_jeeves
That indeed is a good idea. Should put the debate partially to rest.

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therealdrag0
>> “The same people hold that IQ is heritable, that it determines success,
that Asians have higher IQs than Caucasians, degrade Africans, then don’t
realize that China for about a Century had one order of magnitude lower GDP
than the West.”

Lol what. National gdp seems like an absurd thing to associate with with IQ.
This doesn’t prove or disprove a thing. What a waste of ink.

------
ashtonkem
This is a fascinating case study on how a reasonable point—IQ is not a
terribly useful psychometric in most cases—can be completely lost in the
conversation due to your writing style.

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Gustek
I think the only valid interpretation of the IQ test is that you are good at
solving some riddles and spotting patterns. In no way, it can be used as a
generic metric of who is better or worse.

I took the MENSA test last year just for fun, I did not get in :) The examiner
before explained as well that the exam measures an only small part of what is
considered an intelligence.

In short, it is a fun exam if you like riddles and no other value.

~~~
paulpauper
>I think the only valid interpretation of the IQ test is that you are good at
solving some riddles and spotting patterns. In no way, it can be used as a
generic metric of who is better or worse.

Correlations are what matter. It just so happens that success at solving such
seemingly trivial riddles is correlated with important tasks such as coding
and life outcomes. If IQ didn't correlate with anything there would be no
reason to have IQ tests. It would be as useful as astrology.

------
paulpauper
Taleb's article is debunked here [https://greyenlightenment.com/wealth-and-iq-
part-3-continued...](https://greyenlightenment.com/wealth-and-iq-
part-3-continued/)

 _Studying popular subs such as /r/wallstreetbets, /r/investing,
/r/personalfinance, /r/fatfire, and /r/financialindependence is useful because
we have a generally homogeneous population in which everyone tends to have
similar individual preferences, that being the accumulation of wealth, so we
have already controlled for that important variable. To a high degree of
statistical significance, regarding the aforementioned subs, members who
accumulate a lot of money at an early stage in life such as through investing
and or STEM, again, tend to high high IQs. Even inheriting a lot wealth at an
early age is positively correlated with IQ, because of the correlation between
between family wealth and IQ._

Taleb fails to account for individual preferences as it concerns the
accumulation of wealth. Obv. if you compare aspiring actors to aspiring t
lawyers, IQ will not be as useful versus comparing aspiring physicists. It's
not so much that IQ predicts absolute outcomes, but rather relative outcomes
among a homogeneous population who have similar goals/aspirations for g-loaded
activities whether it's writing, publishing, stock trading, law, math, FIRE,
etc.

Aspiring lawyers who have high IQs will have high LSAT scores and GPAs and get
into competitive programs, whereas low-scoring applicants may quit or find it
harder to get into good programs and make as much money. On trading and
investing Reddit subs , top traders almost invariably have higher IQs than
traders who lose money. An extreme example of this is Renaissance
Technologies, founded and staffed by some of the smartest people in the world,
and by a huge margin the most successful hedge fund ever..

~~~
empath75
> Studying popular subs such as /r/wallstreetbets, /r/investing,
> /r/personalfinance, /r/fatfire, and /r/financialindependence is useful

Promising start, lol...

------
georgewfraser
I think we all know what happened here: Nassim Taleb took an IQ test, it
didn’t show him to be the great genius he knows himself to be, and so the
entire concept of IQ must be invalid.

------
abnry
Ever since Taleb blocked me on twitter for such a minor pushback I gave in the
replies of one of his tweets, I've lost interest reading anything he writes.
His unbridled emotion is uncouth.

And it's not that I think IQ is "the most perfect psychometric ever
created(TM)".

~~~
paulpauper
just make a new account and block him so he cannot read your tweet but his
readers will still see it

------
empath75
Oh man, can't wait for the conversation about this one. So much of people's
identity can be wrapped up in being intelligent, which makes sense when you
are still in the phase of your life where what you _can_ do is more important
than what you _have_ done. If you're concerned about your IQ very much over
the age of about 12 years old, that's a sign that you probably aren't focusing
on the right things in your life.

~~~
non-entity
Anytime IQ is brought up on HN, the comment section is gonna get interesting.
I mean hell this thread is already full of snide remarks about the author,
people getting _emotionally_ charged about emotion, personal attacks from
people on both sides of the argument in "clever" attempts to prove who's
smarter, and occasional and questionable views.

------
iratewizard
This comes off like an angry rant by a person who scored 100 but thinks of
himself as highly gifted. IQ as a concept is a useful metric and predictor.
Our current "stale" IQ tests still predict criminal behavior more accurately
than any sociological theories of crime. It just doesn't predict whether
someone will end up in a "menial job" or as a C-level executive.

~~~
paulpauper
He has a greatly inflated perception of his accomplishments and intellect.
Recently he has been trying to get his Mathematica PDFs published in actual
journals, but good luck with that. Rendering fat tails does not make for
meritorious scholarly research. Fat tail distributions long predate Taleb.

------
voodooranger
> If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis
> playing, or random matrix theory, make him/her do that task; we don’t need
> theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged
> psychologists.

^ horrible job interviews in a nutshell

------
zug_zug
I can't even bring myself to read this. After perusing and seeing it gets so
emotional (bringing up eugenics, morality, etc), I have a hard time believing
it's going to be objective.

"There is no significant statistical association between IQ and hard measures
such as wealth."

So... you're saying that people with an IQ of 60 are equally wealthy as those
with an IQ of 110?

I understand getting frustrated about misapplication of tests. But it's
absolute that science must measure what is, not what we wish to be. Science is
never unfair, never has an agenda, never backward -- it's simply a method to
ascertain facts, entirely indifferent to our human affairs and feelings.

~~~
jcranmer
Even as someone who agreed in large part with the conclusion before coming to
this article, I find this virtually unreadable. It's just so full of
vindictiveness and pettiness that it loses sight of its argument, and the
images and graphs it uses aren't particularly coherent in their framing.

> you're saying that people with an IQ of 60 are equally wealthy as those with
> an IQ of 110?

Actually, if I understand his point correctly, he's arguing that the test
"correctly" identifies the low tail of intelligence (because they would fail
at any task), but is pure noise for people of average or above-average
intelligence.

~~~
rcoveson
> ...but is pure noise for people of average or above-average intelligence.

Maybe not pure noise. He pointed out in many paragraphs that further to the
right of the distribution you would find "nerds", salarymen, and other sorts
of boring people that would never write such revolutionary medium articles as
this one. People ill-adapted for "real life"; academics and their lot. Oh, and
"suckers" who don't have the instinct, "why is he/she asking me that
question?"

The impression I got from the article was not that Taleb believes that IQ is
useless, but rather that all the ideal people are at the middle of the
distribution. Too low and you're genuinely unintelligent. Too high and you're
"in on it", one of those "lifeless bureaucrat" metrics-obsessed pocket-
protector types.

~~~
rglullis
My Google-fu is failing me, but I swear I've read before a quote from some
business guy (I want to say Peter Drucker) that is similar to this: You don't
want those with a 4.0 GPA because they will never think for themselves, and
don't get those 2.0 GPA because they will just do enough to go by.

------
brenden2
IQ is just a metric from taking a standardized test. I don't know why people
have a hard time understanding that. It's like being mad about people's SAT
scores. It's not like IQ is even used for anything important, people don't put
it on their resumes or anything.

~~~
rglullis
> IQ is just a metric from taking a standardized test. I don't know why people
> have a hard time understanding that. It's like being mad about people's SAT
> scores.

Metric for _what_? That is the point. The main argument as I understand is
that "intelligence" is not something one-dimensional that can be measured with
a number.

If IQ tests were a simple pass/fail filter for detecting some kind of learning
disability, sure. The problem is when you have a whole army of people trying
to infer something tremendously complex from a single scalar point.

> It's not like IQ is even used for anything important, people don't put it on
> their resumes or anything.

Yet, how many psychologists rely on IQ data and IQ "science" to justify their
research grants, their books and their consulting fees from companies? How
many people parrot Charles Murray to justify their racism with "science"?

~~~
dennis_jeeves
>Metric for what?

Metric for capability. Even though imperfect, IQ appears to reasonable good
predictor of how capable a person is in learning a new task. The better way is
of course to actually tech the person to find out how well he can learn it,
which is time consuming. High IQ people can easily learn and do most jobs, low
IQ people cannot.

>How many people parrot Charles Murray to justify their racism with "science"?

Charles Murray just says that races have statistically different IQ. This is
different from my understood definition of racism which manifest as: "I will
not hire you because you belong to race X"

~~~
rglullis
Assuming you are right, the metric of capability could still work as a
pass/fail filter, and if IQ tests were just that the discussions would be way
less controversial.

The problem is when you have a whole lot of either naive or malicious people
trying to drive this hammer into any and every thing, trying to draw crazy
correlations from IQ: drug abuse, income, life expectancy, social status...

> This is different from my understood definition of racism which manifest as:
> "I will not hire you because you belong to race X".

Yeah, it would be crazy to hear that from a hiring manager saying that
nowadays. But put the veil of science and suddenly it is easy to consistently
choose the White with an IQ of 107 over the Hispanic with "only" 98, even
though both of them are perfectly capable of doing the job - or to get a plant
with 100 new workers and end up with a bias to White/Asian due to a test where
they score "statistically higher" but that is completely irrelevant for actual
job performance.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18803533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18803533)

------
technothrasher
"It does correlate to very negative performance (as it was initially designed
to detect learning special needs)"

It did a crap job detecting learning special needs with my son. Because he has
a weird intelligence profile of being above 98% on some tasks and below 10% on
other tasks, the IQ test simply wouldn't score him, and put him in the "he's
not taking the test correctly" category. Yeah, not at all useful, thanks.
There were plenty of other more useful tests however that teased out his
learning difficulties and actually gave us useful information to help his
education.

~~~
jacknews
Exactly, the standard IQ tests measure a very narrow ability in abstract
reasoning.

This is certainly something we call 'smart', but I don't think it's at all
predictive of success, except perhaps in academia.

------
tgb
This article motivates an extension of yesterday's xkcd comic [1]. A Type X
error: a correct result, interpreted correctly but communicated so poorly that
no one wants to listen.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/2303/](https://xkcd.com/2303/)

------
longtom
Flagged in 3, 2, 1...

~~~
paulpauper
i wish this wasn't flagged because even though taleb is wrong, the discussion
is useful

------
jacknews
did he 'fail' an IQ test?

taleb sometimes makes some great and interesting arguments, but I can't take
rabid monologues like this seriously.

------
generalpass
A fine example of an expert in one field believing he is an expert in every
field.

In reading the section describing psychometricians, he clearly is not actually
reading what they publish.

~~~
danharaj
Taleb is an expert in statistics. This is an analysis of the statistics of a
metric and the statistical methodology of the field it is part of.

~~~
generalpass
> Taleb is an expert in statistics. This is an analysis of the statistics of a
> metric and the statistical methodology of the field it is part of.

If he doesn't understand their definitions within their sphere of expertise,
how can any analysis of such be valid?

